When she’d opened them, it had been to find the woman, standing, eyes wide and glazed, lips moving soundlessly.
With Cian MacKeltar’s jewel-encrusted knife protruding from her throat.
Belatedly comprehending what had sprayed her, she’d almost thrown up. But when she’d opened her mouth, a scream came out instead.
“Jessica, you must stop screaming!” came the sharp command from inside the mirror.
She knew that, and she was going to any second now. Really.
The woman staggered back into the TV armoire, knocked her head against it with a solid thud, collapsed, and slid down. Her body jerked convulsively, and she went abruptly still, half-sitting, half-lying, hotel uniform twisted about her hips.
As Jessi stared in shock, blood suddenly bubbled between the woman’s lips, and her eyes went eerily empty.
Oh, God, she was dead; the woman was dead!
Cian pounded on the inside of the mirror with his fists. “Stop screaming, Jessica! Bloody hell, listen to me, if you draw people to us, they’ll think you killed her. No one will believe your story of a man in a mirror and I will not show myself. I’ll let you go to prison, Jessica!”
Jessi jerked, his harsh words a bracing slap in her face. She stopped screaming so abruptly it turned into a screeching hiccuping noise, then silence.
He was right.
If her screams drew neighboring guests to her room, she would be found covered with blood, in possession of a stolen artifact, with a dead woman on her floor—said woman having been killed by yet another artifact Jessi wouldn’t be able to explain having in her possession.
She’d be arrested in a heartbeat.
And not just for theft, as she’d worried about earlier when leaving campus, but for murder.
And she couldn’t see a thing he might have to gain by showing himself and taking the blame.
In fact, considering that all he wanted to do was to hide for another twenty days so he could have his millennium-old vengeance, he’d probably be happy to end up in the Chicago Police Department’s stolen-goods/evidence lockup. He could hide really well there, under police protection. No, he certainly had no incentive to save her ass.
Shit, shit, shit.
She clamped her lips shut, unwilling to risk so much as another peep.
“Shut the door and bolt it, Jessica.”
She scrambled over the bed so fast that she fell off the other side. She’d left the entry door cracked, with the security bolt flipped between door and frame when she’d let the woman in. Leaping up from the floor, she hurried to the door, eased it open only as far as necessary to flip the metal latch back in, ducking well back from the line of vision of anyone who might be beyond it, closed it, and secured the lock. She could hear voices murmuring down the hall and footfalls approaching.
She didn’t bother stepping away from the door. Though she’d been screaming for only a few seconds, she had good lungs and knew how loud she’d been.
A few moments later there was a firm knock.
“Is everything all right in there, ma’am?” came a man’s worried voice. “We’re in the room a few doors down and heard you screaming.”
Her heart hammering against the wall of her chest, she took two slow, careful breaths. “Uh, yeah,” she managed, “I’m fine. I’m sorry I disturbed you.” She forced a shaky, self-deprecating laugh. “There was a spider in the shower and I have a touch of arachnophobia. I guess I kind of freaked out.” She injected what she hoped was a convincing note of embarrassment into her voice.
There was a silence, then the sound of soft male laughter. “My friends and I would be happy to take care of it for you, ma’am.”
Men. They could be so condescending sometimes, even when they thought they were only trying to be helpful. She’d never been afraid of spiders in her life. And if she was, that was still no reason to laugh at her. Dead bodies—they threw her. But she was no sissy about bugs. People couldn’t help what they were afraid of. One of her good friends, Cheryl Carroll, was afraid of flowers, and there was nothing funny about it.
“No, no,” she said hastily, “it’s all right, my husband took care of it.” Say something, she mouthed over her shoulder at Cian.
“All is well now,” Cian boomed. “‘Twas good of you to inquire.”
She scowled at him. All is well. ’Twas? she echoed silently, wrinkling her nose. Could he have sounded more archaic?
At the sound of another man’s voice, a note of cordial reserve entered her would-be-savior’s tones. “You might want to call the front desk and let them know. There shouldn’t be any bugs in the rooms. My girlfriend hates spiders too.”