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Christian must have already known all of these answers. Otherwise, I couldn't have imagined him not asking at least some of these questions himself.
"Boom," Caleb said.
"Boom?" I asked.
Christian snorted. "Boom is a horrible explosion noise. It's too simple. At least say Kaboom! Or make a cool noise accompanied by a gesture." Christian demonstrated enthusiastically, making his hands into a ball that grew bigger and bigger, finally throwing his arms out in the universal sign for 'explodes'.
I laughed. Caleb just gave his little shrug. "Boom gets the point across. If this house is breached, no more house."
I arched a brow at him, trying not to get mad. "Just the house?" I asked.
He gave that evil little shrug. "No more block."
I shook my head at him, my face tight. "You can't put the entire neighborhood at risk just to keep your secrets." My tone was hard.
"You can't stop me," he said, his own voice just as hard. He must have some very nasty secrets here indeed, to go to such lengths, and be so open with me about it. "Trust me, if this place is breached, this block going down is the least of our problems."
Is ignorance bliss? Hell no. But I still didn't want to know any more about this pandora's box of a house. Uncharacteristically, but not all that surprisingly, I stopped asking questions after that.
The basement was spartan, seeming almost empty, though it was a very tiny space considering the size of the house. I saw why before I could think much about it.
Caleb used his creepy tongue scan to access a panel in the smooth dark gray wall. He very deliberately angled away from us so we couldn't get a good look at his tongue while he did so. Fine by me.
An entire section of the wall just sort of lifted, and I stepped back, startled at the unexpected moving wall.
There was some kind of closet set up inside, though all I could make out was one large silver chest and a smallish black dresser. Other than that, it seemed empty.
"Your weapons' stash doesn't play well with others," Caleb told me idly, stepping into the small space.
Perhaps my mind had been shying away from it. Perhaps I was very very good at denial. Perhaps it was the dragon-trance that made my mind forgot the little things, like, oh, say a blood drinking war-axe that liked to get into my head, aggravating my already unhealthy blood-lust to a fever-pitch within a small amount of time, chanting kill, kill, kill until I fed it the blood that it craved.
Whatever it was that had made me very conveniently forgot about the pain in the ass that was Torst, Caleb's words quickly made me remember.
Right on the tail of that thought was another. If Caleb had recovered Torst for me, the damned axe would be in my head by now. But he wasn't. Did that mean that Caleb hadn't recovered the cursed thing?
That possibility was almost worse than the thought that he had. If he hadn't recovered Torst, that meant that it was either lost in the desert, which was bad, bad, bad. Or else it meant that my deranged relatives had ahold of it, which was worse, worse, worse.
Caleb relieved my mind (kind of) when he opened the silver chest.
