Capitol Magic (8 page)

“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 offering 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.

“Sarah,” I said. “It will only be for a moment. Only until David can help us.”

Neko had already understood my intention. He was practically dancing inside the cage, holding out his hands, welcoming Sarah and me. Still, the sphinx hesitated on the threshold.

We heard the commotion upstairs at the same time—the mansion's beautiful oaken door being torn off its hinges.

“Now!” I shouted, pushing Sarah toward Neko and tumbling after her. I slammed the cage door behind me, working its massive silver padlock with fingers that suddenly felt like sausages. I dropped the key onto the floor of the cage, but Sarah pounced on it and shoved it deep in a pocket.

The basement door was filled with shadow, and then four bodies catapulted down the stairs. I leaped back, stumbling until I felt a solid wall behind me. Neko was on my left, his shoulders hunched, his eyes shooting darts. Sarah was on my right.

And then there was one of those flashes of darkness, a momentary, magical glitch when the world ceased to exist. Everything surged back into being, though, louder than before, brighter than before. And David stood before me.

“What the devil —” he started to ask.

I'd first heard the curse years before, when David questioned my first spell, the one that had awakened Neko. Under other circumstances, I might have laughed, might have told him he was channeling Mr. Rochester, play-acting at Mr. Darcy.

This was no time for levity, though. No time for amusing literary references. “We came for books,” I said. “But we awakened a welcoming party.”

David had already whirled to face the front of the cage. His feet were spread, hip-width apart. His arms hung easily at his sides; his fingers clenched and unclenched.

I realized that he had tugged on jeans in the foggy moments after he received my summons, and he'd shoved his arms into the sleeves of a flannel shirt. A dusting of pine chips clung to the fabric. David had spent at least part of his day cutting wood—a sure sign that he was frustrated, most likely with me.