Alchemy of Secrets - 57

All the bowling pins crashed at once. A collective roar of drunken cheers took over the gaming parlor. Everyone was high-fiving, saying words like Halloween magic and looking around in wonder—everyone except for Holland and Mason.

Mason looked at Holland as if he didn’t want to have this conversation again . And Holland felt dizzy and sick and more than a little angry as she considered his words. That somehow she’d had this conversation before and she’d forgotten. Although if she really had forgotten, she doubted it was a lapse of memory. It was Adam.

“When did we have this conversation?” she asked.

“I’ll tell you. But we need to leave before my brother comes in.”

“I can’t—”

“You’re not going to find the Alchemical Heart in here,” Mason cut in sharply.

Holland bristled at his tone. There was something about Mason that made her feel as if he was the kind of guy who should come with a warning sign: Likes shiny toys. Bored easily .

“I’m impressed with your little magic tricks,” said Holland, “but—”

“I can tell you why you keep having nosebleeds and visions,” he interrupted.

“Already heard that one.”

“From your Professor? Did she also mention the Watch Man, poor Tom, and that depressed bastard Gabe?”

Holland tried to stop herself from asking how Mason knew all this. She hadn’t even told anyone about Gabe bleeding.

We’ve had this conversation before , Mason had said.

But when could she have told him about Gabe?

“What do you know about my bleeding?” Holland asked.

“This never goes well unless you follow me. We only have about ninety seconds before my brother walks in here. He’ll come straight for you. As soon as he touches you, you’ll forget this conversation. You won’t find the Alchemical Heart, and an hour from now you’ll be dead.” He sounded annoyed, as if her death would be a colossal inconvenience to him.

But it was the words never goes well that finally caught her full attention. “What happens if I go with you?”

“You get a chance.” Mason started toward the bar in the cocktail lounge. In the game Clue, there was not a secret passage in the billiard room, but in the Hollywood Roosevelt, there was a hidden door right by the bar. Mason pointed toward a handle that blended in with the wood paneling. Holland turned it, just as she caught a glimpse of Adam in the bar’s mirror. Then she was slipping through to the other side.

Mason leaned one shoulder against a wall of books, somehow having entered the tiny library before Holland. She wondered again exactly what his magic was, but that wasn’t her most pressing question. “Tell me about my nosebleeds.”

“You’re feisty tonight.” Mason regarded her with a subtle cock of his head. “I like this for you.”

“Why do you keep talking as if we know each other?”

“Because we do. Or—” His mouth twisted as if he’d just bitten into something unpleasant. “I know you. You never remember me.”

“Because of your brother?”

“Sometimes. Not always.” Mason sighed and leaned a second shoulder against the bookcase. “It’s mostly because of you .”

“Why would it be because of me?”

“Because you die. You never find the Alchemical Heart, because it’s not hidden in this hotel. You die at one minute to midnight. Then at exactly a quarter after midnight, time turns back to Halloween Eve, and we do this dance all over again.”

“No.” Holland staggered back. “I don’t believe you.”

“You say that every time. Then you tell me that your father wouldn’t steer you wrong.”

“He wouldn’t!” Holland said. She believed in a lot of impossible things. She believed in time loops and magical objects and the dead coming back to life, but Holland could not believe that her father would fail her.

Mason shrugged as if to say sorry , but Holland didn’t think he meant it. She didn’t think Mason felt much of anything except bored and annoyed that he was forced to relive the same forty-eight hours over and over again. Although she still wasn’t sure if she believed him.

“You think I’m a dick,” said Mason.

“I didn’t say that.”

“We’ve had this conversation before,” he reminded her. “I don’t know how or why the time loop happens. But I know the nosebleeds didn’t start right away. We think they’re a side effect of the time loop. Time wants to move forward, and since it hasn’t, it’s started to break.”

As he spoke, Holland felt a drop of blood fall from her nose. She waited for Mason to disappear, for the library to go grainy. But all she saw was Mason frowning at her.

Holland quickly swiped it with her hand, hoping it wouldn’t ruin her mother’s dress, although if Mason was right, the dress was the least of her worries. “Why am I not having a vision right now?” she asked.

“Your visions aren’t visions, they’re memories of past timelines,” he said. “I don’t know why you don’t have them with me. I imagine it has something to do with the fact that I exist outside of time, which is why I remember all this, and no one else does.”

“How is that possible?” Holland asked.

“The same reason it’s possible for me to do this.” Mason shoved off the bookshelf, took one step and then—

He was gone. Holland didn’t even see him walk through the wall, he just disappeared. Then, he reappeared, only slower, as if he was turning from mist to human.

Holland reached out for Mason’s hand, but her fingers went right through him, and she suddenly understood why Adam had said Mason couldn’t leave this hotel or use his powers. “You’re a ghost.”

Mason clapped slowly, his hands making no noise as he pressed them together. If Holland’s mind hadn’t already been fractured into a million spinning pieces, this might have truly surprised her. But learning Mason was a ghost simply seemed to fit in with all the other disturbing details of her night. Of course he was a ghost, his brother was the devil, and Holland was going to die, though she was determined to change that.

“If you’re a ghost, why can I see and hear you?”

“Because you’ve died.”

Holland still couldn’t wrap her mind around this, but she wanted to know more. “How many times?”

“If I told you, it would just depress you.”

“I still want to know.”

Mason leaned back against the bookcase. “You say that almost every time.”

“How many times have we had this conversation?”

“I don’t know. A lot. But it’s not always the same. It depends on whether you go with Gabe when he abducts you in the parking lot. Occasionally, you run away and find my brother. That usually means it’s Adam you betray to the Professor when you’re at the Bank, and then you somehow come in here with Gabe, and you and I don’t ever talk on those nights.”

“But I still die?”

Mason nodded grimly.

“How?”

“I’ll tell you on one condition.” Mason took a slow step toward Holland. Earlier, she’d thought he had an inch of height on his brother, but she’d been wrong. He had at least two, maybe more. Mason might have been a ghost, but he was still formidable. “If you do find the Alchemical Heart tonight, I want you to make me alive again and I want you to kill my brother.”

Holland shook her head. “I can’t do that.”

“You say that every time, too. But you can. Trust me. And when I tell you why you die, you’ll want to do it.”

“You’re wrong,” Holland said. After everything she’d learned tonight, Adam definitely felt like the villain in her story, but she still didn’t want to kill him. She didn’t want to kill anyone. “I think it’s time for me go.”

“My brother,” Mason said.

Holland froze.

“That’s who kills you. Between the time you leave this room and midnight, it’s always my brother who murders you.”