There wasn’t much he could say to that. He tended to withdraw during times of stress until he could cope with the issue or, better still, solve the problem entirely. He thought, perhaps, he ought to be irked she had eavesdropped on him, but her drive to watch over him was matched only by his to protect her.
With dawn on the horizon, he itched to get moving. “You don’t mind me going to the bunker?”
“Corbin’s right.” She waved the chocolate bar at him. “I would only slow you down, and I don’t want to discover the miracle of drugless childbirth. I want the drugs. All the drugs.”
Smile twitching on his lips, he backed toward the door. “You shall have them.”
“I am sorry I was being sneaky.” She tore the candy wrapper into tiny pieces. “I hate being left behind, but I should have let you know what I was doing and not let you figure it out on your own.”
“Would you have told me if I hadn’t?”
“I would have forgotten to be sneaky and called eventually to yell at you to be more careful, yes.”
“Then you have nothing to apologize for.”
“Linus?”
“Yes?”
“I’m glad you told me to my face.” Her smile was radiant. “I love Lethe, but she’s a worrywart.”
“I made you a promise.” He took his vows seriously. “I fully intend to keep it.”
The ping of an incoming text drew her attention, and she held up a finger to keep him there.
“Cruz says your mom’s finances are clean. He had no trouble identifying all her expenditures.”
“That takes blackmail off the table.”
Mouth tight, she reminded him, “There are other means of compensation.”
Nodding that she was right, he turned to go. “Let me know if you discover anything else.”
“Aye, aye.” She snapped out a salute. “Captain.”
Smiling, he left their bedroom and descended the stairs where Lethe and Corbin awaited him.
Belatedly, he recalled Grier’s initial request and faced Lethe. “Can you bring Keet up to our room?”
“Not this again.” Lethe rolled her eyes and went to fetch the parakeet. “She’s going to end up with a bird who corrects our grammar if she’s not careful.”
Once she disappeared into the office, Linus eyed Corbin. “I’ll get my things.”
With the cleaners excluded from this investigation, it fell to them to collect evidence for processing.
“I have everything we’ll need.” Corbin pulled out a bottle of sunscreen. “I came armed for bear.”
Most vampires suffered intense sun allergies, but Corbin was an anomaly. There had been no trustworthy accounting of what the sun would do to him until he had walked in it. Aside from burning easier, his tolerance slightly worse than Linus’s, he appeared unaffected. Another boon for the Deathless vampire.
After Linus checked his pockets to ensure he had his modified pen and extra cartridges, he and Corbin exited the house into the coming dawn.
Linus noticed the driveway was empty, and so was the street. “How did you get here?”
“Based on Lethe’s scolding just now, and the promise she extracted before I left that I would come clean before she tattled on me, I assume you already suspected I’ve been staying on the property.”
Apparently, he wasn’t the only one who believed in giving Corbin a chance to level with them. “How have you been avoiding the gwyllgi patrols?”
They might not actively hunt him if they scented him, but they would have noticed him camping.
“A hammock in the treetops. It’s near Oscar’s fort. My scent is all over that area.”
Linus made a mental note to tell Lethe to inform the guards they might want to look up on occasion.
They got in the van, strapped in, and Linus waited for directions.
“Head to Olde Savannah Chocolates,” Corbin said. “It only has street parking, so we’ll need to park in the lot at the grocery store across the intersection to remain inconspicuous at this hour.”
Moby was a bit large to loom in front of a closed shop on a sleepy street. “All right.”
This particular chocolate shop was not Grier’s favorite—that distinction belonged to Mallow—but they did offer serviceable pralines and a variety of candy-coated caramel apples. Depending on whether the shop had opened before they left, he might stop in and have a basket made up and delivered to Woolworth House.
Perhaps it would do, given Esteban’s stand was closed until dusk, and exceptional churros were rare.
After he parked, they crossed the empty intersection. The scents of fresh caramel and popcorn swirled in the air as the shop prepared its delicacies for the day, and Linus breathed it in. He lacked his wife’s sweet tooth, but he enjoyed the smells all the same. “Where is the entrance?”
“Follow me.”
Corbin ducked between buildings and walked a short distance down an alley. There he lifted a manhole cover and set it aside. He distended his fangs and bit his fingertip. A ward must have created a hard surface for him to write on, because he set to work signing what appeared to be his name in thin air.
Vampires couldn’t perform necromancy, but they could be given keys that allowed them to “open” wards. The symbol they drew contained no real magic. It was all in the blood. Often, vampires used their signatures as makeshift passkeys.
A faint pulse radiated out from the spot where he stood, and Linus pinpointed the second the ward fell.
“There’s an obfuscation sigil etched into the brick wall at the entrance, but it’s not strong.” Corbin checked a mechanism Linus couldn’t see. “It’s only meant to keep passersby from noticing unusual activities, not to obscure the alley itself, since its sudden disappearance would draw unwanted attention.”
The proximity to a chocolatier made him curious if his mother hadn’t been attempting, in her way, to make its location easier for Grier to remember.
At times like these, he wondered if he hadn’t underestimated his mother’s affection for Grier. But each time he began to suspect she was softening toward his wife, his mother spoiled it with a reprehensible act.
As much as he loved her, he wasn’t blind to who and what she was, had always been. She underestimated Grier, and Grier was happy to let her do it. Perhaps that was their relationship, the push and pull of affection versus ambition. In that sense, it wasn’t so different from the one he shared with her.
“We need to hurry.” Corbin lowered himself into the darkness. “The ward is on a timer.”
Without further prompting, Linus followed him down the flaking metal ladder into a damp tunnel.
Necromancers had excellent night vision, so it was only a matter of providing a single point of light in order to allow his eyes to adapt.
His first step away from the surface access port provided him with that and more as motion lights blinked into wakefulness. The tunnel was an active section of the sewer, the pungent reek told him that much, but it had been upgraded to suit a purpose. A grated floor kept their feet out of the runoff, and built-in lights with a hidden power supply allowed them safe passage.
“Your mother had the city maps altered,” Corbin said as he led Linus deeper into the maze. “This section of tunnel has been wiped from the paper records and from the internet. There are wards to prevent anyone from entering through the connecting tunnels without permission, and there’s a glamour in place to fool the maintenance crews into believing the new maps are accurate.”
That was excessive, even for his mother. “The Lyceum has assumed maintenance of this section?”
“Officially, the bunker is for the Grande Dame. She won funding by pointing out the Lyceum’s defenses were breached during the Siege of Savannah. She called for a new safe place to be built. Once her motion was approved, construction began. It was finished in about five months, give or take.”
Its alternative funding source explained why Cruz found no mention of it when he reviewed her finances. Mother was clever at hiding her secrets that way.
A private tunnel still led out of the Lyceum in the event of attack, but Lacroix had learned its location and used it against them. Its exit still wasn’t known to the general public, but enough of their enemies had the information to make it tactically useless. Now it served as a staff exit for fires or other emergencies.
Linus replayed what Corbin had said. “Five months?”
“That’s what I was told, yeah.”
Then, no matter what she might claim, the bunker’s third spot hadn’t been intended for her grandchild. If it had been built to sustain three people, it had been designed with her, himself, and Grier in mind. No construction crew could have finished a project with the detail she required for all her endeavors in under five months.
The thought almost made him smile. Her own upbringing remained a mystery to him, but it did make him wonder if her parents’ treatment wasn’t the cause of Maud’s rebellion and his mother’s icy composure. He was lucky to have Grier in his life to thaw him when he turned cold.
“Here we are,” Corbin announced without fanfare. “The glamour gets in the way, but the door is there.”
He indicated a smooth section of tunnel wall that concealed more than what Linus perceived.
“The work is flawless.” Linus inspected it for seams but found none. “How do we remove it?”
“We can’t, it’s anchored too deep.”
“How do we get in?”
“If someone’s already in there, we don’t.” He walked up to the wall and began groping for an unseen mechanism. “There’s a twenty-four-hour timer on it. The door won’t open again until that condition has been met.”
The glimmer of hope that his mother might be on the other side of the barrier evaporated when metal scraped under Corbin’s hands, and a loud clang reverberated through Linus’s bones.
“It’s empty,” Corbin announced. “Might as well clear it since we’re down here.” He ducked through the doorway, vanishing behind the glamour, and cursed. “You need to see this.”