Read Online Heirs of Grace by Tim Pratt - Free Book Online Page A

connection open so he could hear me if I started screaming.
    “What good would hearing me scream do?” I said.
    “I’d drive faster ,” he said.
    After that, I just sat there, looking at the house and that square of light in the window Grace had probably cut by hand with a hacksaw and framed and glassed in himself. I thought it was the room with the arrowheads in a glass case, but I wasn’t sure. The interior layout didn’t always make a lot of sense to me when I looked at the house from the outside. My kingdom for a set of blueprints.
    I started to doubt myself pretty much immediately. Maybe nobody had turned the light on—maybe it was just always on. Could be some lamp that hadn’t been turned off in weeks, one I hadn’t noticed when I passed through on my earlier explorations and trips back to the studio. I hadn’t spent a lot of time walking around the house at night, so maybe I wouldn’t have noticed the glow from one little lamp. It had only been a few days. Possibly I was being stupid.
    But going in there and getting axe-murdered would be stupider, so I stayed put and waited for Trey. He showed up after a few minutes and parked beside me, well back from the house. We got out of our cars, and I pointed out the light, telling him both my certainty that I hadn’t turned the lamp on, and admitting the possibility that maybe it was on all the time.
    “Hmm. I was going to say let’s call the cops, but let’s see if the door’s been forced or any windows are broken first.” He had a flashlight in the car, one of the big ones that can double as a blunt instrument, and we walked up to the house, where he looked through the window in question. “Nobody’s in there, and yeah, it’s just a little lamp on a table right by the window. There are piles of stuff all around it, so I can believe you wouldn’t have noticed the light. But we should look around anyway, just to be safe.”
    “Now you’re just looking for an excuse to come into my house,” I said, not entirely reassured by his opinion on the lamp but leaning toward a less sinister interpretation of events. “I see what you’re up to, counselor.”
    “Yes, I cleverly contrived to get you to call me over by turning on a light the last time I was here and hoping you wouldn’t notice until you got home tonight. You’ve seen through my plan.”
    The front door was locked up tight, as I’d left it, and I let us in, switching on the light as soon as we got through the door. I drew the sword cane from the umbrella stand, because holding a sword is a remarkable palliative for anxiety. “Do we split up?” Trey said.
    “Have you ever seen a movie?” I said.
    We went through the place together. The kitchen was clear, the mystery padlocked door was still padlocked, and the labyrinth that led to the studio didn’t have any lunatics in clown costumes crouching among the junk piles. We’d relaxed enough by then that we were able to stand around in the studio for a bit, him admiring what I’d done with the place, me brushing off his questions about what I was working on with generalities.
    “Should we check upstairs?” he said.
    I brandished the cane. “I guess we have to. If we’re going to do this, let’s do it right. You know the sadistic dentist from the local insane asylum is always crouched in the last place you look.”
    We went up the stairs and checked the assorted bedrooms and spare rooms and found a remarkable absence of vandals or backwoods cannibals.
    “Just the master bedroom left,” I said.
    “Oh, I see. This was all a trick to deprive me of my virtue.”
    “I didn’t realize you had any virtue. That’s disappointing. But once we make sure there aren’t monsters under the bed I’m shooing you out and getting my makeup off and going to sleep. Fear, followed by feeling like a paranoid idiot, is not a powerful aphrodisiac.”
    “As long as I get points for doing white-knight duty,” he said.
    “I award you three points. They are