He also opened the cases on top of Zack’s dresser. Along with rings, watches, cufflinks, and tiepins, Seamus had very helpfully provided Zack with an array of sunglasses. Artificial light could be intense for newborn vampires. Fledglings also frequently wore sunglasses in order to hide their inability to control the redness of their eyes.
But they also had other uses. Takashi examined a few pairs before settling on one. He snapped the earpieces off. The long, thin pieces of stable wire would come in handy if he discovered any locks. In the closet, he found a drawer of gloves. Luckily, a leather pair fit, and he stashed them in his hoodie pocket, along with his makeshift lockpicks.
He slipped out into the hall. He took a cursory glance at his suite across the way from Zack’s. The rooms were a standard affair meant for a long-term guest. The color scheme was blackand red, and the coffin closet had a bland wooden box in it, but it was functional.I’d rather not sleep away from him, though.
Quietly, Takashi backed out of the suite and began exploring the mansion.
Zack’s suite turned out to be on the second floor of the building, and there were four to which Takashi found easy access. Retracing the few paths that Takashi had taken, he went down to the first floor and to the study where he’d first woken in the mansion. Along the way, he scanned a few rooms. Other than the occasional security guard or staff member caring for the house, Takashi was alone.
The study door wasn’t locked, and Takashi slipped inside without issue. Anton’s blood had been cleaned off the Victorian desk’s massive corner. Zack’s notebooks, their laptops, and the ropes that had bound Takashi to the chair before the desk were gone. Besides that, the room was the same.
Takashi tugged on the pair of leather gloves.Time to get to work.
Many vampires had been suspicious of an ambassador from another coven in their midst, and they’d have every right to be. Takashi’s job was to facilitate Nell’s relations with other powerful supernaturals. Sometimes, that was to attend parties and bring lavish gifts to celebrate new masters.
Sometimes, his job was digging for the dirt. Spy was almost as accurate a job description as ambassador.
He skimmed the top of the desk, running his fingers along the underside edge to see if there were grooves or telltale marks of a hidden compartment. The walls behind the three paintings in the room were also blank, as were the back of the canvases.
He swept back around to the desk and began to carefully comb through the drawers. Each side had three, and there was one in the center. The side drawers contained various papers and envelopes. One drawer had nothing but discardedinvitations from other covens. Another was just loose blank printer paper pages. Takashi took one out and held it up to the light. No secret messages appeared. He wished he had one of his rings that he’d left behind in the hotel suite. It was charmed to detect invisible magics.
Since the rest of the room was more staged office than actual working space, he folded a few blank pages and put them in his hoodie pocket. The center desk drawer was a mess of pens, many of a far cheaper variety than Takashi anticipated finding. He began to slide the drawer shut.
Hold on a second. He tilted his head as he reexamined the center drawer. The difference was subtle, but the drawer wasn’t as deep as it should be. He pulled it out farther and discovered that one of the pens in the center didn’t move. After taking a moment to memorize the pens’ placements, he took hold of the glued pen and lifted out the false bottom to reveal a slim secret compartment.
The only thing in the hiding spot was a switch, connected to a wire that ran into the back of the desk. It disappeared into the depths of the Victorian monstrosity.
What do you lead to? Are you friend or foe? Takashi got onto his hands and knees under the desk. The plush Persian rug didn’t show any disturbances of a wire running anywhere underneath. If it didn’t go anywhere, then it was probably a trap. Just to make sure, Takashi carefully lifted the corner of the desk. When it came up easily from the floor without the tension of a wire dragging it down, he discarded the idea of pressing the switch. He put the false bottom and pens back where they belonged and gently shut the drawer.
As he headed for the door, he took a closer look at the vases of roses. The round black-and-gold porcelain was shaped in such a way that the very bases of the vases wouldn’t actually touch the pedestals they sat on.
Takashi arched an eyebrow. He’d come across far more inventive hiding places, but double-checking couldn’t hurt. Gently, he lifted a vase off a pedestal.
There was a circular button about four inches in diameter. Takashi set the vase off to the side and nudged the pedestal. The wood was bolted to the floor. He went to the other and discovered the same thing.
Now,thiscould lead to something interesting. He removed the other vase so he had access to both switches. They were spaced just far enough apart that he had to stand in front of the door in order to touch both at the same time. Was one a trap? Would it alert Seamus or the mansion’s security?
Who knows if I’ll get another chance at this. Takashi pressed the switch to his left. Nothing happened. He pressed the right. Minutes crawled by, but he heard no running approach.All right then. He pushed them at the same time.
An audible click sounded, and then a section of the far wall swung inward, revealing another room beyond.
The Amazing Sato does it again, folks. The memory of applause was not as great as living it, but an echo of that thunder was in his ears as he strode into the secret room. There were two switches just inside the door. One activated the lights in the room, so he doubled back to the light switch by the door and turned off the main room.In case anyone is passing by in the hallway. Don’t need them suddenly noticing that fraction of light under the door, not with the secret room open.
Where the rest of the mansion had overt signs of wealth, the hidden office was pure functionality. Takashi didn’t doubt that Seamus dropped more than a few pretty pennies on the private space, but there was a sleekness to the lines of the desk that he hadn’t seen elsewhere in the building.
The desk sat against the far wall, nearly as large as the Victorian desk in the other room, and a bank of monitors wasattached to the wall above it. A set of metal shelves beside it held a home server and a desktop computer tower. At the bottom was a LaserJet printer. All fairly standard from what Takashi had seen in recent years from tech savvy immortals.
His own laptop, along with Zack’s journal, notebooks, and laptop, was sitting neatly in one corner of the desk. He resisted the urge to wipe the data from the laptops. Computers had the nasty habit of logging everything done on them, and if Seamus was as paranoid as Roger claimed, then he might have uploaded software that would keep a record even if Takashi cleared everything else. The damn things might even send an alert to Seamus’s phone, so the computers were low on Takashi’s interest list.
The rolling metal bookcases on either side, though, wereveryinteresting.
Each side of the room was about four feet deep. The bookshelves were on tracks, with one end facing Takashi. There wasn’t enough space between them to navigate, but each one had a large handle. An individual created more room at the desired bookcase by nudging the others along the track.
The bookcases to his right contained a multitude of books that ranged in size and condition. Some were quite old, the smell of their ancient pages that of parchment rather than paper. None of the bindings had a title on them. However, as Takashi continued toward the back of the room, he noticed that the books were newer and newer. At the far end, they were modern, leather-bound volumes. Luckily, the books and shelves were dust-free, so he plucked one off the last bookcase and opened it.
March 31st, 1976
I swear, if Anton does not stop his mewling about how poorly his research has been going, I may finally drive a silver stake through his heart. You would think that after funding his quest for magic for more than seven hundred years, he wouldhave discovered the magic he promised me, but no. He is as much a failure as the rest of them. And he thinks I’m unaware that he kept more of the power from our last ritual. Oh, he claims I got the most, but I feel no change and it has been two months. The bitch is holding out on me.
