“The temple Maud favored was vandalized.” Linus gazed out the window of the van as Hood drove us to the ritual space to begin preparation for tomorrow night’s resuscitation. “The fountain was shattered, and its blessed water reserves dumped in the garden. They packed mud to create a raised strophalos in the beds.”

And the appeals to the goddess kept coming. I wonder if she listened to them better than she heard me.

“Whoever they are, they’re desecrating Maud’s favorite places.” The revelation wasn’t an eye-opener, but it stung nonetheless, like someone spitting on her grave. “What about Mr. Thorn?”

Though he was Maud’s usual supplier for sage, we had skipped him in favor of Angel’s market booth.

“His entire crop was uprooted, and the ground salted in the shape of—”

“—a strophalos.” I linked my hands in my lap. “Who knows her that well?”

“Maud was a public figure. There are entire books written on her methods, and those would have included her sources.” Linus gathered his thoughts. “You have a vested interest in preserving her reputation. This could be meant as a direct insult to you, or it might be meant to lure you out to investigate the cause.”

Fatigue swamped me, gave tangible weight to my bones. “Why not you?”

“Targeting the supplies might also be construed as a threat.” Black filled his eyes from corner to corner when he flipped his gaze up to mine. “Whoever they are, they have no reason to fear what I might bring back to life.”

Faultless application of logic, as always. The scope narrowing on me made the spot between my shoulders itch.

“Resuscitate at your own risk?” I mulled it over. “That’s a powerful statement, and it doesn’t fit with the master or the Marchands. Both of them want to use me the same as—”

“—Mother,” he finished for me.

“Yeah.” I rubbed my palms together. “Her.”

“I don’t like exposing you.” He drummed his elegant fingers on the seat beside him. “I would prefer you stay at home, behind the wards, surrounded by gwyllgi, where it’s safe.”

My head popped up in surprise. “Where did that come from?”

“You asked for honesty.” He kept tap, tap, tapping. “I’m being honest.”

“You haven’t tried to stop me.” I cocked my head to one side. “Actually, you’ve been inviting me out.”

“You already feel caged.” He looked up then, his eyes black. “I’m not going to drop a cloth over you too.”

“I appreciate that.” I nudged him with the toe of my shoe. “Where are you holding the resuscitation?”

“The Lyceum.” A grimace pinched his face, in expectation of my response or in a reflection of his own, I wasn’t certain. “Given the circumstances, I felt neutral ground would be best for all parties involved.”

“Ugh.”

A traitorous grin threatened his lips. “Mother is out of town on a business trip, if it helps.”

“It helps,” I assured him, relaxing. “Your clients didn’t mind the venue switch?”

“The practitioner sets the terms.” His tone carried hints of a lesson being taught. “Location is ultimately at our discretion. There will always be environmental factors to consider, and those can change between the time a resuscitation is scheduled and when it occurs.”

“Good to know.” I added that tidbit to my mental vault. “I imagine the rooms at the Lyceum will be booked solid in the coming months. With the Undead Coalition crumbling, I wouldn’t walk into a clan’s home to perform a ceremony that left me vulnerable.”

“There are so few rooms, four in all, that the waitlist is eight months out already.”

“Except for you,” I teased. “You cut in line.”

“I traded the slot I had for the one I needed and tacked on a convenience fee I charged to the clan. The other practitioner will perform his resuscitation in four months, when the slot I reserved after negotiations began comes available. It’s a fair trade. More than fair. His client is young and healthy. She can afford to wait.”

“Back up.” I waved a hand. “Why did you make a reservation if you intended to use the clan home?”

“I always book at the Lyceum in the event of an emergency. Maud taught me that. However, this will be my first time actually using the facility.”

“At least we have that much in common.” I thought about it. “I’ve never been in one of those rooms.”

Maud had her own preferences for resuscitations, and it hadn’t included rented space. Except, according to Linus, as a contingency plan.

“Despite the demand for rooms,” he mentioned casually, “there have been twenty-two cancellations.”

“Are we talking bookings at the Lyceum or contracts with clans?”

“Contracts.”

I blinked at him. “That’s an unprecedented number.”

Humans did not give up their shot at immortality once they forked over their life savings and signed on the dotted line.

“Most of them with the former Grande Dame, Abayomi Balewa.”

That was one name I could go the rest of my life without hearing again.

“That’s got to hurt her bottom line.” And I couldn’t find it in myself to care.

She had sentenced me to Atramentous without a trial and left me there to rot for five long years.

“The Lyceum is blaming the phenomenon on the unrest among vampires.”

“Unrest is temporary, eternity is…well…eternal.” Pass on your shot, and you didn’t get another. No refunds, substitutions, or exchanges. “I don’t buy it.”

“There are always more names on the list,” he said with a shrug. “Until that changes, the Society won’t care about what it perceives as a temporary hit to its bottom line.”

Hood let us out at city hall and went to park while we made our way to the bank of elevators.

The ride down to the Lyceum brought gooseflesh racing over my skin. Nothing good had ever come of me venturing there.

We exited onto a foyer tiled in blood-red marble that echoed with our footsteps.

“It’s quiet tonight.” Hard to tell if I preferred its usual bustle over this stillness. “While the cat’s away, the mice will play?”

“You’re determined to always think the worst.” Linus huffed out a laugh. “I requested privacy.”

“Oh.” I ducked my head. “That makes sense.”

We couldn’t have any witnesses if things got weird when I helped him.

“This is us.” He used a key with a circular fob stamped with the number three to unlock his room. An engraved plaque with his name had been slid into the gold-tone slot mounted on the door, and it had me wondering if everyone got paid the same courtesy. “It’s smaller than I recalled.”

Leaning over, I peeked at the room next door and spotted a similar plaque, this one engraved with Abayomi Balewa. One of her cancellations must have been last minute for her not to relinquish her room to someone else.

“Grier?” Linus glanced down the hall. “Is something the matter?”

“I’m good.” I shrugged off the foreboding sparked by her name. “Let’s get this thing started.”

A marble slab the same pattern as the foyer tiles dominated the center of the space, the table bolstered by a black granite pillar as thick around as two of me. Wooden chairs lined the walls, their design simple but elegant, and an ornate altar carved from the trunk of a yew tree stood in one corner, ready to be hefted into position. I estimated a dozen people—including the practitioner and client—could fit.

“Will this hold everyone attending?” I walked the edge of the room, getting a feel for the old magic seeped into the walls and floor. “How large is the clan?”

“They’re sizeable, but only their elders will bear witness.” He set the bag of supplies on the table. “Let me shift the altar into place, and we can begin.”

I gusted out a sigh. This was it. The real deal. I was bolting on training wheels for the maiden voyage on a bike I had never learned how to ride.

“I’ll start cleansing the space.” I dug through his bag and removed an abalone shell the size of my hand, a hawk tail feather, and a bundle of white sage. I found a gold lighter embossed with his initials in the bottom and struck the flint to light the herbs. A thin curl of smoke twined through the air, and I placed the bundle in the shell to contain the embers. “I ought to warn you. I decided my ball will be themed.”

Starting in the farthest corner, I used the feather to direct the earthy smoke and moved from the floorboards up the wall. As I strolled the room, ridding it of negative energy, I breathed in the familiar scents of ritual and felt the tight knot forever coiled in my chest these days ease.

“Hmm.” His fingers flew over the implements with easy familiarity. “Will I require a costume?”

“A mask, yes.”

He turned his head toward me. “Bal masqué?”

“Fun, right?” I could tell I wasn’t selling him on the idea, so I caved. “Fine. I wanted Neely’s help, but this was the only way I could get it. He associates formal events with Volkov, and he’s afraid I’m backsliding. I lied about a cousin I don’t have throwing a themed bachelorette party to get him on board.”

“Lying to him bothers you.”

“I hate it.” The Torreses toed a dangerous line, both in danger of crossing into Society territory. Cruz through his job and Neely through our friendship. “I understand why I have to do it, not that it’s spared him any pain, but it’s hard throwing up walls between him and me.”

“Honesty is important to you.”

The lift in his tone by the end of the sentence had me questioning, “Isn’t it to everyone?”

“From a business perspective, yes.” He shook out a soft cloth to polish the gleaming blade of his athame. “From a personal perspective…” He got rubbing. “I want you to feel you can be honest with me, always.”

“You don’t expect it from people.” A man in his position, I could see that. I had dealt with my fair share of sycophants back in the day. “But you expect better from me.”

“Yes.” His motions slowed. “I do.”

The trap sprang closed with a hairsbreadth to spare. “Sort of how I expect better from you?”

The movement in his shoulders ceased entirely, and his answer held the ring of understanding. “Yes.”

Grinning, I kept my back to him. “Are there any other Linus friendship rules I should be aware of?”

He appeared to consider this. “I’ll let you know if I think of any.”

As I moved on to purifying the table by scrubbing it with the blessed water, I ignored the knot in my gut. He wanted me to feel I could be honest. That wasn’t asking the same thing as me being forthcoming. I was splitting hairs, and I knew it, and I despised it. But if he wouldn’t spill what was so important about that contract, I would find out on my own.

As luck would have it, Linus had to step out after he dropped me off at home. His clients were pushing back on his choice of location. Most clans of any means had their own chambers where they preferred the ritual be performed. It had no effect on the outcome. It was tradition, plain and simple. A symbolic birth into the clan, surrounded by their clanmates in their new clan home.

But allowances had to be made. Necromancers had already stopped venturing into non-allied clan homes. Soon, they would shun the allied as well. There were too many traitors in our midst. No practitioner was safe at the mercy of their clients until the threat the master posed had been neutralized.

That left me home alone and in the mood to sleuth.

Up in my room, I collected the key. “Do you know anything about this before I make a fool of myself?”

The old house leaned her attention toward the object, and the window above my desk rattled a bit.

“Did Maud ever use this to get into the basement?”

The latches flipped back and forth, back and forth in her indecision.

“That’s good enough for me.” I scooped a dirty shirt off the floor and wrapped the key several times. I felt silly until I reached the door to the basement. By that point, the fabric might as well have been bare skin. The key sizzled, and smoke poured from between my fingers. “This better be worth the burns.”

I shoved the key into the lock and twisted.

Metal scraped, but the tumblers held steady.

“Guess that answers that question.” I palmed the key, but it wouldn’t let go no matter how I jiggled it. “Here I thought the trunk was the one with a bad attitude.” The last time I used the key, I had to pay a blood tithe to the… “Goddess. That’s it.”

Leaving the key in place, I jogged into the kitchen and grabbed a paring knife from the butcher block. The tip was sharp, and cutting my thumb was easy. The blood I smeared over the key and the lock evaporated, absorbed by the magic fueling the spell Maud had laid on both.

This time when I turned my wrist—

I jumped back a foot and clutched my heart.

A chubby face popped through the wall beside the door. “Whatcha doin’?

“Having a heart attack,” I panted. “You scared ten years off my life.”

“I’ve been practicing,” he told me proudly.

“It’s paying off, kid.” I wrapped my hand around the knob. “Here goes nothing.”

“The basement is off-limits,” he reminded me. “You shouldn’t go down there.”

“I’m the one who made that rule, and it applies to everyone who’s not me.” On second thought, I experienced a sudden change of heart that might have had to do with me not wanting to face the stairs alone. “You can come with me, and we’ll play treasure hunt, but you have to leave when I do and not go back without me or my permission.”

“Deal.” He zipped through the door and beyond, calling back a muffled, “Hurry up.”

Sucking in a deep breath, I twisted the knob.

The door opened with a suctioned pop that made my ears ring.

Unnatural darkness yawned before me, putting my enhanced eyesight to the test, the pulsing blackness devouring the well-tread stairs leading down into Maud’s private sanctuary. The walls pressed in on me, the maw as cruel as my cell in Atramentous, the abyss ready to swallow me whole.

An old trick she used to discourage nosy visitors: paranoia. No one got in unless she wanted them in.

“No one gets in unless she wants them in,” I repeated out loud to gauge how it sounded.

Maud left me the key without ever telling me its true purpose. She let me go around sticking it in locks to see if I could coax them open. All those years I carried that key in my pocket, just in case she asked for the contents of a trunk or cabinet or drawer she kept locked, doing my best as her assistant-in-training.

Except that hadn’t been the point of the exercise. This, this moment, had been. I just hadn’t known until now she had been building a bond between me and the key, through blood and intent, and it was mine.

Unsure when to expect Linus, I removed the key, which had cooled, and pocketed it. The door sighed closed behind me as I stepped into the gloom. The first few steps kept a lump bobbing in my throat, the promise of bile an aftertaste that kept growing stronger.

“I’m safe. I’m home,” I chanted down the eighth and ninth steps. “I’m safe. I’m home.”

On the thirteenth, light pierced the shadows, swirling the landing clear, and I stepped into the cluttered chaos that personified Maud in creative mode. The library was lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases stuffed to capacity. The room wasn’t messy, really. There was just so much. Even filed away, the overflow prevented the area from being neat. Organized, maybe. If you knew how her mind worked, if you had worked under her for years, if you were me—or Linus. Otherwise, you might never find what you were looking for on those crammed shelves.

A dull ache throbbed in my chest when I circled the research table in the center of the room. There were two chairs. Hers and mine. The opened books and notebooks scattering the surface were the same. The scene preserved my final moments with Maud from the morning I forgot my homework and scampered down here to snag it before Boaz gave me a lift to school. She had been up since dusk, working. We were ships passing in the night during the schoolyear when I kept human hours.

Bittersweet memories spun through my head, a poignant reminder of how blessed my life had been.

“Have you seen my algebra?” I paw through the stack of papers covered in notes. “Maud? Homework?”

The door to her lab swings open, and she walks through dressed in a simple black sheath with a white lab coat buttoned up to its scooped neckline. Pearls wink at her throat and match the studs in her ears. Her kitten heels click as she walks to the table, swipes her arm across it, and dumps half its contents on the floor.

“Aha.” Triumphant, she holds up the missing sheet. “Always the last place you look.”

After claiming the paper, I stick my tongue out at her. “Only because once you find it you stop looking.”

“Remember to wear your helmet.” She frowns at the mess she made but leaves it. “That Pritchard boy drives like his days are numbered, so he might as well spend them while he can.”

“Boaz is a great driver.”

Her sigh conveys a multitude of things. She wishes I would forget Boaz. She wishes I would let her driver take me to school. She wishes I would pay more attention in class. But I live for the mornings when I swing my leg over Jolene in the school parking lot, when everyone looks at me like I must be special, I must be worthy, if I’m with him.

Amelie rode the bus since Jolene didn’t hold three. She really had been the best friend ever.

Shaking free of the past, I focused on my task and the ghost boy who volunteered to help me. “What did Woolly tell you about the treasure map?”

“It’s rolled up.” He drifted down the shelves. “There’s a ribbon and a wax seal and everything.”

“Hmm.” Maud kept her scrolls in a different section of the library. “Anything else?”

“That’s all she remembers.”

Along the far wall, a wooden cabinet twice my height loomed. The lock in its center was difficult, and opening it always proved time-consuming. Maud kept her most important documents there. But, with Woolly guiding Oscar, it would have been the first place she checked. Where else would Maud hide one of her scrolls? One she might not want found? One her sister wanted so thoroughly destroyed, she sent Linus for the original?

Floorboards creaked overhead, and I cocked my ear for Woolly, but her presence nudged me.

“Linus is home.” I spun a slow circle. “Oscar, we’ll have to try this again later.”

“We’ll probably never find it anyway.” He popped out his bottom lip. “The treasure is lost. Forever.”

“Stop being a drama king. We’ll find the contract—” I corrected myself, “—I mean, the map.”

“Promise?”

“Cross my heart.”

“I’m gonna go now.” His gaze went distant. “I got stuffs to do.”

The noise overhead grew closer, and I backtracked up the stairs on my tiptoes, thankful the gloom only worked one way. Light spilled under the door except in the center where feet interrupted the glow. Linus stood on the other side, the door giving a bit when he pressed his palm against the wood.

Woolly’s consciousness drifted toward him as if he had summoned her.

“All I can do is hope Grier forgives me,” he confessed. “I won’t betray her again to prevent this.”

A gust of warm air from the nearby floor register hit him in the legs and me in the face.

“She won’t hold a grudge,” he assured the old house. “You never would have gone against her wishes if I hadn’t asked for your help.”

It was clear from his tone he didn’t expect the same from me, and that knowledge tugged at my gut.

I was mad he had kept this—whatever it was—from me, I was furious he dragged Woolly and Oscar into the deceit, but Linus had proven he meant me no harm. And it was clear he expected the backlash from the contents of that scroll to devastate our friendship. He was so certain of it, he risked imploding it in advance to try to stop me from stumbling across it unawares.

A dull ache started in my temples, and I sank down onto the steps.

This would have been so much easier to forgive if his mother really had been to blame, but it sounded like this was his personal mission. I should have realized Woolly wouldn’t have helped otherwise. She wasn’t a fan of the Grande Dame either after the B&E incident. The violation was too fresh in her mind.

“Maud, I love you. I’ll always love you, but I don’t like you very much right now.”

She had kept so much from me. This might very well be one more thing. And goddess, did that leave a fresh ding on my heart’s already dented surface. Hard to say for certain how this discovery might impact me when I wasn’t sure which part worried Linus more. Going behind my back, or the actual contents.

I could ask him. I believed he would give me a straight answer now that we had ironed out the rules. But I wasn’t ready to share this rediscovery yet, and it might be nice to go twenty-four hours without something blowing up in my face.

That settled, I stood and creeped out of the basement into the office, where I treated the wicked burns on my hands then tried to appear studious.

Two long hours later, I was still staring off into space. All I could think about was the contract and its power to change my life—our lives—forever.