“Impatient?” he asked.
“Hungry.” Penny rubbed her eyes. “Someone ate all the sandwiches. The best I can hope for is a buttered roll in the house.” A steam horn blared from a boat on the Thames, which flowed nearby along one edge of the property. Penny clamped her hands over her ears. When the noise abated, she suggested, “Let’s just sneak in and snatch the box.”
“Demon queen,” he reminded her.
“I’m not afraid of an Egyptian snake charmer.”
“I am.”
“You said yourself, magicians are merely humans. One good shot and it’s all over.”
“She has a dragon scale.”
“I’ll nick it and you shoot her.”
Malcolm scowled at her, but he was just as antsy. He hated sitting, doing nothing.
“Without that box, the Mansfields would be out of the game,” she pointed out. “One less villain to deal with. We can go focus on Barnes and curing Simon.”
Malcolm’s jaw worked incessantly as he considered the option. “Maybe we could go in and just look around for it.”
“That’s the spirit!” Penny stood up. But Malcolm didn’t. “What are we waiting for then?”
“Waiting for dusk.”
She squinted pointedly toward the west, where the sun was a mere fan of light on the horizon.
He continued scowling. Her agitation was causing his own to stir.
She scoped out the manor with her goggles. “Which entrance are we going to use?”
Malcolm indicated a cellar door that lay on the left side of the house, barely fifty yards from the river sparkling through the trees. “With luck there will be no one down there.”
“There will also be no sandwiches.”
Malcolm let out a harsh sigh. “I’ll buy you a bloody sandwich after.”
“Done.” Penny dug deep into her pack and produced a small pistol. The little weapon had a thick iron tuning fork where the hammer should’ve been.
Malcolm eyed it warily, knowing the engineer’s penchant for contraptions. “What does that do?”
“It produces a harmonic wave.”
“So it hums?”
“You’ll see. I heard your guns weren’t getting the job done so we could try something else.”
When he raised an eyebrow in her direction, Penny indicated the heavy cartridges he carried for his Lancaster pistols. She gave her little weapon a pat and shoved it in her belt. Then dug into a pocket to produce a handful of dice. “Will we need to blind anyone?”
Malcolm couldn’t help but smirk at her enthusiasm, and looked at the little cubes. “Keep them handy.” With that, he rose and moved low toward the cellar door. Penny shouldered her heavy pack and chased after him. No groundskeepers challenged their approach. The estate was oddly silent as Malcolm grabbed hold of one-half of the dual cellar doors. He glanced over to Penny, who pointed her wee pistol. She gave him an excited nod as she took aim at what might lie inside. Malcolm flung them open.
A stale darkness greeted them, silent and still. The loamy smell of damp earth welled up into their noses. Malcolm paused to light a lantern and went first, his Lancaster pistol in his other hand. The light revealed only hard-packed dirt floor and damp stone walls.
The light flashed on a pile of bones, white shapes against the blackness of the earth.
Penny gasped. “Please tell me they aren’t human.”
“They’re not.” Malcolm knelt beside the heap. He lifted a bone near as long as his arm.
“What is that? A cow?”
“Or a horse.”
“Horse? They were butchering a horse down here?” Her face crinkled in disgust. “Or do they have very hungry dogs?”
None of the bones had cleaver marks on them. And they weren’t very old. They were clean as if they had been boiled and stripped of flesh.
“Well there’s one good thing,” Penny remarked.
“What’s that?”
“I’ve lost my appetite.”
Malcolm noticed something else nearby; a hole in the ground about four feet across. He shined the light down its gullet. It went deep, straight down about ten feet before curving horizontally. “Snake demons. Very nasty. Let’s hope we don’t meet up with them.”