The bag was gone. The handful of change I'd thrown on the table before leaving for Mme. Deauxville's was still there, as was the airline magazine I'd filched for the article on fun things to see in Paris, so I knew I was in the correct room. But my bag of clothes and sundries? Gone, goner, gonest. The only things I had with me were my money, Rene's card, a small comb, my plane ticket, and my French phrasebook. The police had confiscated my passport, visa, and all the aquamanile documents. I couldn't leave the country, let alone go home.

A titter of semihysterical laughter burst from my lips. I thought seriously about just letting myself go and hav-ing a good old-fashioned nervous breakdown, but real-ized that once I started, I probably wouldn't be able to stop. Since I had no idea if the French loony bins were at all nice places, it was probably better if I skipped the whole breakdown thing and just stayed sane. "Shower," I told myself. "Sanity, shower, then food. And shopping. Cheap shopping.Then I'll call Uncle Damian."

My dress was still limp when I went downstairs an hour later, but at least I was clean, my hair was combed, and I'd washed out the worst of the bloodstains. I fol-lowed my nose to the small room in the basement of the hotel where meals were served, stopping by the reception desk to inform the management that my bag had been stolen from my room.

The woman in charge didn't look very happy with me when I told her that, and I ended up wasting another twenty minutes by having to tramp up the five flights of stairs to accompany her while she examined the room for signs-of a break-in.

"You must have left the door open when you left," she finally decided. "A stranger must have entered and taken your bag. The hotel is not at all liable for damages in such a situation."

I protested my innocence, but she had made up her mind, and I was too exhausted to argue with her. To be honest, I kind of wondered if the police hadn't taken it. They certainly had the time to sneak in and grab it while I was being questioned. "If someone turns my bag in, will you let me know? There's nothing valuable in it, it's just my clothes and cosmetics, but right now, they're all I have."

She sniffed and returned behind the smooth wooden desk that served as reception, giving me a disparaging eye. "There are many shops in the Rue des Mille D6ces. You will wish to avail yourself of them before you return to the hotel, yes?"

I brushed at my still-damp dress and bared my teeth in what I fervently hoped was a grin. "Afraid I'll bring down the tone of the neighborhood? Yeah, I'm going shopping, don't worry. Later. After I have some break-fast."

I left her pursing her lips as if she'd like to refuse me admittance to the dining room, but breakfast was in-cluded in the price of the room, so I trotted downstairs to a cheery whitewashed room that looked out over a petite little garden. I took a table in the corner and concentrated on consuming as much caffeine and food as one person could handle in a half hour.

By the time breakfast was finished, I'd come to several decisions. First, I wasn't going to call Uncle Damian. Not just yet. My stint in the police station had made it quite clear that although they did not have enough evidence to charge me, they considered me a suspect. Probably theonly suspect because Drake had so conveniently skipped out.

I drew circles on the tablecloth with my spoon, my now-caffeinated mind going over the events of the evening one more time. A lot of the past twelve hours was a dulled blur, most of it consisting of me sitting around in a small, airless room waiting for a translator to show. Then Jean-Baptiste Proust, a small, balding man who was the head of the criminal investigation department arrived, and things began to happen. A call was put in to the American Embassy. My fingerprints were taken, as were samples of the blood on my dress. People asked me ques-tions, some in English, some in French. I explained who I was, showed my passport and visa, and the invoice for the aquamanile.

"Where is this valuable artifact?" Inspector Proust asked in a softly accented voice. Everything about him

was quiet, from his mild brown eyes to the neutral tones of his brown pants and jacket. I knew, however, that you don't get to be the head of a police unit without having a razor-sharp mind.

"It was stolen. Just before the police arrived."

Inspector Proust looked down at a notebook another policeman had given him. "Ah, yes, by the man you claim was an agent of Interpol."

"I'm not claiming it; he is. He said he was an Interpol detective. He even showed me his badge, although I didn't get a good look at it. I was … uh … distracted." By the nonsense about demons, but I wasn't about to tell Inspector Proust that.

He looked at me with sad eyes. "You are aware, Mile. Grey, that Interpol does not have detectives?"

I stared at him, my hands suddenly going clammy. "They don't?"

"No. Interpol is an organization dedicated to the shar-ing of information between countries only; they do not have a police force of their own."

He waited patiently to see what I would say. I didn't say anything but "Oh."

That's not all I was thinking, of course. My brain was whirring about madly, angry at Drake for stealing my dragon and fooling me, furious with myself for having ig-nored Uncle Damian's strictures about security. I see one dead body and what do I do? I throw away everything I know about safeguarding the aquamanile. Damn Drake. It was all his fault. Well. . mostly his fault.

I didn't say any of that to Inspector Proust, though. I answered his questions, then the same questions asked by other members of his investigation team. Over and over again, I answered the questions, until I knew them so well, I started answering them before my interrogators had the chance to ask them.

,But I never once told them that I had frogs in my bidet. I was oddly proud of that fact, too, which just goes to show you how deranged you can get when you don't have any sleep while being suspected of a murder you didn't commit. The truth is, I was certain that I was going to be tossed into some dark, dank, rat-infested jail cell and left to rot there until the U.S. Embassy was notified of the horrible events that had overtaken me, but to my surprise, twelve hours after I was taken to the police sta-tion, M. Proust strolled into the interview room and an-nounced I was free to leave.

"Free?" I asked, blinking, my voice rough and hoarse from talking so long. I was a bit groggy from lack of sleep and food, but I didn't think 1 was quite to the point where I was hallucinating. Yet. "Free as in I can leave? Walk out of here? You're not charging me with murder?"