Shaking out my arms, I jerked my chin toward the ceiling, where we could hear more men stomping around. A lot more men. Erik and I had already taken care of five of them, but there were at least double that tearing apart the upstairs.
Grant had counted ten.
Kids were never reliable narrators.
It was a good thing I loved the little punk.
The stairway leading up to the second floor was too open for Erik and me to move on safely, so I led him back toward the laundry room. There was a doorway just off the mudroom that looked like it led to nothing, but actually was a hidden staircase that came out in the huge linen closet at the top of the stairs.
I stopped halfway up and pointed at the eleventh stair, shaking my head. Then I stepped completely over it. I paused and waited for Erik to do the same thing.
They’d built the staircase back when servants weren’t supposed to be seen more than necessary, but it had creeped Aunt Halle out, so the Cavendishes rarely used it. Ian and I, on the other hand, had smoked quite a few cigarettes in that tiny stairwell where we knew neither of the little boys would come looking for us. That squeaky eleventh stair had once gotten us caught with the contraband, and we’d been grounded for two weeks.
They never realized or didn’t care that grounding both of us, but still letting us see each other, was no punishment at all. We could make our own fun without whatever had been taken away.
God, I hoped Ian and Daniel were okay. I was too preoccupied to look at my watch and see how long they’d been gone already.
Outside the linen closet, I paused again and looked to Erik. He nodded to me. He couldn’t hear anything on the other side.
The door caught on the mess they’d made of the closet. They must’ve already searched it, but somehow hadn’t realized there was a door hidden behind a row of shelves. I stepped inside the room and cringed as my boots dug into all the clean linens that covered the floor.
The men were louder now, and we could easily hear their conversations as they called to each other from different rooms. To the left of us was Seamus and Grant’s room, and I could hear the men throwing shit around. Glass broke. A loud thump that had to have been one of the bedframes being overturned.
“Steady,” Erik said quietly. He paused with his hand on the doorway to the hall.
Once we were out there, we’d be surrounded on all sides. There was no way to hide in the wide hallway that bisected theupper floor of the house. If even one of the intruders was out there, it would be impossible to maintain our cover.
Beau and Ambrose should’ve already been inside the house, but there was no way to know. Hopefully, they’d gotten inside Ian’s apartment and were waiting for a sign from us. If not, Erik and I were kind of screwed.
“I’ll go right,” Erik said after a moment. He turned toward me and quickly grabbed the back of my head, planting a kiss on the hair just above my forehead. “For luck,” he whispered with a wink.
He waited only long enough for me to raise my weapon before he was opening the door wide and stepping out.
The next few minutes were an impossibly loud blur. There were three men in the hallway, and two of them opened fire as soon as Erik had dropped the first. The Vampire behind me was the embodiment of precision. Without even looking at him, I knew the grace with which he moved as he aimed and fired, keeping his body between me and the hallway behind me.
I was a little less precise. I took out the first man and the second, but the third came out too quickly, and I felt a bullet graze the meat at my hip, just below the edge of my vest. It took four shots for me to hit him because I’d automatically jerked when the bullet grazed me, and it messed up my aim.
The hallway behind where I stood was much longer than the one before me, and Erik was firing twice as quickly as more men streamed out of the rooms. He stumbled, and his back brushed mine before he was steady on his feet again. I barely registered the feeling before two more men came out of Uncle Dalton’s room and the spare room next to it.
They weren’t all coming at once. While Erik and I stood in the center of the chaos, they were strategically sending out one or two at a time.
I swallowed hard as one of the men got a shot off as he went down. It lodged somewhere above our heads.
Then, Beau and Ambrose were there. I could hear their voices from the other end of the hall as it quieted. In seconds, they were beside me, and Erik had his hand on my shoulder as he covered my back and we made our way toward Uncle Dalton’s room.
By the time we were finished, my ears were ringing, and I could barely hear a thing.
I stood in the center of my uncle and aunt’s room, barely able to catch my breath.
“Safe room?” Erik asked, looking at the walls.
“It’s not in here,” I gasped, shaking my head.
“Where is it?” Ambrose asked as the sound of a rifle shot filtered in through a broken window.
The thing about the safe room was that I’d been taught since I was old enough to understand words that it was not to be shared with anyone. Not my teachers, not my doctor, not the police, not the fire department, not my priest—if I’d had one. Absolutely no one outside of Uncle Dalton, Aunt Halle, my mom and dad, Ian, Grant, and Seamus could ever know where the door to the safe room was. All of our lives could depend on it.
So it took me a moment to form the words because everything inside me was screaming not to.
