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.
My hands hit a switch and I flipped on the lights. We stood at one end of a long hallway with three doors on either side and one at the far end of the hall. This floor was so seldom used that it didn’t even smell like vampires.
“Left or right?” I asked, since Warren and I were talking to each other again.
Warren gave a shrug because we both knew it wouldn’t matter. With sudden decision he stalked to the first door on the right. He turned on the light and froze in the doorway. Curious as to what had made him stop so suddenly, I followed him and peered into the room. It was a bedroom with a bed, a nightstand, and a dresser. Oh, and all the walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that were packed with sets of books. There were hundreds, possibly thousands of books, most of which were so boring that the publisher had to make them look good in order to sell them.
“No one puts hollowed-out books on the third floor,” I said decisively.
Warren laughed—and not just a little bit; he leaned against the door frame and whooped like a hyena.
“Well,” I told him sourly, “if there was anyone lurking up here, they know we’re here now.”
After he’d quit laughing, he said, “I’m sorry I snapped at you. I know you were only trying to help—”
“If you say ‘but’ again and blame me for it, we are going to go through each and every book in that room,” I warned him.
It made him laugh again. Which made the whole we-must-search-each-book punishment a success.
“I’m sorry I tried to help you,” I told him. “I should know by now that there is no help for you.”
He hugged me. “You did help,” he assured me.
It took us about three minutes to search that room, including under the bed—and Warren was back to his pre-whatever-was-putting-him-in-a-temper self. That reassured me that whatever had gotten his tail in a tangle, it wasn’t life-threatening, so maybe I should trust him to deal with it.
I was in the closet when a heavy thump made me jump and pull my gun. I came out of the closet, ready for enemies—and saw Warren on the floor in push-up position, looking under the bed. He thrust himself to his feet, using only the power of his arms, and smiled innocently.
“Did I startle you?”
I put the safety back on my gun and returned it to my waistband holster. Then I shook my head sadly. “Those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it.”
He laughed again. “I’m sure,” he said.
The other five rooms were identical to the first except that the sets of books were slightly different. One room, the last of the identical bedrooms, had bookshelves filled only with sets of encyclopedias—several of them were incomplete, judging by the book-sized spaces left where the missing volumes had been, or should have been. If we all survived this, maybe I’d ask Marsilia about them.