Even Vampires Get The Blues

"Ouch. OK, so we need to find this statue in five days. That's an impossibly short amount of time to find anything, but I'll give it my utmost attention." I rubbed my chin as I thought. "Does anyone in your family know anything about it?"

"Assumedly my parents do, but they are on a research trip in an uninhabited forest in Bolivia, and thus are out of communication for the next month or so."

"Can't you do the brain thing with them?"

"No." His lips got a wry twist to them for a few seconds. "When I was a child I could, but now I can only do the brain thing, as you call it, with my brothers."

"Hmm." I rubbed my chin some more. "Can they do it with your parents?"

"Not anymore. Like me, they lost the ability when they reached adulthood."

"Huh. Weird. I'd have thought once you had it, you had it forever."

Paen made an exasperated tsking noise. "I appreciate you wishing to know all that there is to know about my family and our relationship to the statue, but shouldn't you get on with finding it? That is your job."

"Yes, but as I told you before, I'm not a Diviner. It's not just a matter of me consulting the higher spirits and asking where the statue is now."

"You may not be a Diviner, but you have elf blood, and you are talented in finding objects—or so you said."

"Hey now, no slurs," I said, getting up to pace the length of the room. "I am good at finding things. Better even than my mother, and she's nothing to sneeze at in the locating department. But every little bit of information I can get helps narrow down the search. Since you don't know anything else… well, we'll just do this logically."

"What are you doing?" Paen asked, coming over to where I was stretching out on the carpet.

"I'm going to open myself up to the castle, and let my consciousness roam the hallways, looking for signs of the statue."

"You intend to search for the statue while lying on the floor?"

"Sure. My mother does it artistically arranged on a fainting couch, but whenever I try that I get a case of the giggles, so I just use the plain old floor."

He stood over me, his hands on his hips, glowering. I smiled up at him. You really are handsome, you know? If you weren't so messed up about relationships, I might go for you.

"Stop that."

Stop what, this?

"Yes. I don't like it."

I could feel how uncomfortable it was making him, so I didn't continue, although I couldn't help but ask why. "All right. But why does me doing that bother you so much?"

He glowered some more at me, and ignored my question. "Why are you trying to find the statue here? I told you it was stolen. Why aren't you using your powers to locate it?"

"I'm looking here first because you don't know for a fact that it was stolen."

"It has to have been stolen. I know every inch of this castle, and there are no monkey statues anywhere."

"It could be hidden," I pointed out, admiring for a moment the gloss on his shoes. "Until we rule out absolutely that it's not here somewhere, it doesn't make sense to search elsewhere."

"Doubtful."

I sighed, closed my eyes, and crossed my arms over my chest. "Shoo."

"What?" Disbelief was rife in his voice.

"Shoo. Go away. Leave me alone so I can work."

"You're shooing me from my own library?"

"Yes." I uncrossed my arms to make shooing motions, peeking at him through barely opened eyes. He looked outraged at the thought of me telling him what to do. "If you're not going to be quiet and let me concentrate, you have to leave."

He drew himself up, not that he wasn't impressive enough before. Now he positively loomed over me. "I will not be shooed from my own room."

"Fine, then. Just give me a little quiet so I can focus and do the mental thing."

The leather couch sighed softly as he sat a few feet away from me. "I thought you said you could only do the astral projection when you were aroused?"

"I can. But this isn't astral projection—I'm just opening myself up to the castle and touching its awareness. My mind will send out little tendrils to wander around, but my consciousness will remain here."

"Mind tendrils? That sounds stranger than anything I've ever heard of, even sexually driven astral projection."

I laughed and opened my eyes long enough to grin at him. "Yes, it is a bit weird, huh? But it works."

The only sound in the room for the next few minutes was of the central heating kicking in and blowing warm air through a grate on the floor near me. I let myself relax, pushed down my brain's desire to think about Paen, and slowly allowed the essentia of the castle to sink into my body.