When I pulled out the Key, we all caught our breath. The blade seemed to have expanded, its leaf shape much wider at the base. The silver surface was thicker than it had been in Jane’s kitchen, and the metal was smoother. It caught the light of the full moon and threw it back, brilliant as a spotlight.
I took a deep breath, centering my awareness as I had when James trained me in the Old Library gymnasium. I forced myself to feel the stillness, the power, the strength that coursed inside my veins.
I had worked at James’s lessons for six months now. I knew how to fight, how to defend myself, how to attack. But I had no physical enemy here—no one I could catch in an armlock, could tumble to the ground with a single well-aimed kick.
And Chris had withheld my sphinx training, the intellectual background that I had hoped would balance the physical lessons from James. Over the past several months, Chris had parceled out only a handful of lessons, the vaguest of historical notions. He had moved so slowly that I had been crazed by the pressure inside me, by my need to order things, to control the chaos in the world around me.
And so I had learned more than Chris knew. I had prowled through texts in his private library when I knew his job as a reporter would keep him away from his home. I had read a handful of books in their entirety, histories of our obscure people, of sphinxes. And I had learned a few words of power.
I filled my lungs again, and I centered both my palms on the Key’s hilt. “Inoixa,” I said, thinking each syllable separately, clearly, like a bell ringing inside my skull. A tart wash of lemon exploded inside my mouth. I gulped at the citrus, surprised, even though I had hoped for it.
I brought the Key forward so that the very tip of the blade kissed the door.
A crash shattered through me. My feet started to slip away, as if I tumbled down a sand dune. The Key flared bright, collecting all the silver light of the full moon, melting it, mixing it, transforming it into the gold of the desert sun. A hot wind blew across the porch, summoned from lands distant in space and time.
In the wake of that scirocco, Richardson’s door gave way. One moment, it was bound by the Eastern Empire, by Chris, by the forces of Sekhmet. The next, it had yielded to me, to a sphinx who dared to bear the Key. It swung back on its hinges, as if it had never been latched.
I took a breath, and I was surprised to find that my lungs burned as if they had been scorched beneath a noon-time sun. That discovery made my legs start to tremble, and I was grateful for Jane’s hand as she cradled my forearm, taking care to avoid touching the Key. I think we were both surprised to see that my blade had transformed back into an ordinary tool of onyx and silver, nothing more than an attractive ornament.
“There,” I said to Neko, and I was grateful that my voice did not shake. “I don’t think the latch will give you any trouble again.”
I strode over the threshold as if I had every right to be there. I had to prove to myself that I was not afraid. I turned to Jane. “I don’t know where he keeps the books. I don’t know how to find them.”
“Well, let’s get started, then.” I suspected she wasn’t aware of the way her fingers flew over the tiger’s eye beads around her wrist, almost as if she was saying a rosary. Neko whined as I closed the door behind us. Its magic was gone, though. It was nothing more than an ordinary set of oak and metal.
Jane’s voice was nervous as she reached for the switches on the wall. “Anyone opposed to a little light?”
A little light. As if all it took was a single flick of a switch to restore a semblance of normalcy to a vampire’s lair. As if a witch knew anything about the power a vampire like Richardson could have acquired, could have let stew in malevolence throughout his grim sanctum. As if a witch knew more than a sphinx about such things.
Strike that.
The light made a huge difference. Bright and cheerful, it let all of us draw deep breaths. “I wish I’d thought of that,” I muttered.
Jane smiled, but the expression looked a little forced. “Where do you want to start? If I were hiding stolen goods, I’d put them in either the attic or the basement.”
“Attic,” I said before the words were completely out of her mouth. I wanted no part of Richardson’s basement.
Jane and Neko looked at me, as if they expected me to lead the way. I realized they were right—this was my project, whether I wanted to be responsible for it or not. I was the Clerk of Court for the Night Court, responsible for all the materials in the Old Library. I was the one who had insisted on coming to Richardson’s sanctum. I was the sphinx who had stolen Sekhmet’s Key.
Lucky, lucky me.
Somehow, I expected the stairs to creak as we made our way to the attic. A part of my mind waited for the hinges to groan as I opened the door that led to the space beneath the eaves. We were going to catch glimpses of ghosts, hear snatches of eerie organ music, feel clammy ectoplasmic mist against our faces.
There was none of that, though. Everything was normal. Mundane. We could all have been ordinary humans, walking through an ordinary house on an ordinary spring evening.
I lost no time turning on the attic lights before we climbed the stairs. Jane and Neko pressed close behind me as I peered around the huge room.
It was cluttered, in a way that made my sphinx need for order twitch. I wanted to stack those boxes neatly. And sort through those papers. Line up those racks of clothes. And I totally, completely, desperately wanted to turn the hangers so that they all faced the same way.
But really, there was nothing strange in the attic. Nothing to raise suspicion. Nothing to make a sphinx or a witch or a familiar blink.
Even when Jane viewed the surroundings through her lens of rock crystal. Before she used her magic, Jane brushed the clear stone against her tiger’s eye bracelet, obviously transferring some of the protective aura she had created back at her cottage. The precaution, though, proved unnecessary.
“I don’t see any books,” she said, after a thorough survey of the space. She even rested a hand on Neko’s shoulder, apparently drawing strength from him to augment her own powers. “I can’t find anything hidden here at all.”
After we returned to the mansion’s second floor, I closed the door to the attic firmly. In fact, I checked it twice. I’d seen enough horror films to know that evil lurks in attics. Evil, and insane wives, ready to burn a house down. Given everything I knew about Maurice Richardson, I wouldn’t put any terror past him.
Huddling close and walking like a single six-legged beast, the three of us checked the master bedroom. The pair of luxurious guest suites, both with four-poster canopy beds. Every bathroom, fitted out with chrome and marble and lion-clawed bathtubs. A linen closet half the size of my basement apartment.
We descended to the ground floor and continued our inspection, through the kitchen, the dining room, the formal living room. I shuddered there, remembering the last time I had stood before its tall windows. Then, I had been worried about James. I had been confused about my powers, exhausted by my battle with Richardson. Now, I was merely frustrated, exasperated that Jane’s magic was revealing no sign of the books I firmly believed were on the premises.
We all perked up as we entered the last room on the ground floor. It was an old-fashioned home library, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. A huge desk filled one side of the room, and a pair of leather couches occupied the rest. The carpet underfoot was rich with swirls of red and black.
The library was the opposite of the attic. Every book on every shelf was in perfect order. There were no haphazard stacks, no casual debris. Nothing triggered my sphinx compulsions. Nevertheless, I shuddered as I stepped onto that crimson rug.
Neko’s nose twitched as we entered the room. “What?” Jane asked him. “Do you smell leather? Parchment?”
He shook his head. “Just that,” he said, pointing toward a mahogany sideboard. A crystal decanter was centered on the wooden surface, surrounded by a quartet of goblets. “Cinnamon.”
I could picture Richardson of
fering a cordial to any human who invaded his lair—unsuspecting police officers, curious neighbors, Mormon missionaries who had left their bikes toppled haphazardly on the driveway.
I took a deep breath. “Well, there’s a lot to go through. I’ll start over there. Jane, why don’t you take that wall? Neko, you can work there.” They moved to their places without protest.
Steeling myself for a long search, I stretched for the tallest shelf. I edged my index finger onto the spine of a hefty book, a leather-clad monster with some title stamped in burnished gold, too dark for me to make out. I tugged.
And nothing happened.
I stretched onto my tiptoes and nudged my fingertips around the spine. Or, rather, I tried to dig into the leather binding, to pull the book free. I couldn’t, though. The book was attached to the volumes on either side.
Exasperated, I dragged over the ornate wooden step stool that crouched behind one of the couches. I clambered up its two steps and did my best to wrest the book from its shelf. Impossible. The volume was glued to its fellows. I tested the next book and the next and the next.
Every single one was bound shut. The entire shelf was nothing but a decorator’s display, an attempt to make the library’s owner look erudite.
Disgusted, I turned to Jane and Neko. They had discovered similar frauds. Maurice Richardson’s entire library was a sham.
Just to be certain, of course, Jane reviewed the shelves with her rock crystal. She checked behind the desk, under the sofas. Well before she had finished, Neko flopped onto one of the couches. “Books, books everywhere, and not a page to read.” He ran a melodramatic hand through his short-cropped hair, flinging out his wrist as if he would never recover from the disappointment.
Jane frowned at her familiar before turning to me. “This way, he doesn’t have to worry about dusting hundreds of volumes. Or dealing with silverfish and dry rot.” She looked at me. “I guess that leaves the basement.”
I nodded, but my throat was suddenly dry. I wanted to go anywhere else, study anything else.
But I was a sphinx. I protected my vampire, James Morton. And, by extension, his possessions, all the belongings that he needed me to collect and organize. Even if that meant returning to the nightmare scene of Richardson’s basement.
I forced myself to take a half dozen deep breaths as I led the way to the door. Richardson was not lurking at the bottom of the stairs. He was safely locked away beneath the D.C. courthouse. I was a strong and independent sphinx. I was trained as a fighter, and Maurice Richardson did not have the power to make me be afraid.
Even as I opened the door, Jane sprang to attention. I whispered, “What?”
She licked her lips. “I can feel them down there.”
Them? Vampires? My face must have registered my fear, because she shook her head, obviously annoyed with herself.
“Books,” she clarified. “Old knowledge. Volumes that are bound with spells, wrapped in magic.”
My heart leaped into high gear. This was it, then. The moment when I regained the holdings of the Old Library. I’d march back into the courthouse, displaying my treasure, gaining the respect of the entire Night Court. James would be pleased with me. Chris would be proud—he’d realize that I was ready to do more as a sphinx, to learn more. To assume my birthright.
The three of us moved down the basement stairs. I knew what we would find there—the hulking furnace, the ancient worktables. The silver cage, where I had been held captive, certain that I would die before the dawn.
My pulse rushed in my ears. My fingers curled into fists. I watched, nearly paralyzed, as Jane and Neko surveyed the entire room.
Jane touched her forehead, her throat, and her heart in the ritual I now knew meant she was about to work a spell. Neko edged close beside her, taking her elbow, as if he were going to edge her past a slick of ice on some invisible sidewalk. She leaned into him, and she whispered something. I could not quite make out the words, but I caught their sing-song rhythm, their hint of rhyme.
Jane whirled to her right. Her hand flew forward, as if the rock crystal were iron dragged home by some massive lodestone. With an effort that made her entire arm tremble, she raised the lens, drawing it up to eye level. When she looked through it, she gasped, and then she clutched Neko’s arm.
With one hand firmly planted on her familiar, the other gripped the herb-soaked strand of stones around her anchored wrist. Her eyes blazed as she shouted, “Reveal!”
There was a flash of darkness. Even as I registered the change, I knew that made no sense—flashes should be light, should be bright, should be blinding.
This was different, though. For one moment, the entire world flashed out of existence. When it surged back into being, everything was sharper, clearer, more distinct.
And there, on the far side of the basement, jumbled onto four massive wooden workbenches, were piles of books. Bound volumes, curling scrolls, limp-backed notebooks. A collection as large as the one I’d studied in the Old Library.
That was impossible, though. I’d seen the listings Jane had found, the indications that scrolls and volumes had been checked out from the Library over the centuries. They wouldn’t amount to a stash this size. They couldn’t.
But the evidence was before me, crystal clear. I saw the call numbers I had been unable to translate before Jane arrived. Each book was marked, branded as part of the Eastern Empire’s collection. Richardson had left a handful of legitimate notices indicating legal borrowing, but even then he had dissembled. He had completely obscured the true extent of his theft.
I moved without thinking, my body flowing into the ancient poetry of wind and sand and dunes. One moment, I was crouching behind the witch and her familiar. The next, I was bowing before the works that I was destined to protect. I reached out to the closest item, a scroll that bore the ancient criss-cross of papyrus. I needed to touch it, needed to confirm that it was actually mine.
As my fingers brushed across the millennia-old scroll, a shriek went up inside my mind. Sharper than glass forged from desert sand. Louder than the sirocco. Piercing to my sphinx heart.
It was a message without words, a summons without speech. I had stumbled across a psychic tripwire. I had summoned a nest of vampires, a clutch of killers who had sworn personal loyalty to Maurice Richardson.
CHAPTER 7
JANE
“THEY’RE COMING!” SARAH gasped.
I didn’t have to ask who. The horror on her face made it clear that we were about to face vampires.
Neko recovered before I did. “How long do we have?” he asked. “And how many are there?” I’d heard that tone in his voice before, that absolute determination. But every time he used it, I was still astonished. No matter how often Neko saved me from my own mistakes, I continued to think of him as nothing more than my happy-go-lucky, boy-toy familiar.
Sarah shook her head and whispered, “I’m not sure… I can’t…”
“Yes,” Neko insisted, closing his hands around her upper arms. “You can. You felt the vampires awaken. Their threat bounced back to you. It was like an echo. How many responded to you? How far away were they?”
I cast a quick look at my familiar. How did he know these things? Could he possibly be drawing upon the repository of knowledge he shared with other familiars, the same pool of information that let him know how to make the perfect mojito, how to wear his hair in the most fashionable of current styles?
Sarah tried to pull away, muttering something about sand, about lemons. My familiar, though, merely tightened his fingers around her biceps. “Sarah, listen to me! Close your eyes. Concentrate.”
And somehow, miraculously, she started to pay attention. Her eyelids fluttered closed. Her breath caught in her throat. She licked her lips, and then she nodded. “There are four of them,” she said. Her voice was high, strained, almost as if she was in a trance. She seemed to question herself, to be unsure, but then she nodded again. “Four. And we have five minutes. Maybe six.”
; Not enough time to call a cab.
But enough time to get David. Enough time for my warder to spirit us all away to safety.
My belly tightened at the thought. I hated being the damsel in distress. I hated being the wayward child who had to be rescued from her own foolish wrongs. I hated the fact that David would be angry with me for venturing here without him, that he’d be disappointed in my judgment.
Neko had released Sarah. Now, he stared at me with the intensity of a cat stalking a garter snake. “Are you going to summon him, or should I?”
I shook my head, but I was already reaching out for the link. It was strung between us, so comfortable, so familiar, that I could go for days without giving it conscious thought. But now, when I needed it, the connection was taut, like the line that linked a child’s pair of tin-can telephones. “David,” I thought. “Now.”
I felt his awareness snap toward mine. He’d been sleeping, deep in a dream that I could not make out. His warder’s awareness surged across our bond, and I felt him gather his astral power to join us.
“He’s coming,” I said.
“Not soon enough.” Sarah’s voice cracked. I tried not to gape at her, tried not to wonder what had happened to her vaunted sphinx abilities. Could this be the same creature who had faced down a furious James Morton, in the basement of the courthouse? Why was she so terrified of the vampires that she sensed? Didn’t she have any ability to control them?
“Hurry,” I said. “Into the cage.”
Sarah shook her head, as if she did not understand the words. “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t go in there again.”
Again. So, she’d been held captive here in the past. Probably by Richardson—that would explain her determination to take back the missing books.
I could see the terror on her face now, the revulsion at reliving some past torment. But she had survived whatever had happened before. She had emerged victorious, or we would never have ended up here now.
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