Unraveled (Turner #3)(93)

“Oh,” Dalrymple said. “Good.” There was a bit of silence. “Are you just saying that to make me feel better?”

“Yes,” Smite admitted. “I suspect the only reason we’re alive is that the Patron may be wanted elsewhere. The instant we have his personal attention, he’ll have us murdered, and the bodies hidden. He hasn’t any choice.”

A grim silence fell after that.

No. It was never silent down here. The faint lapping of water came to him once more. “Say something,” Smite said. His voice sounded harsh. “Say anything.”

“I was thinking that it’s a shame that neither of us knows how to pick locks.”

Smite looked up into the darkness. “You need a thin, flexible piece of metal. A hairpin will suffice. This, you slip into the keyhole. You use it to turn the pins to one side, whatever that means.”

There was a long silence. “How did you know that?” Dalrymple asked. “Oh—never mind. I had forgotten how disconcerting your memory could be.”

“I owe the knowledge to Robbie Barnstable.” Smite scrubbed his hand over his face. “I owe him a debt of thanks, it appears.”

“Why?” A glum sigh came from the other side of the room. “We don’t have a hairpin.”

Smite’s hand slid to his waistcoat pocket. He cleared his throat. “Actually,” he said. “I do.”

“You use hairpins?” The disbelief was apparent in Dalrymple’s voice.

Smite pulled the piece of metal out. “Of course not. This one belongs to Miss Darling.”

He stood and shuffled forward, finding the wall with his hands.

“You have Miss Darling’s hairpin in your pocket? What an astonishingly fortuitous coincidence.”

Smite continued his search for the door in the dark. “As it turns out, I’ve been carrying it for two days.”

“Two days? How does that happen?”

Smite sighed and looked up at the dark ceiling. “Little fairies hide it on my person when I’m not looking,” he snapped.

“Um. Truly?”

“Of course not.” He found the edge of the door. Felt for the handle, the keyhole. It seemed a staggeringly small thing upon which to rest his hopes. But he straightened the pin. “I have it on me because I put it in my pocket this morning,” he said.

He slid the metal into the lock and felt around gently. There were supposed to be…pins. Or tumblers. Something like that. He prodded about.

“But why do you put it in your pocket?” Dalrymple persisted.

“Pure sentimentality, I’m afraid.” He felt a resistance against the metal in his hand. He pushed gently, and then a tiny click sounded. A shot of jubilation ran through him. So that was what Robbie had meant by pins.

“Sentimentality? You?” Dalrymple sounded surprised.

Smite maneuvered the pin in the lock, and heard a depressing clunk as the pin he’d moved fell back into place. “Damn.”

“Truly,” Dalrymple persisted behind him. “That’s…downright romantic. I’m astonished.”

“Why?” Smite prodded the lock and found the ridge of the pins once more—one, two, three, four of them. This was going to be harder than he’d thought. “I’m human, same as you.”

The first pin slipped before he could get the second one down. Smite scowled at the door and ignored Dalrymple’s latest sally in favor of the lock. There was nothing but the metal, the hunch of his back as he leaned against the door. He moved one pin, and then another. He was working on the third when—

“You admit that you’re human?”

Clunk-clunk. The pins slipped once more. Smite rested his head against the wall, gritting his teeth in frustration. “Winnie,” he said, “really. Shut up.”

“Oh. Am I distracting you?”

“No, but it’s convenient to lay the blame at your door.” Smite bent down to the lock once more. He had no sense of the passage of time in that dark room. It took long enough that his hands cramped. His back ached from stooping. The pins slipped again and again. Finally, he managed to trigger them all together. The lock clicked, and Smite let out a breath and opened the door.

A faint, pearly gray light filtered ahead of him. He turned to Dalrymple. The man was looking at him, his head cocked to one side.

“What the devil are you looking at?”

Dalrymple gestured at the hairpin in Smite’s hand. Smite followed his gaze. In the faint light, Smite could make out the two metal prongs, one bent now, both held together by a bit of wrought metal.

“You’re carrying a flowered hair pin,” Dalrymple whispered. “It’s like you’re positively replete with sentiment. I can’t make you out.”

“Can’t you?” Smite slipped the bent object back into his pocket. “I wouldn’t need a sentimentality quota if I had no sentiment to begin with.”

“You just like appearing omniscient.” Dalrymple stumbled forward.

Smite followed him. They found themselves in another, larger room. The faint light they had detected trickled out in a thin line in front of them. Smite fumbled forward. “There’s another door,” he reported. “It’s locked, too.”

“Damn it.” Then, louder: “Damn me. Turner, there’s someone else in here.”