Had Will flown back up the chute? Or was he in the room somewhere? His position determined whether I would have to shift and buzz Tinker.
I waited to see if a voice would come in over my comm. After a few seconds, I pivoted and tilted my ear toward the chute. I couldn’t hear a thing which made my stomach drop.
Will was probably still in the washer room somewhere.Great.That meant that Robin and Munchie were wondering what the hell was happening, and calling Tinker was up to me. Thankfully, my comm had stayed in my ear. I just needed to be human to use it.
I was about to perform the fastest shift of my life so I could talk to her, when the cart I’d landed in jostled. Gloved hands brushed by my tail. Panicking, I hissed, flipped around, and bit the hand. A shrill scream echoed through the laundry room, and the woman leapt back.
“A rat’s in the bin!”
Oh, hell . . .
Any other time, I would have been offended at being called a rat, but this situation was too dire to muster up anything other than terror.Then the lights in the laundry room went out. I sucked in a breath. What was happening?
“Oh shit, no,” the same woman declared. “I amnotstaying here in the dark with a rat running about.”
“Same,” another voice answered. “I’m out until the lights come back. We’ll shut the door so it can’t escape. We can lay traps when the lights are back on.”
The other two murmured agreement. Footsteps followed, and the heavy door to the laundry room slammed shut.
I exhaled a breath as my heart rate slowed. That had been close, too close.
“You okay, Marian?” a voice, Munchie’s, crackled in my comm.
Even though I’d rather not be in the bin in human form, I needed to assure them I was okay. I shifted and climbed carefully out of the laundry bin. “Yeah. How’d you get Tinker to turn out the lights? And why didn’t I hear the call?” Slight annoyance filtered into my voice. If I was going to do this with them, I didn’t want any secrets between us.
Robin spoke next. “Will escaped back up the chute without notice. He said there were lots of people in the room, and we had to get them out of there. We used Tinker’s special frequency so we wouldn’t startle you.”
Apparently, my earlier winces and jumps any time someone had spoken into my ear unexpectedly hadn’t gone unnoticed.
“Is anyone in there still?” Robin asked.
“They all left because one touched my tail and thought I wasa rat.” The bitter tone was impossible to keep out of my voice.
“Your fur is nothing like a rat’s,” Robin said. “It’s silky and perfect.”
“Thanks,” I said, uneasy with the compliment considering the tension between us. “Now, shouldn’t you three be hurrying down here? Tinker can’t keep the lights off forever without someone noticing.”
“Roger that, Mar,” Munchie said. “We’ll be right down.”
“Make it quick,” I shot back, unable to keep the tension from my tone. I didn’t like being down here alone. “I bet the laundry ladies went to get food or a drink, but they won’t be gone forever. We need to be out of this room before they get back.”
The heist had barely begun and already we’d had a hiccup. I hoped that it was the only one and not a sign of danger to come.
Chapter Eleven
By some miracleof the ancients, everyone else made it down the chute just fine, and by the time we peeked our heads out of the laundry room door, none of the laundry women had returned. There wasn’t a soul in the hallway. We crept into the hallway and shut the door. Being in human form and inside the backend of the hotel took a huge weight off of our shoulders.
Of course, there was still the chance that someone would recognize me, but I was confident my disguise was good enough. Personally, I didn’t think I looked like myself at all.
We’d made it about halfway to the vaults when the one person who would test my theory, Anna, sauntered around the corner. I sucked in a breath, hoping we’d breeze by one another. She seemed out of it—her blonde hair stuck out in odd places and her eyelids were heavy. The direction she’d come from indicated she’d been in the manager’s offices. Probably banging Albus again.
Ugh, gross.
And yet, despite her relaxed state, my heavy makeup, and bleached hair, Anna’s perfectly shaped eyebrows still pulled together when she saw me.
I stiffened for a millisecond before loosening up again and pretending not to notice.
No matter how brief my reaction, Will and Munchie caught it. They moved in front of me to block, but it was no use. Anna might be a lazy maid, but she was a tenacious person when she wanted something.
