Soul Taken

12

“You decided it was Bonarata, too,” I said. “When? Why didn’t you say anything?” That was a little disingenuous because I’d only come to the conclusion our enemy was Bonarata after I’d dreamt about him.

We’d spent the morning working. Adam mostly stayed on the phone with his people to take care of the issues that had developed while he’d been out of the office. I slogged through some of the endless paperwork that owning the shop entailed.

We’d eaten lunch and now were headed to my garage to meet the other werewolves, prepared for battle. My cutlass was toast, so I wore a similar-sized katana from Adam’s store of weaponry. I had my concealed carry in my waistband, covered with a light jacket over my usual T-shirt. The lamb that served as my holy symbol was safe around my neck on the new chain that also held one of Adam’s dog tags and my wedding ring.

It was daytime, but I wouldn’t have gone into the seethe without my lamb unless someone dragged me kicking and screaming.

Adam said, “I wasn’t certain. I’m not certain now. It could turn out that there’s a cult of fae spiders who practice some sort of mind control.”

When I winced, he glanced at me. “Sorry. A little close to the bone.”

“Next time, you get to be the spider incubator,” I told him.

“Fair enough,” he agreed meekly. “Anyway, the whole focus on scaring the public and reducing confidence in our pack’s ability to do our job is right in line with the reason Bonarata kidnapped you.”

He stopped speaking, and when I glanced at him to see why, his eyes were glittering bright gold.

“Truthfully, I am surprised that he moved again this soon,” I said, as much to give Adam something to distract himself with as to communicate anything important. “It sounded to me as though you convinced him that the real power in the Tri-Cities rests with the Gray Lords, who are using us as a public shield.”

Adam had managed that because it was absolutely true.

He nodded. “Honestly, I expected him to move against us—if only because we make Marsilia’s position more powerful in a way that does not depend upon him. But Bonarata has the reputation of being a long-game thinker. So I expected him to spend the next forty years building his game before he engaged with us again.”

I thought about the silk belt in our weapons safe. Adam was right, Bonarata was a patient hunter.

“For a straightforward man, you think awfully twisty.”

“Thank you,” he said. “It’s all those years of dealing with Bran. He gets in your head.”

I winced theatrically. “People have been disappearing since September. That means this all started just a couple of months after we got back from dealing with Bonarata in Europe.”

“Maybe this isn’t something new,” Adam said slowly. “Maybe it’s a continuation of the vendetta he’s had against Marsilia since he banished her however many years ago.”

“That sounds about right,” I said. “So maybe my kidnapping this summer was a part of a much longer plot.”

Adam smiled grimly. “God help us. It’s like trying to unweave something Bran put together—or claimed credit for. I imagine we’ll figure out everything eventually. As long as we survive.”

Our wolves were waiting for us in the parking lot. I was a little surprised to see one of the bay doors open and Zee standing outside talking with Adam’s second. Zee looked frail and small next to Darryl’s muscular sleekness. No one would suspect that he was the more dangerous of the two.

I got out of the car and waved at the assembled werewolves but headed straight for Zee.

“I thought that you weren’t going to be here today,” I said after greeting Darryl.

“Do you have a minute that we can talk?” Zee asked.

I glanced at Adam and said, “Give me five?”

“We’re still waiting for Warren and Zack,” he said. “Take your time.”

Zee led the way to the bathroom and shut the door, turning on the fan for good measure. He listened to the gentle hum and made a sound of disgust.

“The fan in the old building would have kept our voices from carrying to a werewolf sitting with his ear against the door,” he complained.

He turned off the fan and waved a hand. I felt his magic fill the room.

“Bonarata is here,” he said.

“We think so,” I agreed. “Both Adam and Larry have word that he’s still in Italy, but all signs point to that being wrong.”

“Talked to a friend in Seattle,” Zee said. “Bonarata is building a home there. My friend says that there’s been a black copter flying in and out of the property three, four days of the week. The only person who uses that helicopter is Bonarata. He’s been in Washington State for five, maybe six weeks.”

“Okay,” I said. I’d felt better when we weren’t certain.

“Bonarata’s at the heart of this,” Zee said. “Found out that he’s had the Soul Taker for centuries. I didn’t look in that direction because, given a few centuries, I would have thought that the Soul Taker would have found a way out of his hold, one way or another.”

“You said that you didn’t think it could take Bonarata,” I said.

“Bonarata doesn’t fill his castle with old, powerful vampires,” Zee said. “It should have found someone.” He frowned. “I think he found a way to contain it. After you helped me understand exactly what it’s doing with its dead, a web of death magic that spans an abyss we have no way to measure, I don’t think anyone is safe. Not you. Not Bonarata. Not me.”

I thought of the vast blackness of the abyss I could sense at the edge of my awareness and shivered.

“Okay,” I said.

There was a bead of sweat on Zee’s forehead. I knew the temperature of the bathroom was sixty-five degrees because I’d lost the battle with him to raise it to seventy. Talking about the Soul Taker scared me—it did something else to Zee.

Zee had settled in the Tri-Cities more than forty years ago because he thought there was a possibility that the Soul Taker would show up here again. The Soul Taker had the same effect on him as the full moon did on a werewolf. I could smell his eagerness.

“How did Bonarata protect himself?” I asked. “Is it something we could do?”

“Not anymore,” Zee said. “That’s where the spider-fae come in. Uncle Mike remembered the story. About eight hundred years ago, a colony of spider-fae discovered the Soul Taker. When it was done with them, they were all dead except for two half-breed younglings who had learned how to contain its power so that it could be handled without danger.”

“The ones we killed at Stefan’s?” I asked.

“They match the description I was given,” Zee agreed.

“Okay,” I said.

“You should tell all of that to Adam and your people,” he said. “But this is what I wanted to tell you alone.”

“Okay?”

“When you find the Soul Taker, do not touch it. Do not let those you care about touch it. Kill its wielder and call me.”

When I came out of the garage, Adam was in the middle of explaining everything we knew about the enemy so far. He glanced at me.

“Bonarata’s here,” I said. “He’s got a place in Seattle and a helicopter. He’s been here for over a month.”

Adam glanced at Zee, who nodded.

Normal people like me would be scared to find out the Lord of Night had come to visit. I could see the pack come to alert, their bodies stiffening. That the feeling I got from them through the pack bonds was eagerness for the hunt was a testimony that all werewolves are crazy.

Adam looked around at them, lips quirked in a smile that told me he’d caught the same thing I had.

“Are we going up against him at the seethe?” asked George. “Because if we are, we need more people.”

“Probably not facing Bonarata today,” Adam said. “Larry says the seethe is empty. Bonarata might be patient, but he has better things to do than sit around in an empty building like a spider waiting for flies to hit his web.”

“Can we stop with the spider metaphors?” I asked politely. I could tell by the grimaces that George had passed around the story of the spiders.

“Are Marsilia’s people still friendly?” asked Mary Jo. “If Bonarata’s involved, isn’t that like Bran getting involved? Don’t they owe allegiance to him?”

“I don’t think we’ve gotten to the point that we need to worry about Marsilia’s people attacking us,” Adam said.

“Except for Wulfe,” I reminded him. “You all should know about Wulfe.”

Adam explained about my encounter with the Harvester.

“We are going into the seethe in the middle of the day, people,” said Darryl when Adam was finished. “Any vampires up and about are going to be weaker and slower.”

“Don’t count on that if it’s Bonarata,” Adam told them. “If you see him, don’t engage.”

“Don’t know what he looks like, boss,” said Warren flatly. He was, uncharacteristically, dressed in an all-black T-shirt and black jeans. His body posture was . . . wrong, his usual relaxed casualness nowhere in sight.

“If you run into a vampire you don’t know,” Adam told him dryly, “assume it’s Bonarata until someone who knows what he looks like says it’s not.”

“He looks like a Mafia thug,” I told them.

“Not always,” murmured Zee. He looked at Adam and spoke more loudly. “I know him. Do you want me to come with you?”

Adam tilted his head. It was a motion I saw the werewolves do all the time—but humans seldom used it.

“I appreciate the offer,” Adam said carefully. Zee was old enough to find “thank you” problematic and rudeness objectionable. “But if I’m wrong, I can justify bringing the pack through Marsilia’s door. I don’t want to explain to her that I let the Dark Smith into her home without more cause than we have. This is just a quick sweep to confirm that our allies are not there, and possibly find some clues into where they’ve been taken.”

“Fair enough,” said Zee, settling back into the body language of his old-mechanic guise. I hadn’t realized until that moment that he’d dropped it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he gave us time to do our search and then went out and did his own.

“If Larry says the seethe is empty,” Darryl said, his voice a little sharp, “why are we going at all?”

Adam looked at him and said in an unfriendly voice, “Do you have anything better to do?”

Darryl’s nostrils flared. He didn’t like the vampires, and I didn’t blame him. I felt the same way about most of them. He didn’t like being put in his place, either.

“Marsilia’s our ally,” I told Darryl before the situation had a chance to get worse. “Someone spirited her and our vampires off. There may be clues. Emails, letters—something that tells us where they went and why.”

“Fair enough,” said Darryl. He had an easier time standing down with me than with Adam. I wasn’t an Omega like Anna, but I wasn’t a threat in any way, shape, or form, either. So his wolf didn’t bristle—and as the Alpha’s mate, I had enough authority that he didn’t feel the need to put me in my place.

Adam wasted no time loading two vehicles with the ten wolves. It might have been eagerness to get on with the task. But I wondered if it didn’t have something to do with Zee. Warren and Darryl ended up in Honey’s Suburban together. Usually this wouldn’t have been a problem. They liked each other. But Darryl was on edge because of the vampires, and whatever had been bothering Warren was still bothering him.

Adam saw it, caught Zack’s attention, and our pack submissive found a seat next to Warren in Honey’s car. Disaster hopefully averted, we loaded Adam’s car with the rest.

“Assuming I don’t die,” I told Zee as I stepped up to the shotgun seat of Adam’s SUV, “I’ll come back and relieve you this afternoon.”

Zee shook his head. “No, Mercy. It is all right. I have the shop today.”

“Okay,” I said. “Don’t drive off customers.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said innocently.

I pretended I hadn’t noticed him baiting me, waved my hand at him, and closed the door.

We got about half a block down the road when Ben, speaking from the far backseat, said, “Any of you sodding wankers know what’s done Warren’s nut for him?”

“Any of us sodding wankers know what Ben just asked?” George’s voice was very dry.

“On it,” Adam said, answering Ben, not George. “I’ve told him he has two days to tell me what his problem is. Just don’t push him before then.”

“Did you tell that to Darryl?” asked Mary Jo.

“I told Auriele,” Adam told her.

“Maybe he should take shotgun in your rig on the way home,” I suggested.

“No,” said Adam. “In my ride, that’s your spot.”

“Okay, then,” I said, a little surprised—and, unexpectedly, a little happy—at the growl in his voice.

It had been a while since I’d visited the seethe. A couple of years, maybe. It was in an area of town where I didn’t have much reason to go—and maybe I’d been avoiding it. Stefan was my friend, but I was with Darryl when it came to the rest of the vampires.

I’d been aware, peripherally, that there was a lot of building going on along 395, the highway that was the demarcation line between east Kennewick and the rest of town. But I hadn’t thought about what that meant to Marsilia’s home.

The last time I’d visited, it had still been surrounded by the shrub-steppe that was the Tri-Cities’ version of virgin wilderness. Now the seethe was surrounded by new houses.

“Didn’t there used to be these weird two-story brick pillar-thingies around here?” I asked as we turned down the paved road that had replaced the single-lane gravel drive. I could see the gates of the seethe, so we should have already passed between the brick edifices.

“Taken down as a hazard,” George said. “About the same time as this housing development was built.”

Upscale houses surrounded the still-expansive grounds of the seethe. The eight-foot cement walls that marked out the vampires’ home ground were far more substantial than the walls that surrounded the seethe the last time I was here. The huge wrought-iron gates were the same, though.

“Some people have no sodding sense of self-preservation,” Ben marveled. “Look at how close the fucking houses are.”

I saw why Adam had insisted on packing all of us into as few vehicles as possible despite the possible danger of cramming dominant wolves together. This was a neighborhood that would notice a bunch of cars driving into the seethe in the daytime.

“I wonder if all these people are trying to figure out why they’re having nightmares every night,” Mary Jo said.

Adam glanced up and down the road. We were too late for lunch and not early enough for kids to be getting home from school. There was no one in sight. That didn’t mean there weren’t people looking out from all those blank windows.

“Mercy, slide over and drive,” he said as he got out.

Adam was up and over the eight-foot-high gates in a quick movement that would have been easy to miss, even if someone was watching. He did something at the control box on the other side and the gates swung open. I drove through with Honey close on my tailpipe.

I negotiated the whole of the wide circular drive until the front of Adam’s SUV was nearly touching the gates, which were sliding shut. If we had to go fast, I didn’t want to waste time. I would have left the gates open to facilitate that, but Adam was probably thinking about not letting anyone else in.

As I turned off the engine, Adam walked up to Honey’s window and spoke to her. In response, she maneuvered her Suburban around until she was parked beside me, effectively blocking the vehicular entrance.

The main building was a two-and-a-half-story Spanish-style house that we could have fit two of our house inside—and our house was not small. Graceful arches and architectural details mostly served to hide the lack of windows. Behind the main house were extensive gardens, a swimming pool, and a guesthouse—or at least I assumed they were still there. The front drive where we were parked had been walled off from the rest of the grounds except for a single-lane paved road that followed the outer wall, presumably leading to the guesthouse, which had its own garages.

The aboveground edifices were mostly a façade, a place to show guests and greet local dignitaries and politicians. Most of the seethe’s grounds were riddled with tunnels and layers of basements that truly housed the inhabitants of the seethe.

The occupants of Honey’s car burst out as if there were a swarm of bees inside. Warren’s face was flushed, his eyes yellow. Darryl looked none too happy, either. Zack caught Adam’s gaze with a wide-eyed look of alarm.

“Warren,” Adam said sharply.

Warren jerked around and met Adam’s gaze for nearly three seconds before he took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and nodded once.

“Sorry, boss,” he said.

He pivoted back toward Darryl without raising his eyes—and we all saw the effort that took.

It was a pretty well-kept secret that if he wanted the post, he probably could have beaten Darryl for second, both by combat and by dominance. Adam and I knew it. Warren knew it. I was pretty sure that Darryl knew it, too (which wouldn’t have helped matters while they were trapped together in Honey’s SUV). But although Warren was more accepted by the pack than he had been a few years ago, that he was gay would still be an issue. Our pack, like most packs, was composed mostly of men born in the last century. The opinion of the pack held sway in pack magic, and his rise to second would disrupt it.

This was not the time to disrupt the pack. And Warren didn’t want to be second. Darryl was good at his job, Warren had told me a few months ago: “Why fix sumthin’ that ain’t broke?”

“I’m sorry, Darryl,” Warren said sincerely. “I’ve got some things riding my hide. But I don’t have to take it out on my friends.”

Darryl considered him a moment—which was enough unlike his usual response to make me wonder how bad the altercation in Honey’s Suburban had been. Or maybe whatever had Warren acting weird was spreading through the pack. When Darryl nodded, it was pretty obvious that he was still riled.

“It’s the seethe,” Adam told me quietly.

I nodded. Darryl’s dislike of vampires had solidified when he’d spent a few days as the unwilling guest of Marsilia’s vampires not long after he’d first moved here, a long time before I’d been a member of the pack. It had been some sort of misunderstanding. Darryl had stayed behind in New Mexico when the pack moved up here to finish up some work projects. Adam hadn’t been expecting him for another week. Marsilia hadn’t known he was coming at all. She had still been pretty immersed in her hibernation-lethargy at the time, so she did not police her people as well as she did now. Maybe, considering the timing, the incident with Darryl could have been why she’d started to wake up again.

At any rate, a group of vampires found a strange werewolf running around and decided to bring him home to play. Though blindsided because he’d been told that the vampires and werewolves here were not actively hostile, Darryl had still torn two of them apart. The other three had succeeded in capturing him and had treated him just as if he’d killed two of their buddies.

Someone apprised Marsilia of the situation, and she’d stirred enough to contact Adam. Darryl had been released, but he nursed a mean grudge. Unhappily for him, the incident meant he knew the layout of the seethe better than any of the other wolves, or else Adam could have left him out of the expedition.

Adam surveyed his troops. “Mercy and”—he hesitated long enough that I knew he’d originally planned on sending me with someone else—“Warren, you search the main house. Start from the ground floor and work up. Darryl, Auriele, Honey, and Zack—go out to the guesthouse, hit the tunnels, and work back toward the main house. Ben, George, and Mary Jo are with me. We’ll enter the tunnels from the main house and plan on meeting in the middle. If you run into trouble, call out. Cell phones won’t work in the tunnels, but wolf calls will travel. Don’t split up from the groups I’ve assigned you.”

“What about damage?” said Darryl. His voice was usually deep, but unhappy as he was, it had dropped until it was almost difficult to distinguish words. “Can we break down locked doors?”

Adam nodded. “We need to clear the seethe, and we aren’t going to dawdle about. No unopened doors, no unsearched rooms. Be thorough.”

The designated four jumped the wall, taking the shortest way to the guesthouse. I found I could sort of catch a glimpse of its roof if I hopped a bit for more height.

“Mercy,” said Adam.

“Just making sure it’s still there,” I told him. I caught up to him as he got to the front door.

It was unlocked.

I couldn’t decide if that meant anything. Marsilia wouldn’t be worried about thieves, but I’d have expected her to lock the whole place down during the day.

“Like a flytrap,” Ben said, hesitating before he entered the foyer. “You know—open maw to sucker the flies inside.”

“Thanks for that,” I said, and he grinned, though he didn’t look any less spooked.

The interior of the house hadn’t changed since the last time I’d seen it. Like the exterior, it showed the influences of the Spanish explorers in the tiles, textures, and color choices of the decor. Our summer heat meant that Spanish-influenced architecture was pretty common in the Tri-Cities.

“The entrance into the basement is in the kitchen,” Adam said as he led the way.

“I know,” I said. “The first time I came here I escaped that way.”

He nodded. “This house is mostly for show, but Marsilia is unpredictable, so don’t get complacent.” That was directed at Warren and me, I thought. No one could get complacent in the tunnels, which reeked of blood, death, and vampire. “Look for anything that might tell us where they went.”

“That’s more likely to be in the guesthouse,” I said. Marsilia spent her daylight hours in the smaller building, where her enemies would not expect her to be. “But we’ll stay on our toes and look everywhere.”

I met his gaze and he held it for a minute, then nodded.

The kitchen was the same as it had been the first time I’d seen it. Bird’s-eye maple cabinets and cream-colored Spanish stone countertops added to the effect of the backlit stained-glass panels on the walls, making the kitchen appear bright and airy despite the lack of windows. The stainless-steel elevator doors were in line with the fridge and a walk-in freezer, making for a wall of metallic gray without so much as a fingerprint smudge.

Adam and his team got into the elevator—and Adam looked at Warren. “Don’t get complacent.”

“You got it, boss,” drawled Warren. He looked more like himself than he had when he’d gotten out of Honey’s SUV, but I didn’t miss the tension in his shoulders.

After the elevator closed and hauled my mate down to the bowels of the earth, I said, “Sorry you got stuck with babysitting duty.”

As the least able fighter, I was always destined to be stuck with exploring the main house because it would be the safest place. All the scary stuff would be down in the tunnels. Warren, however, was one of the pack’s big guns.

“Best use for me,” Warren said. “I’m unlikely to pick a fatal quarrel with you.” Almost to himself, he growled, “I could really have refrained from poking at Darryl before he had to face vampires.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

He looked at me thoughtfully. “Bonarata is challenging our ability to protect our territory. Our vampire allies have disappeared—except for Wulfe, who is killing people with a cursed weapon. People we are responsible for protecting are disappearing and dying. Fuel costs more than it did this time last year, and I’m still stuck with the conviction that it should be twenty-five cents a gallon. Financial disparity is at an all-time high.”

I frowned at him. He knew what I meant.

“It’s nothing,” he said with a growl in his voice. “It’s fucking nothing, Mercy.” Warren didn’t swear much. He saw my look and said, “Leave it.”

“Are you sure I can’t help?” I asked.

He looked at me, then away. “I am very tired of being pushed,” he said. “Let me tell you how this is gonna be. We are gonna look through this house and find damn all. And you are going to leave me the fuck alone while we do it. I am tired of you sticking your Little Miss I-Can-Fix-It nosey self in my fucking business.”

I blinked back sudden hurt tears.

I was tired. I was scared. I was worried about Adam and the rest down in the tunnels. I was worried about Zee. About poor Aubrey, who would never get to kiss his secret crush.

I had two choices. I could stand here and cry—or I could get mad. Guess which one I chose.

Warren started methodically searching the kitchen. I did the same beginning from the opposite side.

The fridge and walk-in freezer had never been used—nor had the dishwasher. Both still had that fresh-out-of-the-box smell, even though I was pretty sure it was still the same fridge that had been here three years ago. The cupboards were empty of food, though there were dishes and cookware in appropriate locations.

“Staged,” Warren said, surveying the empty pantry. “Shall we move on?”

I didn’t respond. Didn’t look at him. I just stalked out of the kitchen to the next room I came to. We worked in silence while I nursed my righteous anger until I could pretend that I wasn’t hurt.

Mostly.

Despite knowing that the whole huge house was mostly a decoy, I had expected that exploring the home of our local seethe would have been more interesting. But Warren had found the right word—it was staged. The whole house aped a place where people lived. Closets and drawers were empty. Rooms were beautifully decorated, walls filled with good but not expensive art. There was not a trace of personality anywhere.

Adam was risking his life in the tunnels, and I was wandering through a house that could have been a showroom for a Southwestern-themed furniture catalog. And I was doing it with someone who was tired of me.

He was so obviously in a hurry that I’d started slowing down just to irritate him. We were going through the last room on the main floor, the second room we’d run into that was pretending to be an office, when Warren finally snapped.

He had gone through the desk, both closets, and a small bookcase and had to wait for me. He tapped his foot once as I shut the bottom drawer of the totally empty three-drawer filing cabinet I’d just spent five minutes looking through.

I looked at his foot. Then I tipped the filing cabinet on its side so I could examine the bottom, just in case there was a concealed hiding place. But it was solid.

“What are you looking for?” Warren growled. They were the first words that either of us had said to the other since we’d left the kitchen.

I blinked at him. Set the filing cabinet back on its solid metal bottom and contemplated the room. He’d looked through the closets and the desk. I looked at the bookcase. It was not a big bookcase. Four shelves, each with a matched set of books. I squinted at the titles—they appeared to be books on banking and the stock exchange.

“I used to make secret compartments in books,” I said thoughtfully. I went back to the bookcase and pulled out the first book on the top shelf, Bank Audits and Examinations.

“My foster mother showed me how to make them.” I didn’t look at him while I spoke. Looking at him might make him think I thought he cared about anything I had to say. “I still have one of them. You glue the edges of the pages together and cut out the center to make a hollow.”

“You have got to be joking,” he said.

I almost smiled at his tone. There was still irritation, but it was edged with wariness. As if he’d finally started to figure out he was not going to (hurt me) snap my nose off and swear at me without paying for it.

“Adam said to be thorough,” I told him, putting that book back on the shelf and picking up another one. I wasn’t moving particularly quickly.

To my delight, the next floor up had bookshelves in all the rooms. It was as if someone had told Marsilia, “Human habitations have bookshelves on the second floor.” The books were all in sets, but otherwise seemed completely random, the complete set of Charles Dickens’s work placed next to a specially bound set of Thoroughbred studbooks from the turn of the last century. Just exactly the sort of collection guaranteed to irritate a man who really loved books the way that Warren did.

He knew why I was going through each book—and he knew that all he had to do (probably) to put himself out of his misery was to apologize. He didn’t, so I opened every book on every shelf.

Two rooms and four bookshelves later, I opened a book and found it hollow. Sadly, there was nothing in it, but someone had made a hiding space in—I checked the title—Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume 4, printed in 1974.

“I always thought I should read Gibbon,” I said. Not to Warren. I wasn’t talking to Warren yet. More as if I were talking to an invisible friend who might be interested in what I had to say. “But I made it through War and Peace and decided I’d paid my toll to the gods of history.” I closed the book but set it aside.

“It was probably hollow when she bought it,” Warren said, looking with unhappy resignation at the book that was going to justify my search.

I’d actually had the same thought, which is why I’d set it aside so I could tell Marsilia about it. I didn’t say so to Warren, though.

Giving up—but not enough to apologize—Warren joined me in going through every book we found. He was a lot faster about it than I was.

“I am sorry I swore at you,” Warren said. “But quit poking.”

I considered how to respond. An apology that starts with an “I’m sorry” and ends with a “but” isn’t an apology at all.

“You know,” I said, putting A Child’s Garden of Verses back on the shelf between Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Black Arrow, “while we are thumbing through books that no one has ever so much as opened, our compatriots are wallowing through eldritch abominations.”

Unsaid but plain to be heard was And if you’d let someone help you before now, you’d get to go play in the scary dungeons instead of facing near-fatal boredom babysitting the useless coyote.

Maybe I was upset about more than Warren getting mad at me for trying to help. The rest of them hadn’t run into anything bad, though. I wasn’t Adam, who could pick up quite a lot from the pack bonds when he wanted to, but a fight in the tunnels would have been close enough for both Warren and me to sense.

“Teach me to pick a fight with Darryl,” Warren muttered, picking up the last of the white leather-bound collection of H. P. Lovecraft’s work.

We moved to the next room. Five more bookcases, half-full of books. The next room also had five bookcases.

Somewhere along the line, the growl went out of Warren. Warren loved books. Despite the obviously ridiculous amount of I-don’t-care that had amassed the titles on Marsilia’s shelves, there were some good ones plunked between a complete collection of World Almanacs 1900 to 1965 inclusive and Time-Life collections. The Time-Life books were really too thin-spined to make good hiding places, but I looked in them anyway.

“Warren,” I said, staring at the book in my hand. There was a close-up of a knight whose raised helm showed a spectral mist, and the gold-embossed lettering informed me I held The Enchanted World: Ghosts.

Maybe I should have been paying better attention to what we were here for instead of trying to get under Warren’s skin and worrying about Adam.

“What?”

“There should be ghosts here,” I told him, putting the book back on the shelf.

There were always ghosts where vampires sleep; traumatic death was one of the things that created ghosts. I’d used ghosts to track down vampires’ lairs before—that’s how I had located Wulfe’s house the first time.

Warren came to alert and looked around. “Here in this room?”

“No,” I said. “Here in this house.”

“I thought you told me ghosts avoid vampires,” Warren said, his manner all business, since we were actually talking about something that might be useful. “Like cats—except for yours.”

“When the vampires are out and about, you won’t find a ghost anywhere near them,” I told him. For truth’s sake I said, “Not usually. But when they’re sleeping, their dwelling places tend to fill up with the shades of their victims.”

Stefan’s house didn’t. But as long as I had known him, he’d been very careful that the people he and his fledglings fed upon lived to see another day. Daniel was the only ghost at Stefan’s house.

“Is there a vampire running around here?” Warren asked.

I tapped my nose. “The last time a vampire was in this room was maybe six months ago.” My nose, we had found as we dealt with more and more vampires and zombies, was better when it came to dead-but-still-moving creatures than the werewolves’. Especially if we were still running around on two feet instead of four.

“Were there ghosts here the last time you were here?” asked Warren.

I had to think about it. “Not in this house,” I conceded. Though I’d felt them on the edges of my nerves in the tunnels.

“Maybe Marsilia has the house warded some way,” Warren said, going back to his book with studied casualness. Not like he was interested in the ghost angle—more like he was interested in the book and didn’t want me to know it.

“I’ll ask her about it,” I said.

My mother once told me to be careful of punishments that ended up going two ways. My hands were filthy—and the skin on my face itched where I’d touched it. Handling books wasn’t quite as bad as handling money, but those books had been sitting around for years with nothing but a light dusting.

We trudged up the stairs from the second floor to the third floor, which was only half the size of the house. With no windows and no light filtering in from below—because we’d turned the lights off as we finished with each room—it was pitch-dark. I could see in the dark, but not in the absolute dark, and we were near that now. I fumbled along the wall on my side of the staircase and heard Warren doing the same on his.

My hands hit a switch and I flipped on the lights. We stood at one end of a long hallway with three doors on either side and one at the far end of the hall. This floor was so seldom used that it didn’t even smell like vampires.

“Left or right?” I asked, since Warren and I were talking to each other again.

Warren gave a shrug because we both knew it wouldn’t matter. With sudden decision he stalked to the first door on the right. He turned on the light and froze in the doorway. Curious as to what had made him stop so suddenly, I followed him and peered into the room. It was a bedroom with a bed, a nightstand, and a dresser. Oh, and all the walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that were packed with sets of books. There were hundreds, possibly thousands of books, most of which were so boring that the publisher had to make them look good in order to sell them.

“No one puts hollowed-out books on the third floor,” I said decisively.

Warren laughed—and not just a little bit; he leaned against the door frame and whooped like a hyena.

“Well,” I told him sourly, “if there was anyone lurking up here, they know we’re here now.”

After he’d quit laughing, he said, “I’m sorry I snapped at you. I know you were only trying to help—”

“If you say ‘but’ again and blame me for it, we are going to go through each and every book in that room,” I warned him.

It made him laugh again. Which made the whole we-must-search-each-book punishment a success.

“I’m sorry I tried to help you,” I told him. “I should know by now that there is no help for you.”

He hugged me. “You did help,” he assured me.

It took us about three minutes to search that room, including under the bed—and Warren was back to his pre-whatever-was-putting-him-in-a-temper self. That reassured me that whatever had gotten his tail in a tangle, it wasn’t life-threatening, so maybe I should trust him to deal with it.

I was in the closet when a heavy thump made me jump and pull my gun. I came out of the closet, ready for enemies—and saw Warren on the floor in push-up position, looking under the bed. He thrust himself to his feet, using only the power of his arms, and smiled innocently.

“Did I startle you?”

I put the safety back on my gun and returned it to my waistband holster. Then I shook my head sadly. “Those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it.”

He laughed again. “I’m sure,” he said.

The other five rooms were identical to the first except that the sets of books were slightly different. One room, the last of the identical bedrooms, had bookshelves filled only with sets of encyclopedias—several of them were incomplete, judging by the book-sized spaces left where the missing volumes had been, or should have been. If we all survived this, maybe I’d ask Marsilia about them.

We searched each of the rooms thoroughly—which was easy. There wasn’t anything in any of them besides a bed, an empty chest of drawers, an empty nightstand, and the bookshelves. Warren did his thump-producing pratfall to search under all of the beds. We’d stopped checking individual books, but we’d looked behind the books for papers. Each room had a safe behind the painting above the bed. Like the three larger safes we’d found in the lower levels, they were all unlocked and empty and had the combination taped on the outside.

The door at the end of the hall led into a master bedroom suite.

There was a bathroom, a bedroom, and a small office off to the side. The ceiling was taller than the other bedrooms had been—maybe around twelve feet. A huge chandelier hung from a fancy medallion in the middle of the room. About half of its lightbulbs were out, maybe because it would take a ladder to change the bulbs. Maybe because no one cared.

The bed was the only piece of furniture in the room, and I probably could have described it pretty accurately before we opened the door. It was a huge thing, built of mahogany, and framed with velvet curtains. It might have walked off the set of a 1950s Zorro movie and was exactly the bland sort of choice that a decorator would have picked for this house.

“I’ll check the office,” Warren said, surveying the room. “You do the bathroom. Then we can go downstairs and lounge in the kitchen and wait for the others to get back.”

“And you can grab that Lovecraft book and keep reading,” I said.

He gave me a shamefaced grin but didn’t deny it.

The bathroom, like the bed, was exactly the kind of bathroom that I expected to find in a house that looked like this one. There must be a decorator somewhere who specialized in creating rooms that looked exactly like they should.

“Maybe this is a room from the world of forms that Socrates talked about,” I murmured, knowing Warren would get the reference.

He’d told me once that he’d carried Plato’s Republic in a saddlebag for two years and read it every day. I’d had to read it for a college class and pass a test on it. He had passages memorized, and all I could remember was the bit about the world of forms. And that Socrates liked to teach people by asking them questions.

“The form that all other Spanish-style mansions are modeled on,” intoned Warren from the office on the opposite side of the bedroom.

There was a huge antique claw-footed bathtub in the corner of the room, surrounded by small tables holding trays of empty handblown glass bottles that should have been filled with soaps and bath oils. White fluffy towels were piled on a wire rack, close enough that a person bathing could just reach out for them.

I turned and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My face was filthy from where I’d touched it. I looked at my hands.

“Marsilia sure has a vast collection of dirty books,” I said.

There was a pause. “You are in a bathroom,” Warren told me, a hint of laughter in his voice. “I’d guess you could wash your hands.”

“Do you suppose she’d mind?” I asked. I tried to make it funny, but the bathroom had an untouched quality that made me uneasy—as if it didn’t want to be used.

“If she does, you can buy her a new towel to go with the doors Darryl is taking pleasure in destroying.” Warren’s voice was dry, as if he understood my hesitancy and thought it ridiculous.

Which it was.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Anytime, darlin’,” he said, sounding as though he’d come back into the bedroom. I could hear him drop down to look under the bed.

The soap on the dish wasn’t wrapped, but it didn’t look as though it had ever been used. I turned on the water and watched it suspiciously. Sometimes if a faucet wasn’t used often enough, the water was gunky. It looked and smelled okay—and it even warmed up fast. The soap smelled of lemons, but not too strongly.

I used a washcloth to scrub my face and spent some time on my hands. When the water ran clear, I turned it off and dried on a nearby towel. The white towel was smudged when I finished, so apparently I hadn’t gotten all the dirt with the washcloth. I bundled the mucky things together and set them beside the sink, where the cleaning crew couldn’t miss them.

“Bathroom is clear,” I said, starting for the door—and caught a glimpse of something in the huge old bathtub. There hadn’t been anything in it when I’d checked it a few minutes ago.

Now it held an assortment of encyclopedia volumes. Five of them were leaned up against the back edge of the tub, braced by the three on the bottom. They were mismatched and from different places in the alphabet. The first one was The World Book Encyclopedia in gold-embossed leather, Volume 19, W-X-Y-Z. The second one was from a set of Encyclopedia Britannica, Volume 1, A-ak, Bayes. My eyes had moved to the third one, registered it as the T volume from a different set of World Book—and that’s when I realized that, taken as a whole, they spelled WATCH OUT.

Schooled by Hollywood horror movies, I dropped to the floor. Nothing happened. I felt like a fool as I got to my feet. I hoped Adam hadn’t felt the way my heart had pounded.

“Warren?” I said. “I think I found the missing encyclopedias. And possibly the ghosts that should be here.”

He didn’t say anything.

I thought of that thump I’d heard. The one I thought meant that he was looking under the bed. An unconscious body falling to the floor would sound like that, too. I drew my gun but stayed where I was.

“Warren?”

I couldn’t feel any distress from him through the pack bonds. He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t feeling pain or stress—I was pretty sure I’d know it if he were. If this was another joke, I’d shoot him. My gun wasn’t loaded with silver bullets so it probably wouldn’t kill him.

All of the lights went out.