by Chant, Zoe
She started giggling, shaking with so much laughter she couldn't speak. "Until then," she tried again, then covered her mouth with both hands before patting at her eyelashes, trying to keep laughing tears from making her mascara run. "Until then you'll have have to be a volunteer libearian," she blurted, then threw her head back and positively roared with laughter at herself.
Matthew put his face in his hands and groaned, making Sarah laugh even harder. Eventually she recovered herself, although she kept interrupting herself with chortles for quite a while afterward. "I thought I was very funny," she told him, and he laughed out loud.
"You were. Funny and perfect. I love you."
"Oh." Her eyes went enormously wide and her laughter fell away into wonder. "Oh, good, because I love you too. I'm so glad you're staying."
"So am I," he murmured, and pulled her into his arms. "I can't imagine how I ever thought I was leaving."
His oso yelled, See?! in the back of his head, and Matthew muttered, Yes, yes, you're very smart, now shut up, and the bear went silent in smug satisfaction.
"Come on," Sarah murmured back happily. "Let's go back to the party. I have a speech to make, and then I might have to take my gorgeous boyfriend home and seduce him."
Matthew cleared his throat. "Do you have to make a speech?"
Sarah laughed. "Yes. Yes, I do."
"Oh, all right." Matthew tried to sound put-upon, and Sarah gave him a sweet, sexy smile.
"Don't worry. The seduction will be worth it."
Matthew, throatily, said, "I bet it will be," and let Sarah drag him back to the party.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Two nights later Sarah sat up in the middle of the night and said, "Oh my gosh," out loud. Matthew startled beside her and pushed up on an elbow, looking adorably bleary. "Oh my gosh," she said again. "The halls of law and order. I'm an idiot."
"You are?" Matthew sounded as bleary as he looked. He rubbed a hand over his face, obviously trying to wake up, and in doing so, clearly came to an inarguable conclusion. "You are definitely not an idiot."
"I am, though." Sarah kissed him and rolled out of bed. Doc McStuffins yowled an objection as she was dislodged from her corner—really, her half, because she was a cat—of the bed, and ran out of the room with her tail fluffed up. Sarah stubbed her toe on the bedside table, but her heart was beating so quickly from excitement she didn't really feel the pain. "The halls of law and order, Matt!"
"You speak in mysterious ways," Matthew said with a yawn. He got out of bed, though, fumbling for his clothes. "Are you going to tell me?"
Sarah grabbed her bra, practically hopping with excitement, which did not, in truth, make putting a bra on all that easy. "The halls of law and order! The halls!"
"You said that." Matt sounded more awake now, and amused. He got dressed while Sarah was fighting with her bra, and stood there grinning at her while she wrangled clothes into place. "What am I missing?"
"Where's the hall of law and order?"
His eyebrows drew down and he shook his head. "There's...the sheriff's department is one building and the courthouse...I guess it has a couple of short halls leading into the jury room and the judge's chambers, but those aren't really halls, are they? They're just the sides of the courtroom, with the...whatever it's called. The part where the judge and jury and plaintiffs and everybody sits, that have half walls. They're not really halls."
"Right!" Sarah managed to get the rest of her clothes on and scurried around to him, grabbing his shoulder. "So where's the hall?"
"The only hall I can think of is between the oooh! Oooh! Oooh!"
"Right? Right?! Come on!"
"It's two in the morning, Sarah. How are you going to get in?"
"There'll be a deputy on duty," Sarah said urgently. "C'mon c'mon c'mon!" She ran out of the bedroom to get her shoes, and was in the truck before Matthew made it through the front door. He bumbled along after her, though, smiling and sleepy and really the most wonderfully perfect man Sarah could ever imagine. The very fact that he was getting up at two in the morning to come see if she'd solved a mystery proved that, even if everything else about him wasn't also wonderful.
"Drive on, Macduff," he said when he got into the truck. "I can't wait to see how you convince them."
"I'm Sarah Ekstrom," she said of a confidence born partly from his support. "I can convince anybody of anything."
"I see no lies," he said happily, and closed his eyes to drift off as she drove them the few blocks into town. A couple of minutes later she'd parked in front of the sheriff's office, where a single lonely light was on. She knocked, then tried the door, and let them in as Donna Arnesen, the deputy, looked up in surprise.
"Everything okay, Sarah?" Her gaze went to Matthew and stayed there a moment, her eyebrows drawn down, but then she returned her attention to Sarah.
"It is, but I have a really genuinely weird ask. Can I go knock on the floor in the hall in front of the cells?"
Donna, who was clearly not much more awake than Matt, blinked at Sarah slowly. "I guess...? Why...?"
Sarah hadn't thought that through, not entirely. If she'd known whether Donna knew about Virtue, it would be one thing, but she couldn't exactly ask that. "Um. For...very good reasons. It has to do with...Judge Owens asking me to look for some things...."
"It's okay," Matt said with a yawn and a stretch. "She's a shifter."
"What?" Sarah and Donna both yelped the word at the same time, and Matt looked apologetic.
"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have...I'm not thinking very clearly. Crap. Lo siento. Matthew Rojas." He stepped forward, offering Donna his hand, which she looked at with no small amount of irritation. "I'm sorry," he said again. "Sarah's my mate and I've gotten used to telling her when I run into other shifters, but I should be more careful."
"Oh." Donna's irritation visibly faded and she said, "I didn't think you were in the know, but if you're his mate, that's different," to Sarah.
"I won't tell anybody," Sarah promised.
"No, I know. Mates won't. Okay, fine. What do you need to knock on the hall floor for?"
Sarah shot Matthew a wide-eyed glance, then shrugged. "We found the public town charter, right? But we read about another one, a secret charter about—"
"About why Virtue was really founded, yeah." Donna sighed. "And you think it's, what, in the hall?"
"But you're not from one of the old families!" Sarah burst out.
"I am, though. We're not one of the rich old families," Donna said with some asperity, "but the Arnesens have been here for hundreds of years. We came...well, after the founders. After Virtue was set up as a shelter town. So what's in the hall?"
"I don't know. Maybe nothing." Sarah scurried past Donna into the hall and started thumping on individual planks, listening to see if anything sounded different.
"That one," Matthew and Donna said almost simultaneously. They exchanged a look as Sarah glanced over her shoulder at them, surprised. The two shifters exchanged a faint smile.
"You have pretty good hearing, huh?" Sarah asked, and drooped, looking back down at the board. "I guess I can't just go ripping up the floorboards here, can I. Even if the jail doesn't get a lot of traffic, it's probably just kind of a bad idea."
Donna said, "I'll get the toolbox," and left them in the hall for a moment.
"I should call Jake," Sarah said. "He knows how to take old boards out without damaging them."
"You can't call a newlywed at two in the morning for a construction job, Sarah," Matthew said, amused.
"Ah!" Sarah raised a finger in disagreement. "I shouldn't call a newlywed at two a.m. for a construction job. That's a whole different thing than can't."
"And this," Matthew said in an awed tone, "this is why you can and do get everything done in Virtue. You know no barriers and no bounds."
"All shall love me and despair," Sarah agreed.
Matthew dropped his voice. "Love you, anyway."
Sarah went gooshy and gave him a sa
ppy smile that Donna rolled her eyes at as she returned with the toolbox. Sarah took a crowbar and fit it carefully into the biggest space between two boards that she could find, and very cautiously worked the board up. It took several minutes, and she had to take a second one up before she could see anything in the darkness beneath the floor.
What she saw was Wallace Evans, staring up at her in outrage.
* * *
"Put those back!" Evans snapped.
Sarah shrieked and slapped the boards back down as Matthew and Donna rushed forward to see what was going on. A moment later she pulled one of them back again to find Evans's scowling face glowering up at her again.
"I said to put those back! What do you think you're doing? Donna Arnesen, you should know better!"
Donna squeaked and Sarah slapped the boards down again, then sat on them for good measure. "What the—what the heck?!"
"Well," Matthew said cheerfully, "I think we're on to something."
"The old man is a badger," the deputy said, baffled. "But I didn't think he lived under the jail."
Sarah bit down on another shriek, this one of glee. Wallace Evans' temper seemed wonderfully suited to a badger. There was some justice in the world. After a few seconds, when she was sure she wouldn't giggle out loud with delight, she said, "Don't even regular badgers have pretty big tunnel systems? Maybe a shifter badger has...more?"
Especially a shifter badger who had had well over a century to dig them, she thought. Maybe Virtue was entirely riddled with badger tunnels. Although she didn't know how stable that would be, or how deep the bedrock was, or...maybe she shouldn't worry about it right then.
Particularly since the sheriff's department door banged open and Wallace Evans stomped in. "What the devil do you kids think you're doing? Do you know what kind of trouble you're stirring up? I knew it was bad news to have new shifters coming to town!" He glowered at Matthew, who blinked in surprise.
Before he could mount a defense on his own behalf, though, Sarah stood up, indignant. "None of this is Matthew's fault, Mr. Evans! The judge would have asked me to find the charter even if Matt hadn't come here! And we'd have ended up here anyway!"
Given that she hadn't known about Virtue's shifter history until Matthew told her, Sarah realized this was something of a stretch, but Wallace Evans didn't have to know that. And from the twitch in his cantankerous face, he accepted the general truth of her argument one way or another. "Mr. Evans, can you please tell us what—what you know?"
"What I know is you young people are going to make a mess of what this town has become!" A sudden frustrated resignation swept Wallace Evans. His shoulders dropped, and he sighed. "And maybe that's a good thing."
Matthew and Sarah exchanged glances as the fight completely went out of the old man. "Fine," he muttered. "Come on, then."
Sarah scrambled to her feet, but looked guiltily at the floor. "Wait, I need to—"
"Wait and I'll change my damn mind," Evans growled.
"I'll put the boards back down properly," Donna said with a sigh. "I can't leave the office anyway, not unless there's an emergency call-out. And this isn't an emergency." She glared at the other three. "It's only the most interesting thing that's ever happened in Virtue in my entire life. You'd better come tell me what's what, when you're done."
Sarah skipped forward and hugged the deputy. "We will. Promise."
Donna said, "Urgh," and pushed her off, but not meanly. "Go on, find out secrets, be a detective, whatever, it's not like I'm a deputy who should get to solve mysteries or anything." She gave Sarah a rueful little smile and sat down to fix the boards.
Wallace Evans stumped out of the sheriff's office and across the town square with Matthew and Sarah following at what she hoped was a safe distance. Not that she knew what an unsafe distance was, but it felt like he might turn on them and savage them at any moment, so staying a little distance back seemed wise. She whispered, "Did you," to Matthew, then remembered shifters all apparently had good hearing and pressed her lips together.
He whispered, "Did I what?" anyway.
"Did you know he was under there? Couldn't you sense him?"
"Not through the boards and the dirt! I would have warned you!" That came out in a rather strong voice that echoed across the square, reminding them both it was the small hours of the morning and no one else in Virtue was awake. A fit of giggles swept them and Evans scowled furiously over his shoulder at them. Matthew whispered, "Sorry," very loudly, and they both dissolved into giggles again.
"I don't think detectives turn into giggling idiots when the game is afoot," Sarah whispered.
"Thank goodness we're a librarian and an archivist, then," Matthew whispered back.
Sarah snorted back a loud laugh, coughed on it, and was wiping tears of laughter from her eyes when Old Mr. Evans stomped up to one of the abandoned buildings on Church Street, opened the door, and gestured them in. "Oh no," Sarah whispered hoarsely, through more giggles, "is he gonna murder us in the dark and leave us to rot in a badger warren?"
"No," Matt said a bit dryly, "because I am, in fact, a bear, and I don't think he could take me in a fight."
A flush of heat ran through Sarah. "Not that I want you to have to fight on my behalf, but that's really hot."
"I live to serve. C'mon." He took her hand and they followed Wallace into the house. Sarah turned the flashlight on her phone on before they went into the house's cellar and then—not surprisingly, Sarah supposed—into a tunnel beneath the cellar.
What was surprising was the size of the tunnel. She had to hunch a little, and the men had to hunch more, but it was very nearly person-sized, not just badger-sized. "You dug this, Mr. Evans?"
Wallace Evans gave her an irritated look—she didn't think he had any other expression available to him—and shifted into the biggest, most terrifying badger Sarah had ever seen. Even Matthew staggered back a step, whispering, "Madre de Dios," and sounding very, very Argentinian for a moment. "Maybe I couldn't take him after all."
Evans shifted back with a dour look. "I certainly wouldn't try it, if I were you. Come on." He led them through a warren, and within a few minutes, Sarah was fairly certain they were back under the jailhouse. The tunnel turned into a larger open space, above which a steady thumping was audible. Sarah went over to peer upward and saw the crack of light where Donna was finishing the repairs to the hall floor.
"Do you just...hang out here?"
"All the racket you were making woke me up. I came to see what was going on, and realized I'd never get any peace until you found what you were looking for." Evans, to Sarah's enormous surprise, pulled a string to turn on a bare bulb overhead light and illuminated what turned out to be a fairly good-sized hollow in the earth.
In fact, it was a room, the walls smoothed and the ambient temperature obviously steady, cool and dry. Like Hazel's home, it had storage boxes and tables tucked against its sides, although these were stone, not beadwork. Matthew, under his breath, said, "This is a great preservation room," and for an instant, Evans looked furiously pleased instead of just furious. He gestured to one of the boxes.
Sarah and Matthew crowded close as he opened it and withdrew, rather reverently, a scrolled document that had the same kind of magnificent illustrations around its exterior border that the public charter had. Sarah caught her breath and clutched Matthew's arm. To her delight, he clutched hers back just as hard, obviously as thrilled and anticipatory as she was. Evans brought it to one of the tables, with Matthew leaping ahead to brush any dust off the table first.
He actually got a grunt of approval from the old man, for that. Evans unrolled the charter carefully, pinning the corners with paperweights that Sarah thought he might have just casually pulled out of the walls when he needed them. Probably not, but she hadn't seen them until he used them, and there was enough magic going around already that she couldn't deny the possibility.
Between the overhead bulb and their phones, there was plenty of light to see the charter by. T
he page was larger—much larger—than the public charter, although it was almost identical in terms of royal proclamations and land grants. Matthew murmured, "Look, though, it mentions the 'curious nature' of the Virtue settlers," and hovered his hand above where the language differed from the public charter.
Like the public charter, the secret one had a map of Virtue, delineating its borders. But below that was drawn another map, and Sarah had to stare at it a few long seconds before she suddenly realized what it meant. "Oh my God. These are—they're routes to other shifter towns. Other planned shifter towns. Routes and names and—oh my God, Matthew. They're all over the east coast."
"And Europe," Matthew whispered reverentially, tracing the maps farther down the page. "Look, there are trade ship routes and shifter towns and villages all over Europe listed here. And—this one goes as far as the Silk Road!"
"And in to northern Africa, and across the Ural Mountains," Wallace Evans said. He'd gone to sit across the room in a chair Sarah was certain hadn't been there before.
Not a chair, really, she supposed. A square lump of earth that didn't shift with his weight. Close enough to a chair, at least. She squeaked, "Did you just...make that? Without digging anything?"
Wallace scowled magnificently at her. "Shifter magic's more complicated than you think, girl, and I've had a long time to get good at it."
Sarah, genuinely impressed, whispered, "Wow."
Evans looked momentarily satisfied and began to speak again. "Virtue was the first European shifter town settled in the colonies. It's been our duty to hold the secrets of the old towns for centuries now. To keep the old networks alive. But people have moved on." He fell silent for a moment, then admitted, "Shifters have died out."
Sarah exchanged a glance with Matthew, then, cautiously, said, "Some people apparently think they should. Some shifters, even."
