Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson #13)(86)

“I always thought I should read Gibbon,” I said. Not to Warren. I wasn’t talking to Warren yet. More as if I were talking to an invisible friend who might be interested in what I had to say. “But I made it through War and Peace and decided I’d paid my toll to the gods of history.” I closed the book but set it aside.

“It was probably hollow when she bought it,” Warren said, looking with unhappy resignation at the book that was going to justify my search.

I’d actually had the same thought, which is why I’d set it aside so I could tell Marsilia about it. I didn’t say so to Warren, though.

Giving up—but not enough to apologize—Warren joined me in going through every book we found. He was a lot faster about it than I was.

“I am sorry I swore at you,” Warren said. “But quit poking.”

I considered how to respond. An apology that starts with an “I’m sorry” and ends with a “but” isn’t an apology at all.

“You know,” I said, putting A Child’s Garden of Verses back on the shelf between Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Black Arrow, “while we are thumbing through books that no one has ever so much as opened, our compatriots are wallowing through eldritch abominations.”

Unsaid but plain to be heard was And if you’d let someone help you before now, you’d get to go play in the scary dungeons instead of facing near-fatal boredom babysitting the useless coyote.

Maybe I was upset about more than Warren getting mad at me for trying to help. The rest of them hadn’t run into anything bad, though. I wasn’t Adam, who could pick up quite a lot from the pack bonds when he wanted to, but a fight in the tunnels would have been close enough for both Warren and me to sense.

“Teach me to pick a fight with Darryl,” Warren muttered, picking up the last of the white leather-bound collection of H. P. Lovecraft’s work.

We moved to the next room. Five more bookcases, half-full of books. The next room also had five bookcases.

Somewhere along the line, the growl went out of Warren. Warren loved books. Despite the obviously ridiculous amount of I-don’t-care that had amassed the titles on Marsilia’s shelves, there were some good ones plunked between a complete collection of World Almanacs 1900 to 1965 inclusive and Time-Life collections. The Time-Life books were really too thin-spined to make good hiding places, but I looked in them anyway.

“Warren,” I said, staring at the book in my hand. There was a close-up of a knight whose raised helm showed a spectral mist, and the gold-embossed lettering informed me I held The Enchanted World: Ghosts.

Maybe I should have been paying better attention to what we were here for instead of trying to get under Warren’s skin and worrying about Adam.

“What?”

“There should be ghosts here,” I told him, putting the book back on the shelf.

There were always ghosts where vampires sleep; traumatic death was one of the things that created ghosts. I’d used ghosts to track down vampires’ lairs before—that’s how I had located Wulfe’s house the first time.

Warren came to alert and looked around. “Here in this room?”

“No,” I said. “Here in this house.”

“I thought you told me ghosts avoid vampires,” Warren said, his manner all business, since we were actually talking about something that might be useful. “Like cats—except for yours.”

“When the vampires are out and about, you won’t find a ghost anywhere near them,” I told him. For truth’s sake I said, “Not usually. But when they’re sleeping, their dwelling places tend to fill up with the shades of their victims.”

Stefan’s house didn’t. But as long as I had known him, he’d been very careful that the people he and his fledglings fed upon lived to see another day. Daniel was the only ghost at Stefan’s house.

“Is there a vampire running around here?” Warren asked.

I tapped my nose. “The last time a vampire was in this room was maybe six months ago.” My nose, we had found as we dealt with more and more vampires and zombies, was better when it came to dead-but-still-moving creatures than the werewolves’. Especially if we were still running around on two feet instead of four.

“Were there ghosts here the last time you were here?” asked Warren.

I had to think about it. “Not in this house,” I conceded. Though I’d felt them on the edges of my nerves in the tunnels.

“Maybe Marsilia has the house warded some way,” Warren said, going back to his book with studied casualness. Not like he was interested in the ghost angle—more like he was interested in the book and didn’t want me to know it.

“I’ll ask her about it,” I said.

My mother once told me to be careful of punishments that ended up going two ways. My hands were filthy—and the skin on my face itched where I’d touched it. Handling books wasn’t quite as bad as handling money, but those books had been sitting around for years with nothing but a light dusting.

We trudged up the stairs from the second floor to the third floor, which was only half the size of the house. With no windows and no light filtering in from below—because we’d turned the lights off as we finished with each room—it was pitch-dark. I could see in the dark, but not in the absolute dark, and we were near that now. I fumbled along the wall on my side of the staircase and heard Warren doing the same on his.