Ascanio frowned. “It wasn’t random.”
“Right. There are easier places to rob and a guarded tunnel isn’t like a bank. It doesn’t automatically look like something valuable is hidden in it. Also a random robber would’ve emptied the vault.”
Ascanio looked at me. “So the thief had to know about the vault and what was in it.”
There was hope for him yet. “Exactly. We have two avenues of investigation: one, find out who knew about the vault and could’ve accessed it, and two?”
“Find out what they were after,” Ascanio said.
I smiled at him. “Good. We know that the building was owned by Jamar Groves. If the Blue Heron had a secret vault, Jamar had to know about it, because he was the one who had put it there. We know that Jamar Groves collected art and antiques. It’s logical to suppose that the secret vault contained Jamar’s personal stash. We also have the catalog of the vault’s contents, which I made at the scene. We’re going to search the archives for any mention of Jamar and his collection and compare it against the list of items in the vault.”
Ascanio arranged his pretty face into a martyred expression.
“The Central Library sits on the edge of Centennial Park,” I told him. Over the years the park had exploded in size, swallowing additional city blocks, and the library was one of its victims.
“So?” Ascanio asked.
“Centennial Park is owned by the witch covens. They provide security for the library, because it is a depository of knowledge.”
Ascanio came alive. “Female witches?”
“Most of them, yes. If you work hard, I’ll let you flirt.”
The teenage bouda grinned.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” I told him. “The witch girls are pretty pragmatic.”
Ever since the Shift, the moment when our slow apocalypse in progress began, the plants had decided it was time to wage full-on assault on all things human. Magic fueled the tree growth, and Centennial Park was a shining example of that. In the decade since the Shift the park had tripled in size, taking over the neighboring city blocks. Once the Atlanta witch covens had purchased it from the city as their meeting place, the park had stopped expanding sideways, directing all of its growth upward instead. As we drove up, a dense wall of green greeted us, the tree trunks bound together with thorny vines, as if a three-hundred-year-old forest had somehow sprouted in the middle of the city.
The brown square building of the Central Library sat recessed in the green. A pair of massive ash trees hugged it on both sides, their branches and roots braiding together, sliding over the walls and sometimes through them, as if the library itself was some odd mushroom growing from their twin trunks. The trees sheltered the library and while its neighbors had long-ago fallen and crumbled, the library looked intact.
We parked in a large parking lot, which used to be Forsyth Street, and went to the doors. Inside, a young dark-haired girl, barely fifteen if that, stepped in our way. She carried a staff, wore jeans and a frilly white T-shirt, and the left side of her face sported a tattoo of some arcane symbols above her eyebrow and down over her cheekbone.
“Please surrender your weapons!” she chirped in a high voice and nodded at the cart full of plastic bins.
Ascanio’s eyes lit up.
I removed my Sig-Sauers and put them into a plastic bin. The two knives followed. I put my wolfsbane and a small flask of my silver powder into it.
“Thank you!” the witch said and looked at Ascanio.
The boy offered her his knife with a charming smile. “Hi! What’s your name?”
“My name is Put the Knife into the Bin, Please!”
Ascanio deposited the knife into the bin and followed me.
“Giving up?” I asked.
“She isn’t interested,” he said. “Cute, but not interested.”
That was one thing I could honestly say about the Atlanta boudas: the men always understood the difference between no and maybe.
We crossed the floor to a heavy desk manned by a female librarian. She smiled at me. “May I help you?”
“We need access to the Library of Alexandria.”
“Are you a member?”
“No, but I would like to be.”
“Andrea?” a familiar male voice said.
I turned. A tall, broad-shouldered man stood on the right, by the reference bookshelves, looking at me. He wore a black robe with silver embroidery along the hem and sleeves, fastened by a leather belt around his narrow waist. His jet-black hair was shaved on the sides of his head into a semblance of a horse’s mane. His features were bold and harshly cut: he had a large aquiline nose, a square jaw, prominent cheekbones, and a full mouth that could be either sensual or cruel.
His eyebrows were black, and his eyes, full of humor, were black, too. He seemed to really like that color, which was understandable since he was a volhv, which was kind of like a Russian druid, and he worshipped Chernobog, a Slavic god of “Everything Bad and Evil,” as Kate once put it. If you looked in a dictionary under “dark wizard,” you’d get his picture. Except he would be standing on a pile of skulls and holding a staff with magic fire shooting from it.
“Hi, Roman.”
The volhv put his book down and walked over to us. I had to admit, the robe, the hair, and his height combined into a pretty menacing whole. He smiled, showing even white teeth. “You remembered my name.”
He had one of the best male voices I’d ever heard. Rich and resonant and just a touch suggestive. Or maybe I was reading too much into it. The first time I ever saw him, he was in a loup cage in our office, because he’d attacked Kate and she didn’t like it. He’d made some comments to me, which could have been construed as flirting. In a dark, terrible wizard way.
I also remembered him having a Russian accent. Not a big one, but now he was talking like he’d been born and raised in Atlanta. Maybe he had been.
“Still the same outfit, I see. Do you ever change it up?”
“In private,” he said. “Must maintain the whole ‘knitted from darkness and shadow’ image.”
“Aren’t darkness and shadow the same thing?” I asked.
He wagged his eyebrows at me. “Aaah, you’d think so, but no. Shadow implies the presence of light. I am not all bad, you see. Parts of me are good. In fact, parts of me are excellent.”
Ascanio rolled his eyes behind him.
“So,” Roman said. “What brings you here?”
“We’re trying to get access to the Library of Alexandria.”