"Thanks, Rene. I appreciate the lessons. You just never know when you need to tell someone there's an amphib-ian in your bidet."

"One moment. I have something for you." He rustled around in a small brown bag for a second, then pulled out a battered card and handed it to me with the air of some-one presenting an object of great value. "I am available for hire as a driver. You pay me, I drive you around Paris, show you all of the sites you must see. You can call me on my mobile number anytime."

"Thanks. I don't know that I'll be in Paris long enough for a chauffeur to drive me around, but if I ever need a driver, you'll be the one I call." I saluted him with the card, then tucked it away in my wallet.

He drove off with a friendly wave and a faint puff of black exhaust. I turned back to the impressive building, squared my shoulders, and after a quick look around to make sure no one was watching me, stepped into the doorway to press the buzzer labeleddeauxvelle.

"I am confident," I muttered to myself. "I am a pro-fessional. I know exactly what I am doing. I am not at all freaked out by being in a different country where the only thing I know how to do is complain about frogs and insult people. I am cool, calm, and collected. I am… not being answered."

I buzzed again. Nothing happened. A quick glance at my watch confirmed that I was two minutes early. Surely Mme. Deauxville was in?

I buzzed once more, leaning on the buzzer this time. I tried putting my ear to the door, but couldn't hear any-thing. A glance at a window showed me why—the walls of the building looked to be at least three feet thick.

"Well, hell," I swore, stepping back so I could look up at the building. I knew from– the instructions Uncle Damian had given me that Mme. Deauxville was on the second floor. The red-and-cream drapes visible through the slightly opened windows didn't move at all. Nothing moved anywhere on the second floor… or on any of the floors, for that matter. Since it was a pleasant June evening, I expected people to be arriving home, bustling around doing their evening shopping, strolling down the street, gazing upon the Seine, and so forth, but there was no movement at all in the house.

I looked down the street, the hairs on the back of my neck slowly standing on end. There was no movement on the street either. No people, no cars, no birds … nothing. Not even a flower bobbed in the slight breeze from the river. I looked behind me. The cross street was the Rue Saint-Louis en l'fle, a busy street with stores and restau-rants, and lots of shops. It had taken Rene ten minutes to navigate a couple of blocks because the traffic and shop-pers were so dense, but where I stood, the noise of said traffic and shoppers was oddly filtered, as if the whole of Rue Sang des Innocents was swathed in cotton wool, leaving it an oasis of stillness and silence in a city known for its liveliness.

"The wordcreepy doesn't even begin to cover the situation," I said aloud, just to hear something. Unease rip-pled through me as I held my case tightly, giving Mine. Deauxville's bell one more long ring. The skin on the back of my neck tightened even more as I noticed that the door to the building wasn't shut properly.

"Someone must have been in a rush to leave this morning," I told the door, trying to tamp down on the major case of the willies the silent street was giving me. "Someone was just late for work, and they didn't quite close the door. That's all. There's nothing foreboding in a door that hasn't been shut all the way. There's nothing eerie in that at all. There's nothing creepy about a street… Oh, crap. Hello?" I pushed the door open and took a step into a tiny hall. The entrance narrowed into a dark passage beyond a brown-paneled stairway that led upward. "Anyone here? I'm looking for Mme. Deauxville. Hellooooooo?"

I expected the last notes of my hello to echo up the stairwell, but strangely, my* words were muffled, as if they had been absorbed into the walls, filtered by the same strange effect that kept the street outside as quiet as a tomb.

"I would have to think of a tomb," I grumbled to my-self as I carefully closed the door behind me, turning to start up the stairs to the second floor. 'There are times when it absolutely doesnot pay to have a good imagina-tion."

There were two doors in the tiny hall stretching the length of the second-floor stairs. One bore a silver plate with the worddeauxville written on it in a fancy script mat screamed expensive. The other door, I assumed, was a second entrance to the apartment. I stepped up to the main door, one arm holding the case tight to my chest, the other upraised to knock. Just as my knuckles were about to touch the glossy oak of the door, a wave of dread and foreboding, a sense of something being very, very wrong swept over me. The sensation was so strong, I stepped backwards until the coolness of the paneling seeped through the thin cotton of my dress. I clutched the case and struggled to breathe, my chest tight with dread. The feeling of unease that had set in as soon as Rene left swelled into something much more frightening, leaving me with goose bumps on my arms and a warning voice in my head shrieking at me to leave the building that very second, if not sooner.

Something horrible had been in that apartment. Some-thing … unnatural.

"I am confident," I ground out through my teeth, and forced my feet forward to the door. "It's just an eccentric collector, nothing evil. There is nothing to be afraid of. I am a professional. I can do this."

The door swung open at the first brush of my hand against it.

I stood frozen in the doorway, the skin on my back crawling with horror as I looked down the short hall into what must be the living room of the apartment. Tiny lit-tle motes of dust danced lazily in the late afternoon sun-shine that streamed through the tall floor-to-ceiling arched windows, spilling in a ruby pool on a carpet of deeper red. A bouquet of fresh flowers sat on an antique table between two of the

windows, the sharp scent of it detectable even from where I stood. The ceilings were high, cream-colored to complement the robin's-egg-blue walls, the edges scalloped with intricate molding. Along one wall I could see a highly polished antique desk with a red upholstered matching chair sitting before it at an angle, as if its occupant had arisen just a moment before.

Everything was lovely, beautiful, expensive, just exactly what I expected in the apartment of a rich woman who lived in an exclusive area of Paris.

Everything except the body, that is. Suspended from a chandelier, a woman's body was doubled over, hanging from her hands tied behind her back, her body swinging slightly above a black circle of ash that had been drawn on the lovely red carpet, a circle inscribed with twelve symbols. The dead woman was Mme. Deauxville; of that I was sure.