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Magic. Weird religious stuff.

I’d just closed the botany book with a snap, muttering under my breath, when Nick came back into the library.

He stopped in the middle of the room, watching Black as he pulled the remaining paintings off the wall with Jax and Kiko. They’d been going over all of them, one by one, opening up the backs of each canvas to make sure Brick hadn’t left us anything there. Once they’d cut open every back and looked there, they checked the frames, then hung them all back up, grouping portraits on one side of the room and landscapes and still lifes on the other.

Now Kiko and Jax were examining the paintings themselves for any clues the vampire might have wanted them to see.

So far, they said they’d found nothing.

Dex was using an iron poker to sift through the fireplace ashes and coals in the same room, looking for anything of significance.

Nick had been wandering between this room and the sitting area for some time now, asking questions of the apparitions.

He got nothing out of the one with the spell book, but he kept trying.

Now he’d returned to the library where the rest of us worked.

He looked around at all of us, and exhaled in annoyance.

“Anything?” he growled, not hiding his annoyance. “Nothing?”

“Not unless you want to know about the herbal properties of indigenous plants,” I said sourly, motioning towards the books. “Or hear about the adventures ofFloof and Fuzz… or maybe read about your family roots,” I added, tossing him the copy ofDracula.

He didn’t try to catch it.

The hardcover book smacked down heavily on the floor at his feet.

Nick read the title in a swift glance.

He gave me a nonplussed look.

“Didyoulearn anything?” Black asked Nick. “Anything that might help?”

Black glanced over his shoulder as he re-hung a painting of a very humorless-looking man with giant, auburn-colored sideburns.

Nick exhaled another expression of annoyance.

He ran a chalk-white hand through his black hair.

“Only details about where they were in New Orleans… or‘Nueva Orleans,’as it was called when they were last there… or‘La Nouvelle-Orleans’as they usually call it themselves, being Creole, from what I can tell.”

He scowled around at all of us, as if holding us personally responsible for his annoyance.

“Why the fuck didn’t Brick inviteAngelto his stupid haunted house party? Or Cowboy? We havetwo peoplein our crew who have family from Louisiana, and he didn’t think to bring either one of them? He invited all of us instead. And we don’t know shit.”

“Nueva Orleans?”Kiko frowned.

Nick glanced at her. He made a mocking flourish with one hand.

“You just made my point for me, Kiks. The Spanish owned it through most of the 1700s, apparently. I hadn’t known that, either. But the Creoles were pretty fond of their French roots, so they didn’t really acknowledge the Spanish change of hands all that much. They continued to call it by the French name. Then the French took it back… only to sell it to the Americans as part of the Louisiana Purchase shortly after.”

“That’s lovely that you’re learning things, vampire,” another voice growled from by the fireplace. “But how the hell’s that going to help any of us get out of here?”

All of us fell silent, but only because of who spoke.

That was the first time I’d seen Dex address Nick directly like that.

Nick paused, too.