Before I could say another word, Moira had hustled my aunt away into one of the curtained booths. Fabric rustled, and I heard the snap of hooks being undone.
“Hold your water, Hope,” Moira ordered as she emerged, carrying a huge bubble of yellow taffeta. “Ye’ll get your answers. But let your auntie change first. She’s pure tired.”
Moira began to bustle about, humming under her breath as she tucked the various costume accouterments away in the tall cabinet. Doug crept back to his computer. Only Collum acted as if anything unusual might be going on. He passed his gun belt and officer’s coat to his grandmother, but his cold hazel eyes stayed focused on me. Dressed in a tight gray T-shirt, his Union-blue pants tucked into black boots, Collum’s muscles bulged as he leaned against the wall, arms crossed.
If he wouldn’t scowl like that all the time, he’d actually be kind of cute.
Ignoring him, I marched over to the booths just as the curtain was whisked aside. Lucinda emerged swathed in a soft navy tracksuit, a terry-cloth turban wrapped around her head.
“Much better, Moira,” she said. “You were right, as usual.”
When I wouldn’t move out of her way, Lucinda stared into my face, her turbaned head tilted. A look of something like pity creased her eyes as she studied me. “Yes. Yes, you’re absolutely right. It’s time you knew.”
For one split second, I longed to stop her. To walk away and go on with my broken little life. I straightened my spine and stared right back. I’d come way too far to chicken out now.
“This will be difficult for you,” Lucinda said without dropping her gaze. “You were brought up in a household of logic, Hope. Of academia and rationality. And your mother’s descriptions of your eidetic abilities are quite astonishing. In the end, however, Sarah decided your phobias had grown too intense for you to bear those secrets she wanted so desperately to share with you.”
My face burned at the casual way she brought up my issues . . . problems . . . whatever, but I disregarded this. “What are you talking about?” I said. “My mother didn’t have secrets.”
Doug wheeled the desk chair over and offered it to Lucinda, who skirted around me to sit. Pinching the skin between her eyes, she exhaled long and deep. “Hope, I want you to know that my sister’s decision to keep all this from you is not something I agreed with. We argued about it. Often. In the end, I honored her wishes. Unfortunately, we’ve now come to a place where that is no longer an option.”
Lucinda let out a long breath and squared her shoulders before continuing. “Prepare yourself, Hope. It is now time for you to set aside what you think you know of this world. For there are things in it which are not easily explained.”
Chapter 9
I STOOD MUTE WHILE MY AUNT AND MOIRA HELD A BRIEF, private discussion, after which they marched out the door. Lucinda gestured for me to follow.
I had no choice. I scurried after them as they moved along the cellar and back through the still-open vault door. Behind me, I heard the two boys follow.
“Lu,” Moira fretted, “ye look pale. Couldn’t this wait till morning?”
Lucinda murmured something I couldn’t hear as we wove among the high stacks and cloth-draped objects. Near the rear wall of the stone chamber, we stopped. Lucinda waved Doug forward, where another security layer was embedded in the stone.
“In the year 1883,” Lucinda said as Doug keyed in a code, “after a late night of brandy and cigars, my great-great-grandfather Hubert Carlyle, along with his estate manager, James MacPherson, and Dr. Carlos Alvarez, a family friend, went down to view the excavations of Huberts’s new wine cellar. The room in which we currently stand. Construction had ceased, due to the family’s waning funds, but Hubert wanted his friends to view the progress.”
There was a grating sound. A section of stone the size of two men began to slide back into the rock.
“The excavations,” Lucinda continued over the noise, “had left this back wall unstable. No one was injured in the rock fall, but the collapse did reveal something quite odd.” Lucinda gestured toward the now-open portal. “An ancient stone staircase.”
“And too bad for us it wasn’t an ancient escalator,” Doug mumbled, pushing through the door.
As he helped Moira and Lucinda through, I glanced down at a dust-covered glass case. Tacked to the front was another of the innocuous labels.
ARTIFACT 3624. TRANSYLVANIAN REGALIA.
ACQUIRED: CARPATHIA, 1573. LC, MM1, MM2.
I read it again. My gaze tracked over the hundreds of boxes and crates, all with similar labels. On the far wall I could make out the top of a jackal-headed statue. And weren’t those sword hilts sticking up from the packing material in that open crate?
The shock was wearing off now, and a piece of the puzzle clicked into place.
LC, MM1, MM2.
Lucinda Carlyle. Mac MacPherson. Moira MacPherson.
Archeologists? Art dealers? Are these some kind of black-market antiques?