“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.