I flipped through stacks of what were obviously bills, found a red-inked manuscript of what looked to be a romance book in the making, and discovered a cache of letters in one of the drawers. Most of them were in a language I couldn't read, although parts were oddly familiar. None of them contained the word "London" so I set them aside. I searched all of the drawers, finding nothing else that was even remotely like what I was looking for.

"Well, crap. Now what do I do?" I looked around the room again, searching for anything that was out of place or different. "Let's go about this in an orderly fashion. I'm going to assume that whatever notes Christian has are valuable. Thus he would not keep them in a drawer. That means he's got them hidden somewhere."

The sound of my voice echoed starkly in the high-ceilinged room. I glanced with dismay at all the bookcases. There had to be thousands of books in the library, each one a potential hiding place.

"Or it could be in a wall safe, or floor safe, or—hell"—I looked up at the high arched wooden ceiling—"the owner's a vampire. He can probably fly, so I wouldn't doubt that he's got a handy-dandy ceiling safe! It's hopeless!"

The word safe triggered something in my mind. I stood up, looking around the room again. If I were your average safety-conscious vampire, and I had something of value, I wouldn't just entrust it to a safe. "Not when I was the sort of guy who uses magic to guard a door," I mused, walking around the room with my hands stretched out, feeling a bit stupid as I tried to feel a tingle that might mean that something was warded against discovery. I found it on my third pass around the north wall.

"Hmm. Book. Tingly. A bit dusty. Title is… Dark… someone needs to tell the maids to dust on the bottom shelves… Desire. Sounds fun. Let's just see why this particular book has been picked out to be warded or what… whoa! This is interesting!"