Carmen went to stand beside Lucien, studying the vault door. “Irena? Come take a look.”
Irena came forward on silent feet, pacing back and forth in front of the vault. “Stainless steel and concrete make. Probably built into the surrounding support walls of the station. It can’t have a time lock on it if they use it on a regular basis or if it’s their bolt-hole.”
“Dual control?” Lucien asked.
“Doubtful. I’d go with a combination lock. We can drill through the panels to get to the locking mechanism if you want to stay unnoticed for as long as possible.”
“How long will that take?”
“Not quick enough to make you happy.”
“Use the thermal lance. I don’t care about the noise it will make.”
“And the wards?”
“We brought artifacts. Use them.”
A pair of Lucien’s vampires carried over a heavy-looking crate and deposited it near Irena. Between the three of them, they rapidly put together the tool Irena would need to cut through the vault door. She donned a protective suit and helmet that could withstand high heat from the backpack she had carried into the tunnel and got to work.
Patrick left them to it, retreating to the tunnel entrance, artifact in hand and sweat sliding down his spine. A loud yip drew his attention to where Áltsé Hashké pawed at the wall of the tunnel, magic sparking like miniature Vesuvius flames in Patrick’s NVGs with every scrape of his paw.
“If you say so,” Patrick said with a shrug.
Áltsé Hashké moved out of the way, and Patrick knelt in front of the curved brick wall. He moved his goggles onto the top of his hard helmet, the sudden change to darkness making him blink rapidly to adjust his eyesight. Magic burned bright, and modern technology couldn’t always block it out.
He pressed a gloved hand against the brick, watching as the damaged wards flared into existence at his touch. Patrick studied the way they linked together, running his hand over the wall, tracing out the power that had warped the magic into something ugly and dangerous—a hole for all the hells to walk through.
Áltsé Hashké yipped again, sounding impatient. Patrick rolled his eyes. “Defensive magic isn’t my affinity, and I can’t tap a ley line.”
Another yip.
“Yeah, well, fuck you, too.”
Patrick pressed the tip of the quartz crystal against the brick, the artifact warming rapidly. He could feel the heat of borrowed magic through his glove, pricking at his own shields. Áltsé Hashké watched with eerie yellow eyes as Patrick reached with his magic for thecommandburied within the artifact. A nonmagic user would’ve been given a set of spell words to speak, but Patrick didn’t need those in order to access the magic held inside the artifact.
Power poured out of the crystal, the barrier ward etched in its depth set by a mage of considerable strength. Patrick carefully wrote out a series of linked sigils that Nadine had given him. Then he used his entire body weight to force the quartz crystal into the brick wall, magic easing the way.
The barrier ward spiderwebbed away from the artifact, bright lines overwriting the wards in the tunnel in a different pattern, one meant to contain the damage. It was a stop-gap measure Patrick only hoped would last long enough until SOA agents could get down here and find a permanent fix.
Áltsé Hashké gape-grinned at Patrick, then trotted off back into the depths of the abandoned station. Patrick rose to his feet and pulled his NVGs down over his eyes once more before following after the immortal. He pushed his way to the front of the crowd, taking in the scene.
The vault door had been sliced through in segments, though the entire thing was still standing as Irena cut the last line to the final corner. The heat was intense from the thermal lance, and there was a good amount of space between her and everyone else. When she finished, she disassembled the thermal lance and put it back into storage.
Lucien approached the vault door and studied it for a few seconds before he pressed both hands against the segmented pieces andpushed. The sections that Irena had cut through toppled over with a crash that reverberated through the ground.
“They’ll have heard that,” Carmen said.
Lucien flashed her a smile that was all fangs from beneath his balaclava. “Good.”
Patrick clicked the safety off his weapon and conjured up a mageglobe, letting his magic hover near his left shoulder. “Plan Let’s Get Ready To Invade These Assholes is a go.”
Lucien ducked through the hole, and the rest of them could only follow the master vampire into the unknown.
19
The roarof gunfire nearly deafened Patrick.
He ducked his head, shielding his face from pieces of the cement wall that bullets tore up across the way. The T-intersection of the corridor he and a handful of others were hunkered down in was looking more and more like a corner with no way out. Patrick ejected the empty magazine in his M4A1 carbine and slammed in a new one, feeling it lock into place.
