"Cassandra?" Aaron said. "Shut up."
"What? I was praising her-"
"Don't. Please." Aaron looked at me. "I wish I could say she hasn't always been like this, but she has. After a few decades, you get used to it."
"Get used to what?" Cassandra said.
"So," Aaron said. "How do you guys like living in Portland?"
Cassandra and I stood on the side of a country road, our rental car parked behind us. Through the thick brush and gnarled skeletons of dead trees, we could make out a tiny cabin that looked like it predated indoor plumbing. "Uh, rustic getaway cottage?" I said, double-checking the address Aaron had scribbled into my notepad. "Maybe they preferred life before electricity."
"This is ridiculous," Cassandra said. "I warned you, Paige. Aaron is far too trusting. He hates to believe anything negative about anyone, but that Josie is, bar none, the stupidest vampire ever to walk the earth. Probably gave him the names of her ex-boyfriends instead of Edward's aliases. She-"
My cell phone rang. Thankfully.
"It's Aaron," he said when I answered. "We have the house here. Lucas is scouting it out now, but I talked to the lady next door and she gave me a spot-on description of Edward and Natasha. Says they've been away a lot lately, and she hasn't seen Natasha in a few months, but Edward stops by now and then."
"Want us to come and help search?"
"If you could. Four pairs of eyes are better than two. If Cassandra squawks, tell her she can wait at a coffee shop instead. That'll make her pipe down. She hates to miss anything."
I signed off and relayed Aaron's message to Cassandra.
"So this isn't the right house?" she said. "What a surprise."
She headed for the car. I stayed where I was, peering through the trees at the cabin.
"Wait there," I called back to Cassandra. "I want to check this out first."
I headed for the cabin. Cassandra's sigh was loud enough to be heard from the roadway but, a moment later, without so much as a whisper of long grass, she was beside me.
"The only thing you're going to find here is Lyme disease," she said. "That's not a vampire's house, Paige. It never has been. It's too small, too far from the city-"
"Maybe that's the point," I said. "Immortality questers are notoriously paranoid about security. They need a place to conduct their experiments. Why not here?"
"Because it's a dump. And it's certainly not secure."
"Does it hurt to look?" I said. "It's probably five hundred square feet tops."
Cassandra sighed, then swung in front of me and marched to the cabin.
Ask people what they fear most in life and, if they answer honestly, they'll say "the end of it." Death. The great question mark. Is it surprising then, that people have pursued immortality with a relentlessness that surpasses the pursuit of wealth, sex, fame, or the satisfaction of any other worldly desire?
You might think that supernaturals wouldn't fall into this trap. After all, we know what comes next. Well, okay, we don't know exactly. Ghosts never tell us what's on the other side. One of the first lessons apprentice necromancers learn is "Don't ask about the afterlife." If they persist, eventually they'll be unable to contact the dead at all, as if they've been put on a ghost-world blacklist. So we don't know exactly what happens next, but we know this much: We go somewhere, and it's not such a bad place to be.
Yet even if we know that a decent afterlife awaits, that doesn't mean we're in any hurry to get there. The world we know, the people we know, the life we know, is here on earth. Faced with death, we kick and scream as hard as anyone else. Maybe harder. The supernatural world is rife with immortality questers. Why? Perhaps because we know, by our very existence, that magical things are possible. If a person can transform into a wolf, why can't a person live forever? Vampires live for centuries, which seems proof that semi-immortality is not a pipe dream. Then why not just become a vampire? Well, without getting too deeply into the nature of vampirism, let's just say it's extremely difficult, even harder than becoming a werewolf. For most supernaturals, finding the holy grail of immortality seems more feasible than becoming a vampire. And a quester needs only to look around to know that being a vampire doesn't cure the thirst for eternal life. If anything, it sharpens it.
I always assumed that vampires were such ardent immortality questers because, having enjoyed a taste of it, they can't help wanting the whole deal. Now, after Jaime told me she'd never heard of a necro contacting a dead vamp, I began to wonder how many vampires knew there was no proof of a vampire afterlife. I've never thought immortality sounded all that great, but if it was a choice between that and total annihilation, I'd take eternal life any day.
"Well," Cassandra said, standing in the cabin doorway. "I think we can safely say there's no secret lab in here."
I squeezed past her. Inside, the cabin was even smaller than it had appeared, a single room no more than three hundred square feet. The door had been secured with a lock good enough to require my strongest unlock spell and there were no windows, which had raised my hopes that something of interest was hidden within. From what I saw, though, the lock was only to keep out teens looking for a party place. There was nothing here worth stealing.
The cabin did appear to be in use, maybe as a retreat for an artist or a writer, someone who needed a distraction-free place to work. Distraction-free it certainly was. The only furnishings were a wooden desk, a pullout sofa, a bookcase, and a coffee table. The desk was empty, and the bookshelf held only cheap reference texts.
I surveyed the bookshelf's contents, then peered behind the unit.
"Please don't tell me you're looking for a secret passageway," Cassandra said.
I turned to the sofa, grabbed one end and pushed, but it was as heavy as most sofa beds.
"Could you-?" I said, gesturing at the far end. "Please."
"You can't be serious."
"Cassandra, please. Humor me. You know I'm not leaving until I move this sofa, so unless you want to be here a while-"
She grabbed the end and hoisted. We moved it forward just far enough for me to roll up the area rug and look underneath.
"I've always said you were practical, Paige. Whenever someone in the council questioned your ideas, I said 'Paige is a practical girl. She's not given to flights of fancy.'"
"Huh," I said, heaving up the carpet. "Don't remember hearing that."
"Well, you must not have been around. The point is that I have always given you credit for common sense. And now, here you are, searching for a secret room…"
The floor under the carpet was a checkerboard of wood panels, each roughly three feet square. The gap between most of the panels was less than a quarter inch, but one groove looked a shade wider. I ran my fingers along it.
Cassandra continued. "If Edward and Natasha were into alchemy, which I doubt, they would have rented storage space in the city for their experiments. They would not be digging secret rooms under a run-down cabin in-"
My fingertips struck a catch, and the door sprang open.
I peered into the darkness below. "Strange place for a root cellar, don't you think?"
I cast a light spell, then tossed the ball into the hole. Along one side was a ladder. As I shifted to step onto the first rung, Cassandra grasped my shoulder.
"You're not invulnerable, Paige. I am. It might be trapped. I'll go first."
I suspected this offer had more to do with curiosity than concern, but I stepped back and let her go through.
Appetite for Art
As I stepped onto the ladder, my vision clouded for a second, like a mental stutter.
"Someone's coming," I whispered into the hole. "My perimeter spell just went off. I cast one across the front of the property."