"My job puts me at risk. I said I'll be careful, and I will," I said loudly, then locked my knees as the heady scent of excited vampire cascaded over me like water. It was Nina, and I sidestepped her so she wouldn't link her arm in mine.
"I'll see to Rachel's safety personally," the woman said gracefully, not at all upset that I'd avoided her. "I can smell them, you see," Nina said, and she touched her nose as she smiled coyly. "Nasty little humans with mischief on their brains. I'm sure Ms. Morgan will be most careful, but I will restrain her from entering any room that's unsafe. Physically . . . if necessary."
"There, you see?" I said brusquely, my heart pounding as I made a mental promise that Nina wasn't ever going to lay a hand on me. "You should stay here, though. You're right about the legal thing. You might get hurt and sue the city."
"I would not," Wayde said with a scowl, but Glenn was pointing at one of his men to stay behind with him. "Fine. I'll stay," he said with bad grace, arms over his chest and his feet spread wide. "I'm starting to see why you don't have many friends."
I probably deserved that, but with only the faintest tug of guilt, I followed the curator into the wide hallway, the rest of the men behind me, and Nina behind them. The wide door shut behind us with a solid thump, and I stifled my shiver. Almost immediately we found a set of stairs, and Mr. Calaway started down, turning on big industrial lights as he went. It was cold, and the air smelled stale. My feet in my soggy garden shoes didn't make a sound. Neither did Nina's, and it was giving me the creeps. I could feel her behind me, lurking. Maybe leaving Wayde behind hadn't been such a good idea, but I was surrounded by men with guns looking for an empty room. What did he think was going to happen?
I checked my cell phone when we reached the bottom of the stairs, not liking that there was no signal. The amulet still worked, meaning we weren't too deep to reach a ley line. Small comfort, since I wasn't going to.
"Which way?" Glenn asked when we came to an intersection. He was tense, and I could see Nina enjoying the mild temptation Glenn was making himself into. It probably didn't help that he smelled like Ivy.
"Give me a moment," I said. Head down over the amulet, I left them, half on the stairs, half in the lower hallway, and went a few paces to the left, watching the amulet's color.
"That leads to storage," Mr. Calaway offered. He was starting to fidget, and Nina smiled, basking in it.
"What do you store here?" Nina almost purred, clearly happy belowground. "Brochures?"
I turned at Mr. Calaway's scoff, but then he hesitated and backed up several steps when he saw her almost lascivious expression. "Mostly artifacts that we haven't gotten prepped for display or those that we don't want to make available to the general public."
Glenn spun on a heel, his face creased in irritation. "Why wouldn't you want them on display?" he asked belligerently.
The curator adopted a stiff posture, one step up from Nina. "Slavery was an ugly business, Officer Glenn. It became more so when given a high monetary value and people took inhuman steps to protect their investments."
Clearly this was a sore subject for the man, but Glenn had turned to face him squarely, just as upset. "It's Detective Glenn. And what right do you have to determine who gets to see it?"
Mr. Calaway squinted at the larger man, not backing down an inch. "I'll arrange a private tour for you if you like, and if you still feel the same way, I'll be very much surprised."
Eyes down, I walked past them in the other direction. My pulse jumped when the amulet glowed a brighter green. Nina must have sensed it because she came down the last few steps, her eyes alight. "I think it's this way," I said, and Mr. Calaway waved his hands in protest.
"There's nothing down there," he claimed, but my amulet said differently, and we all strode forward to find it ended in . . . nothing. No stairway, no door. Nothing.
"I don't understand," I said, staring at the empty wall as I remembered doing almost the same thing in Trent's labs a few months ago. There'd been a door that I had needed to use a ley line to walk through to the room beyond. I couldn't do that now, and I looked from my band of charmed silver to Glenn, feeling ill.
"What's behind this wall?" Glenn asked, his hand skating over the smooth paint.
Mr. Calaway thought for a moment. "That's the storage area for the holding pen."
Glenn stiffened. "The one upstairs is a fake?"
"Absolutely!" the man exclaimed.
"What are you afraid of?" Glenn pressed.
I looked down the hallway to Nina, leaning casually against the wall and wedging something from under her fingernails. It was a very masculine gesture that looked odd with her carefully manicured nails. This was not going well, and Mr. Calaway flushed.
"I'm not afraid of anything," he said, flustered. "The holding pen is behind this wall, yes, but we have access to it through the elevator. If you had told me that's where you wanted to go, I would have taken you there in the first place. Follow me."
Glenn clenched his jaw, and Nina closed her eyes, soaking in his anger. I turned and trudged after Mr. Calaway as he backtracked to a set of huge silver doors. He keyed it to life with a flourish, glaring at us as the machinery rumbled and whined. I shivered as the doors opened to show a huge elevator that looked big enough to hold an elephant.
"It's not right that you're hiding a piece of history down here where no one can see it," Glenn grumbled as he filed in after me.
Mr. Calaway entered last, and he used a second key to light up the panel. "We don't have the original holding pen up for display for several reasons, Detective Glenn," he said stiffly as we waited for the lights to quit flashing and the panel to warm up. "Preserving the priceless art created by the people confined within it for one, maintaining people's sanity for another."
Sanity?
"The truth should never be hidden," Glenn insisted.
Nina covered a smile as the smaller man fumed. "It's not hidden," Mr. Calaway barked. "It's simply not on public display! The original inscriptions on the interior of the structure are as priceless as they are heartbreaking, but there are magics associated with the structure itself, and that's what we are keeping from the public. Black magics."
My gut tightened, and I exchanged a look with Nina, who was suddenly a lot more alert. Black magic under the museum? Maybe there was a method to the madness after all.
The angry, smaller man punched a button, and we started to descend. "It was deemed better to have a small lie that the public could touch, sit in, and connect with on a physical level than a harsh truth behind glass that would divorce them from experiencing anything," Mr. Calaway said, the rims of his ears red. "You'll see."
Glenn shifted from foot to foot and faced the front. "It can't be that bad."
Something was crawling up my back, and I turned to see that it was Nina's attention.
"You are such a delight to watch," she murmured, but everyone in the elevator could hear the seduction the dead vampire was putting into Nina's voice. "Every thought you have passes over your face."
"Y-yeah . . ." I drawled, trying to remember who had told me that before.
"Do you always fight crime in dirty shoes?" she asked, and Glenn, in the back of the elevator, cleared his throat.
"Give me a break," I said, trying to hide the wrinkles in my shirt. "I was having coffee with my bodyguard. I didn't expect to be hunting bad guys until later. Leather before sundown is tacky."
"Besides," Mr. Calaway muttered, "if we had the pen upstairs, it would fall apart in twenty years. We have it in the biggest temperature-controlled room in an eight-hundred-mile area," he said proudly. "That's why the museum was set here in the first place. It was originally university property."
My eyebrows went high. Do tell?
Oblivious to my sudden interest, Mr. Calaway said, "Some of their machines are still down here, and we let university people in occasionally to use them. The room has its own heating and cooling system, and battery backup in case the electricity goes down."
Machines? I thought, forcing myself to be still, but inside I was fidgeting. "Mr. Calaway? Just what kind of machines do you have here?"
The man's enthusiasm vanished, and he winced. "Uh, they tell me they're used to identify genetic markers," he said, and Glenn grunted. "It's all perfectly legal," Mr. Calaway said as the doors opened to show a hallway almost identical to the one above, with the exception of a huge double door facing us from across a wide hallway. "Nothing unsavory," the curator insisted. "We use it occasionally to find out who used an artifact, owner or slave. It's old technology, and they need the cooler room to run it in."
Airtight room. Black magic. Genetic, borderline technology. I wasn't liking what this was adding up to, and I followed Glenn to the locked door. My amulet was a bright green. Clearly this was it, and the tension grew.
"There, huh?" Mr. Calaway said, disappointed as he glanced at the amulet and then his massive key ring. The first key he tried didn't work, and Glenn became impatient. The second one didn't, either, and when he tried the first one again, Glenn just about lost it.
"Open the door," he demanded. "Or I'll call in for a warrant and sit here until it arrives. Rachel, go stand over there."
"I'm trying!" the curator insisted as I obediently moved to where Glenn wanted me, knowing it was going to be an empty room but wanting to prove that I could be a team player as well as the next person. "My key isn't working," he said, bringing the key right up to his nose and squinting at it. "Either the key has been changed or the lock has."
Glenn squatted before it, breathing gently on the lock with his hands unmoving before him as he looked it over. "It's the lock," he said softly as he stood. "You can see the new scratches in the paint. We need to get a team down here for fingerprints."
"They can't do that!" Mr. Calaway exclaimed, affronted. "I'm the curator!"
"I don't have time for this," Nina said impatiently. "Excuse me."
She moved vampire fast, and both Glenn and Mr. Calaway backed up when she grasped the knob and simply yanked the mechanism out of the door. It gave way with a terrible shriek of twisted metal and, looking satisfied, Nina threw it into the open elevator.
"Shall we?" she said as she tugged down the hint of lace at the hem of her sleeves.
Glenn was outraged, sputtering at the loss of fingerprints. Mr. Calaway looked at the waiting vampire, then the broken lock in the elevator, and finally the door. "Sure," he said weakly. I think he'd only just realized she was a vampire.
My skin prickled as Glenn pushed the door open, tense and straining for sound as he slipped into the darkness past the threshold. Nina was next, straight and upright as she casually strolled in and turned on the lights. Thinking about the mutated, twisted body in Washington Park, I hesitated where I was with Mr. Calaway. "We're good," Glenn's voice echoed out, and I lurched to get in before Mr. Calaway.
The room was at least two stories high, lit with fluorescent lights still flickering and ringed with banks of cupboards and counter space. At the center of the room was the holding pen in a huge snow-globe-like affair, all blackened timbers and broken chimney. The windows were mere slits, and the walls had fallen apart in places. It was ugly, awful, and I was glad it was behind glass. Maybe Mr. Calaway was right to hide this. The emotion coming from it was almost too much to bear.
Shivering, I went in farther. Mr. Calaway was staring, aghast, at the twin empty spaces against the opposite wall. I could see why. There were scrape marks, and in one place, the wall had been busted and a thick cable had been pulled out. The end was raw and looked like it had been connected to something, hardwired in, and just cut out.
There were no bodies, no blood, and it looked barren. Perhaps too barren, I thought as Mr. Calaway began a high-pitched cry, his hands over his mouth.
"They're gone!" he shouted, pointing at the broken wall with a trembling finger, and Glenn turned from where he'd been staring at the holding pen.
"Who?" the FIB detective asked, his voice suddenly aggressive.
"The machines!" Mr. Calaway said, pointing again. "Someone took the machines! They're gone!"