The Soulkeepers

  Chapter 27

  The Search

  “What the hell?” Jacob said, pulling the plate from the refrigerator. He’d eventually agreed to care for Gideon while Dr. Silva made her trip to St. Louis and was following the directions she’d left for him. The note on the plate said for Gideon in Dr. Silva’s tight scrawl but the food looked nothing like cat food. There was no meat. It was fresh peaches, cottage cheese, and a variety of fresh vegetables. Could a cat live on this? He placed the plate next to Gideon’s water. The big red cat came running and buried his face in the dish. Not the weirdest thing he’d seen since coming to Paris, but a vegetarian cat definitely made the top ten.

  With Gideon distracted, Jacob wasted no time. The relationship between Dr. Silva and her cat was something he hadn’t figured out yet, but he had a gut feeling it was better if Gideon didn’t know what he was about to do. Quietly, he walked toward the door and then veered left to the staircase.

  Even with Gideon occupied, everywhere Jacob moved in the house, thousands of eyes followed him. Dr. Silva had a penchant for Victorian decorating and every conceivable type of angel could be found in her furnishings. There were statues and paintings; even the newel post was carved into the image of an angel. Creepy.

  Jacob climbed the stairs two at a time. Instructions for navigating through Oswald were written in years and years of charts Dr. Silva had kept on her travels. She’d mentioned them to Jacob when he’d first asked her how she knew where the tree would take them. These notes were the key to going home and starting the search for his mom. He planned to return to the spot where she was last seen, Manoa Falls. It seemed like the best place to start, not to mention on Oahu where the Red Door was located. They might not give him answers over the phone but they wouldn’t deny him in person. If Dr. Silva wouldn’t help him, he would help himself.

  The landing at the top of the stairs was a library. Shelves of books stretched from floor to ceiling in a three-sided square around several leather recliners and a large empty table. Against a window overlooking the backyard a huge book rested on a wooden stand. He walked over to it but was disappointed to find it was the Oxford International Dictionary. Of course it wasn’t going to be that easy.

  He perused the books on the shelves. There was a complete wall of volumes on exotic plants. Another shelf housed information on herbs, gardens, and landscaping. There was a shelf of botany textbooks that appeared to be written by Dr. Silva herself, and a row of organic gardening magazines.

  Once it was obvious that the library didn’t contain what he was looking for, he headed down the hall, opening doors as he went. There were six bedrooms filled with furniture covered in white sheets. Of course, none of these rooms would get any use; Dr. Silva lived alone and as far as Jacob knew had never had a guest. There were two bathrooms, as empty and unused as any of the other rooms.

  At the very end of the hall, he opened the door to the master bedroom. This room looked lived in, or maybe a better description would be died in. Dr. Silva’s bedroom was black—black walls, a black comforter, and wrought-iron fixtures. The only color in the room came from red candles whose wax had dripped in various patterns on the lacquer and the large stained glass window Jacob realized was the repaired version of the one he’d broken.

  Malini was right about the black. It did look like a cave. He entered the room and was swallowed by the darkness. He wondered how it must feel at night, devoid of even the light that streamed through the stained glass window. Like everything else in her house, the image in the window was of angels, two reaching for each other. The background looked like the Garden of Eden, complete with snake and apple tree. The first angel, a glorious vision of blue and white, was depicted reaching down from the heavens above the tree in the garden. From the roots of the tree, the second angel was reaching up, the hand emerging from the slate depths. The wings were leathery black like a bat’s, the body humanoid but with serpent skin and vertical slit yellow pupils. This was a dark angel, crawling from the depths of hell. What had Dr. Silva called it? A Watcher.

  “Creepy. Who the hell would want that in their house?” Jacob said. He turned his attention back to his quest. “Where is it?” he whispered to himself. Opening drawers and digging through shelves, he searched for the notebooks without success, careful to replace everything exactly the way he’d found it.

  When he was sure the notebooks weren’t in her bedroom, he descended the stairs and opened the front door to leave. Taking one last look up toward the landing, he thought about places he could search the next day. Gideon was looking down at him, tail twitching.

  “How long have you been there?” Jacob wondered out loud.

  The cat answered with a menacing growl.