16
Silver
We spend the next couple of days planning exactly how to break into the vampire elder’s place to rob him. Dante manages to find out when he’ll be out of the house at a meeting, but we don’t find out much more to help us.
I guess I’m winging it, then.
The three of us head over to Victor Blackthorne’s house in the late afternoon. The place isn’t exactly what I was expecting from a vampire elder. It’s on a quiet street lined with trees. Before this point, I didn’t even know Arcanumhadtrees. Hedges and stupid fucking topiary, sure. But this place is leafy. The houses are enormous, but not ostentatious in the same way the Arcanum Heights mansions are.
“Huh, no turrets in sight,” Zeph says. “It’s less creepy than I was expecting it to be, too.”
Dante turns to me, running his hands down my arms until he’s holding my hands in his. “So he should be at his meeting for the next hour. I don’t know him well, so I don’t know where he’ll keep the books, but—”
“This is not my first rodeo,” I tell him, tugging my backpack tighter onto my back. “I’ll have a dig around in his pantie drawer and I’m sure they’ll turn up. You both know the signal if he turns up before we expect?”
“Sure. I’ll punch the vamp here in the face and when you hear him yell, you come running,” Zeph says with a smirk.
I’m... not entirely sure he’s joking. “Maybe come up with something else. Call my cell phone or something.”
Zeph grumbles something under his breath, and Dante just shakes his head. My vamp looks nervous, and it’s making me weirdly giddy. I’m not used to having anyone waiting right outside while I do a job. I’m also not used to anyone being quite this worried about mewhileI’m doing a job.
It’s sweet.
We’ve done some research on this guy and I have an idea of the sort of vamp he is. He’s old as dirt. Eccentric. And I’m guessing he’s going to be at least a little lax with his security, considering he decided it was a good idea to bring a bunch of highly sensitive books back to his house instead of leaving them in the safety of the Forbidden Archives.
Scouting around the back of the house, I’m relieved to be proved right when I spot a cracked window on the ground floor. Result. I’m not even going to need to break my neck to get inside.
There are a bunch of rose bushes I have to skirt around to reach the window, and I’m careful not to catch myself. The last thing I need is to leave this vamp a calling card once I’ve been and gone. Pushing the window open carefully, I heave myself up and onto the sill and then climb inside. There’s a short drop once I’m inside and I climb on the sink and sort of slide off until I land on the hard floor.
Using my blood magic to confirm there’s no one inside, I continue deeper into the house.
It smells like cologne. Like, a lot of cologne. An overwhelming, teenage boy level, like he’s trying to hide something by filling the air with it. He also has a bunch of cat trees dotted around the place. I count eight of them as I head through the living room into the bedroom.
Not a single cat, though.
Which is weird. But handy.
The inside of his house looks kind of like a mixture between a porn palace and a... cat palace. It’s a strange combination, but who am I to judge? I’m just here to rob the guy.
I keep my blood magic at the ready, just in case he slips by the guys outside without their notice. It’s easy enough to discount the living room since he doesn’t have a single book anywhere, no drawers or boxes where they might be hiding either.
Continuing swiftly through the house, I check the kitchen and come up empty before discovering his office. Making quick work of rifling through the desk drawers and the shelves he has lining one wall. I come up empty pretty quickly and blow out a long breath.
Guess I’m heading upstairs. I slip my phone out of my pocket and check it before I make my way up there. I have a message from one of my old contacts who apparently has something useful for me, for the right price. I make a mental note to check it out once we’re done here. But there’s nothing from Z or Dante, so I pull up my socks and run up to the second floor, cursing the unexpected cardio.
It’s also a lot trickier to make a hasty exit once you rule out diving from the window as a route out of the house.
Up here, there are a bunch of closed doors and I’m fully expecting to discover a kink workroom or something. Instead, I’m slightly deflated when I just find a bunch of bedrooms that look like they’re barely used. The sheets are piled up, kind of like a hotel midway through cleaning service.
Checking each chest of drawers, wardrobe and then under the dusty beds, I come up empty again. Dammit. This is taking longer than I expected. The house is deceptively large, and he has a lot of rooms, a lot of crap to search through.
Moving on, I discover another bedroom, which must be the one Victor Blackthorn uses. It has that overwhelming smell of aftershave again and the covers are a deep red, crushed velvet and they’re slightly rumpled. I work my way through the room again before throwing myself onto the floor to check under the bed, where I discover a tatty old suitcase.
