Ryan Frost stood over his craft desk and stared down at the papers scattered on the surface.

He’d had the nagging feeling that something was wrong ever since he’d arrived home. He tried to dismiss it. He was upset. Lots of things were wrong. It wasn’t the house—it was him. But under his fingers was evidence he couldn’t ignore.

Someone had moved the papers.

It wasn’t much, and he wasn’t such a clean person that he would normally notice, but he’d pulled them out that morning, and he’d been careful to make sure they weren’t overlapping his latest project. It needed to finish drying.

The corner of that project was now covered.

The doors had been locked, but that didn’t mean anything.

A numbness seeped into his body from the air around him, leaving him chilled and dull.

When his doorbell rang, he jumped.

It took some time before he could hear anything other than the pounding of his heart in his ears, but when he could, he heard the doorbell sound again.

He walked to the door of his craft room and opened it wide, but before he stepped out, he hesitated. He reached around the door and twisted the lock. He pulled the door closed behind him until he felt it latch.

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I had already endured two longish car rides that day. It left me feeling fidgety. It wasn’t long before I started playing with my hands behind my back. After that, I took up rocking from my heels to my toes.

Then my mouth started moving.

“Maybe he’s not home.”

“He’s home,” Darius said.

“It’s been five minutes, and he hasn’t answered the door. How can you be sure?”

“Because he’s on the other side of that door, breathing rather loudly.”

I stared at him. “You’re kind of freaky.” When Darius threw a glare my way, I raised both hands. “Hey, don’t let the opinion of the bald, black-eyed weirdo bother you.”

We both turned back to the door.

“So he knows we’re here?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“And he’s choosing not to answer.”

“That’s correct.”

“Are you sure it’s him? I mean, what if someone else is in there, and they took him hostage?”

Darius grunted. “I wish you hadn’t said that.”

“Why?”

“Because now I can’t get the idea out of my head, but if I bust in there to make sure that Frost’s all right, a lot of important people are going to want to know why, and if I say it’s because I could hear someone breathing but they wouldn’t open the door, do you know what they’ll say?”

“That you’re kind of freaky?”

“Exactly.”

“So we’re going to wait out here?”

“For as long as it takes.”

Ugh.

I slammed on the door a few times with my fist. “Hey, Professor Frost,” I yelled, “I really need to pee. Do you think we could speed this up a bit?”

Still no answer.

“Don’t worry about Agent Vasil,” I yelled. “He doesn’t bite.”

I glanced over at my friendly neighborhood vampire, just to confirm it, but he was too busy rubbing his forehead to notice.

There was some noise at the door. It opened to reveal the worried face of Ryan Frost.

“Bathroom?” I said.

He opened the door wider. “Turn right at that wall, go down the hall, second door on the right.”

“You’re my hero, sir.”

I departed immediately. The count would have to find his own way in.

Once my primary concern was dealt with, I could slow down. As I washed my hands, I gazed around the bathroom. It was barren, like you’d expect a bachelor’s place to be, but the hand towel was fluffy and clean.

When I left the bathroom, Frost was nowhere in sight. I dawdled down the hall so I could look at the professor’s decorations.

Wayde had collected a bit of everything, so his house had looked like a curio shop, but Frost specialized. His entire hallway wall was covered with a crowd of plain, black picture frames. Each one was carefully spaced to be an equal distance from its neighbors. The similar frames and exact placement created a kind of harmony that made up for the strange sizes and wild variety of documents they held.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

There was a tiny scrap of paper with nothing on it except a signature: A. Lincoln. There was a page from an illuminated manuscript that was at least fourteen by sixteen inches. There was a paper that could have been torn out of a ledger. Beside it was a sketch from one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. There was stuff from every age and every culture I could think of. The only thing they had in common was that they were flat.

I stopped at the Da Vinci sketch. I was still inspecting it when Frost came to find me.

“Do you like it?” he asked.

“It’s incredible,” I said.

“I’m glad you think so. It’s one of my favorites.”

“But it can’t be real. Something like that would have to be worth at least a million dollars.”

“Well, certainly more than I could afford. None of them are real, Miss Cole.”

My eyes wandered over the massive grid of historical documents. “None of them?”

“I know my real-or-fake game isn’t very exciting, but this is my hobby. Trev cooked, and I make replicas.”

“Dude, that’s awesome! Did you make one for Wayde?”

Frost’s grief-weighed smile appeared. “I did. I gave it to him for his birthday. Did you ever see his study?”

“Yeah.”

“It was Ortelius’s world map, up on the wall, by his window.”

“That thing was gorgeous! How do you get such old paper?”

“Coffee and instant coffee powder usually does the trick. Paper is easy. The hard part is when the document isn’t on paper. Or if the document has water stains that smeared the ink. I try to make each one as realistic as possible, and it takes forever to get the smears just-so.”

“Okay, I know I hang around with an FBI agent, so there’s probably no non-threatening way to ask this—do you ever try to pass them off as real?”

He chuckled. “Don’t worry. My signature and the date are always on the back in modern ink. Besides, they may look good, but they wouldn’t fool an expert for a second.”

“How long does it take to make them?”

“It depends, but the short answer is, a long time.” He pointed from one frame to another. “Three weeks. Three months.” He pointed to the illuminated manuscript. “That one took the better part of two years, and that’s not counting how long it took me to ship in the special ink.”

“Two years?”

“It took two or three weeks of experimenting until I could get the gilding to look right.”

“I don’t see a lot of other gilding here.”

“That’s because I swore to myself, ‘never again!’”

There I was, laughing and chatting with a possible murderer. Either that demonstrated the power of art or my complete lack of focus, and I wasn’t sure which.

As we passed down the hall, he pointed to a piece with oriental writing.

“I can get the look of parchment pretty easily,” he said, “but for that one, I had to order the mulberry paper.”

I paused to examine it. “I can see why.”

The texture would have been almost impossible to replicate.

Further on, I stopped in front of another frame. I recognized the writing surface from glaring far too long at the scroll. It was another textured surface that would be almost impossible to replicate.

“That’s real papyrus, isn’t it?” I said.

“Yes. It’s a copy of a page from the Book of the Dead.”

I couldn’t have cared less about the content. “You can age papyrus?”

“I can.”

I groaned. “Professor Frost, I wish you hadn’t said that.”

Vasil appeared beside us. I was half expecting it, so I didn’t jump, but Frost did.

“You can’t like everyone,” Darius said to me.

“I didn’t like Summer!” I protested.

“True. It’s a damn shame he was one of the victims—he would have made a wonderful suspect.” He turned to Frost. “How did you get this papyrus?”

“I bought it,” Frost said. “It’s not hard to come by online.”

“How many sheets did you buy?”

Frost’s face was so pale, it was going gray. I felt bad about saying Darius didn’t bite. It was technically true, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t ravage your brain.

“It was years ago,” Frost said. “I don’t remember.”

“Don’t worry, I’m sure we can look it up if we have to,” Darius said. “How many sheets do you have left?”

Frost’s mouth opened and closed several times. He lowered his head for a moment, then raised it again. His voice trembled. “Why do you want to know?”

“Because if you bought twenty and now you only have one or two, I’m going to ask to see all the projects those pages went into.”

“What about the sheets I threw away? A man makes mistakes, Agent! Not every writing surface I work on winds up on my wall.”

“That’s a fair point, Professor.” Darius paused. “How many mistakes did you make?”

I could almost see the giant arrow shaft sticking out of Frost’s chest, still vibrating from the impact.

The professor clenched and unclenched his hands. He swallowed. “Agent Vasil, I feel like you’re attacking me. I don’t want to talk about this, and I don’t think you can force me to.”

“I understand that you heard about Louis Summer’s death.”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any thoughts on that?”

“All I know is that he was found dead at the bottom of a ravine. Was it suicide?”

“We have reason to believe it wasn’t.”

“What reason?”

“I’m not at liberty to say. What about you?”

“What?”

“Do you have reason to believe it wasn’t a suicide?”

Frost turned his feet toward me, but he wasn’t brave enough to show his back to Darius. “Miss Cole, I assume that you’ve finished using my bathroom?”

Out from my mouth burbled the following: “Please, Professor. We can help you.”

Darius frowned and looked away. Frost’s eyes filled with tears, but he managed to blink them back.

“You want to help me?” His voice was choked, but it grew firmer as he went on. “I find that hard to believe.”

Even awake, I could feel the cold horror and the hot specks of blood.

“Professor Frost,” I said, “you were his best friend.”

He couldn’t blink them back this time; the tears rolled down his face, large and gloopy.

“Leave,” he demanded.

I said, “If you won’t let us help you, will you help us? It still needs one more!”

“Emerra!” Darius snapped.

“Sorry. I wasn’t supposed to say that.”

“Leave,” Frost repeated.

“If that’s what you want, we’ll leave,” Darius said. “Before we go, would you like to tell us what you’ll be doing for the rest of the day?”

“I don’t have to.”

“That’s true. You don’t have to tell us your alibi for the night Louis Summer died either, but you might want to, since you’re a suspect in an ongoing murder investigation.”

“Good bye, Agent Vasil. Miss Cole.”

We left. I was still close enough to the door, I heard it lock behind us. We walked toward the SUV.

“How bad did I screw up?” I asked.

“You didn’t,” Darius said. “Frost had already decided he wasn’t going to tell us anything. I think he was closer to talking to you than he ever was to me.”

“Would you have helped him?”

“Do you think he killed Wayde?”

“I think he was sitting in the chair, watching, when Wayde was killed. And I think he’s still scared.”

“Scared or not, that makes him an accomplice to murder.” The vampire sighed. “Two scrolls,” he grumbled. “‘She was wrong, it faded, or this is a different scroll.’ That’s why Drix couldn’t sense the magic. Frost had made a copy.”

“You heard him—some of those things take months to make.”

“He had months.”

“Even if he was translating?”

“It fits, Emerra. You know it does.”

“But that means the one we have is the copy.”

“And the other one is still out there, so whoever has the device can still use it.” The count pulled out his phone and dialed. “Kosh, this is Vasil. I need a judge to get an exclusive warrant.” Pause. “How long?” Another pause. “Then can you send over one of our agents? I need a house watched…Don’t worry. We’ll stay here until they do.”

The vampire hung up and put the phone back in his pocket.

“Do I get to be part of a stakeout?” I asked.

My tough-girl image was going right up. I was already dressed in black, and now I could pretend to be a hard-boiled detective, staring grimly at a suspect’s house. All I needed were some shades.

Darius said, “You went to the bathroom, right?”