A Perfect Blood

stairs, half in the lower hallway, and went a few paces to the left, watching the amulet’s color.
    “That leads to storage,” Mr. Calaway offered. He was starting to fidget, and Nina smiled, basking in it.
    “What do you store here?” Nina almost purred, clearly happy belowground. “Brochures?”
    I turned at Mr. Calaway’s scoff, but then he hesitated and backed up several steps when he saw her almost lascivious expression. “Mostly artifacts that we haven’t gotten prepped for display or those that we don’t want to make available to the general public.”
    Glenn spun on a heel, his face creased in irritation. “Why wouldn’t you want them on display?” he asked belligerently.
    The curator adopted a stiff posture, one step up from Nina. “Slavery was an ugly business, Officer Glenn. It became more so when given a high monetary value and people took inhuman steps to protect their investments. ”
    Clearly this was a sore subject for the man, but Glenn had turned to face him squarely, just as upset. “It’s Detective Glenn. And what right do you have to determine who gets to see it?”
    Mr. Calaway squinted at the larger man, not backing down an inch. “I’ll arrange a private tour for you if you like, and if you still feel the same way, I’ll be very much surprised.”
    Eyes down, I walked past them in the other direction. My pulse jumped when the amulet glowed a brighter green. Nina must have sensed it because she came down the last few steps, her eyes alight. “I think it’s this way,” I said, and Mr. Calaway waved his hands in protest.
    “There’s nothing down there,” he claimed, but my amulet said differently, and we all strode forward to find it ended in . . . nothing. No stairway, no door. Nothing.
    “I don’t understand,” I said, staring at the empty wall as I remembered doing almost the same thing in Trent’s labs a few months ago. There’d been a door that I had needed to use a ley line to walk through to the room beyond. I couldn’t do that now, and I looked from my band of charmed silver to Glenn, feeling ill.
    “What’s behind this wall?” Glenn asked, his hand skating over the smooth paint.
    Mr. Calaway thought for a moment. “That’s the storage area for the holding pen.”
    Glenn stiffened. “The one upstairs is a fake?”
    “Absolutely!” the man exclaimed.
    “What are you afraid of?” Glenn pressed.
    I looked down the hallway to Nina, leaning casually against the wall and wedging something from under her fingernails. It was a very masculine gesture that looked odd with her carefully manicured nails. This was not going well, and Mr. Calaway flushed.
    “I’m not afraid of anything,” he said, flustered. “The holding pen is behind this wall, yes, but we have access to it through the elevator. If you had told me that’s where you wanted to go, I would have taken you there in the first place. Follow me.”
    Glenn clenched his jaw, and Nina closed her eyes, soaking in his anger. I turned and trudged after Mr. Calaway as he backtracked to a set of huge silver doors. He keyed it to life with a flourish, glaring at us as the machinery rumbled and whined. I shivered as the doors opened to show a huge elevator that looked big enough to hold an elephant.
    “It’s not right that you’re hiding a piece of history down here where no one can see it,” Glenn grumbled as he filed in after me.
    Mr. Calaway entered last, and he used a second key to light up the panel. “We don’t have the original holding pen up for display for several reasons, Detective Glenn,” he said stiffly as we waited for the lights to quit flashing and the panel to warm up. “Preserving the priceless art created by the people confined within it for one, maintaining people’s sanity for another.”
    Sanity?
    “The truth should never be hidden,” Glenn insisted.
    Nina covered a smile as the smaller man fumed. “It’s not hidden,” Mr. Calaway barked. “It’s simply not on public display! The original inscriptions on the interior of the structure are as priceless as they are heartbreaking, but there are magics associated with the structure itself, and that’s what we are keeping from the public. Black magics.”
    My gut tightened, and I exchanged a look with Nina, who was suddenly a lot more alert. Black magic under the museum? Maybe there was a method to the madness after all.
    The angry, smaller man punched a button, and we started to descend. “It was deemed better to have a