"Looking to see if anything has been disturbed," Paen said, checking the computer. "I don"t see anything missing."
"Maybe he didn"t find what he came for," I suggested.
"That, or he was looking for information rather than an object," Paen answered, tidying up some papers. "We won"t know that unless you see the man again. Unless you can..." He waved a hand over the table, one eyebrow c.o.c.ked in question.
I held out my hands over the table, but didn"t get the slightest inkling of anything untoward. "Sorry. That"s not really my forte."
He grunted a noncommittal response as he shoved some papers into a leather attache. I used the moment to get a better look around the room. I wandered down a line of bookcases, noting a few empty shelves. "Is this the room where the statue had been kept?"
"No."
I waited a moment for Paen to elucidate, but he just shucked his coat, held out a hand for my jacket, then went back to the desk to check the answering machine for messages.
"All righty," I said, looking around the room again, trying to orient myself. "Where was it kept? If you take me there, maybe I can pick up some information about it."
He stopped frowning at the answering machine and frowned at me instead. "That"s what you"re here to do-find it. I have no idea where it was kept."
"Why do I think there"s more to this statue thing than you"re telling me?" I asked, taking a seat on a chair next to his desk. "You don"t know what it looks like, don"t know when it was stolen from your family"s castle, don"t even know where it was kept...
Nope. Not adding up. Why don"t you tell me the whole story?"
He stood silent for a moment. I don"t know if I can trust you.
Of course you can. I"m eminently trustworthy, just ask anyone. Besides, we"re going to sleep together. Even you, Mr. No Emotional Commitment, must have some level of trust you are willing to grant to a s.e.xual partner.
Paen"s jaw slackened for a moment as a look of absolute surprise filled his lovely silver eyes. "How did you do that?"
"Do what?" Talk to you without actually speaking aloud?
He stared at me as if I was an escapee from a freak show. "Yes."
"I"m not quite sure," I said, shrugging. "I could hear you, so I figured the reverse might be possible if I thought at you. Evidently it is. Are Dark Ones usually telepathic like that?"
His eyes widened for a moment before narrowing. "No, they are not. Not without some connection, usually a close blood relationship."
"Oh, so you can talk to Finn that way?"
"My brothers, yes. But not others," he answered, moving behind the desk. I got the distinct feeling he was uneasy, as if he was avoiding something. "About the statue-it has been demanded as payment to the demon lord Oriens. I have five days to find it, or a horrible penalty will be placed upon my family."
"What penalty?" I asked, feeling nosy, but needing to know everything there was to know about the statue and its history.
He toyed with a pen for a moment. "My mother"s soul will be forfeited."
"Ouch. OK, so we need to find this statue in five days. That"s an impossibly short amount of time to find anything, but I"ll give it my utmost attention." I rubbed my chin as I thought. "Does anyone in your family know anything about it?"
"a.s.sumedly my parents do, but they are on a research trip in an uninhabited forest in Bolivia, and thus are out of communication for the next month or so."
"Can"t you do the brain thing with them?"
"No." His lips got a wry twist to them for a few seconds. "When I was a child I could, but now I can only do the brain thing, as you call it, with my brothers."
"Hmm." I rubbed my chin some more. "Can they do it with your parents?"
"Not anymore. Like me, they lost the ability when they reached adulthood."
"Huh. Weird. I"d have thought once you had it, you had it forever."
Paen made an exasperated tsking noise. "I appreciate you wishing to know all that there is to know about my family and our relationship to the statue, but shouldn"t you get on with finding it? That is your job."
"Yes, but as I told you before, I"m not a Diviner. It"s not just a matter of me consulting the higher spirits and asking where the statue is now."
"You may not be a Diviner, but you have elf blood, and you are talented in finding objects-or so you said."
"Hey now, no slurs," I said, getting up to pace the length of the room. "I am good at finding things. Better even than my mother, and she"s nothing to sneeze at in the locating department. But every little bit of information I can get helps narrow down the search. Since you don"t know anything else... well, we"ll just do this logically."
"What are you doing?" Paen asked, coming over to where I was stretching out on the carpet.
"I"m going to open myself up to the castle, and let my consciousness roam the hallways, looking for signs of the statue."
"You intend to search for the statue while lying on the floor?"
"Sure. My mother does it artistically arranged on a fainting couch, but whenever I try that I get a case of the giggles, so I just use the plain old floor."
He stood over me, his hands on his hips, glowering. I smiled up at him. You really are handsome, you know? If you weren"t so messed up about relationships, I might go for you.
"Stop that."Stop what, this?
"Yes. I don"t like it."
I could feel how uncomfortable it was making him, so I didn"t continue, although I couldn"t help but ask why. "All right. But why does me doing that bother you so much?"
He glowered some more at me, and ignored my question. "Why are you trying to find the statue here? I told you it was stolen.
Why aren"t you using your powers to locate it?"
"I"m looking here first because you don"t know for a fact that it was stolen."
"It has to have been stolen. I know every inch of this castle, and there are no monkey statues anywhere."
"It could be hidden," I pointed out, admiring for a moment the gloss on his shoes. "Until we rule out absolutely that it"s not here somewhere, it doesn"t make sense to search elsewhere."
"Doubtful."
I sighed, closed my eyes, and crossed my arms over my chest. "Shoo."
"What?" Disbelief was rife in his voice.
"Shoo. Go away. Leave me alone so I can work."
"You"re shooing me from my own library?"
"Yes." I uncrossed my arms to make shooing motions, peeking at him through barely opened eyes. He looked outraged at the thought of me telling him what to do. "If you"re not going to be quiet and let me concentrate, you have to leave."
He drew himself up, not that he wasn"t impressive enough before. Now he positively loomed over me. "I will not be shooed from my own room."
"Fine, then. Just give me a little quiet so I can focus and do the mental thing."
The leather couch sighed softly as he sat a few feet away from me. "I thought you said you could only do the astral projection when you were aroused?"
"I can. But this isn"t astral projection-I"m just opening myself up to the castle and touching its awareness. My mind will send out little tendrils to wander around, but my consciousness will remain here."
"Mind tendrils? That sounds stranger than anything I"ve ever heard of, even s.e.xually driven astral projection."
I laughed and opened my eyes long enough to grin at him. "Yes, it is a bit weird, huh? But it works."
The only sound in the room for the next few minutes was of the central heating kicking in and blowing warm air through a grate on the floor near me. I let myself relax, pushed down my brain"s desire to think about Paen, and slowly allowed the essentia of the castle to sink into my body.
Every building has an essentia. It"s the essence of existence, similar to the souls of living beings, a collection of emotions and thoughts that have been imbued upon its structure and pulled from the surrounding environment. Most dwellings" essentias consist of a mixture of happiness, contentment, and sorrow, as collected over the years from the people who"ve lived in them. I"ve only once encountered a place that had a bad essentia, but most places, like this castle, were an a.s.sortment of emotions, most good, a few bad, but nothing unexpected."This castle has been at peace for the last five hundred years," I told Paen without opening my eyes. "But before that, it had a violent history. Many people were killed here, some justly, others without reason."
I heard him shift on the couch. "My great-grandmother"s family fought long and hard to retain the castle. It was under siege many times."
"You resemble the man who built the castle," I said, catching a flash of him in the castle"s consciousness. "He loved this land dearly. He died defending it, and was happy to do so."
Just what I need-a house whisperer.
I laughed. "I can"t help it if houses talk to me."
"Stop reading my mind!"
"I"m not reading it. You"re talking into mine."
"I am not," Paen said crossly. "I"ve told you I can"t do that with strangers. You"re poking into my mind, and I want it to stop."
I bit back the urge to argue, and kept focused. As soon as I saw what there was the castle wanted me to see, I let my mind wander around it.
"What are you doing now?" Paen asked quietly some ten minutes later.
"I"ve just checked the top two floors, and am now in the bas.e.m.e.nt. So far there"s nothing to see, although I did find two hidden rooms."
"One off the dining room?" he asked.
"Yes. And one in the bas.e.m.e.nt, leading into a tunnel."
"That is the castle"s bolt-hole. It collapsed several hundred years ago due to the land shifting."
"Ah. Well, there"s nothing in either other than cobwebs, damp, and mouse droppings, so it looks like you"re right-the statue must have been stolen. What bothers me is that I don"t get any sense of it ever having been here in the first place."
Paen shifted again on the couch. "Why don"t you just ask the castle where it went?"
I snorted. "A house isn"t a living being. I can"t ask it questions-I"m limited to just sorting through information from its memories."
I opened my eyes and sat up, blinking a bit at the lights Paen had turned on. "And this castle has no memories of the statue you described. There are lots of other objet d"art memories, too many for me to look at individually, but I glanced at every one that would match the description, and there was no black monkey statue. There"s an ebony statue of a man with a giant p.e.n.i.s in a second floor bedroom, but he"s not a monkey in any form."
Paen looked mildly embarra.s.sed. "That would be one of my mother"s mementoes from the time they lived in New Guinea."
"She sounds like an interesting woman."
"She is. What do you intend to do now?" he asked.
I bit my lip, glanced at my watch, and thought for a moment. "Well, I don"t think the castle has anything else to tell me."
"I don"t see that it told you anything," he said, rather grumpily."Sure it did. It told me that the statue wasn"t here, and hasn"t ever been here."
"That"s ridiculous. It has to have been here. The castle is... er... confused."
I sat up, hugging my knees. "I suppose it could be, but most houses are pretty good about things like that. It"s their purpose, you know-to hold and protect the things inside them. This castle doesn"t know anything about a black monkey statue. Does your father own other houses?"
"No," Paen said, shaking his head. "This is our only family home. The statue had to be here."
"Hmm. Well, regardless, the castle can"t tell me anything else, and it"s almost deep night, so I had better be getting along."
"What does the hour have to do with you finding the statue?" Paen looked puzzled.
"My mother is a sun elf. Deep night is the time when they are at their weakest. It would be useless for me to try to do anything during the four hours of deep night, so I should probably get back to the office and see how Clare is getting along."
I thought Paen was going to stand up, but he didn"t. Instead he knelt on the floor next to where I was sitting. "You can"t leave.
You aren"t finished here."
"I"m not?"
"No."
"The castle told me everything it could."
"I"m not talking about the castle," he said, his eyes burning with a bright silver light. A little ripple of excitement had me shivering as I realized what he was talking about, "Oh. That. Er... you wanted to do that tonight? Now?"
"Is there anything wrong with now?" he asked, using my own words against me.
His eyes had me shivering again. I was still surprised at how strongly I was reacting to him-I"m not the sort of person to have a casual relationship-but just the thought of doing all sorts of intimate things with Paen had me flushing with arousal. That, and the sense that he needed me. I could fight the former but not the feeling that I could help him in some manner.
"Well... deep night is coming," I said weakly as he leaned toward me, the fingers on one of his hands stroking up my arm.
"That"s not the only thing that will come tonight," he said. Wickedly. With an intent that made my whole body tingle.
"Oooh." I breathed the word rather than spoke it as Paen leaned into me, gently pushing me back onto the floor until I was stretched out with him leaning over me. "I suppose I could stay for a little while longer."
"I believe it will take us all of deep night to explore this attraction we share," he murmured, his lips brushing mine for a moment before they burned a little trail over to my neck. Propped up on an elbow as he was, he had only one free hand, but oh, how he made use of it! My back arched as his hand slid along my ribs to the closest breast. "I have watched you the last half hour, and have decided on many ways to give you pleasure."