Читать книгу Hunted By the Others - Jess Haines - Страница 14

Even though I’d forced myself to lie down and take a nap so I wouldn’t be a complete zombie later that night, I was still feeling groggy when I entered the lobby of The Circle’s downtown office tower. I’d almost slept through my alarm and ended up hurriedly throwing on presentable clothes, fluffing my hair and slapping on some makeup before running out the door. Traffic had been hell, and even though I knew it was better to park somewhere and take the train, I just didn’t want to deal with it. So between traffic and finding parking, I was twenty minutes late.

The design in the lobby was impressive: lofty ceilings; high windows that allowed sunlight to stream in; low-slung red couches; and intricate arcane symbols inlaid on the floor. Feeling hassled, rumpled, and cranky, I approached a sleek, polished desk where a bored-looking receptionist tapped away at her keyboard. She didn’t bother to look up.

“Excuse me? I’m here to see Arnold.”

The girl slowly raised her eyes from her flatscreen monitor to look at me over the rim of her glasses with cool, studied contempt. I couldn’t help but notice that her clothes were all trendier and nicer than mine and that her expensively dyed blond hair framed a thin, elfin face with heavy, but expertly applied, makeup. She was stick-thin and pretty enough to be modeling those clothes on a runway somewhere.

She looked me up and down and cocked a dismissive eyebrow before sliding her eyes back to the screen. Obviously, I failed her inspection.

“You’re late.”

More tapping on the keyboard. A pause.

“He’ll come get you in a moment. Please have a seat, ma’am.”

The bored voice couldn’t hide the underlying irritation. I’d probably interrupted a game of solitaire.

Making a heroic effort not to flip her off, I hefted my purse higher on my shoulder and had a seat on one of the uncomfortable but stylish red couches. The magazines spread on the table were up to date, but stuff I’d never read. Arcana Quarterly and Familiar Fashion: How to Accessorize Your Fae Focus just isn’t my cup of tea. I pulled out my cell and started fumbling with the text messages, trying to find something to focus on other than the rapid clicking of nails over keys coming in rattling spurts every few seconds from the reception desk.

Arnold kept me waiting exactly thirty minutes. His way of telling me off for coming late, I supposed. I looked up at the sound of him clearing his throat from the glass double doors next to the receptionist’s desk.

He was tall, skinny, with thick glasses perched on a narrow nose and an untidy mop of sandy brown hair, and wearing jeans and a faded T-shirt that read JESUS SAVES. THE REST OF YOU TAKE DAMAGE. Oh great, a geek.

“Ms. Waynest?” He appeared distracted, glancing at me from a thick sheaf of papers he clutched in one ink-stained hand, offering the other to me to shake. His shy, somewhat weak smile was genuine, however, and I realized he hadn’t been keeping me waiting on purpose. He was probably just tied up in his work. He actually looked a trifle apologetic under all the distraction.

“Thank you for seeing me, Mr., uh…Arnold.” I realized I didn’t know his last name. “Veronica told me you’d be able to help me.”

He nodded, reddening a bit at the mention of Veronica. A crush, perhaps? Poor guy. That love was destined to remain unrequited, and for more than one reason if her hitting on me in the restaurant the other night was any indication.

“Yes, ah, Ms. Wright told me you were coming. She said you needed something from our security vaults, is that right?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

I found myself liking the guy despite his geekiness. He was nice enough. Too bad he worked for scum like Veronica.

“This way, please. Follow me.” The receptionist didn’t look up once, still tapping away as I followed the guy into the room behind the glass doors.

Inside it looked pretty much indistinguishable from any other cube farm in corporate America. Gray and drab, with a few amusing cartoons tacked to cube walls or mildly entertaining screensavers on the computers we passed, but otherwise unremarkable. I couldn’t hear the sounds of anyone working, and it looked pretty deserted. Guess even magi took the weekends off.

He led me to an elevator oddly stuck in the middle of the floor between two rows of cubicles. I wasn’t going to question it. Magi could do whatever the hell they wanted with their architecture.

As we stepped inside, he pressed the button for the lowest basement level instead of one of the double-digit high-rise levels I was expecting. All the corporate bigwigs must get the view.

He didn’t speak during the short ride, just zoned back into the papers he was holding. When the doors opened, he looked up with confusion, as if surprised we had arrived so soon. Weird.

Stepping out, he led the way down a damp, obviously underground hallway. Thick insulation pipes ran overhead and the paint was dull, institutional gray-blue. We passed a number of doors, one or two with strange inscriptions where one would expect a name tag or some such. Then I noticed we passed one that had a nameplate for the boiler room. Lovely. Poor Arnold must be among the lowest of the low on the corporate ladder to be stuck working down here.

We rounded a bend or two, then he abruptly stopped at an unmarked door with peeling paint. I probably would’ve walked right past it. There was nothing special about it that I could see, but he opened it anyway and stepped inside.

Following him into the room, I was a little disappointed to see it looked like an entirely unremarkable, if high-tech, security office. A collection of monitors gleamed against one wall showing various scenes inside and around the building. A guard in a slate gray uniform glanced over at us briefly at the sound of my heels clicking against the floor but soon returned his attention to the monitors. A couple of fans were running, keeping the computers under the table cool. I noted with some amusement that the guy was hiding a paperback under one thick palm against his leg, probably hoping we wouldn’t notice.

Arnold continued walking, nose in his papers, and I have to admit to being surprised when he walked without stopping into the blank far wall and disappeared. I paused, mouth agape, not sure whether to attempt to follow or just stand there staring like an idiot. Guess which option I took.

“You can follow him. Just keep walking straight ahead, you’ll be fine.”

The guard’s voice was bemused but kindly, and I felt just a little foolish for being so shocked. Magi do magic. Duh. I should expect that here. It still gave me the willies.

Swallowing my discomfort and putting on a brave face, I took the guy’s direction and kept walking. I shut my eyes when I got close, expecting-but-not to have my face smashed when I walked into the wall. Nothing happened. Well, nothing except a slight tingling sensation against my skin and my footsteps suddenly being muted by carpet.

Opening my eyes, I saw Arnold watching me expectantly from across the room. I took it all in, feeling a mix of elation at having survived walking through the wall with my dignity intact and disappointment for the plain homeliness of the room he’d brought me to. There was a big, beat-up desk in the middle of the room, one leg propped up with a bit of cardboard to keep it level. There were tons of papers scattered around the room and on the desk, piled on a table off to the side and on top of the two tall filing cabinets shoved into a corner. A pizza box was perched on top of one pile, an open box of Chinese food, and a couple of coffee mugs on the desk. One held pens and pencils, the other what looked to be very old tea. The smell was a mix of old pizza and gym socks, with a very faint undertone of incense.

I knew it was Arnold’s office almost immediately, not because of the clutter but because of the scatter of dice on the desk and the dinosaur and alien action figures on top of his monitor.

“I just need you to sign a form for me, then we can go into the vault.”

I shrugged and took the form he deftly pulled from somewhere in the middle of the stack in his arm. Looked like a standard requisition form, nothing terribly exciting. I signed and dated it and left it on the desk. He dropped the rest of his stack of papers next to it with a muted “thump” and moved behind the desk, twisting a ring on one of his fingers before placing a hand against the wall. I blinked as he revealed another wall behind it as the first simply blinked out of existence at his touch.

This one looked like the back of a cave, all sandstone and multicolored layers of reddish rock. It curved inward a few feet behind the desk. There were a pair of arched double doors made out of some kind of gray stone, closed tight and covered with intricate patterns—runes or something like them, I supposed.

The hair on the back of my neck rose when I realized the runes were moving and changing even as I stared at them. Solid stone is not supposed to move.

An idle wave of Arnold’s hand and a short “Aperto” and the thick, rune-inscribed doors slowly opened inward.