“So?” Anne got to her feet and went behind the desk, where she grabbed a pad of sticky notes. “We’ll leave him a message. Besides, he’s in the armory. He’ll be there awhile.”

“Men can’t resist the lure of shiny new toys,” I reluctantly conceded. “He’s going to freak out, you know.”

“Don’t worry, I know how to handle him. He’s not so tough.” She scrawled something on the paper and stuck it to her computer monitor, then offered to take my bag from me. “It’ll be safe back here,” she said, stowing it beneath her desk. “You sure didn’t bring much.”

I followed her to the doors. “Max packed it. Guess he didn’t plan on staying long. We leave tomorrow night.”

“That’s too bad.” She shrugged and ran her badge through the reader. “The hotel they’ve got you staying in is pretty nice.”

The fact we were staying in a hotel at all surprised me. “I thought you guys would have underground dormitories or something.”

“Oh, we do,” Anne assured me. “But only for the staff who are permanently on call. Like me, for instance, or the doctors who take care of the Oracle. The new assassins in training and their mentors stay here, too, but it’s not permanent.”

A tall, thin man in a frock coat and an Edgar Allen Poe haircut passed us and nodded curtly. Anne gave him a wave and continued on.

“You must be a pretty good receptionist, if they want to keep you on 24/7.” I ran my fingers along the wall as we walked, a horrible habit I’d adopted as a human and had to break when I’d learned exactly how many diseases you could pick up that way. Now that germs were no longer a concern, I didn’t mind it. It drove Nathan crazy, though.

“Actually, I’m not just a receptionist. I’m more like Miguel,” she explained, thankfully taking my mind off my sire.

“Max said Miguel was security. You must have background as an assassin, then?”

She nodded. “Three hundred years. They finally let me retire back in the fifties. Er, the eighteen fifties. Too bad, though. During that whole ‘don’t exercise or your uterus will fall out’ time period, no one would have seen a female assassin coming.”

“Three hundred years? Wait…” I stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Nathan told me the Movement was two hundred years old.”

“Yeah, but before we started calling ourselves the Movement, because it made a better acronym, we were the Order of the Brethren. Things were a lot tougher back then, let me tell you.”