to have their own business to attend to. And Lucy was relieved not to be surrounded by them. Relieved…and terrified.
James opened the door his sister had indicated, and they entered what must have been a beautiful bed room once. The wallpaper, old-fashioned, gold perhaps, beneath the grime, bore a pattern of swirls in deep red velvet, and had probably been wildly expensive and elegant at one time. The windows were tall, the glass in them so old it was thicker at the bottoms than at the tops, distorting the view even more than the filth covering them did.
James let go of Lucy’s elbow and crossed the bedroom to the far wall, where he grabbed hold of the gaslight that was mounted there and pulled it forward. Lucy jumped in surprise, her mouth going bone dry as the wall began to slide sideways, vanishing into itself at a point that had appeared no more than a piece of wood trim.
Beyond it, she saw a void, total darkness. Until he reached beside him to flip a switch and lights came on. Electric lights. They illuminated a room that was entirely different. Modern. Clean.
Floor-to-ceiling bookcases lined one wall, and they were loaded with volumes. Hundreds of them. To the left stood a large cherrywood desk with lion claw feet. It supported a computer with a thirty-inch flat-screen monitor, a cupful of pens, a stack of file folders. It was so out of place and so…so ordinary…that her brain didn’t seem to want to process it at first.
“The DPI knows about this mansion,” James told her. “But they believe we abandoned it decades ago. We prefer to keep that illusion intact. Believe me, it’s the last place they’ll look for us.”
“DPI,” she repeated. Trying to remember what it stood for. He’d told her, hadn’t he? “That’s the government agency you were talking about before.”
“The Division of Paranormal Investigations. It’s sort of a black op division of the CIA. The man who shot you was probably DPI.”
“And they shot Mr. Folsom, too?”
“Yes, to keep him from exposing their existence—and ours.” The wall slid closed behind them, and James led her across the large room toward a gleaming oval table that matched the desk. It was surrounded by expensive but comfortable-looking swivel chairs, upholstered in burnt-red leather studded with antique brass upholstery tacks. This place looked for all the world like an ordinary office in the ordinary world. But what caught her eye was a familiar-looking slab of hardened clay in the center of the conference table.
James kept on walking, opening a door on the far end of the office. “This hidden section of the mansion is laid out in a straight line, everything end to end, following the lines of the house, so nothing stands out. The outside windows are actually false—opaque. It’s ingenious, really. But then, so is its designer.”
She barely heard him. Her eyes were riveted to the ancient clay tablet that lay on the table. Its surface was covered with the lines and angles of cuneiform script, marks that had been made by a scribe pushing reeds through the clay when it had still been moist and pliant. Around three, perhaps four, thousand years ago, given the style of the markings.
“At any rate,” James went on, “there are bedrooms and a kitchen through here. One working bathroom, too. All of them completely stocked for comfort and emergency use. And while I don’t imagine there are a lot of supplies for human beings, there are always at least some basics. At least, there always used to be, back when—”
He stopped talking, and she knew he must have finally noticed that she was no longer behind him nor paying any attention to his guided tour of her prison. Her attention had been caught, and it wasn’t coming back any time soon. Lucy laid her palm on the cool tablet, moving it slowly over the markings that another human being had painstakingly pressed into it tens of centuries ago. She closed her eyes, and in her mind she could see the scribe in his pristine white robes, with his bushy dark unibrow. He would have had raven black hair, and deep brown or even ebony eyes. He would have thought of himself as one of the black-headed people, and his job would have been a sacred one.
“Ah, the tablet is here already. Good. Rhiannon said she would try to get it by the time we arrived.”
Lucy blinked out of her reverie, though she swore she