1 Witchy Business (13 page)

I shuddered and brought myself back to the mechanics of the task I had to undertake. I had a theory about what happened to the Escher, and whatever else came out of tonight, I wanted to test my theory.

No, I
needed
to test it. I needed something to come to a definite end here. Every time I closed my eyes, it felt like I had people pulling me in different directions. I could remember the soft perfection of Niall’s kiss, the rough, demanding passion of Evert’s. He and Rebecca wanted me to help them kill Niall, Niall wanted…I didn’t know what he wanted, but I was in the middle, not knowing what
I
wanted. At least I could deal with the insurers’ demands without ruining everything.

I needed to remember what I was. What I did for a living. Forget everything and everyone else, I was going to find that Escher woodcut block and stop this madness tonight!

I slipped over to the front door and started work with the tools I had. Manipulating emotions may have been my main skill set, but it wasn’t my only one. Sometimes, when I couldn’t buy back an item from a thief, or simply persuade someone to return it, it was useful to have other options.

When it came to locks, I had to take the physical options. There were witches who could make a lock spring open with a gesture. Rebecca had already shown me several times that she was one of them. I’d even studied the spell, but I was an enchantress. It wasn’t a branch of magic that worked for me. Practically none of them did.

There was a kind of irony to that. The daughter of Annette Chambers was so weak that she couldn’t cast a real spell. She was so fragile that she couldn’t even walk into a crowded room. She was so short of options right now that she had to resort to breaking and entering.

Still, the lock clicked open easily enough after a minute or two. I knew the model of the alarm, how it worked and its weaknesses. If I’d wanted, I could probably have gotten the code, but that would have been cheating.

What would Samantha in
Bewitched
do? Samantha would have cheated and used her magic, but I didn’t want to cheat. Not for this test.

I slipped inside, trying not to make too much noise. I’d waited outside for Niall’s car to go past, so it didn’t look likely that he was in there, but his staff still would be, and avoiding them was kind of the point.

I tiptoed lightly across the floor in the direction of the main alarm box, opening it up as quickly as I could while keeping my ears open for signs of either Niall’s assistant or his housekeeper. I wasn’t sure where the driver was, either—probably in his room, watching TV or asleep.

If any of the staff showed up, I could probably talk my way out of any problems. I could tell them I was following a line of investigation and testing security. I would insist it was normal procedure to see what the weaknesses were and surmise how a real thief could have gotten in. If it came down to it, I could even tell them the truth about what I was doing here. Strange that the truth would be my very last resort…

Yet despite all that, there was a frisson of danger as I started bridging connections within the alarm box, hoping that I’d correctly memorized what to do. Things
could
go wrong, and technically, what I was doing could land me in jail and make me lose my job. I wasn’t sure which of those was the bigger worry.

Worse things could happen, too. If everything Rebecca and Evert had said was true, if any of it was, then getting caught could mean far more than a little trouble with the local police. If Niall really was a vampire preying on my emotions, and really
was
hunting me, then getting caught here might be the last thing I ever did. I was coming to the realization that I had serious feelings for Niall, and if he betrayed me, my heart would never be the same. That thought made me swallow hard as I made the last of the connections.

Nothing happened when I made the changes to the alarm system. That was probably a good sign, although I knew as well as anyone that there were silent ones. For all I knew, a dozen burly police officers were already on their way. I could imagine them now, swarming into the house, their booted feet thundering across the floor in pursuit of me, handcuffs at the ready. The image of handcuffs kept coming up, again and again, and a feeling of terror rose inside of me. I pushed it away. There was nothing to fear here. I had gotten away with this part of it, at least.

But as my mind snapped out of that daydream, it became obvious that someone
was
coming. I could hear the steady click of heels on a parquet floor, and I looked around for a handy corner into which to press myself. I found one and stood there, barely daring to breathe, as Niall’s assistant Marie walked past. She stopped just a pace or two from me, staring at a text message on her phone. All it would take for her to find me would be one glance in the wrong direction…

I was about to send a pulse of restlessness into her to get her moving when I spotted the security access card clipped to her belt on a coiled dangling cord. Did some part of the security system require one? I wracked my brain, going through the system, trying to work out which part it was for. The doors to the gallery room. It had to be. They’d been open when I’d been there previously, so I hadn’t given them much thought when I’d planned this, but it made sense to have something like that to stop access. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more sure I was that I’d seen the model number for a card reader somewhere in the insurance documents. Of all the things to ignore.
Damn.

I shifted from the restlessness I was going to project in Marie’s direction to the kind of daydreaming stupor I needed for the next part. It wasn’t much, just an extension of the kind of natural calming effect I normally favored, and it certainly wouldn’t hurt her, but it did make it easier to reach out and unclip the keycard from her belt.

Easier, not easy. I still had to reach out, inch by careful inch, willing my fingers not to tremble. Trying to keep the movements sure and delicate, because any sudden jerk might break through the personal assistant’s reverie. Only when I was sure I had the key card in my possession did I pull my arm back and break her out of the distraction with her phone. She shook her head, looked down at her phone again, and headed off deeper into the house, texting as she went.

I waited until she was well clear before padding over to the collection gallery, stretching my senses as much as I could. Especially the more than normal senses. It wasn’t like I had a magical radar working for me, but I figured if someone became suspicious, I would at least feel a spark of
some
emotion before they caught up with me physically.

It took me another couple of minutes to get to the doors of the gallery room that way. Sure enough, they had exactly the kind of card reader that would have made things difficult for me if I hadn’t stolen Marie’s pass right off her belt. As it was, all I had to do was swipe it through the lock and step inside, trying not to worry too much as the room’s lights came on automatically.

I stopped and looked around, trying to work out the last part. A thief would have had to go in and out in a matter of minutes. More was just too much of a risk in a house where there were people moving about. They couldn’t control where the staff would go. Yet, I’d been in the house at least five minutes, and I still had the defenses in the gallery room to go. I’d been a bit sloppy with the doors, but these ones I knew all about. Pressure pads and laser sensors were all wired to a separate security box in the room. And then…well, we’d get to that part afterward.

How long would it take me to crack it? I didn’t know, but I suspected it wouldn’t be too long, though I really had to put on my thinking cap. Even getting the box open would involve de-activating a failsafe with this model. So, I tried another way—my way—honing in my senses on the buttons, trying to feel as precisely as I could, trying to separate out the different sensations…

Even inanimate objects retain feelings or impressions, especially if they have been touched. Whoever touches an object leaves behind their psychic tracks, little bits of emotion, and intent.

Four of the buttons had stronger impressions clinging to them than the others, and unsurprisingly, I knew that Niall’s fingers had pressed 1, 3, 7, and 8, but that wasn’t enough to go on.

I focused more, pressing the part of me that felt emotions like a wine taster picking apart flavors, trying to force myself to distinguish the tiniest differences. Did the “3” feel like it had a tiny hint more satisfaction clinging to it? The last number then, the one that gave them what they wanted. Did the “1” have that tiny fleck of “do I really have to punch this code in again” frustration? Which just left two numbers. Indistinguishable, as far as I could tell. A fifty-fifty shot on the order. Was fifty-fifty good enough?

I punched it in and my heart skipped a beat while I waited for all hell to break loose. 1873 didn’t set off any alarms, though. I sighed with relief and lifted one of the smaller sculptures at random. Off a plinth. It didn’t matter which one.

“Here goes nothing,” I whispered to myself as I stepped through the gallery doors.

The blare of the alarm was instant, just as I’d known it would be. Those last sensors on the works, the ones that sensed when a piece of art had been removed from the room, weren’t connected into the same circuit as the plinths. They couldn’t be shut down from here. It meant that they could be rearranged within the room, but not taken outside.

I’d been almost certain, but I had to check. I had to understand. I moved back into the room, setting down my looted prize and sitting with my back to the sculpture’s pedestal. When Kelly and Marie both came running, I knew for sure. Mostly because of what I could feel pouring off them like smoke. I looked over at them and put on a calm demeanor.

“I think you’d better call Niall, don’t you?” It didn’t even take a push of magic to make them nod. They knew as well as I did that he would want to hear about this. “Since the alarm’s wired through directly to a security company, you might want to call them to stop them from coming. And just in case the security company has already called the police, call them, too.”

 Marie, red-faced, made all three calls, right in front of me, explaining to the latter two that it had all been an accident. I sat there, looking as carefully nonthreatening as I could.

After a minute or two, Kelly actually brought me coffee with shortbread and thanked me for running the surprise alarm drill, even said it was a good idea, though she had been “alarmed.”

I giggled nervously at her pun. I barely tasted the coffee, but wolfed down the shortbread in three bites. I was too caught up in waiting for Niall to show up to get too distracted with small talk with Marie and Kelly, so I gave them perfunctory answers to their questions, saying I would discuss my findings with Niall. They were quiet then. All of us knew that this situation required Niall’s presence.

The two women left when he came into the gallery, without having to be instructed to do so. Niall stood there, not demanding to know why I’d broken into his home, not raising his voice, not anything. Just waiting. He looked at me patiently, almost compassionately, and yet clearly hiding something from me, too. I felt it clearly that there was a missing piece to the puzzle and that Niall held it.

I stood up straight to match his confidence, and I could feel his attention on me as if it had true weight. I felt everything that I’d felt from him at the club, plus a hint, just a hint, of expectation as he waited for the other shoe to drop. I did my best not to disappoint him.

“So, Niall,” I said. “I’m only going to ask you this once. We are running out of time. What did you do with the Escher?”