Sex, Lies, and Vampires

results of my studies were published, she could just think again.

Maybe.

Man, I wanted that breastplate.

'But I can't! The door is warded. Couldn't you feel it when you passed through it?'

'Warded?' I ignored the faint memories that struggled to come forth and walked through the door. 'What are you talking about? I didn't feel anything. What warded?'

She made an impatient gesture with her hands. 'How can you be a Charmer and not know anything about wards?'

'I told you, I'm not a Charmer.'

'A ward is a device drawn by an individual. Most wards guard something like a door or window, keeping dark forces from entering. Wards can be drawn to protect or bind people, an object, or a building. As I told you earlier, you as a born Charmer have both the ability to draw and charm a ward just as you can draw and charm a curse— the unmaking process is basically the same, just reversed.'

Her explanation teased my memory. 'Oh. Those wards. I'd forgotten about them, to tell you the truth. A lot of what I learned before the tragedy was… er… for lack of a better word, erased from my memory. So you're saying this door is warded? Protected by magic to keep bad things out?'

She nodded. I walked through the door again, this time more slowly, experiencing only a slight tingle, but I had the worst feeling of an elusive something just out of the range of my vision. I eyed the door, but it looked completely normal… until I looked away. A glint of gold hanging in midair caught my peripheral vision, flickering into nothingness when I focused on it. I gave a shrug. 'OK, so why can I break it without doing any charmy-type things to it?'

I could tell she was fighting to hold on to her patience. 'You haven't charmed the ward, Nell. You simply passed through it because it was not meant to keep you out. It is a protection ward to keep beings of the dark powers out.'

'Like you?'

She nodded. 'I am born of an unredeemed Dark One. Thus my blood is tainted. The ward will not let me pass. Now, if you are satisfied with the explanation, could you please go to the library and look for the notes regarding a house in London where Damian might be held? I will wait for you here.'

'Not so fast, there's a little matter of breaking and entering—'

'I swear to you,' she said hoarsely, yanking an amulet from under the mohair sweater she'd slipped on before the drive. 'I swear to you on the Luna Crescens that you will not suffer for this. You will not be arrested for searching the house. If you do this for me, I will let you have the amulet as well as the armor.'

Greed, I'm sure, flared up in my eyes for a few seconds while I fought with my better self to keep from snatching the hammered gold and silver piece from her hand. I'd heard stories of the fabled amulet worn by one of the Crusading knights who was said to have discovered the Holy Grail, but I never really thought such a thing had existed.

The same could be said for imps, vampires, and the Graven Plate.

'The breastplate is enough reward,' I answered thickly, swallowing my desire. 'But I'm going to hold you to that promise of no trouble. If your cousin suddenly walks in and finds me digging around in his library, I expect you to make things right.'

'You can be sure I will. Thank you.' She stood still and silent as a statue as I walked down the long, dimly lit hallway. Evidently the castle was built in a T-shape, and I had entered on one of the short ends. I turned left at a junction, wondering what I was going to say to anyone I encountered.

'Go with the flow, go with the flow,' I repeated to myself as I walked into a huge entry hall.

My voice echoed back at me, sending a skitter of goose bumps down my arms and back. I rubbed my arms as I slipped through the hall.

'Boy, if I get through this without being tossed in jail, I'm definitely coming back here,' I whispered to myself, sadly forced to give short shrift to the wonders in armor, art, and museum pieces that I was passing. 'Hmm. This looks libraryish.'

I opened one of twin bound oak doors, reaching inside to turn on a light.

My jaw hit the floor as lights flickered on down the length of a long, narrow, high-ceilinged room. 'I have got to meet Cousin Christian!'

Tall mahogany bookcases lined three sides of the room, long glass cases filling the fourth wall. I drifted over to one of the cases, flipping on a light to illuminate what was within. Drool formed as I gazed at the frail illuminated parchment. 'My God, that's a tenth-century psalter!' I did a bit of translating Latin on the fly and reached for my purse to take a few quick notes on what I was seeing. The feel of the tiny notebook in my hand reminded me of a more important task.

'Rats. The kid.' Reluctantly I turned off the case light and bit my lip as I looked around the rest of the library. 'If I were a scholarly vampire, where would I keep my notes about the possible location of a demon lord? Ah. Desk. Good choice, Nell.'

The big rosewood desk was remarkably orderly, or perhaps it was that my own was particularly disorderly. I flipped through stacks of what were obviously bills, found a red-inked manuscript of what looked to be a romance book in the making, and discovered a cache of letters in one of the drawers. Most of them were in a language I couldn't read, although parts were oddly familiar. None of them contained the word 'London' so I set them aside. I searched all of the drawers, finding nothing else that was even remotely like what I was looking for.

'Well, crap. Now what do I do?' I looked around the room again, searching for anything that was out of place or different. 'Let's go about this in an orderly fashion. I'm going to assume that whatever notes Christian has are valuable. Thus he would not keep them in a drawer. That means he's got them hidden somewhere.'

The sound of my voice echoed starkly in the high-ceilinged room. I glanced with dismay at all the bookcases. There had to be thousands of books in the library, each one a potential hiding place.

'Or it could be in a wall safe, or floor safe, or—hell'—I looked up at the high arched wooden ceiling—'the owner's a vampire. He can probably fly, so I wouldn't doubt that he's got a handy-dandy ceiling safe! It's hopeless!'

The word safe triggered something in my mind. I stood up, looking around the room again. If I were your average safety-conscious vampire, and I had something of value, I wouldn't just entrust it to a safe. 'Not when I was the sort of guy who uses magic to guard a door,' I mused, walking around the room with my hands stretched out, feeling a bit stupid as I tried to feel a tingle that might mean that something was warded against discovery. I found it on my third pass around the north wall.

'Hmm. Book. Tingly. A bit dusty. Title is… Dark… someone needs to tell the maids to dust on the bottom shelves… Desire. Sounds fun. Let's just see why this particular book has been picked out to be warded or what… whoa! This is interesting!'

The book seemed to be made of some slippery substance, or I suddenly had a whole handful of butterfingers (and not the chocolate kind), because I couldn't for the life of me seem to get a grip on it. It seemed to slither from my hands, falling with a solid 'thunk' to the floor. I squatted down to give it a good, long look, and noticed if I glanced just beyond it, I could make out what appeared to be an intricate pattern sketched into the spine of the book, one with lots of swoops and curves that doubled back on themselves, like a Celtic knot design. It was almost as if someone had drawn a path of green luminous paint on the spine, then left the book exposed to the sun. The pattern was faded, but as I traced it with one finger, it seemed to dissolve. Was I seeing a ward?

A faint memory emerged from the dark corners of my mind: the face of a tiny Asian woman sketching symbols in the air. I thought I had lost or destroyed all memories of the woman as she'd instructed Beth and me, but there she was, saying something about the importance of wards. I shook my head to clear the sad thoughts, leaning forward to examine the pattern more closely. It shimmered and faded as I traced it, definitely of a suitably intricate nature as to qualify for my still extremely fuzzy memory of a ward.

The tip of my finger came to the end of the ward, and suddenly the book was in my hot little hands. 'What the… ooh!' Pushing aside the question of why the book had decided to cooperate, I flipped it open to find a couple of torn-out sheets of scribbled notes, and what looked like a hoop earring pressed between them. It was made of some sort of shell, something like an opaque mother-of-pearl, rimmed with a thin band of gold.

'Houston, the eagle has landed,' I said as I took the book, pages, and earring to the desk so I could examine