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Instead, he dropped my hand and raised both of his, mumbling a long string of something that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and his already wild mane go positively electric. And all the doors to all the rooms between us and the furniture dams to slam open. And the contents start to stream out, like reinforcements going to the front lines.
“The instant you can, shift us out of here,” he yelled, to be heard over the creak of wood and metal moving in ways the designe
rs never intended, and the high-pitched shriek of the wards. “We’ll have to come back for the other!”
“No . . . need,” I gasped, trying to will air into my starved lungs.
“What?”
I reached up and yanked off the fedora, which was somehow still sticking to the crackling mass on his head, and fished something out. It was a smallish bronze sphere encased in glass, which glowed faintly when I touched it. “Spelled,” I explained breathlessly. “You have to know . . . it’s there . . . or it isn’t.”
Jonas’ blue eyes moved from the paperweight to my face, going sharp and squinty along the way. “I assume there’s a reason you didn’t tell me about this before?”
I licked my lips. “Uh-huh.”
“Pythias!” He threw his hands up in a manner that reminded me eerily of Agnes, my predecessor, who would probably have had some trick to get us out of this. But the most I could do was to slide down on my heels, put my arms over my head to cut the noise, and concentrate on recovering.
I only hoped I did it fast, because Jonas hadn’t bought us much time. Two first-level masters redecorate quickly, and the rooms were already running out of things to shred. We needed to get out of here.
“Billy,” I whispered. “The train is leaving the station.”
I didn’t get anything back, even though I knew he’d heard me. Billy didn’t need ears to pick up on my call; whether he chose to answer it or not was another thing. But he’d sounded eager enough to leave before.
I started to try again, but Jonas grabbed my arm. “Change of plan. When you can shift, take us back to the office.”
“What? Why?”
“We have the orb,” he explained, less than helpfully.
“Isn’t that what you wanted?”
He looked exasperated. “Yes, but not to take it out of this time stream! The spirit it contains is the only thing keeping the world’s protective barrier in place. To remove it would drop that protection, exactly as our enemy wants!”
“Then hide it somewhere. Someplace where Tony can’t find it. Then we can look it up when we get back to our—”
Jonas shook his head. “We have no idea what Tony used it for between now and then.”
“To hold down papers?”
“And what else?” Jonas asked severely. “We don’t know; therefore we cannot risk removing a piece of a very delicate puzzle. We could inadvertently change history!”
I frowned. “If you’re not going to take it and you’re not going to hide it, then what are we doing here?”
“I needed to see it, to know what I’m looking for. ‘Paperweight’ could mean anything—”
“I described it to you!”
“—and to verify that the vampire Antonio had not lied about your father’s fate merely to torture you.”
Which he totally would have done, I realized. Tony and I had had what you might call a suboptimal relationship. “But he didn’t.”
“No. For once, it seems, he told the truth. Which means we must return this,” Jonas said, shaking the paperweight at me, “lest Antonio realize its importance and alter his actions in the future. Then we may never find it!”
I said something unladylike, which he didn’t hear because it was becoming impossible to hear anything. I felt like screaming right along with the wards, if I’d had the breath and if it would have done any good. But it wouldn’t—just like using the last of my energy to shift us to the office, where we’d be trapped all over again, because I wasn’t going to be doing this twice in close succession. Not the way I felt right now, and not carrying two. And that was assuming I could manage to do it at—
“Cass! Get ready to shift!” Billy’s panicked voice cut through the din.
“In a minute,” I said irritably, rubbing the back of my neck.
