I was a little sad when I reached the top.
Scrambling up into the alcove, I panted for a moment. My calves burned and my fingers ached. I could feel a dozen scrapes begin to sting, but I’d made it in one piece.
The alcove was a natural formation, a cavelike notch in the cliff with a view of the mountains. Ryan and I used to come here to play out of sight of his parents. We told each other secrets here, mocked our relatives here, kissed for hours here. This alcove dripped with memories. This was where Ryan told me about his mother’s illness when he was nine, how she’d almost died and how his father had flown in doctors from around the world. She’d recovered, but he’d been so terrified. He hadn’t shown his fear to anyone else. Showing emotion was, apparently, bad manners. Ryan had had etiquette training since he was a toddler, so he knew these things. By age nine, he also knew how to waltz, how to serve a proper tea, and how to greet anyone politely in up to twenty languages. Here in this alcove was the only place he felt free enough to demonstrate that he could also curse in twenty languages. I remembered him, age ten, whispering swear words to me, delicious foreign words that meant things I couldn’t even visualize. Still wasn’t entirely sure how some of them worked.
“I’m up,” I whispered.
The earpiece was silent for a moment, and then I heard Ryan’s voice in my ear, as close as if he were pressed against me, whispering to me.“Glad to hear it.”
“Where’s the pulley?” I asked.
“I hid it behind the rock.”
I scanned the alcove. “Ryan, it’s all rocks.”
“The big one.”
Climbing over a scattering of other rocks, I found the pulley nestled between a boulder and a bush. He’d already secured it to the ground. All it needed was the rope, so I ran that through and then tossed one end down the cliff. “Gabriela, come on up. I’ve got you.”
Positioning myself on the other side of the pulley, I picked up the rope and braced myself. Leaning back, I pulled as Gabriela climbed.
The earpiece crackled.“Keep it up,”Maximus encouraged her from the ground.“You’re doing great.”
“You could help,”Gabriela said.
“I am helping,”he said.“I’m encouraging you.”
Leaning back farther, I kept pulling. At last, Gabriela flopped over the edge and then scrambled up into the alcove. She lay panting while Maximus climbed, with my help. Reaching the top, Maximus shook himself like a dog, spraying rain.
“You know, if you could transform into a dragon, that would have been a lot easier,” Gabriela said.
“My wife used to say that often. She dreamed of the freedom of flying.” His face took on a wistful expression, as if he were about to launch into a litany of memories. While I didn’t want to be insensitive, we were on a bit of a clock. “She blamed the council for keeping us from Home and from reclaiming our legacy—”
“That’s nice,” I said. “Sharing later. Stealth now. Ryan, are you ready?”
“One sec…”
Creeping forward, I waited behind a bush. The nice part about the alcove was that its opening was inconspicuous. Just a hole behind a lilac bush. I pulled on my face mask and gloves. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Gabriela and Maximus do the same.
“Now,”Ryan whispered.
We ran.
At night, the sculpture garden behind Ryan’s house looked more like the set of a horror movie than a place of quiet reflection. The statues of dragons, hydras, and serpents loomed larger than normal, and their shadows stretched as if they wanted to swallow us. All the flowers and bushes were tangles of gray in the darkness. Rain covered everything in a slick sheen. My shoes sank into the wet grass, and it felt as if the mud was sucking at my soles. It wanted to trip me, to slow me, to stop me, but I was unstoppable. I saw the security cameras, mounted on the tops of gargoyles, but I knew they couldn’t see me, thanks to Ryan.
We bolted across the gardens to the back kitchen door. I jammed my lock picks into the keyhole, jimmied it open in thirty seconds, and then we were inside.
Borrowing a kitchen towel, I wiped my feet, then gave it to Gabriela and Maximus. They soaked up the water from their shoes, and then we all tiptoed through the kitchen, taking care to leave no trace and make no sound. They returned the towel to me, and I tucked it into my bag—the police report would have to list one kitchen towel stolen, in addition to treasures.
As I crept forward, I saw our reflections in the stainless steel refrigerator, oven, and stovetop, in the microwave, and in the copper pots that hung above the center island. We were darker shadows in the already dark kitchen. I picked the lock on the basement door—twenty seconds.
Stepping on the first step, I heard awhoosh.Flames roared up in front of me—the wall of fire, the first line of security. The walls of the stairwell must have been coated in fire-protected paint, because the fire was contained. It formed a wall of dancing red and orange in front of us. Rather pretty, actually.
“Anyone bring marshmallows?” Maximus asked.
“Just give her the spell,” I ordered. Holding my hands out, I let the flames lick over them. It felt comfortably warm, like the sun in August. The fire beast, I knew, would burn much, much hotter. Steel-meltingly hot. This was just your run-of-the-mill immolate-humans kind of fire. We could walk through it fine, but not Gabriela—and we needed her on the other side in order to block the wyvern detection spell.
Maximus dusted the three of us with a fire protection powder, like what was on the walls and stairs, to keep our clothes from bursting into flames. My nose tickled, and I held in a sneeze. Then Maximus handed Gabriela the purple vial. “Bottoms up,” he told her.
