07 The Return_ Midnight - L. J. Smith

“I noticed his lapis ring,” Meredith said. “I saw him with it on his right hand as he went
out earlier. When he came back he had it on his left hand.”
There was a brief pause as they all stared at her. She shrugged. “It was part of my
training, noticing little things.”
“Good point,” Matt said at last. “Good point. He wouldn’t be able to change it in
sunlight.”
“How did you know, Mrs. Flowers?” Elena asked. “Or was it just the way we were
behaving?”
“Goodness, no, you’re all very good little actors. But as soon as he stepped over the
threshold Mama fairly shrieked at me: ‘What are you doing, letting a kitsune into your house?’ So then
I knew what we were in for.”
“We beat him!” Elena said, beaming. “We actually caught Shinichi off guard! I can hardly
believe it.”
“Believe it,” Meredith said with a wry smile. “He was off guard for a moment. He’ll be
thinking up revenge right now.”
Something else was worrying Matt. He turned to Elena. “I thought that you said that both
you and Shinichi had keys that could take you anywhere, anytime. So why couldn’t he have just said,
‘Take me inside the boardinghouse where the star ball is’?”
“Those were different keys from the Twin Fox key,” Elena said, her brows drawn
together. “They’re, like, the Master Keys and Shinichi and Misao still have them both. I don’t know
why he didn’t use his. Although it would have given him away the moment he was inside.”
“Not if he went inside the root cellar, and stayed there the whole time,” Meredith said.
“And maybe a Master Key can override the ‘not invited inside’ rule.”
Mrs. Flowers said, “But Mama still would have told me. Also there are no keyholes in
the root cellar. At all.”
“‘No keyholes’ wouldn’t matter, I don’t think,” Elena answered. “I think he just wanted
to show how clever he was, and how he could fool us into giving him Misao’s star ball.”
Before anyone else could say a word, Meredith held out her palm, with a shining key on
it. The key was golden with diamonds inset and had a very familiar outline.
“That’s one of the Master Keys!” cried Elena. “It’s what we thought the Twin Fox key
would look like!”
“It sort of came out of his jeans pocket when he did that flip,” Meredith said innocently.
“When you were flipping him over me, you mean,” said Elena. “I suppose you picked his
pocket too.”
“So, right now, Shinichi doesn’t have a key to escape with!” Matt said excitedly.
“No key to make keyholes,” Elena agreed, dimpling.
“He can have fun changing into a mole and burrowing out of the root cellar,” Meredith
said coolly. “That’s if he’s got his transforming gear or whatever with him.” She added, with a
troubled change in her voice, “I wonder…if we should have Matt tell one other person where he’s
actually hidden the star ball. Just…well, just in case.”
Matt saw knitted brows all around him. But suddenly the realization hit him that he had
to tell someone that he’d hidden the star ball in his closet. The group—including Stefan—had picked
him to hide it because he had so stubbornly resisted when Shinichi was using Damon’s body as a
puppet to torture him a month ago. Matt had proved then that he would die in hideous pain rather than
endanger his friends. But if Matt were to die now, Misao’s star ball might be lost to the group forever.