(13) Two vampires, a ghoul and a shifter.

"You've read all of these. Right?" Linden looked at Piers as if expecting him to say he had.

Instead, Piers stared at him in disbelief. "You are so kidding. Me, read?"

"Don't pull the dumb act; I know you read, I've seen you at it. So, anyway, where the hell do we start?" Linden looked around the huge library, every wall filled floor to ceiling with books from modern to what appeared to be ancient ones.

"Actually there's some order to them, believe it or not, and Rod has a file as to what sort are where." Piers opened one of the drawers in the antique mahogany partner's desk that sat at one end of the center of the room. The file was in a plastic loose-leaf binder, a bit incongruous with everything else.

Piers opened it, thumbing through the pages until he found the one he wanted. "With any sort of luck at all we might find what we're looking for up there," he said, pointing to one of the top shelves across the room from where he stood.

With a nod, Linden rolled one of the library ladders over and climbed up. Sitting on the top step, he studied the spines of the books. "Nothing here that I can see," he commented a few minutes later after checking a few of them that had looked like possibilities.

"Okay," Piers replied somewhat distractedly. He was pulling out drawers in a library table that matched the desk in both size and style. The drawers held maps and other antique papers in thickly covered folders labeled with their contents. When he got to the third drawer he crowed, "Bingo."

"Find something?" Linden asked, jumping down from the ladder.

"Yep. Sketches of the interior of the castle from the time period." Piers spread them carefully out on the table and they both studied them.

"It looks—" Linden tapped one of the sketches, "—as if there was a central courtyard, though you could have fooled me from what we saw tonight."

"I agree. All the walls must have fallen in on it. So I guess we can rule out the central area as a place to look."

Linden began gathering up the sketches they deemed useless to what they were looking for, flipping each on over onto the 'discard' pile. He stopped, leaning closer to peer at the back of one of them.

"Piers, look here. There's a rough floor plan that someone sketched out on the back of this one."

"Just what we need, if we can figure out what's what, and which floor it's for."

Linden went to the desk to dig through the drawers. A moment later he was back with a magnifying glass. Holding the sketch up to the light, he moved it slowly. "Though so," he muttered as he got the right angle, looking at something through the magnifying glass. "See, here. It's faint but I think it says 'kitchen'."

"It does," Piers agreed. "And there's stairs indicated, going down I think from the arrow."

Linden nodded. "Might make sense, if they needed to store—I guess vegetables and grains and such for the winter. So that proves there was a cellar and maybe—"

"We can get to the dungeon from there if we can find the entrance."

"It's a place to start anyway."