peered through the letter box in the front door. “What’s the PIN?”
Ashoka inspected his palm. “040776.”
Parvati shrugged off her coat. “I’ll just be a minute.” Then she reached through the letter box, sliding into her cobra form as she did so. Her tale flicked before vanishing through the slot.
Ashoka glanced up and down the street. “I’ve never done anything illegal, and now I’m breaking and entering.”
“How are you finding it?”
“I feel half sick and half excited, you know?”
“Yes,” said Ash. “I do know.”
A minute later the door opened and Parvati, back in human form, smiled at them. “Come in.”
Savage hadn’t stinted on the decorations. It was an elegant mix of old and modern. The walls were original bare red brick, but full-height portraits lined the hallway, each lit by a discreet spotlight hidden among the old wooden beams across the ceiling. A long, dark red Persian rug ran all the way to a wrought-iron staircase, and the doors leading off the hallway were antique wood, their colour glossy and dark from the varnish.
Ashoka stood facing a life-sized portrait. “It’s Savage.”
Ash had seen it before, back in India. “At the beginning of his career.”
Savage wore the red jacket of an officer of the East India Company. He gazed down at them with half-lidded eyes that were cold blue chips of ice. They burned with all the greed, hunger for power, the sense of destiny, and of superiority that would define his three-hundred-year existence. All present in this first portrait of him as a mortal man in his mid-twenties. He held a tiger-headed cane, and the beast’s own gaze was pure red, two small rubies glistening from the silver face, snarling at the painter. Behind Savage lay a pair of manacles and a bundle of dried poppies, the source of his wealth. Further along the hallway was a portrait of him as an old man, then nearest to the stairs the most recent – just him sitting on a stool, dressed in his customary white suit, wearing his black shades. His skin was pearly white, almost luminescent. Behind him was desert and the faint outline of a vast archaeological excavation. His cane rested across his knees.
“That’s the dig in Rajasthan,” said Ash, “where we found Ravana.”
Parvati stood by a small electrical panel beside the door. A schematic of the building showed all the alarm locations, now all green. She double-checked and sighed. “The entire building is alarmed.”
“Which means no one’s at home,” said Ashoka. “What are we going to do?”
Ash knew Ashoka was gutted, and he was too. But then did he really believe it would have been that easy? This was Savage they were dealing with. The Englishman would have backup plans to his backup plans.
But they were here. In his house. Who knew what they might find?
“We need to have a good look around,” he said. “Maybe we’ll find a clue as to where they’ve gone. We know they were here recently.”
Parvati didn’t look happy. “It’s a big house.”
“We should split up.”
Ashoka shook his head. “Nope. No way. I’ve seen too many movies where that happens and the loser in the party …” he looked to Parvati, then Ash, “… which, under these circumstances, would be me, comes to a bloody and awful end.”
“Which is why you’ll be staying with Parvati,” said Ash.
“How come I get stuck with him?” replied Parvati.
“Hey!” said Ashoka.
“You have him,” she continued.
“No. Hanging out with him, it’s just too … freaky.” Ash smiled. “And look, you dealt with me when I was young and useless, so—”
“Who says I’m useless?”
Parvati put up a finger. “Shh.” She turned to Ash. “OK, then what are we looking for?”
“The house is huge, and I don’t want to stay here a moment longer than necessary, but we need to try to find out where they’ve gone, and we need to work fast, and that means splitting. I don’t like it any more than you do, Ashoka, but otherwise we have no leads. I’ll start at the top, you two start down here, and we’ll meet in the middle. All right?” Ash turned to Ashoka. Yes, it was still odd, staring at himself. “You do exactly as she says. Got it?”
“I am not useless.”
“Whatever.” Ash checked his watch. “We’ll meet in fifteen minutes.”
Parvati nodded, then took the left corridor, Ashoka close behind her.
Ash went directly to the wrought-iron staircase and climbed, moving quickly and keeping to the shadows. A clock chimed somewhere in the house, but all else was silence. He paused at the first floor to listen, gazing down the corridor. There was no one around. He continued on up.
Clues. I’m looking for clues. Now which door leads to clues?
He was at the top of the house. A skylight illuminated a large square patch of the corridor in a silvery blue. The space was mean compared to the rest of the house. The ceiling was low and the doors were plain, without the ornate panelling of the floors below. It smelled musty and a cold breeze sank through the old frame around the skylight.
He peered into the first room, opening the door slowly to minimise the squeak of the hinges. Linen sat in neat white stacks upon a row of shelves and there was the stuffy odour of mothballs. Ash moved on.
He went quickly from room to room, finding nothing of interest. He saw the stairs at the opposite end. One more room to check, then he’d make his way down to the floor below and search there.
The door was oak and the handle a brass curl, different from the rest. Ash opened it and entered.
A study. Savage’s home from home. It had to be. Small, cramped and with a row of windows overlooking the street, but there was a tiger skin on the floor and a large desk by a window. The desk was bare but for an old-fashioned telephone. Most of the wall was covered with shelves overstuffed with books, mainly old, worn and leather-bound. Alongside these were some glass cabinets, each filled with archaeological artefacts from around the world. There were ancient bronze arrowheads, clay statues, feather headdresses and gold coins, rusty swords and urns. Animal heads decorated the walls, everything from tigers to boars with massive tusks.
A chill breeze caressed Ash’s nape.
He’d been in a room a lot like this once, in the Savage Fortress. It had been the night he’d learned his world was stranger than he’d imagined, when he’d discovered monsters – demons – were very real.
A photograph caught his attention. Age had turned it yellow
