I closed my eyes. “No.”
“No what?”
“You donotget a crush on me,” I told him. “My life is complicated enough. You want to fall in love with someone, fall in love with yourself.Youdefeated the fire beast.Yousaved our lives. Not me. All I did was say, ‘Hey, let’s do something reckless that will probably get us both killed.’ ”
He chuckled, but it was a painful wheezing kind of laugh.
“You okay?” I asked. “Do you think you can move?”
“Sure. Yeah. Maybe.”
“How about more fire? Are you up for that?” I asked.
He groaned. “I don’t know.”
We couldn’t stay. We had to be safely out of the vault before the fire beast spell reactivated, especially if Worm was spent. Thirty minutes, Maximus had said. That should be enough time, if we could muster the strength to move. “Any chance you could burn a hole through the rock out of here?” I knew he’d drilled a few inches. I’d seen it before all the fire went out. But this was twelve feet of granite, which would be an impressive miracle…
“No chance. I’d pass out if I tried that much heat so soon.”
Okay. Fine. That would have been a lot more awesome, but we could do it the old-fashioned way. “There are security cameras. See the tiny red light? Once we move out of this corner of the vault, they’ll see us. You’ll have to fry them here and also in the hall. I’ll open the vault door—that should shut off the motion-sensing lasers and the pressure plate alarms—then you burn out the cameras, and we run like hell for the stairs.”
I wished I could see his face. His voice sounded anxious, but I couldn’t tell if he was ordinary nervous or about-to-freak-out nervous. “Your mother said there was a ‘wyvern detection spell’?” he asked. “And what are ‘motion-sensing lasers’ and ‘pressure plates’?”
“Don’t worry about what they are. Just do what I say, and run when I say run.”
“So the guy who set the fire beast…he’ll chase us as we try to escape?”
“We aren’t going to be trying to escape. Not yet. Just stay close to me and nurture that anger you have for me over how cryptic I’m being. There are six cameras, and you’ll have to shoot them all. We need to buy as much time as we can so we can make it up the stairs before anyone comes to stop us.”
“Okay,” he said. And then: “What’s a ‘camera’?”
“See that red dot? Burn it out,” I ordered. He complied, and I heard a sizzle and spark as the cameras were fried. “Now, grab as much gold as you can. We want this to look like an ordinary heist, not like someone came through the Door.” Feeling around in the dark, I shoved necklaces and bracelets and gold rings into my pockets. I heard the clink of gold bars.
From there, I moved to the door. Vaults were meant to be inaccessible from the outside, so I had it open fast. “Cameras will be by the ceiling in the hall. Light them all up,” I ordered Worm. “Don’t worry about the walls—they’re fire resistant.”
He stepped into the doorway, wreathed in flame, and the fire shot out of him, crisping the electronics. In his fire, I saw the hall: empty. There was no way to avoid the wyvern detection spell. From here on in, we’d have to really move.
“Now, run!” I grabbed his hand, and we ran down the hallway and up the stairs. Ahead was the kitchen door. This was it, the place I’d been caught last time, the moment we could be stopped—
We burst out. I ran toward the door to the outside and kicked it open so it would look like we’d run that way. Worm followed me. “Not that way,” I told him as he went for the door. Grabbing his arm, I pulled him back with me. We wanted Mr. Keene looking for us outside, not inside.
We ran through the house, into the foyer, past the grandfather clock, and through the dining room to the back stairs. Stopping on the stairs, I put my finger to my lips.
It was time to sneak.
“Step exactly where I step.” I knew these stairs. I’d crept up them often enough with Ryan. Carefully, I laid my foot on the parts of the steps I knew didn’t squeak.
At the top of the stairs, I poked my head out into the hallway.
Empty.
Ryan’s room was three doors down.
Scooting forward, we hurried along the hallway. I pushed on the door and then pulled Worm inside just as one of the other doors slammed forward and Ryan’s father thumped down the hallway shouting to Ryan’s mother, “Gretchen, stay in your room! Ryan, you as well! An alarm’s been tripped, and the basement cameras are out. I’ll handle this!”
I put my finger to my lips, and Worm and I flattened against the door.
“Sky?” Ryan. “How—”
