The corner where Alex had been.
He chose to believe that in her last desperate moments she had wanted him to save her.
“Is this what happened to everyone who disappeared?” Sorsha asked, her voice husky and low with emotion.
“Yes,” Alex said. “If you ask me, this rune is some kind of trap designed to weed out anyone smart enough to be a threat to whoever made it.”
Sorsha smiled. “I assure you,” she said. “The Monograph is real.”
Alex shone his light on Thomas’ shadow.
“He believed that too.”
At that moment Agent Warner returned.
“The investigators are on the way,” he said. “They’ll go over this place with a fine-toothed comb.”
“Good,” Sorsha said. She turned to Agent Davis and nodded toward the door and without a word, he left, taking the young blond Agent Warner with him. Once they were gone, Sorsha fixed Alex with a hard stare.
“How did you know that rune would fail?” she asked.
“Because I didn’t finish unraveling it.”
“But how do you know?”
“Because I could see that there were parts that weren’t aligned yet.”
Sorsha smiled. It was not a reassuring look.
“So you admit you could have unraveled it,” she said. “Given enough time.”
Alex tried to look casual as he shrugged. “Assuming it could be unraveled at all,” he said. He didn’t want Sorsha telling her government friends that she found a patsy to take another run at the Archimedean Monograph.
Her eyes flashed suddenly, as if lit from inside her skull.
“I think you’re lying to me,” she said, but her voice was suddenly deep and the sound of it echoed, trailing off after her words until they became lost in a faint blur of noise. At the same time, the room seemed to dissolve around him, colors and shapes blending into a solid plane of gray.
Alex wanted to be alarmed, but felt calm and safe instead. As if this platinum-haired angel in front of him were the person he trusted most in all the world. The person who wanted nothing more than to help him.
Somewhere in the recesses of his mind he knew it was a truth spell. Like spell breakers, truth spells were also illegal, which is why Sorsha had sent the only witnesses out of the room before using it. Now, if Alex tried to make an issue out of it, it would be his word against the word of one of New York’s most prominent citizens.
“I have a few questions for you, Alex,” Sorsha said, her voice still unnaturally deep and echoing. “Does your version of the finding rune work?”
“No,” Alex said, feeling no compunction to lie.
“Did you find the Archimedean Monograph?”
“No,” Alex said.
“Are you going to continue to look for the Monograph?”
“No.”
She picked up the notebook where Alex had drawn the rune Evelyn used.
“You seem to have this mostly figured out,” she said. “Do you think you could finish it?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“That rune will never work,” he said.
The Sorceress swayed suddenly and leaned against the table. A moment later the room snapped back into focus. Alex shook his head and blinked his eyes a few times to clear them. When he could see properly again, he noticed that Sorsha was breathing hard and sweating through her satin dress. She looked like she’d run a marathon.
“You hexed me,” he said. It was not an accusation, just a statement of fact.
“I had to be sure,” Sorsha said between gasps. “I’m sorry.”
Alex just shrugged. He understood why she had done it.
“If you can just wink your eye and make men tell the truth, why don’t you? You don’t care about it being illegal, or you wouldn’t have used it on me.”
“As you can see,” she said, her breathing finally returning to normal, “it takes a great deal of focus and effort. Even then, it’s not always right. People who know it’s coming can sometimes shape their answers in such a way as to speak the truth… but still be deceptive.”
“And you figured I was just the kind of dim bulb it would work on?”
“On the contrary,” she said. “I knew I would have to surprise you to have any chance of success. You’re far too clever for me to have warned you in advance.”
“Carful, Sorceress, that sounded dangerously like a compliment.”
She blushed. Alex wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t been looking her straight in the face, but her perfect, alabaster cheeks turned a rosy shade of pink.
“The spell has a reverse effect for a few moments,” she said. Her face suddenly clouded over, her eyebrows dropping down over her eyes. Clearly she believed she’d revealed too much.
“So if I asked you a question right now, you’d have to answer truthfully?” A broad smile stretched across Alex’s face as he tried to think of the single most embarrassing thing he could ask. The look on Sorsha’s face, however, told him the moment had passed. Still, he filed that particular bit of information away for later use.
“I’m grateful to you for finding the missing Monograph pages,” she said, her voice stiff and formal. She spoke something in that deep, echoing voice and moved her hand down her dress. As her hand moved, the dark perspiration stains vanished, leaving the satin material unmarked and pristine.
“Is there a reward for finding them?” he asked. “Not that your gratitude isn’t appreciated.”
“I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “I’ll ask. Now, if you don’t mind, a team of FBI investigators will be here soon. I don’t want to have to explain your presence to them.”
“Can I have my notebook?” he asked.
Sorsha smiled and set the notebook aside on the workbench. “I’m afraid that’s evidence now.”
Alex collected his kit and his pistol, then made his way downstairs to the five and dime. He called home and Iggy picked up immediately.
“There you are, lad,” he said. “I was wondering when you’d be home.”
“I don’t want to go home,” he said.
“Rough evening?”
Evelyn’s long, tortured scream still lingered in his mind. He death had been of her own making, but that didn’t make it all right.
“You could say that.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Iggy said with an infectious energy. “How about a picture? There’s a Sherlock Holmes one over at Radio City starring Basil Rathbone. What say you meet me there and we’ll make an evening of it?”
Alex didn’t really feel like another mystery, but Iggy seemed excited. He loved movies, and Sherlock Holmes, so why not?
“Sounds great, Iggy,” he said.
“I’m closer than you are,” Iggy said. “You hop on the crawler and I’ll walk over and meet you there.”
“Just take a cab, Iggy,” Alex said. This was one of their usual arguments. Iggy simply refused to admit that he was over seventy.
“It’s not far,” Iggy said. “I like to walk, and I’ve got plenty of time. It’s not like I’m in a hurry.”
The words hit Alex like a runaway crawler.
“Iggy?” he said. “Why didn’t Charles Beaumont take a cab?”
“What?”
“Charles Beaumont,” Alex repeated. “He ran out of his apartment right after that plague jar broke. He must have known what was in it.”
There was a long pause, then Iggy answered. “I guess if you want a thief to steal a jar full of plague, you don’t want him opening it by accident, so yes, he probably knew.”
“So he knew he was sick,” Alex said. “So why didn’t he take a cab?”
“Who says he didn’t?”
“No,” Alex said. “If he’d taken a cab, we’d have a dead cabbie and dead fares all over the city.”