“Stay out of this, Marsh,” Rory added.
He ran to the two of us, pulling us close. “Wish I could,” he said, lowering his voice. “But we’ve got a bigger problem.”
“What?” I asked, the word coming out short, just as testy as I was feeling.
“I think I heard something,” he said. “Something from within the building.”
Like a campfire being doused with water, all the fight went out of me. Rory, too.
The three of us stopped, turning to listen, and when we heard sound coming from the back stairs of the building, we all spun to face it. Rory raised and readied her pole arm, but I put my hand over hers, forcing her to lower it, which she did, but only a little.
“Stay sharp,” I whispered. “Just . . . you know, don’t stab my parents if it’s one of them.”
Rory looked offended. “I think I can manage not stabbing Doug and Julie,” she whispered back.
A shadow rose into view as it cleared the stairs leading up onto the floor, but it was not the shadow of my mother or father, which I was pretty sure I’d know by now. A lone figure advanced slowly into the room, unrecognizable until it stepped in a section of moonlight streaming in from one of the windows.
“Holy hell,” Marshall whispered. “It’s the ghost of Sean Connery.”
“Not quite,” I said, standing up, relaxing a bit. Seeing Desmond Locke was a relief compared to the myriad horrors I imagined shambling up those stairs—Kejetan’s stone men or maybe something worse.
“Mr. Locke,” I said, in turn startling him as his eyes darted our way.
“Well, well,” he said, brushing off his pant legs as he stepped with care into the room, picking his way through the debris. “Have I caught you at a bad time, Miss Alexandra?”
I gave a weak but pained smile. “Not exactly the greatest timing, Mr. Locke,” I said.
He glanced to the pole arm in Rory’s hand, then over to Marshall.
“No?” he asked, a tight-lipped smile crossing his lips. “Would you care to tell me what happened to Alexander’s library and studio, then?”
I looked to both Rory and Marshall, each of them staring back at me expectantly, no doubt curious what I was going to say. I was curious, too.
“I think we had a break-in,” I said after a moment, which was, while technically true, the most vague answer I could give without lying. “Someone trashed the place.”
“So I see,” he said, not looking away from me, his eyes searching mine for answers.
I kept my own steady, refusing to give in to whatever type of intimidation the man hoped to use on me. It might work on my father given the religious sway Desmond Locke held over him, but it wasn’t going to work with me.
“Pardon, sir,” Marshall asked. “But what exactly are you doing here? This building is supposed to be closed for repairs and renovations, isn’t it? And it’s late.”
Mr. Locke gave Marshall the simplest and most patronizing of smiles, which I wanted to smack off his face.
“I might ask the same of you three,” he said. “As a point of fact, I believe I already have.”
“This is my home,” I reminded him, snapping. “I have every right to be here any damned time I wish. Which, Mr. Locke, is more than I can say for you. The only reason you’ve been allowed here before is due to my father’s good graces.”
Desmond Locke’s smile faltered for half a second and he shifted his posture, turning his attention from Marshall back to me.
“Perhaps it’s time we had that little talk I mentioned the other day when I ran into you down in the foyer,” he said, his smile falling from his face.
“Are you serious?” I asked, his request flipping my bitch switch to full-on mode, unable to stop myself at his nerve. “The last thing I want to hear about right now is your ‘spiritual guidance’ or its stranglehold over the rest of my family.”
“Alexandra,” he started, but I shut him down.
“I think you should leave. Now.”
Rory stepped forward, moving through the rubble toward him. “I’ll show you out,” she said.
Desmond Locke sighed. “I had hoped to avoid confrontation,” he said, reaching into his coat. “But I’m afraid I will have to insist on that conversation now.”
Even in the low light of the room, the gun in his hand caught the glint of the moonlight outside. Despite my dealing in a lot of arcane and crazy things, the purely mundane weapon set off another kind of panic in my heart.
Rory saw it, too, but ignored it and kept moving for him.
“Stop your little friend, Miss Belarus,” Locke said, angling the gun toward her.
Rory was already raising her weapon, but I was pretty sure the gun could go off a lot faster than her closing with him, regardless of her prowess with the pole arm.
“Rory, don’t!” I said, fighting to stay calm. This was exactly the type of danger I had hoped to keep both my friends out of, yet here we were, in it nonetheless.
Thankfully, Rory stopped, but she kept her weapon still raised.
“I’ve got this one,” I said.
“You sure?” she said, remaining poised for action.
“Positive,” I said, and breathed out one of my words of power. Broken bits of stone statuary were spread out all around us, littering the floor of the art space, and I called out to them with my will, the connection snapping to within me.
Reaching out with my mind’s eye, I aimed the pieces at Desmond Locke and shot them through the air at him. The pieces responded in perfect unison, flying at the man, but just as they were about to hit their target, several of them shattered. The rest followed suit like stone bits of popcorn popping, forming a giant cloud of dust that hung in the air around Locke.
My friends and I backed away, all coughing, but within the cloud itself I could see there had been an invisible barrier surrounding the man, made visible now only due to our circumstance.
As the dust cleared, Locke stepped forward as calm as could be, his hand wrapped around something hanging from his neck. When he opened it, I saw a variety of lanyards and chains, talismans and charms hanging from them all.
Desmond Locke’s eyes went first to Rory, her pole arm now hanging in her hand at her side. Gone were the kind, jovial eyes of the man who had come to visit my father in our home for years. His stare was dark, purposeful, his whole face deadly serious.
“Put that thing away,” he said to Rory, pronouncing each word like an angry father talking to a child. “Before someone truly gets hurt around here.”
Rory looked to me, her eyes full of reluctance, but I nodded. Moving slowly, she took apart the sections of her weapon and, with care, slid them back into their individual compartments within the art tube.
“Much better,” he said, then added, “thank you.”
“What is going on here, Mr. Locke?” I asked. Nothing made a lick of sense to me. Then again, it was hard processing anything sensible with a gun pointed at you. That and all the events of the night had my thoughts going a mile a minute, without hope of any actual destination or understanding.
Desmond Locke turned to face me, a modicum of his old self returning to his eyes, perhaps because no one else was brandishing a weapon in the room except for him. “As I said, I’d like to have that little chat now.”
Marshall laughed, but it was short, nervous, and forced. “I say we let the man talk,” he said, his hands up in the air like he was being robbed.
I remained standing, with my hands at my side, calm on the outside but screaming on the inside.
Months ago, when I was simply being chased on a regular basis by cultists serving Stanis’s father, this type of interior panic would have sent Stanis to my rescue. But now? That time and bond was past, as was that kind of rescue. It formed an unsettled emptiness in me, mixed with genuine fear for my life. Not just mine but those of my friends as well.