A short bald guy in a black tie and trench coat had come out of ASHH. “Have a good night, Frankie,” the man said in a nasal voice. “Everything’s turned off. I’m the last one.”
Ivy heard the security guard grunt in acknowledgment as the man made for the elevators.
Ivy turned to Olivia. “The office is empty,” she whispered. “I don’t see a keypad or card slot or anything. We just have to get past the security guard.”
“Who’s only, like, the size of the Washington Monument!” replied Olivia.
“And we have to hurry,” Ivy added, knowing that Brendan couldn’t keep up his act forever. She stuck her head around the corner again to survey the situation.
About a third of the way down, opposite the elevators, was a fire exit with a sign that said:
OPEN ONLY IN EMERGENCY. MANAGEMENT WILL BE NOTIFIED . And on the floor next to the elevators was an enormous potted plant.
“I have an idea,” Ivy whispered. “Stay here.”
She crawled along the carpet as fast as her vampiric speed would allow, her shoulder tight to the wall. She stopped behind the plant. Her knees ached momentarily from rug burn, but then they instantly healed. Through the plant’s leaves, Ivy kept an eye on the guard, who had started pacing back and forth.
Ivy set her feet and took a deep breath. When the guard’s back was turned, she pushed off into a front handspring, tapping open the fire exit with the soles of her boots. When the alarm began blaring from the stairwell, she was already tumbling back on the other side of the plant. And I thought I’d never use my cheerleading skills, she thought proudly.
The security guard came charging down the hall. He raced through the fire door to investigate and the heavy door slowly clanked shut behind him. Moments later, the door shook as the guard realized his mistake and tried to open it from the other side, but it was locked.
Olivia ran up, beaming. Together, she and Ivy dashed to the end of the hall. The ASHH doors whispered open obligingly, and they disappeared inside.
Olivia stood beside her sister inside the darkened office. She could make out rows of desks, each one topped by an ancient-looking computer. Hulking filing cabinets lined the walls.
Ivy fingered a stack of papers on a nearby desk. “Look how much paper there is in this place,” she said in a discouraged voice. “We might as well be looking for a corpse in a graveyard.”
Olivia’s eyes focused on the only closed-off room she could see: a huge partitioned cube in the center of the office, its smoked glass walls glowing slightly in the darkness. If I were an important file, she thought, that’s where I’d be. “Come on,” she said.
Luckily, the door was open. Olivia flipped the light switch, and then had to squint because of all the reflected light bouncing around the room. Stainless steel filing cabinets lined the walls, except in the corners, where there were gleaming glass display cabinets filled with strange-looking artifacts. In the center of the room was a huge stainless steel slab of a table—without, oddly, any chairs around it.
They each took a filing cabinet and started thumbing through folders. Olivia scanned the typed labels: Kulter ...Kunz ...Kuzin.
“Everything’s filed by last name,” she and Ivy announced at the same time.
“What name should we be looking for?” Ivy asked.
“How about Vega?” Olivia tried.
Ivy pulled open another cabinet. “Nope,” she said after a moment.
Olivia glanced back down at her cabinet, and a label caught her eye, one that was flagged with a red dot: LAZAR. That’s the name the Daniels mentioned, she remembered. Curious, she pulled out the file, which was nearly two inches thick, and opened it.
ASHH CASE ABSTRACT
CASE #: 6765475888-102923 NAME:KARL LAZAR
P ROVENANCE:ELDEST SON OF COUNT AND COUNTESS LAZAR OF COVASNA PROVINCE, TRANSYLVANIA
SUMMARY:(1) SUBJECT INVIOLATION OF 1ST AND 2ND LAWS OF THE NIGHT,WITH HUMAN SUSANNAH KENDALL OF ANDOVER,
MASSACHUSETTS.
(2) COUNT AND COUNTESS LAZAR IN STRICT OPPOSITION TO RELATIONSHIP.
(3) SUBJECT’SWHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN
STATUS:POTENTIAL HYBRID ALERT! Olivia turned the page, and her gaze fell on a creased black-and-white photograph of a stern looking vampire couple with their three children: a little girl and two young boys. Behind them, an imposing castle loomed ominously. The Lazar Clan, Covasna read the ornate caption. Count Rolen and Countess Rochette with children Kat, Karl, and Karina.
Olivia peered at the photo more closely. Her gaze fell on a jeweled medallion hanging around the countess’s neck. There was a symbol carved in it—and it looked like an eye with a V inside it.
Olivia gasped. Carefully laying the file on the stainless steel table for her sister to see, she pointed with a shaking finger at the countess’s necklace.
“It’s the same symbol that’s on our emeralds!” Ivy whispered.
They looked at each other in shock, and Olivia gripped her sister’s hand. “I think our parents’ names,” Olivia said slowly, “are Karl Lazar and Susannah Kendall.”
Ivy’s eyes flashed. “Are you sure?” She started flipping through the file frantically as Olivia looked over her shoulder. Suddenly her black fingernail plunked down in the middle of a page. “Fourteen years ago!” Ivy said. “They disappeared fourteen years ago!”
“Are there any pictures of them?” Olivia asked, her heart pounding.
Ivy summarily dumped the file on the table, and they both started sifting through the papers.
“Anything about them having kids?” Ivy asked.
“No.” Olivia shook her head. “Just a potential hybrid alert.”