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Rory and I started down the steps.
    “Excitement pee,” she said, taking some of my books from me to carry. “He gets this way when he talks about Comic Con, too.”

Five

    Alexandra
    R ory and I headed down to the finished basement of our new building, not wanting to wait around for Marshall while he hit the little boys’ room. The sooner we got to work sorting through our comparative notes from the brick-man incident, the sooner I might get to sleep. Pillowy thoughts of slumber filled my head as we walked along the half-finished basement hall, following the series of bookcases off to my left.
    “I’m glad you took Marshall’s suggestion months ago when he tried to talk you into the library motif,” Rory said.
    I nodded, counting off the bookcases as I went. “‘Very Wayne Manor,’ he had said. Apparently, Batman liked secret doors, too.”
    “I still don’t get why you call it Alexander’s guild hall, though,” Rory said. “I mean, he was a guild of one.”
    “My guess is that Alexander built it in the hopes of using it for a higher purpose,” I said. “For finding other Spellmasons, for educating others to his way, but I think having a madman hunting down that power made him think the better of it. Some things, it would seem, were better kept secret. Which, conversely, is why we’re so busy playing arcane Nancy Drews.”
    We arrived at the bookcase that concealed the one thing that had survived the original building’s collapse—my great-great-grandfather’s old alchemical workshop.
    I reached behind a copy of
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
on the top shelf to activate the pressure plate against the back wall, but, to my surprise, the bookcase was already clicked free from its swivel locking mechanism.
    “This door shouldn’t be open,” I said. “That’s the point of it being
secret
.”
    Rory looked at the unfinished section of the basement along the other wall. “Maybe one of the workers triggered it by accident?”
    I shook my head. “I’ve changed enough workers in and out on this project. I switched them out every few weeks. No single one could have known enough about any one aspect of the project to open this door.”
    “Let’s check it out,” Rory said, dropping her dance bag on the floor. “Cautiously, of course.”
    I pressed against the bookcase, sliding it over to reveal the black stone door behind it, finding it ajar as well. I put my hand on it and willed the heavy stone to move as I breathed out the old country’s words of power. It yielded, and the two of us entered the room beyond, the light spilling in behind us, allowing us to make our way easier as we went.
    Carved-stone markings bearing the winged Belarus sigil adorned the walls of the cavernous circular space, rising up to a dome high above, but it was the lower part that sported tables, chairs, and counters built into the walls that we had to step through carefully. I checked the glass-covered cabinet built into the far side of the room, inventorying the array of my great-great-grandfather’s alchemical mixes within it.
    As Rory and I stepped to the center of the room, she stopped and pointed at the cobblestone floor beneath her. “You fixed it,” she said. “That giant ball you summoned, protecting yourself from Alexander’s defenses when we first found this place.”
    “Yeah,” I said, recalling how I had needed Stanis’s help to extract me from it. “I’ve been training myself to feel Alexander’s signature in his stonework. It helps that his magic in here had gone untouched for so long. It’s still strong here, which made it easier to wrap my will around it.”
    “Aww,” Rory said, all baby-voiced, “somebody’s been giving magical hugs, wrapping their will around things again.”
    I pressed my sense out into the rest of the room, holding a finger up to my lips. “Somebody’s definitely been in here,” I whispered. “I can feel it.”
    I let my connection to the whole space take control, letting