I wiped my nose on my sleeve. No blood.
I pulled the chain out of the loops on the door and eased it open. A small office waited inside: a writing desk with a computer and a phone on it, shelves filled with files, and a tall glass cabinet. Inside the cabinet, a staff rested, caught between two metal hooks. It stood at least six and a half feet tall, its shaft of brown, aged wood polished to a smooth sheen. At about five feet high, the wood gave way to ivory that flared into a complex shape that seemed oddly familiar. A ferocious male face with a long mustache had been carved into the ivory, followed by rows of Cyrillic characters etched into the wood.
Cyrillic. I wondered how Roman was doing.
I moved to the desk and turned the computer on. It started with a quiet whirring. Code scrolled up on the screen, some sort of mathematical nonsense, and the log-in screen came on, requesting a password.
Let’s see. “123456.”
The PC beeped and the log-in refreshed with a warning in red. Denied.
“12345678”?
Another beep.
“Password.”
Beep.
Okay, fine. How about “password1”?
The screen blinked and Windows booted up.
Heh. One of the most common passwords, right up there with “Jesus,” “letmein,” and “Iloveyou.” I bet she’d thought she was brilliant.
I pulled up the recent documents. Two clicks and I stared at the picture of the knife from the photograph in Anapa’s study.
I leaned back. Something was vitally important about this knife. If Raphael was right and Gloria and Anapa were two independent players, that knife had to be truly something special. It looked so simple, time-worn, and almost brittle.
I sifted through the contents of the folder. PDF files. Yellowed clippings of news articles about Jamar’s collection. An interview with the building’s architect and next of kin after the Blue Heron fell. I hadn’t seen that one before.
When asked for comment, Samuel Lewinston, who has authenticated most of the artifacts Jamar Groves had acquired, stated, “It’s a great loss. The city lost one of its best sons and the people of Atlanta lost a collection that was a true treasure. The objects that were once our link to the past now lay buried with Jamar in his vault. Perhaps, one day history will repeat itself and they will be once again uncovered.”
They were uncovered, alright.
Magic punched me, strong and sudden. The world blossomed in an explosion of sharper scents and brighter colors. The computer screen turned dark. I raised my head to the sky and swore. There were times I really hated magic. This was one of them.
A small silvery web flared on top of the ceiling directly above me. Uh-oh.
I jumped to my feet and moved away. Another web blossomed on the brick wall, expanding. A third bloomed to the right and above, yet another to the left and below…All around me glistening webs sprouted like wildflowers, stretching and growing. Within seconds the entire office was sheathed in a network of pearly slime, drawn in gossamer patterns across the walls and ceiling.
I moved toward the doorway and glanced through, into the main warehouse. Iridescent webs hung in layers from ceiling to floor, forming curtains over the shelves, the walls, and the other door.
The office was sealed tight and I was trapped in the middle of it.
Staying trapped here wasn’t an option. Tomorrow the PAD would show up, and I would be arrested. They would be disinclined to take it easy. If I was arrested, I would be jailed and I’d go away for a while, and Jim would have a hell of a time trying to pick up my investigation where I left off. Killers would go unpunished, justice wouldn’t be served, and Nick would not get closure for the murder of his wife.
I needed to get the hell out of Dodge.
I took a pack of wooden pencils off the shelf and hefted it in my hand. If that stuff exploded, I’d have to duck and cover.
I hurled the pencils into the web. For a second, the small package stuck to the slime, and then the web around it shivered and wrapped over it, twisting and winding, over and over, until the pencils disappeared from view and only a thick cocoon of slime remained. The rest of the pearly curtain flowed, replacing the web that had been used up by the cocoon.
If I tried to bust my way through the walls or run through the slime, I’d be wrapped up like a mummy ready for burial faster than I could blink.
New plan. I pulled out my knife and worked a square of the parquet floor aside. Concrete. Great. Just great. That’s the second time I had gotten trapped after breaking and entering. Maybe God was trying to tell me that I should give up my life of crime.
I dug in my duffel bag and pulled out the small flask of alcohol. The chair yielded a leg, the medkit gave me the gauze, and once I soaked it in alcohol, I had myself a torch. I set it on fire and carried the torch up to the wall. The flame licked the slime. The web bit at the torch, jerking it, and I let go a fraction of a second before the slime touched my fingers.
The torch stuck to the wall, cocooned in webbing. Fire didn’t work. Fire pretty much always worked.
I looked around. Throwing something heavy at it wouldn’t do either—there was too much web and the walls were solid enough that I’d have trouble breaking through.
Think, think, think…
My gaze snagged on the staff.
I walked up to the desk and grabbed the phone. Phones were strange. Sometimes they worked during magic and sometimes they didn’t. The phone clicked, once, twice, and I got a dial tone. I fished a card out of my wallet and dialed the number.
“Ullo,” a familiar Russian voice said, dripping fatigue. “Yesli ehto ne catastropha…”
Well, it looked like a catastrophe from my end. “Hi,” I said. “This is Andrea.”
“Oh, hello.” A new life came into the voice. “How are you?”
“I’m great. Never better. Hey, listen, I have a staff here I thought you might be interested in. It’s about six and a half feet tall, part wood and part bone. There is writing on the shaft and a face with a mustache. Interested?”
Roman fell silent for a second. When he came back on the line his voice was calm. “Can you read the writing?”
“Some of it looks like runes and some of it is Cyrillic. Let’s see, the top one under the face looks like backward number four, then e, then p, then something that looks like capital H except it’s lower case…”
“Are you holding the staff now?” Roman’s voice was still very calm.
“No, it’s in a case.”
“Do not touch the staff. It’s a very bad staff.”