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Whatever my mother had hidden under the stairs, she expected the book in my hands to help me understand what it was.

I closed the cover carefully and looked at River.

"We need to find those stairs."

Luckily, Blackman was not just a pretty face. We found the back stairs at the end of the hallway and made it to the bottom fast enough that I nearly missed the last step. The little shared entryway beneath them was barely wide enough for River and me to stand side by side, with a back door at one end and a narrow cupboard tucked beneath the staircase.

Of course, it was locked.

A padlock the size of my fist hung from the latch, old enough to have accumulated several generations of rust but apparently still serious about its responsibilities.

I looked at River. "Please tell me you can open that without bringing the entire staircase down on us."

He wrapped one hand around the lock without breaking eye contact with me. The shackle came apart with the resistance of warm cheese.

"Show-off." I snorted and bumped my shoulder against his without thinking it through. He just gave me a long, loaded look and then pulled the door open.

Whatever mystery my mother had hidden under the stairs had spent the last twenty-six years sharing accommodations with a collection of cleaning supplies no one had been brave enough to throw away. Two brooms leaned against the wall beside a vacuum cleaner that looked old enough to remember dial-up internet, and a plastic mop bucket sat in the corner with several inches of murky water in the bottom.

Something moved in it.

I decided I had enough mysteries in my life and left that one alone.

The cupboard went deeper beneath the stairs than I expected. Pipes ran along the back wall to an old gas meter, disappearing into the ceiling between exposed supports. I crouched and swept the light from my phone across the space, looking for anything that didn't belong.

At first, I saw nothing.

Then River reached past me and pointed behind the meter without a word.

Wedged into the narrow space between a pipe and the support beam was a flat metal box, almost invisible beneath a layer of dust.

My heart started pounding.

I squeezed an arm behind the meter and worked the box loose, sending years of dirt raining onto my sleeve in the process. It resisted for a moment before suddenly coming free, and I nearly dropped it.

I caught it against my chest and clutched it there until I stopped coughing.

Neither of us spoke for a while after that.

The box was rectangular, roughly the size of a hardcover book, with darkened metal around the edges and no markings I could see beneath the grime. It could have belonged to anyone. It could have been sitting there since before my mother was born for all I knew.

But it was exactly where she had told me to look.

The third one is under the stair.

My hands began to shake.

I lowered the box carefully, intending to wipe away the dust and find out what the hell my mother had gone to so much trouble to hide.

I never got the chance.

Chapter Thirteen

The temperature in the hallway dropped. Not gradually. One moment the air smelled of dust, old wood, and whatever biological experiment was taking place in the mop bucket; the next, cold slid across my skin hard enough to raise every hair on my arms.

My first instinct was River.

Then I looked at him.