I was listening to the murmurs at the table behind me as I looked over the scrolls. As these were handwritten, there were no spacing clues, but I quickly found a single scroll with some little decorative, Book of Kells-esque squares in the margins that indicated where something new had been stuck in.
“They really are evil geniuses,” Anyan said, his voice tinged with admiration.
“The Alfar?” asked Blondie.
“Yeah,” answered Anyan. “If they’d created a secret room in which to hide this information, someone would have found out and needed to break in. Because that’s what people like me do. We’re nosy. But instead, they work it into a book everyone already knows about, and has already read as a kid, and won’t ever pick up again because it was ruined for them in school.”
“Like Catcher in the Rye,” I exclaimed. “Everyone gets that book too young, and teachers inevitably screw it up trying to make it ‘nice.’ That book is brutal!”
Everyone ignored me. Anyan continued.
“They hide the real information in these books, knowing no one is ever going to come reading these textbooks. To top it off, they don’t even keep them. They generously donate them to the Great Repository. No one is ever going to crack open one of these books.”
“Wait, but what’s in the missing book that’s so important that we don’t know?” I asked. “After all, we have Blondie. She was there. What can the book tell us that she can’t? And we have the person who wrote it!” I said, pointing at Sarah. “She can…”
“Sarah wouldn’t have been responsible for the changes,” Blondie broke in, using a sharp voice that brooked no argument. Her vehemency was odd, against her laid-back, surfer-girl persona. But she didn’t meet my curious gaze, instead obviously avoiding my eyes as she continued talking.
“As for what the books might have contained, it’s obvious: what happened to the pieces.”
“Oh,” was my only response. I was busy sticking more questions into my “ask Blondie later” file.
“I didn’t take care of that part,” she continued. “I was pretty badly wounded. The Red got me right before I took her down, and there’s something about that bitch’s claws that wouldn’t heal right. It wasn’t a mortal wound, or I’d be a goner. But it was bad enough, and I had to heal the old-fashioned way. So the bits were gathered up and distributed by others.”
While Blondie was talking, my eyes flicked over to Sarah. She looked disturbed, her face scrunched up as if she were trying to remember something.
“So we need that book,” Anyan said. “For all we know it contains the exact locations of every piece of chopped up bad guy that’s out there.”
“Where do we start?” I asked, eager to follow up our first real lead.
Sarah pursed her lips, and then smiled.
“What they always do on Taggart, with the CCTV footage,” she said. I had no idea what she was talking about, but I followed her anyway.
“It’s this Scottish police show,” Anyan explained patiently, as we walked through back hallways of the British Museum towards the room where Sarah said the security footage was held. “It’s a good show, but also really quirky as they have this rotating roster of like twenty Scottish actors they keep killing off, so one guy dies as a bum in one episode, then you see him die again as a rich exec in another.”
Anyan kept talking as we all took seats in front of a bank of small televisions, five twelve-inch monitors in a short row, and Sarah started fiddling with a central keyboards station.
“And there’s this great tag line,” Anyan said, suddenly affecting this really bad Scottish brogue. “ ‘There’s been a mur-der,’ and they say it each time, in this thick Weegie accent…”
The barghest was adorable when he geeked out, and I resisted the temptation to scratch him behind the ear as I watched Sarah and Blondie begin scanning through CCTV footage from around the museum.
“We need Magog,” Blondie murmured.
Anyan chuckled, “Yeah, she can do it way better. ‘There’s been a mur-der.’ ”
“We need her to help us look through these tapes, barghest, not to say your stupid tagline,” the Original said huffily. “Hiral, go tell Magog we need her,” she told the gwyllion. “And take her place as sentry, would you?”
The little man grumbled under his breath but dutifully stumped off.
Sarah kept cycling through the various pieces of footage, shaking her head as she did so.
“I’ve gone over this a thousand times,” she said. “There’s nothing.”
“Maybe,” Blondie said. “But if there is something you missed, Magog will find it. She’s the eyes of a carrion bird, after all.”
I couldn’t help but make a face at that, one that I pulled up short as the carrion bird herself walked in.
She’s pretty hot for a vulture, my libido said.
Not a vulture, a raven, my brain reminded me.
And you think everyone’s hot, my virtue told my libido, snottily.
My little mental battle went on, unnoticed by anyone else, as I gave up my chair to Magog. The dark-haired girl sat down with a careful adjustment of the wings under her massive coat.
Sarah started up the series of videos on all the different monitors again. I moved around to watch Magog’s black eyes flicking over the various screens. She did so with a serene expression, however, as if she were not at all overwhelmed by the process.
“Faster,” Magog said, indicating to Sarah she wanted the videos put on fast forward. Sarah shrugged, and the images on the screen began to blur in front of us.
“Again,” Magog said, when the thirty minutes surrounding the time the books must have been stolen had been gone over. Sarah hit another button, and we watched Magog watching.
“Again,” Magog said, a final time. For about halfway through this viewing she raised her hand and said “stop” in a voice that brooked no argument.
The images froze. It was an outside shot of the docking bay that stood on the left hand side of the museum. There was a large truck parked next to a bunch of motor scooters, all of their mirrors practically tangled together they were so close.
“Back up a bit,” Magog said. “Then play it again, slowly.”
Sarah did so, and we watched as absolutely nothing happened. But Magog grinned fiercely, her small mouth stretched into that humorless grimace I’d come to associate with her.
“There,” she hissed, pointing at a scooter’s mirror. “In the mirror.”
Sarah played it again and, sure enough, there was a flash of something reflected in one of the motorbike’s mirrors, even though nothing appeared in any of the others.
“How did that happen?” I demanded, thinking in horror of all the times I’d had semi-public sex with Ryu, after he’d assured me that his glamour meant no one, no camera, no nothing could see us.
“It’s a reflection of a reflection of a reflection of a reflection,” Blondie explained as Sarah saved the image to a thumb drive that she took over to a larger computer on the wall. “Sometimes, in such circumstances, our magic peters out after so many reflections.”
I frantically tried to remember if Ryu and I had ever had any fun house sex, as Sarah loaded various programs onto her computer until she was ready to enhance the picture. I decided to worry about any possible YouTube videos of me engaged in “hide the fang” until later, as we watched Sarah work.
She was pressing buttons, and the little scrap of image kept getting larger and more defined, until we could see a bit of a face. I thought it was still really blurry, but it was enough for Blondie.
“Alistair, you little shit,” growled the Original.
Sarah looked at Blondie curiously.
“You recognize him?” she asked.
I thought it was rather obvious the answer was yes, but I kept quiet.
“He’s a petty criminal. Hands for hire. But I would have thought he had the good sense and nose for trouble to stay out of this one.”
She sighed, straightening. “Magog, will you call some of your contacts, see if they know where Alistair is squatting nowadays. They may know him as Fingers or Ali Baba or dead meat if I don’t find him soon.” Magog nodded, pulling out her cell phone and heading into the hallway.
That left the four of us, with Sarah staring longingly at Blondie.
“Um, why don’t Anyan and I head outside. Round up the troops,” I said. “Let ’em know we’re coming…” I grabbed Anyan by the elbow, but he looked at me as if he didn’t understand what I was doing.
“Give you two some time alone,” I said for his benefit, jerking my head at where Sarah was giving Blondie mooneyes.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, finally cottoning on. “We’ll go outside. Meet us… whenever.”
“Smooth,” I muttered as we walked into the hallway, past Magog who was busy hissing threats at someone in the phone.
“Yes, well,” the barghest replied, “not all of us can be as smooth as Smooth Jane True.”