Page 63 of Elven Lies

Once the number had fully illuminated in the center of the key, a flash of the same green light lit up the entire golden circle on which they stood. A thin panel of the floor slid aside in front of Rebecca’s shoes, and a pedestal of the same polished cream marble with flecks of gray rose from below until it stopped just above waist height.

She placed the key on the slanted surface at the top of the pedestal.

With another flash of green light, both key and pedestal illuminated, then the number five glittered into existence on the panel, and Rebecca removed the key.

“Now what?” Rowan asked.

“Now we wait for our stop.”

“Ha, ha,” he replied flatly. “Seriously, where are we going?”

“You’ll see. In three… Two… One…”

A deep, echoing boom—oddly reminiscent of the underground mechanisms running Mr. Kaplan’s workshop—rumbled beneath them. A weaker and far more controlled tremble vibrated through the circle beneath their feet, then all the lights in the lobby went out.

“Um…” Rowan smacked his lips in the all-consuming darkness. “Is that supposed to happen?”

“Yep.”

Then, a few moments later: “What do we do now?”

Rebecca steadied herself with a breath. “We keep waiting. Unless you wanna take your chances stepping off the circle before we get to where we’re going.”

“No, I’m good.”

The seconds ticked by, and when still nothing had changed, Rebecca started to wonder if there was something wrong with Aldous’s key. Or maybe, worse still, the changeling hadn’t been as much of an idiot as she’d given him credit for.

Could he have rigged the security in here to require some other kind of entry code? Biometrics, maybe, or a verbal-command passcode?

It wasn’t likely. Aldous had been paranoid, but he wasn’t smart enough to have taken it a step further and implemented extra security measures inside a personal vault he owned.

“Actually,” she said, scanning the darkness, “I have no idea what’s causing this. I’m just guessing in the dark.”

Rowan chuckled. “Literally.”

But now that the thought had occurred to her, the possibility of someone else being on level five of Chicago’s Nexus branch while she and Rowan were magically signing in, so to speak, felt far more probable than a glitch in the interdimensional transitioning system.

If she was right, and they weren’t alone on level five when they finally got there, it meant one of two things.

Either this was a remarkable coincidence, and a client who shared a vault level with the late Aldous Corriger just happened to be visiting their own personal vault, in the same building, on the same day, at the exact same time…

Or someone else had discovered Rebecca’s investigation of the key that had led her here and they were on level five now, waiting for her arrival.

If that were the case, the most important question for which she had no answer—not here, in the dark, before they arrived—hurtled through her mind.

Was this unknown party waiting for Aldous? Or did they know it was Rebecca instead?

And if not, how pissed would they be to discover two elves stepping off the level-five platform instead of the changeling?

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Another tremble raced through the floor beneath them. Rebecca stilled her breath, all her senses on high alert now for whatever might be waiting for them when they arrived at the level-five vaults.

If someone else knew they were coming, this key might prove a lot more trouble than she’d anticipated. If someone was waiting for her, how the hell did they even know she’d be here in the first place?

A low buzz rose through the darkness all around them. Then, one by one in quick succession, the lights flickered back on.

“Whoa,” Rowan said through an airy chuckle. “That’s some system, all right.”

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