Unhallowed (Rath and Rune #1) - Jordan L. Hawk Page 0,31

looked around, but didn’t see any obvious crate or barrel stacked so Ves could have reached the ladder. The man must be an Olympian, to have jumped high enough to hoist himself up.

“Impressive,” Sebastian said as he scrambled up the ladder.

Ves didn’t smile at the compliment, only held a finger up to his lips. “We don’t want to alert anyone inside, assuming anyone is at home this time of day,” he said in a low voice.

They managed to reach the roof without encountering any residents. A few blankets lay up there, along with a mattress. Either someone had been sleeping up here to escape the heat, or been using the roof for romantic rendezvous. Or both.

Sebastian tried the door, and it opened easily under his hand. Inside, the stairwell led down through the center of the building. Voices and the notes of a badly tuned piano escaped from some of the apartments, but they met no one else on the stair.

When they reached the landlady’s apartment, Sebastian knocked in the faint hope she might actually be in for once. It went unanswered.

“Now it’s your turn to stand guard,” he said.

He’d spent yesterday afternoon re-familiarizing himself with the picking of simple locks, including the one on Bonnie’s front door. The children had watched in fascination, but he’d refused to show them how to do it themselves, for fear of their mother’s wrath. The inexpensive lock on the landlady’s door presented no great challenge, and he had it open within seconds.

“After you,” he told Ves with a bow.

They slipped inside, Sebastian locking the door behind them out of habit. Only a little light made its way through the drapes, even on a sunny day like today. The air had grown stuffy in the warmth, with the sort of dead feeling air gets when no one has breathed it in, or moved through it, for several days. The landlady must have gone on a trip, which explained why she never seemed to be home.

The sitting room apparently doubled as the landlady’s office, judging by the ledgers on the shelf above a rolltop desk. The desk was open and unlocked, the current ledger keeping track of who had and hadn’t paid the month’s rent neatly centered. To either side were piles of correspondence.

Ves took the left-hand pile, and Sebastian the right. After a moment, Ves said, “Here.”

He passed Sebastian a small stack of letters, held together with a rubber band. Sebastian tucked them into the inner pocket of his coat. “That was easy. We should—”

His words were cut off by someone fumbling at the door.

Chapter 11

“Door’s locked,” a rough male voice said. Not the landlady returning from her trip, then. “They ain’t in there.”

“That librarian keeps coming back for a reason. We might as well check it out. It’s a simple lock. Just give me a few seconds,” said another.

Sebastian froze, eyes wide as he stared at the door, like a rabbit confronted with a hawk. Ves cursed silently and grabbed his elbow. He jumped, and Ves put a finger to his lips, hushing him.

They needed to get out. Hopefully, one of the other rooms would have a convenient window they could climb through. Ves crossed the room, moving unhurriedly so as not to cause too much noise. The farthest chamber from the door proved to be the bedroom. There was a window they could hopefully ease open, and—

“There,” said the second man with satisfaction, and the hinges squeaked as the front door opened.

No time left. They were going to have to run or fight—

Sebastian seized Ves’s arm and pulled him to the left, away from the bedroom door and out of sight of the men coming inside. Ves caught a brief glimpse of himself in the mirror as Sebastian swung open the door to a large wardrobe—then climbed in, pulling Ves after him.

The wardrobe was almost entirely empty; the landlady must have taken most of her clothes with her, or else packed them away. Even as footsteps sounded in the sitting room, Sebastian pulled the door nearly shut, leaving only a tiny crack to peer out through.

“What are we looking for?” one of the men asked.

“I dunno. A book, maybe?”

“It’d help if the boss told us anything.”

Ves tried to breathe quietly, but not shallowly. He’d need the air if they were discovered. He listened intently to the sound of footsteps, the mutters of the men, the rustle of the papers on the desk being tossed about. Sebastian’s fingers were still locked around Ves’s