Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson 13)

My hands hit a switch and I flipped on the lights. We stood at one end of a long hallway with three doors on either side and one at the far end of the hall. This floor was so seldom used that it didn’t even smell like vampires.

“Left or right?” I asked, since Warren and I were talking to each other again.

Warren gave a shrug because we both knew it wouldn’t matter. With sudden decision he stalked to the first door on the right. He turned on the light and froze in the doorway. Curious as to what had made him stop so suddenly, I followed him and peered into the room. It was a bedroom with a bed, a nightstand, and a dresser. Oh, and all the walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that were packed with sets of books. There were hundreds, possibly thousands of books, most of which were so boring that the publisher had to make them look good in order to sell them.

“No one puts hollowed-out books on the third floor,” I said decisively.

Warren laughed—and not just a little bit; he leaned against the door frame and whooped like a hyena.

“Well,” I told him sourly, “if there was anyone lurking up here, they know we’re here now.”

After he’d quit laughing, he said, “I’m sorry I snapped at you. I know you were only trying to help—”

“If you say ‘but’ again and blame me for it, we are going to go through each and every book in that room,” I warned him.

It made him laugh again. Which made the whole we-must-search-each-book punishment a success.

“I’m sorry I tried to help you,” I told him. “I should know by now that there is no help for you.”

He hugged me. “You did help,” he assured me.

It took us about three minutes to search that room, including under the bed—and Warren was back to his pre-whatever-was-putting-him-in-a-temper self. That reassured me that whatever had gotten his tail in a tangle, it wasn’t life-threatening, so maybe I should trust him to deal with it.

I was in the closet when a heavy thump made me jump and pull my gun. I came out of the closet, ready for enemies—and saw Warren on the floor in push-up position, looking under the bed. He thrust himself to his feet, using only the power of his arms, and smiled innocently.

“Did I startle you?”

I put the safety back on my gun and returned it to my waistband holster. Then I shook my head sadly. “Those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it.”

He laughed again. “I’m sure,” he said.

The other five rooms were identical to the first except that the sets of books were slightly different. One room, the last of the identical bedrooms, had bookshelves filled only with sets of encyclopedias—several of them were incomplete, judging by the book-sized spaces left where the missing volumes had been, or should have been. If we all survived this, maybe I’d ask Marsilia about them.

We searched each of the rooms thoroughly—which was easy. There wasn’t anything in any of them besides a bed, an empty chest of drawers, an empty nightstand, and the bookshelves. Warren did his thump-producing pratfall to search under all of the beds. We’d stopped checking individual books, but we’d looked behind the books for papers. Each room had a safe behind the painting above the bed. Like the three larger safes we’d found in the lower levels, they were all unlocked and empty and had the combination taped on the outside.

The door at the end of the hall led into a master bedroom suite.

There was a bathroom, a bedroom, and a small office off to the side. The ceiling was taller than the other bedrooms had been—maybe around twelve feet. A huge chandelier hung from a fancy medallion in the middle of the room. About half of its lightbulbs were out, maybe because it would take a ladder to change the bulbs. Maybe because no one cared.

The bed was the only piece of furniture in the room, and I probably could have described it pretty accurately before we opened the door. It was a huge thing, built of mahogany, and framed with velvet curtains. It might have walked off the set of a 1950s Zorro movie and was exactly the bland sort of choice that a decorator would have picked for this house.

“I’ll check the office,” Warren said, surveying the room. “You do the bathroom. Then we can go downstairs and lounge in the kitchen and wait for the others to get back.”

“And you can grab that Lovecraft book and keep reading,” I said.

He gave me a shamefaced grin but didn’t deny it.

The bathroom, like the bed, was exactly the kind of bathroom that I expected to find in a house that looked like this one. There must be a decorator somewhere who specialized in creating rooms that looked exactly like they should.

“Maybe this is a room from the world of forms that Socrates talked about,” I murmured, knowing Warren would get the reference.

He’d told me once that he’d carried Plato’s Republic in a saddlebag for two years and read it every day. I’d had to read it for a college class and pass a test on it. He had passages memorized, and all I could remember was the bit about the world of forms. And that Socrates liked to teach people by asking them questions.

“The form that all other Spanish-style mansions are modeled on,” intoned Warren from the office on the opposite side of the bedroom.

There was a huge antique claw-footed bathtub in the corner of the room, surrounded by small tables holding trays of empty handblown glass bottles that should have been filled with soaps and bath oils. White fluffy towels were piled on a wire rack, close enough that a person bathing could just reach out for them.

I turned and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My face was filthy from where I’d touched it. I looked at my hands.