“You want to explain this?”
Nigel snorted. “I do not. The contessa is a complicated woman.”
“You got that right.” I focused on the room more closely. There were chests of drawers and armoires positioned all around the space, clearly used. One chest had a large mirror atop it and a full-length mirror beside it, along with a desk that was littered with feminine accoutrements: bottles of perfume, tubs of powder, jeweled hairbrushes, and about eight million hairpins.
I glanced around critically. “Where’s her jewelry box?”
Nigel waved his hand dismissively. “She wouldn’t store anything of value there. Beyond that, the cubes would be too big to fit in a conventional box. And heavy.”
“Okay… but we’ve got about six minutes left up here before your little reunion, so we should probably figure out something.”
He grimaced but didn’t say anything further, and I scanned the room a second time. Even with the benefit of my third eye, I wasn’t picking up much. Random chests and dressers, the Barbie hair station, the enormous bed with thick wooden pedestals for feet. The bed itself was unusually high, boasting a two-tiered flounced skirt all around, woven with thick brocade and velvet tassels. I thought about the contessa, who was by no means an Amazon. She would need to take a running leap to get into a bed like this.
“You take the desk, I’ll take the armoires,” Nigel suggested, saving me from imagining that for too long.
We’d been at it for only thirty seconds when the sound of the door handle turning caught us up short. Nigel and I had both been caught in enough compromising positions—fortunately, never with each other—that we acted instinctively. He vaulted across the room onto the bed while I dove beneath the skirts, praying the space wasn’t jammed with boxes.
It wasn’t. I scrambled beneath the bed with the enhanced speed that was one of my most useful skills. I’d barely tucked my knees up tight when the contessa’s oddly girlish voice sounded across the room.
“Oh, Nigel. What a delightful surprise!”
Nigel, situated atop the bed, though hopefully not already ensconced beneath its covers, merely drawled in his crisp British voice, “Contessa.”
I rolled my eyes hard enough to give me brain damage as Marguerite Odermatt crossed the room, rushes rustling. Beneath the heavy brocade bed skirts, the heavy planks and carved base of the massive bed looked like they’d been hewn from a single oak tree. Taking in the impressive craftsmanship, I was surprised that I could see as well as I could, given, you know, that I was under a bed. Then I glanced to the right and realized what I was seeing.
A four-inch by four-inch metal cube, propping up the contessa’s princess-in-a-tower bed.
My jaw would’ve dropped if there’d been any place for it to go, but with my face smashed against the floor, I didn’t have that luxury. Instead, resolutely ignoring the low conversation above me, I army-crawled over to the nearest bedpost. Sure enough, set neatly inside a thick metal casing beneath the original leg of the bed was one of the Nazi cubes we’d come to find, its glow growing ever so slightly brighter now that I was focusing on it. That energy was muted, probably because of the casing, but there definitely was some woo going on here. More to the point, this bad boy was holding up a bed that probably weighed north of a ton. Who in their right mind would use a Nazi artifact for a bed stand, let alone one that was possibly radioactive? People never failed to amaze me.
I shot a glance across the space and down, and sure enough, all four bed posts were supported in the same fashion. The cubes hadn’t been set into the posts permanently, thank heavens. They’d apparently been serving their purpose as a prop of a very real sort for decades.
Above me, the contessa trilled with laughter, and then her and Nigel’s conversation was muffled, I suspected by canoodling. There was nothing I wanted to be part of less than Nigel canoodling. But how was I going to get the cubes?
My hand stretched out toward the nearest one, my energy following the natural path of my mind. To my surprise, the energy crackling around me seemed to increase. As if I was waving a metal rod in front of a hypercharged magnet. Apparently, the cubes and I operated on the same frequency.
Interesting. Could I simply pop the cubes free?
To test my theory, I stretched my hand toward a second cube, and there was no missing the shift of the artifact as well. The cube on the other side of the bed nearest me also moved, the change enough that above me, the contessa let out a delighted giggle.
“What was that?” she asked girlishly. “Or was that just you?”
I grimaced, glad to have something else to focus on besides the diorama above me. But the problem still remained. Now that these cubes were becoming polarized to my energy, it seemed almost likely that I could yank them all out from underneath the bed, but how could I do that without causing a very messy scene? It didn’t seem possible. Actually, nothing about this situation seemed destined to be anything but messy. How well did Nigel actually know the contessa, anyway…and, more importantly, how well did her current husband know Nigel?
For the first time, it occurred to me that a formal invitation has been extended to me under the auspices of the Arcana Council, and I was in the bedroom of the host’s wife, with a man who, from the sounds of things, was doing a damn fine job making all her dreams come true. Was all this a setup of an entirely different kind? Who was playing whom, exactly?
Across the room, the doors slammed open. A flurry of excited, deep, male, and extremely Swiss voices erupted in outrage and shock.
I didn’t need more of an invitation to get rolling. Spread-eagled on the ground beneath the bed, I extended both arms and both legs towards all four cubes, thinking very, very magnetic thoughts. Impossibly magnetic thoughts. Super-duper come-to-me-now thoughts.
It only took a second. The entire space seemed to electrify at once, all four cubes popping out from beneath the base of the bed and shooting toward me, two of them snapping to my palms, two of them cracking into my ankles. Ouch.
The bed fell four full inches as the metal casings formerly holding the cubes completely collapsed, and the contessa let out a bloodcurdling scream to add to the chaos.
Nigel, for his part, scrambled off the bed and hit the floor, rolling underneath the bed with me. His eyes were wild, his hair disheveled, and lipstick was smeared along one side of his aristocratic face. “We go?” he pleaded.
To be honest, that had been my plan. One of the other skills I’d developed during my tenure with the Arcana Council was high-speed transportation, allowing me to dissolve my body and anything touching me and reassemble it in any place I’d ever been to before. I had to have been there, granted, but most of the time, it worked pretty well.
Only, this time when I attempted to crackle us out of existence…nothing happened.
“Sara,” Nigel hissed.
“I’m trying!” As I stared at Nigel with increasing desperation, I realized the flaw in my not so careful construct. The uranium cubes adhered to my body were doing a number on my psychic equilibrium. I couldn’t focus enough to think, let alone pull off my usual transport ability of crackling into nothingness, taking along anything that was wrapped around me. Instead, we had a screaming woman above us, pounding feet approaching from all sides, while Nigel and I were trapped beneath an honest-to-God bed like five-year-olds with candy. I barely managed to shake my head, and his eyes popped wide with alarm. He grabbed for one of the cubes—