“Oh!” Sierra bellowed. “I found an alcove behind this tapestry! There are a bunch of engraved metal plates with names on them. Desdemona, Nikolai . . .”
“Here!” Beck and Carter called at once. Sierra dumped the nameplates onto the table. Each one had a colorful gem embedded beside the name . . . but nothing about blood types.
“How do we know which nameplate goes where?” Beck said.
“Found a diary!” Adi shouted. He’d given up inspecting the crowded bookshelves and was pulling the diary out from beneath a log in the fireplace. The pages were burned around the edges. He turned to the first page and groaned. “There’s a lot of text here. This might take a minute.”
“Do your thing,” said Sierra. “What’s up with that?”
Beck followed her pointing finger. High in the vaulted ceiling, above the iron gate, one portion of the wall was draped with heavy black cloth. Beck hadn’t even noticed it. His thoughts went to the words at the bottom of the guest list.Beneath the moonlight, we shall dine.
“If there’s a window behind that, it would let in the moonlight,” he said. “Or the fake moonlight, anyway.”
“But it’s so high up,” said Carter. “How are we supposed to . . .”
Before she could finish, Beck rushed to the library ladder and wheeled it along the shelves. He pushed it as far as it would go, then bounded to the top. But even standing precariously on the uppermost rung, he knew he wouldn’t be able to reach. “There’s a rope looped on this end,” he called down to the others. “Do we have anything that can reach it? Like a broom handle or—”
“A sword?” said Sierra. “Like the one you tucked into your belt loop?”
“Oh yeah!”
Gripping the bookshelves with one hand, he leaned out toward the cloth, sword outstretched. The blade slipped into the loop of rope and he pulled.
The rope came loose. The swath of fabric fell, drifting dramatically to the floor and revealing a stunning stained-glass window.
Far below, Carter cried, “The table!”
Beck glanced down. From his vantage point near the rafters, he had a perfect view of the dining table and the beams of colorful light hitting each plate.
“The gems!” said Carter, unnecessarily, as Sierra had already started sorting the nameplates according to their colorful jewels and the beams of light. When she’d finished, they held their breaths, waiting for something to happen. But nothing did.
Nothing, except for a thump at the door that sent Beck’s heart into his throat. They waited, listening for the telltale sound of a keypad beeping.
But Fitzy and Symphony fell silent again.
Exhaling, Beck had started down the ladder when Adi called up to him, “Hold on! There’s a book mentioned in this diary. The writer says it’s hidden on the top shelf, behind ‘the dragon.’ It has to mean that!” He pointed.
Beck spied the dragon-shaped crystal bookend two shelves over. Normally he would have climbed down and pushed the ladder into place, but never had he felt so intensely the ticking of a clock. He gripped the edge of the bookshelves and sidestepped, Spider-Man–style, across them.
“Beck!” Carter cried. “What are you doing?”
“Not looking down,” he said, toeing some books out of the way. They fell to the floor, and he tried not to think about how their loud thuds would mimic the sound of his own body if he fell.
His palms were sweating. His arms shook. But adrenaline was flooding his veins and he barely had time to think before he had reached the shelf and shoved the dragon bookend out of the way. There, behind it—a book. “Here!” he cried, tossing it down to Carter. She screamed and fumbled with it a few times—sending a loose sheaf of paper flying out from between the pages and across the stone floor.
Not bothering to return to the ladder, Beck scrambled down the shelves.
“Symbol cipher!” yelled Sierra, studying the paper. “Bats, crowns, crosses . . . Anyone know what this connects to?”
Carter pointed. “The tapestries!”
Beck hadn’t given the tapestries much thought yet. The first showed a stag lying amid a bed of flowers. The second—a dog hunt with a castle in the background. The third depicted two people stomping grapes in a barrel. The fourth, a band of musicians.
“Yes . . .” said Sierra, then more forcefully, “Yes! The dogs in that second one look like this symbol, the one forL. And the musician playing . . . What is that? A lute? That’s the letterD.”
“The stag antler,V,” said Adi, pointing. “And the third one . . .”
“A,” said Carter, who had run to the curio cabinet to input the four-letter code. “It has to be ‘Vlad.’”
