The lock on Caelan's library was a Thornward mechanism — triple-bolted, silver-threaded, enchanted by a wardsmith who had been dead for two centuries and whose work was considered unbreakable by every vampire in Bellmere.
Elenora picked it in forty seconds.
She knelt before the door in the dark corridor with a hairpin in her right hand and a bent sewing needle in her left, and she worked the tumblers with the particular, practiced ease of a woman who had been picking locks since before her daughter was born. The Thornward mechanism was clever — three interlocking cylinders that required simultaneous rotation, each threaded with silver wire that would burn vampire skin on contact. But Elenora was not a vampire. She was something considerably more dangerous.
She was patient.
