Page 53 of Visions in Blood
Ginger and I burst out laughing.
“Something tells me you don’t have a sister.”I meant it as a joke and not to pry, but Lucas’s gaze became unfocused as he glanced off at nothing in particular.
“I have two, actually.But they were much younger than me when I left home.It’s been some time since I’ve seen them.”
“That explains the overprotectiveness.”Ginger gave me a knowing look before her keen gaze flitted back to Lucas.
“All vampires are protective, some more so than others.”He shrugged and stared down at the map.
One look at Ginger told me not to delve deeper.She’d eventually worm the story out of him.
“So, what are you looking at?”I asked instead.
“It’s the map of the Renaud libraries.”
The map was an internal view of a multi-story building.It had been hand-drawn on paper as ancient as the pages in Anna’s history books.Symbols, painted in myriad of colors that appeared mixed with a metallic substance, dotted the sketch.A tingle ran over me.How did something this amazing not reside in the museum itself.
“For which library?”I didn’t know what I wanted to do more—go over every nuance of information that had been packed into one map, or find the library and spend days, maybe weeks, exploring all its nooks and crannies.
“All of them.”Lucas’s eyes glowed a preternatural blue.
Ginger laid a hand on his arm.“He gets that way every time he looks at the map.”
“You mean each of their libraries are built the same way?”I dragged over a monstrous chair, the legs leaving a sunken trail in the carpet, and took a closer look at the drawing.
He nodded.“They built their first one in the south of France, which is their home territory.This was centuries ago when the Council made House Renaud the Keepers of Knowledge.”
“This was before the House Wars?”
“About a decade or two before.Their House was considered untouchable, even through the wars.”
“Like Switzerland,” Ginger offered.
He gave her a pleased smile.“Exactly.The Renaud family never took sides.They were chroniclers of everything vampire—the good, the bad, and the ugly as it were.”
“I thought history was written by the conquerors.”I ran a finger over the oddly-sketched stairwells, my gaze jumping back to the unknown symbols.
Lucas laughed.“That’s true for the most part.But the Council, true to our nature as a long-lived species, understood that truth can’t be hidden for long, so why bother.”He gave us an evil grin and twirled an imaginary mustache.“But that doesn’t mean the less-favored books couldn’t be buried so deep it would be as if they hadn’t been written at all.”
A cold shiver went through me when I considered the illusiveDe første dage, still positive it was a book.My thief alarm blared that we were on to something as I stared at the drawing of a massive library that could hold thousands of artifacts, probably more.And this was just one of them.
I leaned over to re-examine the map, then pointed at what appeared to be the front door.“If this is the entrance, then only three levels are above ground.”
He nodded.“And six below.”That grin returned.“We are vampires, you know.”
Vampires who preferred the dark.When I reviewed the upper floors, very few windows existed, and they probably all had blinds or heavy drapes.
“How do you know so much about this?”Ginger had stopped gazing at the map some time ago, her focus solely on Lucas.
He sat back and got that faraway look again.“My family are merchants, neither wealthy nor poor, though aligned with a powerful House.My father tried numerous times to teach me the business, doing everything he could to keep me out of our library in exchange for his office of inventories and financial records.Once I was old enough to travel on my own, I visited the Renaud Library in France and fell in love.I have visited them all, several many times over.”
“A librarian turned warrior?”I teased.
He laughed and shook his head, but his fingers grazed the edges of the well-aged map.“It didn’t take me long, having read hundreds of books by the time I was of age, to realize that our race survived on both good and evil.And with the rise of humans and shifters, it wasn’t difficult to see that a horrible war was on the horizon.I was friends with several vampires from the Bertrand House and discovered that many Houses believed peace among the races was the only way to survive.”
“As Devon believes,” I said to no one in particular.
“But peace comes at a price,” he continued.
