“I assume they’re talking about their pirate days,” Thomas replied with an edge of judgmental tone.
“We had to make money somehow,” Roger said. “Cobbling didn’t pay like stealing the goods from rich pricks.”
“Cobbling?” Janiyah asked.
“It’s an old word for shoemaker,” Vincent answered.
“Enough discussion,” Josefina declared. “We’re close, yes?”
“Three blocks,” Vincent said.
Roger slid his black ski mask on, and the others followed suit. The final few seconds were an eternity of anxiety.
The instant Roger felt the van come to a complete stop, he shoved open the back doors and stepped out onto the pavement. Everyone behind him fell into step and followed him toward the double doors. Amber left the passenger seat and took up the rear position as they swept into the lobby.
The security guards behind the desk were already reaching for phones and alarms. Roger rushed one, and Josefina zipped at the other. Not taking a chance, he had a silver dagger in hand and plunged it into the heart of the guard he’d caught. Only as he held on to the man did he catch his scent of the grave. A vampire.Someone just doing his job.
This was no time for guilt. Josefina dropped her guard to the ground, another victim motionless, and cleared the way for Dmitri. Keeping with the plan, Dmitri disabled what security he could at the front computer. If the guards had triggered any alarms, he would know.
After a few seconds of typing, he gave a thumbs-up. Then he ripped the computer off the desk and smashed it against the floor.
One step done, many more to go. Roger took a set of keys off one of the dead guards and led the way to the staircase. Amber and Janiyah remained behind in the lobby to protect their exit while the remaining four of them began a stealth march up to the sixth floor. As the only mortal, Thomas made the most noise, but even he was a whisper of a professional.
The keys gave them access to the floor, but Dmitri had been confident that they wouldn’t work on the door they needed. Roger handed them off to Thomas. With a nod, Thomas slipped them into his back pocket and pulled an arrow from his quiver. The hallway they were in extended in long sections either way, and he stayed to guard the stairway door.
Dmitri took point and headed down the left hall. When it joined at an intersection, he turned left again and halted.
A guard was walking the hall. As his hand went for his gun, Roger flung a dagger at him. It struck the guard in the shoulder rather than the heart. The scent of mortal blood filled the air, and hesitation stalled Roger’s plan.
Josefina surged forward and snapped the man’s neck. She took the walkie from his belt and held it out toward Roger.
The guard would have done his job and stood in their way, complicated everything. There was no reason to let him live, especially since he would have endangered the ones Roger cared about in this place. His death had been a necessity, and yet Roger had paused.I am so tired of collateral damage. Grimly,he took the walkie from Josefina.But there will be more before we’re done. And every drop of blood has to mean our freedom. I have to make it all count.
Silently, Dmitri strode forward, and Roger followed him. With Josefina bringing up the rear, they navigated their way to the server room door. A biometric lock barred their path. Dmitri put his hand on the pad, but it flashed red. He tried a second time. Same result.
Josefina took one of the smaller detonation charges out of her bag. Explosives had been the backup plan, but the floor was silent. The noise of a bomb, however small and targeted, was certain to drag attention. And attention meant more guards.
Securing their exits had seemed like the smart strategy, but their group was spread thin. A sudden image of an overwhelming number of vampires swarming the ground floor and Thomas came to Roger. The security wasn’t endless. If Roger and the others fought well enough, they might even win.
But so much could go wrong.
The door wasn’t seamless in the wall. The thinnest gaps existed—they had to—and in those gaps were places the light didn’t touch. Anton managed to use shadows to travel whole miles in an instant. He could call on them to do his bidding.
Roger had managed a facet of that. On instinct, he’d once slipped Seamus’s grasp through some form of shadow manipulation.I didn’t turn my arm into shadow. I pushed my arm into the shadow space. If he could do that, he could manage a few inches to the other side of the door, couldn’t he?
He motioned for Josefina to stay back and then put his hand on the crack of the door. The strange, otherworldliness awareness was at the edge of his mind, like a friend waiting for him to answer his phone. He picked up, letting it speak to him.
Something beyond his mundane senses opened. Reality became a web of stimuli, sticky with concrete details andgossamer with that weird elseness. The shadow under his fingertips had a cold, liquid feel to it. Despite its thinness, he sensed that the surface went deeper and the shadows extended into the room beyond.
He had dived into crystal-clear waters where the depth had been so much more than the waters seemed at first sight. Perhaps the shadows were the same. All he had to do was step to the edge of reality and take the plunge. He pushed into that thin space.
Moving into the shadow was like dropping into an icy ocean, though these ethereal seas were colder than any wave had ever been. While he didn’t need air in the real world, in this moment, his lungs screamed for oxygen. He opened his mouth to suck some in but found only murky otherness. The world was shapes in darkness with ill-defined edges except where the light touched. The shadows roiled away from the light, and yet some of them were biting at it. They seemed to have some level of consciousness or at least a feral instinct. They had to be the kind of shadow that Anton commanded into tendrils.
He realized that even in the act of turning around to look at the light, he had stepped past the door. The shifting blacks and grays defined the borders of the server room. All he had to do was find his way back to the normal realm.
When diving, his greatest challenge had been reaching deeper. The surface had always called him upward. Physics, Zack would have said. And he didn’t belong to this other-place. Closing his eyes, Roger felt a tug toward the surface. He leaned into it, and the cold fell away. Air brushed against the thin strip of skin left exposed by his ski mask.
He opened his eyes to darkness, but a familiar empty-feeling shadow rather than the inky living gray matter of that other realm. Gently, he reached out and touched the door. The handle turned easily, and he pulled the door open.
