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I want to ask more questions, but his legs have got to be twice as long as mine, and with a few strides he's already half out of the room. I scurry behind him, my footsteps loud on the wooden floors.

Beneath the thick layer of dust are strange shapes in the parquet—a menagerie of animals the likes of which I've never seen. Strange lions, medieval cats whose faces look too human to be considered anything close to a cat, what appears to be a peacock, a gargoyle, a centaur. The longer I stare at them, the dizzier I get, because it seems as though they're moving, whispering to each other even as I walk among them.

"You're gonna make yourself sick if you do that," Lachlan says easily. "And as entertaining as it was for you to do it in front of the entire Eternal Society, I don't expect the house is ready to clean up any more of that mess."

"You're talking about the house like it's alive," I say, because that seems to be the most important thing to get clear.

"Of course it's alive," he says with an air of astonishment. "Aye, not like you and me, of course not—flesh and blood—but it listens. And once you learn how to wield it, it will respond to you in kind."

"I'm having a hard time with all of this."

"You're the one that keeps asking questions," he says. "All right, here we are."

He jostles the handles of two massive carved wooden doors, those same animals looking down at me from leaves that seem to flutter in a nonexistent breeze. The doors are inset with stained-glass depicting all manner of scenes, none of which make any sense to me—a dagger in a chest on a table, a scroll that seems to unwind itself, a door inside a door inside a door inside a door, endless.

I step closer, my chest hitting the hard line of Lachlan's arm as he stops me.

"Don't look too close at those," he says. "You're not ready."

"I don't think I'm ready for any of this," I tell him.

"You might not be yet. But you'll get some Scotch in you and you'll feel better. You'll see."

"No, I think I'll just feel drunk—and who's to say that's not better?" I snort, shaking my head. "I already drank half a bottle of wine. I'm not sure I want to get any drunker than I already am."

"Och, just a little dram then, just to calm your nerves."

He jiggles the doorknob again, then curses in what sounds like Gaelic underneath his breath.

"What's wrong?" I ask, tearing my gaze away from the stained-glass and strange carvings of the doors.

"Library doesn't want to let me in." He steps back and flourishes grandly at the door. "Go on then, give it a try."

I shrug, as though that's gonna ease some of the strangeness of all of this. I take a deep breath, place my hand on the door, and press the lever down gently. It stops. Nothing happens.

I stare up at Lachlan with a quizzical expression. "What now?"

"I think that's a question for the house," he says, a strange gleam in his eye. "Claim it," he urges.

"Claim what?" I ask at a complete loss.

"Everything," he tells me gruffly, a flicker of emotion in those eyes that I can't quite place.

All right, I shrug. Why not? Why shouldn't I claim it? I mean, I have no idea what that really means, and you don't have to be a genius to know that claiming something magical without knowing what it is is probably a bad idea. But I don't see a whole lot of other choices.

So I square my shoulders, take a deep breath, and say, "I claim it." And then I recite the Latin phrase, somehow remembering it word for word even though I've only seen it a few times now.

"Quod Tenet." The sound of rustling leaves catches my attention as I finish, the words thick on my tongue. And as I look up, my eyes grow wide in amazement and no small part of fear.

The wooden carving of leaves is moving. There's no doubt about it now, no way to explain it away. The leaves are moving. And a lion emerges from between the thick branches and vines.

No, I think, narrowing my eyes. Not a lion at all. A lioness.

"Well, aren't you beautiful?" I tell the carved lion, holding a hand up, my body seeming to move of its own accord as I press a fingertip against her carved snout.

Heat flares against my skin. And the next minute, a key is where the lion was—and not a wooden one, a real key.

My fingers close around the warm metal and I stare down at it in alarm. It's glowing that same unnatural blue, unnatural green, and a strange red. And even though I haven't done anything with the key besides take it, it feels like it's already unlocked something. Something deep inside me that has nothing to do with this door or this house at all. Something I thought I was trying to achieve for a long time and didn't know why or what I was looking for. A profound sense of rightness.