Judging by size alone, the intruder had been male, but Auberon could provide no solid physical description. The person appeared to have worn a black leotard that covered them from head to toe, giving the impression of only a shadow. Auberon described the person as strong and fleet, a quick thinker, for while they had clearly not anticipated Auberon’s presence, they knew how to circumvent it. The elevator car being equipped with a hatch in its roof, the person had downed Auberon with a swift right cross before hoisting themselves upon his back and climbing out. Auberon had pursued up the length of the old elevator shaft.
“That goes to explain the condition of your suit,” Eleanor said, but she could not look away from the townhouse entry; not knowing the actual condition of the archive might well drive her mad.
“The fire crews should be pulling out now,” Auberon said, as though he knew what she wondered—and having worked with her these past months, surely he had a good idea. Eleanor managed a nod, but it took all her willpower to not run toward the archive and see with her own eyes. “It…”
Auberon paused, which told Eleanor all she needed to know about the archive. Things would have been lost. Priceless artifacts that had yet to be catalogued, gone in the flames. Virgil’s hand pressed reassuringly against her back and she leaned into the touch.
“He wore a pack on his chest, slim, strapped to him the way one might carry a child,” Auberon continued. “Whatever was taken…it could not have been large or heavy.”
This did not comfort Eleanor; she knew enough about the archive to know many of its treasures were tiny indeed. Even the rings of Anubis were not large and could easily be carried away in pocket or pouch. She began to catalogue what might have been taken—jewelry, ceremonial cups, scrolls, artwork, ushabti—but the list quickly spiraled to an unmanageable size in her mind. Too many things were not large or heavy. Too many.
“And the rope at the door?” Mallory asked. “Do you believe he had an accomplice or is this intended as distraction?”
“Given his competency, I would presume the latter,” Auberon answered. He unbuttoned his jacket and slipped out of it, giving the entire thing a shake. Dust flew into the air, leaving him to peel the sticky cobwebs off. “This person knew the building, Virgil—we came out of the elevator shaft, and the hallways surrounding it were no obstacle. He made for the main entry and was gone before I could reach him.”
Eleanor looked for footprints, but given the traffic the street had seen with agents exiting a presumably burning building and fire crews entering, there was no separating one set from another. Those clues were already melted away. And others, she thought as her throat tightened, likely burned.
“Miss Folley, Agent Mallory.”
They turned to find Director Walden approaching them. While not as messy as Auberon, the director was plainly out of sorts, not entirely sure what to do about the evening’s events.
“I have never seen such a brazen assault upon Mistral—within the very heart of our operations in the city.” His green eyes befell Eleanor and he nodded, the lights gleaming off the dome of his smooth, bald head. “They will allow you in shortly, Miss Folley. I know you have yet to catalogue the entire collection, but you will be our best guide to what may have been taken, if anything.”
Eleanor realized then she had a tight grip upon the tails of her scarf. She forced her hands to unclench, wishing she had had her fangs around the throat of whoever dared attempt this feat. Attempt? Accomplishment. She exhaled and tried to sort her chaotic thoughts into some kind of order. Given her worry over the condition of the archive that housed countless treasures from her beloved Egypt and elsewhere, she found this difficult at best. She looked at Mallory and Auberon, the latter of whom was still plucking cobwebs free from his jacket and hair.
“We have no idea who may yet be in Howard Irving’s employ,” she said softly, mindful of the agents milling nearby. “While we have made a thorough examination of the agents on site and rousted one, there may yet be those in the city who would act on his behalf, despite his demise.”
Mallory nodded in agreement and despite the chill of the night, warmth flooded through Eleanor, as if they were in Egypt once again. It had not been so long ago that they had stood before the ancient god Anubis and watched him judge Irving and his wife for attempting to resurrect their dead daughter. Irving had plundered Mistral’s resources to make his attempt and while all presently employed agents were still being interviewed and observed, there was no telling how wide Irving’s net spread through Paris and possibly beyond.
Mallory withdrew a notebook and pencil from his coat pocket and began to make notes. Eleanor couldn’t help but smile a little at the sight; it was normal, a sign that things would proceed with him as they ever did. But she noticed, too, the way his hands trembled, and the tight set of his mouth, and knew these were not only the result of the evening’s events. He was still very much coping with a withdrawal from the opium he had sought escape in. Eleanor rubbed a hand over his arm, then looked again toward the townhouse, where at last Director Walden gestured for her to enter.
Chapter Two
One letter, written but unsent. Heavy cream paper; green wax seal in an unevenly dripped blob, embossed with the letter A. Addressed to Miss C. Barclay in an even hand, Alexandria Egypt, dated October 1888.
* * *
At the mouth of the elevator, burnt paper crackled under Eleanor’s boots.
Even after accepting the position with Mistral, enlisted to search, sort, and catalogue its highly mismanaged and abused collections—chiefly those relating to Egypt—Eleanor had never imagined the archive would be so sprawling. The sub-basement level of the Mistral townhouse was vast and appeared to reach beyond the foundations of the building itself. Where Eleanor once would have said that was impossible, she found herself avoiding that word after having met Anubis and discovering what she herself was capable of. “Impossible” placed foolish limits on the world.
The basement was divided into rooms nestled around a central core that normally put her in mind of the reading room at the Biblioteque Mazarine, spacious and filled with wonders that only awaited discovery. But tonight, the room didn’t look so much like a library as it did a swamp filled with puddles, strewn boxes, and sodden paper. Books and files had been pulled from shelves and drawers and thrown into a pile upon a table before having been set ablaze; the ceiling bore marks of fire and still dripped with water from fire hoses.
The walls of the central room were lined with doors and tonight, every door stood open, though whether by the firemen or the intruder, Eleanor did not know. It would be hard to say where the intruder had gone within the archive, where his attention had been focused, given the condition of the rooms at this point. She despaired over that, but mostly it was the loss spread before her that was her undoing.
The rooms should have made sorting easier as the collection was assembled by Mistral over the years, but nothing appeared to have ever been sorted. Egypt’s treasures had been taken without heed of date, location, or dynasty. Perhaps Howard Irving, who had used the contents of the archive for his own nefarious doings, had once kept a catalogue in his mind, but portions of the collection might have predated even him. Viewing artifacts out of their original contexts distressed Eleanor. The idea that most of the artifacts within the archive would be forever without a solid and verifiable context had made the work daunting, but no less enjoyable.
She had told herself time and again that even without context, the items were here, safe from tomb robbers and time, but now…
What little ground she had managed to cover in the past month and a half of cataloguing appeared wholly undone. She walked through the debris of the central room carefully, peering into each storage room as she went. Most appeared undisturbed, shelves and bins standing as they ever had and Eleanor took some courage from that, even if it meant their current mystery was that much harder to solve. If the storage rooms were untouched, there might truly be no telling what, if anything, ha
d been taken. And if the rooms were untouched, why burn the books and files in the reading room? Distraction? A cover for the intruder’s nearly thwarted exit?
Eleanor feared something had indeed been taken, otherwise why attempt the break in. Even if the intruder was as acquainted with the building as Auberon theorized, it made no sense to break in, set a fire, and leave. She didn’t believe the fire to be a threat or a promise of something more; such a break in was a one-time opportunity, given Mistral’s security traditions. Eleanor could only hope whatever had been taken was something from the portion of the collection she had already catalogued.
She stepped into a storage room, the scent of burnt paper still strong in the air. It was so quiet, she thought that if she closed her eyes she could hear the slush of the winter Seine even this deep underground, but it was only her heartbeat that came to her in the dim room. She moved toward a bin of artifacts and peered inside. A palm-sized honeybee carved from pumpkin-hued carnelian that glowed even in the dim room looked up at her. It gave her a shiver, remembering a ring with a stone of the same shade. She clasped her hands together, ringless and cold, and studied the etched lines on the stone that created the bee’s delicate wing. Upon its back was a small broken hinge, she knew, where it had once possibly attached to a bracelet or necklace.
“Little bee,” she murmured. “Who was here?”
There came no answer from the stone bee, nor even Anubis. Eleanor reached for the dark god the way she had before, but there was only quiet stillness until—
“Eleanor.”
She startled at the sound of Mallory’s voice so close, but he had that way about him, approaching silent when he wanted none to hear. Even on four feet he had mastered silence, whereas she was still learning. Eleanor turned her attention from the disorganized treasures around her to him, and shook her head a little.
“Whatever has been taken, we likely won’t know until I can compare my lists with what remains, and even at that, I haven’t managed to catalogue enough of this to know for c-certain.” Her voice hitched and Mallory’s hands closed warmly over hers.
“Sshhh.”
Mallory stepped into her and Eleanor did not back away, enjoying the closeness of him, especially here at the apparent bottom of the world, surrounded by items that had withstood the ages as well as the evening’s intruder. He was warm as ever, one hand sliding over her hip as the other came up to brush what was surely dust from her nose, her cheeks. Eleanor closed her eyes, pressing into his fingers the way a cat might.
She knew sorrow over the theft, to be certain, but was surprised at the spike of anger that went through her. The idea that someone had unlawfully been inside the archive she had been entrusted with went beyond all rational thought. The notion that the intruder knew the building and this secluded level, that possibly the intruder knew which artifacts were kept where, and had taken something without so much as a ripple in the water—
“Virgil.”
Eleanor opened her eyes. She knew she was on the edge of changing back into her jackal form, despite the fatigue that cloaked her. She found herself having to focus on Mallory’s touch to keep herself in human form. Still, a snarl escaped. She pushed the beast down, finding this was as good a lesson as any Mallory had given her, on how to keep human when she wanted to be anything else.
“The fire was deliberate, not accidental. It didn’t touch any of the storage rooms, only the reading room. It could have easily been set within a room, if destroying the collection were something the burglar wished. And the books…”
She turned out of Mallory’s hold, left the room, and approached the sodden pile of burned books and files in the reading room. She dug into the charred, wet mass, as deep as she could to extract something that wasn’t entirely blackened. While a burned book would never cheer her, what she withdrew from the pile made an eyebrow lift. The book was burned around the edges, but intact enough to allow her to confirm what she believed.
“This isn’t anything historically significant,” she said as Mallory joined her. It was a reference book, easily had anywhere in Paris. “There was no…” She trailed off, trying to hold herself together. Mallory remained silent, focused on her, waiting for her to continue. “If, as Auberon says, the intruder knew this building well enough to get down here and get back out, there was no need to burn anything—”
“It doesn’t seem a large enough fire to actually threaten the rest of the building,” Mallory said.
“It might have threatened the archive, had Auberon not arrived, but not the rest of the building…” Eleanor shook her head, teeth biting into her lower lip as she considered. “We were meant to know someone was here. Without this…” She let the book drop back to the wet pile. “We wouldn’t have known a thing.”
The notion that it was deliberate—that the thief had known the building well enough to escape unseen but had still taunted them with a fire—troubled Eleanor. Was it someone from Irving’s employ, or was this something entirely different. Until they knew what was taken—
“But we still don’t know what was taken,” Mallory said as the elevator opened and deposited Auberon within the reading room.
“And we might never,” Eleanor whispered. She turned abruptly away from the men, running down the length of the reading room. Her heart was in her throat, her hands shaking as she rounded a tall stand of cabinetry. Her notes, every single bit of the work she had done for the past two months was kept under lock and key, kept here where she believed no one outside Mistral would stray. If that had been taken—
The lock looked undisturbed. Eleanor turned to her desk. It looked untouched, too, but she slid the bottom drawer open. She found the key where she normally kept it, beneath a heavy stone that had probably fallen from the stars themselves. It fit into the cabinet lock as easily as it ever had, the doors swinging open to reveal her notebooks as she had left them.
But not only her notebooks.
Placed upon the stack of notebooks, in the center of the worn top cover, was something Eleanor had never seen before, yet knew down to her bones. It was a ring, impossibly old judging by its condition. Except for a slim line of tarnished metal along one edge, it looked corroded, as if time itself were eating away the metal. The band was not smooth, but as cratered as the moon, its colors shifting from silver into amber and black and back again. There was even a hint of green, as if a patina had worked its way deep inside the metal. Eleanor was reaching for it, meant to pick it up, until Mallory’s hand stayed hers.
“Someone is playing a game,” Mallory whispered. Eleanor did not miss the strain in those few words.
Mallory and Auberon wouldn’t let her handle the ring and Eleanor couldn’t find an ounce of reproach, given her history. Still, she would have wagered the ring was not attached to Anubis as the others had been. She could not possibly put that ring on and find herself in another time, could she? She perched in her desk chair, watching as the men examined the lock, the cabinet and all it contained, without ever touching her notebooks or the ring itself. How had it been left? Had the lock been picked?
She ached to pick the ring up. Not necessarily to put it on, she told herself, but knew she was lying. Sliding the rings of Anubis onto her fingers had been a singular, extraordinary thing, and she wanted very much to do it again. Not only to step wherever she liked in time and look upon people as they had lived, and not only to see how her mother fared in that far-distant time. To hold that power literally within her hand—this was what she wanted. In some ways, it was like embracing the jackal part of herself, summoning and controlling a great power that others simply could not.
This, she feared, was arrogance, and worse yet, she did not care. She wondered if Virgil ever believed the same, that ordinary people were beneath him, given what he could do with his body and the power he controlled. The longer she pondered, she supposed having the ability and not using it was where the real power lay. Not destroying people, when one so easily could. Very much, she thought, like Anubis,
recalling how he had plucked the Irving’s hearts from their chests. How they had crumbled to dust.
“It cannot belong to Anubis,” Eleanor reasoned as they worked. “His mural at Deir el Bahri only ever showed four rings—four rings that we returned to his keeping, thank you very much.”
“Four rings,” Mallory said, his dark and somewhat amused gaze swinging to Eleanor, “that may yet be buried in the desert, given what we know of history. Four rings possibly in that desert even now.” His attention came back to the cabinet. “Auberon?”
“I see nothing else amiss,” Auberon said, taking a step back. “Had we been more cautious, we would have stopped Eleanor from opening the cabinet at all.”
“Explosives?” Mallory asked.
“Oh, I doubt anything so dramatic,” Auberon said with a dismissive shake of his head. “The intruder wanted this to be found, as much as he wanted us to know he had been here and could have caused much greater havoc had he been of a mind to do so. I have to wonder if my arrival disturbed him at all, given what we’ve discovered.”
Eleanor tried to swallow a yawn, but was unsuccessful, and Auberon nodded at her, retrieving tweezers and a small wooden box from her stash of supplies on her desk. She was about to protest—he couldn’t possibly put the ring away without letting her look at it!—but he plucked the ring from her notebook and secreted it away in the box. She could not deny she was exhausted, but wanted very much to put the ring under a microscope and figure out exactly what it was and where it had come from.
And where it might lead.
“Plenty of time for this come morning,” Auberon said. “Go on with you.”
Auberon shooed them much like the watchman in the park, but she didn’t protest. She couldn’t possibly as Mallory’s arm slid around her and he walked with her to the elevator. She knew perfectly well the ring would be in safe hands overnight; Auberon would guard it and the archive through the night, but she suspected whoever had been here would not return tonight; they had accomplished what they set out to—mischief, indeed.
The Honey Mummy (Folley & Mallory Adventure Book 3) Page 2