“Something wrong, ladies?” Mr. Strain called.
Olivia looked up. “Sorry, Mr. Strain,” she said, smiling. “It’s just that there’s more to my . . . cheek than I ever realized!”
Ivy took her ring out from under the lens. Olivia replaced it with her own and bent back down over the eyepiece.
“Does yours have the same mark?” Ivy whispered.
Olivia nodded excitedly. “What do you think it is?”
“A jeweler’s mark, maybe?” Ivy guessed.
Olivia looked up at her quizzically.
“Maybe the jeweler put this tiny symbol into his work,” Ivy went on quietly, “the way a painter signs a painting. We might be able to use this mark to find the person who made the rings or cut the stones.”
Olivia’s eyes flickered as she caught on. “And that person might have a record of our parents’ names!”
“I’m pretty sure that it’s a vamp jeweler,” Ivy said, taking a turn to look through the microscope at Olivia’s ring. “I can tell from the symbol. Vamp businesses often hide tiny marks in their signs and logos and stuff to identify themselves as vampiric. They don’t always use a V, but they often do.”
Mr. Strain appeared in front of their desk. “That does not look like a cheek slide,” he said sternly.
“We were just fooling around,” Olivia said with a panicked glance at Ivy.
“Right,” Ivy agreed. “We were being ...ha ha . . . cheeky.” Olivia giggled nervously as she returned her ring to her finger.
Ivy didn’t have a chance to talk to Olivia again until they were heading home. “Maybe we’ll find out that our biological mother is a master jeweler!” Ivy said a few blocks from her house, her hands jammed in her pockets to protect them from the cold. “Maybe she made our rings herself.”
“That would be cool,” agreed Olivia. Just then, Ivy’s cell phone rang. “Dad,” she announced, glancing at the caller ID display and flipping open the phone.
“Hello, Ivy,” her father’s smooth voice intoned. “Will you be joining me for dinner tonight? I am preparing hemoglobin stew with parsnips.”
“Hi, Dad,” Ivy said. “I’m glad you called. Olivia’s coming over this afternoon to, uh . . .” Olivia mimed reading a book and taking notes. “Do some research,” Ivy finished. “She’s dying to meet you.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. “It is fine for Olivia to come over, but I am afraid I must leave for an appointment with a client,” her father said at last.
“Can’t you change it?” Ivy pleaded. “No,” her father said simply. “My regrets,” he finished and hung up.
Ivy sighed, her warm breath forming a frosty cloud in the air. “The good news,” she told her sister, “is that the computer will be free.” She kicked a rock into a pile of frozen leaves. “The bad news is that my dad won’t be there.” She couldn’t help feeling disappointed. Why isn’t my dad more eager to meet my twin sister? she thought.
“That’s okay,” Olivia said, swinging her book bag onto her other shoulder and putting her arm through Ivy’s. “We’ll cross paths one of these days.”
“He’s already two hundred years old,” Ivy said with a roll of her eyes. “ ‘One of these days’ could be two decades from now!”
Olivia had been to Ivy’s a handful of times before, but the mansion at the top of the hill still blew her away. From the outside, the place looked like something out of a Civil War epic—or an old black-and-white vampire movie.
The inside was just as glamorous. She’d seen Ivy’s basement crypt bedroom with its huge closet. And she’d helped to decorate the gothic third floor ballroom for the All Hallows’ Ball, so she wasn’t expecting Mr. Vega’s study to be a pile of old decorating magazines on top of a bangedup filing cabinet. Still, Olivia couldn’t keep from being impressed when Ivy opened the door to the study on the second floor.
All four walls were lined with bookshelves. There was a huge mahogany desk crowned by a flat-screen computer monitor, and across the room was an enormous globe in the middle of a rug that looked like a starry sky. Next to it, on top of a wide pedestal, stood a gray model with tiny paintings on the walls.
And then Olivia looked up, and realized that the dark-wood bookshelves lining the walls stretched up for another story, and there was a narrow walkway—like a balcony—to enable browsing up there.
This place is awesome! she thought.
Ivy dragged a second high-backed blacklacquer chair behind the desk and motioned for Olivia to sit beside her as she powered up her dad’s computer.
The screen lit up with a black-and-white photograph of Ivy in profile, looking thoughtful, the outline of tree branches against a sunset sky behind her.
“I wish my father would change his background,” Ivy said with a sigh.
“But that’s such a good picture of you!” Olivia exclaimed.
“Look at my nose,” her sister scoffed. “It’s huge.”
“Hey,” Olivia countered with mock offense. “You better be careful what you say about our nose!”
Ivy grinned. “Are you ready for the Vorld Vide Veb?” she asked.
Olivia nodded and Ivy clicked on an icon of a moon in the corner, and the screen went black, except for three big Gothic letters in the center:
VVV
“Can anyone access this?” Olivia asked. Ivy shook her head. “Your computer needs a special chip just to get this far.”