It only stood to reason. Dragon’s Head was almost a half century younger than Rose & Grave, and though generally well respected (hey, anything we deign to consider a “rival” is okay by us), it boasted fewer alumni gifts, a smaller trust, and, perhaps as a consequence of both, a lesser cachet in the campus pecking order.

Or at least, it had until this year. The scandals that had rocked Rose & Grave during the last two semesters had tarnished our reputation somewhat. I’m sure the Dragon’s Head’s (or Book & Key’s, or Serpent’s) sales pitch to potential taps this spring would sound something like, “Rose & Grave is going to pot. Look at how many times they’ve been in the tabloids this year. You sure you want to hitch your wagon to that falling star?” Which made tonight’s expedition all the more important. Pull off a good crook, and we’d prove our mettle once again.

Unfortunately, our chances of departing without a police escort, never mind scoring any booty, looked slimmer than the cut of Angel’s jeans.

“Bet it’s heavy,” said Thorndike, leaning a bit on the beast’s long, lithe body. The pedestal base barely jiggled. “But what a coup, huh?”

“Really puts the ‘grand’ in grand larceny.” I shook my head. “There’s no way we can take this with us. Are you sure you can’t open the safe?” I directed the beam of my headlamp toward the enormous safe set into a recess in the far wall.

“Nope,” said Thorndike. “I’ve never even seen a lock like that before. Sorry to let you all down.” Apparently, our safecracker hadn’t spent as much time studying with her grandmother as she had preparing for her SATs. Couldn’t blame her, to tell the truth.

“Great,” said Puck. “All this trouble for nothing.”

“At least you can afford a good lawyer when we get caught,” I said. “I doubt these charges will look good on my graduate school applications.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Angel scoffed. “New Haven cops never take these pranks too seriously.”

Poe, as usual, was standing somewhat away from the rest of the group, studying the peeling wallpaper in the bluish ray from his headlamp. Suddenly, he stiffened. “Someone’s inside. Quick, we’ve got to hide!”

We all froze, straining in an attempt to hear whatever clue Poe had that we weren’t the building’s only occupants. I looked around. Where would we hide? This room was cluttered with various knickknacks and furniture, but nothing that would conceal six college kids (no matter how petite certain starlets were).

But Poe was straining to lift the upright piano in the corner by the safe as quietly as possible. “Someone help him,” I whispered, though I really had no idea what he was trying to do.

So I asked him. “Um, if we’re trying to steal something heavy, I think it’s best we go with the dragon.”

In response, he grabbed my arm and shoved me behind the piano. “Get in.”

There was a thigh-high hole in the wall, and from the cobweb-covered opening came a distinctive draft. Great. Spiders and cold air and blackness. I reeled back against him, standing up. “No way!”

“Now,” he hissed, pushing me back down.

“Crawl space” is a generous term for the damp, grimy cavity my companions and I presently found ourselves crowded into. Poe squished himself inside and began tugging the piano back into place. “It won’t budge,” he said, a note of real fear entering his voice at last.

Angel, who was closest, began pulling on it with him, and as the back of the upright snapped against the wall, the two of them tumbled across the unfinished floorboards and hit the wall opposite with a crack.

We all stopped breathing. Could whoever was downstairs hear that?

“The lights!” Thorndike’s warning came on a breath, and around me, LED headlamps extinguished one by one. And then, from a distance, we heard a rhythmic pounding. Footsteps on the stairs. We lay completely still, heedless of our awkward positions and the way we were all jumbled together in a heap.

“Did they get anything? Search all the rooms.”

A chorus of voices began to ring out from all around us. “All clear here.” “Nothing here.” “I don’t think they even made it up here.” And then, one voice, louder and clearer than all the others. “I’m in the treasure room. They took the cover off the dragon.” A sliver of light sliced into our hole from the crack between the piano and the wall. In its blaze, I saw Poe’s eyes, wide and almost silvery inside the eyeholes of his mask. They met mine and we simply stared at each other for several long moments, not blinking, willing in unison for the light to vanish before it gave away our location.

More voices joined the first. “Did they open the safe?” I heard the rapid-fire clicks of the lock spinning. “They didn’t get it,” a voice said, and someone sighed loudly with relief.

Inside the wall, we were still a long way from that point. I glanced away from Poe, and then, after a decent interval, looked back. He was still staring at me.

“I think they set off the alarm and ran,” said one at last. “They didn’t have the chance to steal anything.”

“We’ll get them back, though,” another cut in, his voice low and threatening. “We can’t let this kind of affront stand without a counterattack.”

Puck jerked in place, and several pairs of arms clamped down on him before he could rally to the Diggers’ defense.

“Yes,” said the third voice. “But how? We can’t get into their Inner Temple. We’ve tried.”

They had? That was news. I could feel, in the infinitesimal shifts of my companions, how they were taking this information, and predicted a sudden increase in our tomb’s security. If we had any say in the matter, they’d continue to fail at breaching our sacred spaces.

Another voice joined in. “They aren’t here. We’ve checked all the rooms.”

“Even the back stairs?” said the scary voice. “You know they know where all of our secret places are. Damn frat boys.”

Poe’s eyes glinted slightly, and I fought to keep from giggling.

It seemed like hours later that the Dragon’s Head members finally left the room in darkness, and hours more before any of us felt comfortable enough to move. I spent the time trying not to think about spiderwebs or rats’ nests or how many creepy crawlies were sharing this space with me. I think Thorndike fell asleep. Puck did something that made Angel knee him in the balls. Lil’ Demon almost had a heart attack when her two-way radio beeped on, but she shut if off before anyone could transmit.

Finally, Poe broke the silence. “We should make a break for it…soon.”

“How did you know about this place?” I whispered back.

He shrugged, a move I could feel in the close quarters. “Didn’t. But the safe was in a recess. Stood to reason there’d be a space, and I thought I could feel a draft from behind the piano. My main worry was that they knew it was here, too.”

Thorndike roused herself from slumber. “You’re the go-to guy when it comes to secret rooms on campus, man.”

Poe fell silent, and I didn’t blame him. When last he’d commandeered a secret room, it had almost torn our society apart at the seams. Of course, Poe was only one of the men who’d been involved in the society-within-a-society of Elysion last semester, and, as a group, we’d risen up and nipped the experiment in the bud well before Winter Break. Still, I swallowed the impulse to respond on his behalf. If Thorndike was still pissed off, she wasn’t alone, and she was well within her rights.

Also, I wanted to defend Poe like I wanted to make this hole my new summer home.

Slowly, we pushed the piano away from the wall and squeezed out, stretching our cramped limbs and breathing deeply at last. After our long confinement, even the dim glow filtering in around the edges of the window seemed enough to define every detail of the room. We’d spread out, relieved to finally be able to have some space to ourselves. Lil’ Demon was doing lunges, Thorndike had gone back to examining the dragon, and Poe leaned against the wall, his hands pillowed behind his head. Angel once again checked the status of the hallway. “I think they’re still here,” she whispered. “I can hear a television on downstairs.”