Christian pulled his tiny car into the carport, and we filed out silently.
No one said a word as we entered the dark house. Like the other house, this one was completely dark, and Caleb didn't turn on any lights as he led us through it. He told us to stop in the hallway, approaching a door about six feet away by himself. He typed in a code, then did a tongue scan to open the dark steel door.
Yes, a tongue scan.
Only Caleb.
He pointed a finger at me. "No one is to know about the tongue thing," he told me.
I just nodded, eyes wide in the dark. Weird sociopath chameleon alien. So there was something distinctive enough about his tongue that it could be considered identifying. I hadn't particularly wanted to know that, in fact I found it disturbing, but I still made a note of it. In the very small mimic file in my brain, it went under the tab: More weird shit I've learned about Caleb.
Caleb led us into another basement, only turning the light on when we were all inside, and the door was shut behind us.
I started to walk down the stairs ahead of him once the lights were on.
"Wait," he called, his tone casual. Still, I stopped on a dime. In the world of heinously scary, crazy booby traps, I imagined that Caleb was King. And I didn't imagine for a second that what he claimed was his biggest weapons' stash in the city didn't have a failsafe, or ten.
He led us down the stairs, his steps very calculated. I watched his feet, seeing that he seemed to be stepping out a sort of pattern on the stairs as we descended.
"Do we need to follow your steps?" I asked him, hesitating behind him.
"No. Just don't go ahead of me. The system is set up to allow me two companions."
"What happens if there's less than two?" I asked.
"Nothing."
"What happens if there's more than two?" I tried.
Christian must have already known all of these answers. Otherwise, I couldn't have imagined him not asking at least some of these questions himself.
"Boom," Caleb said.
"Boom?" I asked.
Christian snorted. "Boom is a horrible explosion noise. It's too simple. At least say Kaboom! Or make a cool noise accompanied by a gesture." Christian demonstrated enthusiastically, making his hands into a ball that grew bigger and bigger, finally throwing his arms out in the universal sign for 'explodes'.
I laughed. Caleb just gave his little shrug. "Boom gets the point across. If this house is breached, no more house."
I arched a brow at him, trying not to get mad. "Just the house?" I asked.
He gave that evil little shrug. "No more block."
I shook my head at him, my face tight. "You can't put the entire neighborhood at risk just to keep your secrets." My tone was hard.
"You can't stop me," he said, his own voice just as hard. He must have some very nasty secrets here indeed, to go to such lengths, and be so open with me about it. "Trust me, if this place is breached, this block going down is the least of our problems."
Is ignorance bliss? Hell no. But I still didn't want to know any more about this pandora's box of a house. Uncharacteristically, but not all that surprisingly, I stopped asking questions after that.
The basement was spartan, seeming almost empty, though it was a very tiny space considering the size of the house. I saw why before I could think much about it.
Caleb used his creepy tongue scan to access a panel in the smooth dark gray wall. He very deliberately angled away from us so we couldn't get a good look at his tongue while he did so. Fine by me.
An entire section of the wall just sort of lifted, and I stepped back, startled at the unexpected moving wall.
There was some kind of closet set up inside, though all I could make out was one large silver chest and a smallish black dresser. Other than that, it seemed empty.
"Your weapons' stash doesn't play well with others," Caleb told me idly, stepping into the small space.
Perhaps my mind had been shying away from it. Perhaps I was very very good at denial. Perhaps it was the dragon-trance that made my mind forgot the little things, like, oh, say a blood drinking war-axe that liked to get into my head, aggravating my already unhealthy blood-lust to a fever-pitch within a small amount of time, chanting kill, kill, kill until I fed it the blood that it craved.
Whatever it was that had made me very conveniently forgot about the pain in the ass that was Torst, Caleb's words quickly made me remember.
Right on the tail of that thought was another. If Caleb had recovered Torst for me, the damned axe would be in my head by now. But he wasn't. Did that mean that Caleb hadn't recovered the cursed thing?
That possibility was almost worse than the thought that he had. If he hadn't recovered Torst, that meant that it was either lost in the desert, which was bad, bad, bad. Or else it meant that my deranged relatives had ahold of it, which was worse, worse, worse.
Caleb relieved my mind (kind of) when he opened the silver chest.