A faint flush colored his usually pale face. "I know that. But I've been alive a hundred years, and I'm starting to act my age."

Starting to? "In all fairness, Max is technically in his fifties."

"Max is a teenager, no matter how old he gets." Nathan's cool gray eyes scanned the street below us. "I understand why you came here. You wanted to be around someone you can identify with."

"What I want is someone who can love me." I studied him carefully to gauge his reaction. "Someone who can love me as much as I love him. But I wasn't looking for that in Max."

Nathan lifted a hand as though he would touch me. I brushed it aside and pointed toward the fireplace. "We have things to do."

He taught me how to use the pendulum. First, he showed me how to hold the cord so the crystal hung perfectly still over a book. I asked two questions. The first, "Is this a book?" caused the pendulum to swing in tight, clockwise circles. The second question, "Is this a dead fish?" resulted in wide, counterclockwise swoops.

"That's all there is to it," Nathan explained. "Clockwise for yes, counter for no. At least, for you. It varies from person to person."

It was much easier than Bella made it sound. She either had a gift for overcomplicating things, or she had greatly underestimated my intelligence. Probably the latter, as werewolves didn't put much stock in the intellectual equality of other species.

I dangled the crystal point over a map of the world moving it from area to area and asking, "Is the Oracle here?" while Nathan hid out one complicated spread of cards after another. As soon as I made inroads to the continent North America, I flipped to a new page in the atlas and started working on the states and provinces. Occasionally, the pendulum would swing erratically, and I'd have to go through the process of recalibrating it. Then I'd start over from my last reasonable answer, sometimes to find it had changed. Every yes I got, I wrote down. Though the Oracle couldn't really be in all those places at once, Bella had said to write everything down. I would let her sort out the details.

We'd sat in silence for an hour before Nathan looked up and frowned. "Do you hear that?"

Now that he mentioned it, I did. Every few minutes, a rhythmic bang came from the upper level of the library.

I rose slowly, staring at the walls. The sound grew louder and more violent, actually shaking the crystal chandelier suspended high above us. "It sounds like it's coming from—"

"The dining room," Nathan said, breaking into a run toward the doors.

We were coming up the stairs to the foyer just as Max ran down from the third floor. "What the hell is that?"

Nathan didn't answer, but rushed to the doors leading to the dining room.