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CHAPTER 6

  Even though her icy expression let nothing slip, Grace was furious.

  That inept detective had decided to retain her – obviously only for the purpose of annoying her, since it was far too clear that he had no way to accuse her of anything – and she had been forced to spend the rest of the day and the whole night in jail.

  Her lawyer – her former lawyer by now – had been nowhere to be found until the following morning, when he had finally showed up, muttering excuses she hadn't even listened to, and eventually had done what she paid him for and set her free.

  With a demon for each hair, Grace had, in this order, fired the lawyer, heavily insulted detective Delmenar and reached her clinic, where she had barricaded in her office doing researches for the rest of the day, even forgetting to have lunch.

  The goal of her search was, mostly, the infamous new clinic at which, according to that idiot of an elf, Lyana had been intentioned to get a new job. The detective had refused to show her the contract draft he said he had found in the personal things of the fairy, thus forcing her to find out by herself even the name and address of this unexpected competitor.

  But obviously that hadn't been the hardest part. What she needed to know was quite different. Most of all she wanted to understand how it was possible that something popped out of nowhere, which she didn't even think could exist till yesterday, had been able to steal all of her clients in such a short time-span.

  Her attempt had lead to mixed results. On one hand, she had gathered a lot of information. On the other, they weren't at all what she needed. At least, though, they would be useful to get to those.

  Night had come already when she got into action.

  As a rare exception, she was completely dressed in black. It was something she avoided, usually, because in many cultures that was a color associated to mourn and death, and since she was a publicly know necromancer she thought it might make her look like a stereotype. She still used dark colors when it was the case, but preferred blue, green or dark red, and she used white as much as possible. For this reason, black clothes in her wardrobe where scarce, and almost none of them could have been used for what she had in mind. Thus she had chosen an old jogging suit, which didn't really fit her and was as far as possible from her usual clothes. Which was fine, since she had no intention of being noticeable, not to mention being easily recognized.

  The streets in the historical center where much narrower than in the rest of the city, and they had a strange feeling, a mixture of old and new. Almost all of the buildings of Tejarak, in time, had been demolished, rebuilt, demolished again and again recreated until they had become what they were today. But in that area there were still remnants of the past – such as the royal palace and some less famous and glorious, but equally well preserved, places – near more modern buildings, risen on the ruins of others that had been destroyed by time and carelessness. Of the former, just a few still looked like they once had; others had been restored, at times with the intention of recreating their original look – with the effect of transforming them into weird monuments to themselves – more often to adapt them to new functions and uses, using the parts that could still be exploited and changing or replacing those who didn't fit the new role the building had to take.

  The clinic ended up being an interesting hybrid of the two options. The front of an hold building had been artfully restored, maybe making it very similar to how it had been originally, and at the same time changed slightly, hiding new features in the old appearance so that they were functional but not conspicuous. Only getting closer it was possible to see how, for instance, the windows where quite up to date, very far from the ones that must have been at the sides of the door in the past. Even the door itself just looked old, perfectly integrated in the wall, but for sure it had to be a hard reinforced door, well protected against thieves. On the contrary, the stone arch over it was almost for sure part of the original building. On it Grace could see a writing, mostly cancelled by time, in some language she wasn't able to read or even identify.

  If she could have, she would have found out that it was a quite unusual sentence: "We honor thee great divine creature... we honor thee great winged king of the sky... we honor thee dragon who protects Anthuar", but, even if she had known, that would have been of no interest for her. Her examination of the place didn't really had the purpose of appreciating its architecture. What she wanted to know was how difficult it would have been to get inside.

  She was a world famous surgeon, not a petty burglar. She wouldn't have known how to pick a lock for the life of her, neither she could imagine why she should have had to. The other reason why she was famous gave her means that no thief, as clever as they could be, possessed, and that luckily – or better thanks to a careful policy adopted by those who, like her, knew the arts of necromancy – weren't known to the public at large. People already mistrusted necromancers due to their ability to control dead and talk to them. If they had known every smallest detail of their powers, they would have had many more reasons not to trust them. Which was a good reason enough to keep the secret.

  It wasn't that necromancy could allow to enter any place undisturbed, that wasn't its purpose after all. Still it allowed to tap on some peculiar abilities that, under the proper conditions, made it quite easy to go past a locked door. The trick was understanding whether those who had made – and most of all those who had locked – that door had taken any precaution against such an occurrence.

  Having made sure no one was around, Grace started to move her hands around the sides of the door, not touching it, following an odd and convoluted path to the lock. She didn't find anything that could alarm her, so she moved her hands closer, brushing the cold metal masked as wood, and she felt incredibly stupid when it moved under her slightest touch, showing that the door not only wasn't magically locked, it wasn't locked at all.

  She didn't waste time wondering why it had to be open, since it was obvious than no one was inside, judging by the darkness and the silence, and pushed it as much as needed to enter, then repositioned the door like she had found it.

  The inside was deep in darkness. Only the light coming through the windows slightly lit the room, allowing her to see two flights of stairs at the end of it – one going upstairs and the other to the basement – and a corridor. There was nothing that looked like the usual furniture of a medical study; not a reception desk, not a single chair on which patients could wait. The only furniture, actually, was some kind of bookshelf along the wall to the right of the door. It didn't look like it could hide any kind of secret document, but she had to start somewhere, so she took a light crystal from a pocket – trying to keep it shielded so that it only gave the minimum light needed to see, but didn't draw attention in case someone happened to walk in the road outside – and started examining the contents of the shelves. Very scarce contents indeed. Apparently, there were only a few trinkets, one or two magazines of some months ago and a few books of no importance. She even tried to open and check some of the latter, in case there might be some document hidden between the pages, but to no avail.

  She only had to decide whether to check the other room first, or the upper floor, or the basement.

  Logic told her that an archive, or even better something you did not want just anyone who came in to see, should have been in the basement. Granted, it was true that that same logic required a clinic to have an anteroom, someone who cared for the reception of the patients and some furniture... according to such thoughts, the lower floor should have been the last place to go, since it was quite obvious that nothing was normal and logic in there.

  So she decided to go upstairs before trying to go down. She went through the corridor, noticing it was almost certainly part of the original building. Along its walls there were several niches, most of them empty, but some still containing statues which had to be quite ancient, maybe even possess some historical value, if not a monetary one. At the end, the corridor parted in two ways, going left and r
ight, and at the same time going straight under a stone archway to which a modern-style door – looking entirely out of place – had been added. She chose to proceed that way and reached another empty room, only containing a couple of chairs and a small desk. The squalor of that place didn't cease to surprise her.

  She went back and chose not to explore the other two branches of the corridor, walking back all the way to the entrance.

  She was examining the stairs and trying to decide her next move when she heard a noise from behind and realized that the door was being opened.

  Immediately she pocketed the crystal to shield its light and flattened against the nearest wall. She crawled along it until she reached a corner and slipped in the empty space between the wall and the bookshelf. It wasn't the best hiding place she could have thought of, but since it was the only one, it was for sure the best choice.