Dmitri and Josefina stared at him with wide eyes for an instant, but they recovered and moved into the room as soon as he stepped out of their way. Moving swiftly, Dmitri went to the back and took a laptop from his sling bag. He hooked up to one of the machines.
Josefina took a position by the door with Roger. She whispered, “You didn’t tell me you were gaining ancient powers.”
“This didn’t feel like a vampire ability,” Roger murmured. “Something weird is going on.”
“Whatever it is, you make good use of it,” Josefina replied.
“Hm.” Roger glanced around for any sign of a camera but didn’t see one. That didn’t mean the room was free of them. Zack had taught him that cameras could be smaller than a button and still capture quite a bit of area.
The long minutes waiting for Dmitri to finish with the servers were eternities unto themselves. Each one brought a new hellish imagining of what hell they would endure if they were discovered. Seven painful ideas were far too many, and yet an eighth added its weight. A ninth.
“How much longer?” Roger asked.
“A couple more minutes,” Dmitri replied.
“Anyone notice you?”
Dmitri didn’t answer aloud, but he had an intense desire to keep going and a thin want to suppress information. That was an emotion Roger was all too familiar in feeling from him. Back in the early 1700s, he would get the same way when they were robbing carriages and the job was turning against them.
“Damn it,” Roger swore under his breath. “Set the charges.”
“Are you sure?” Josefina asked.
“Ten minutes. Do it.”
Josefina nodded and set to work.
Roger poked his head out of the door. The stillness of the floor was disturbed, though he didn’t hear a distinct sound at first. Then there was a running footfall, and another. He stepped out into the hall and pulled two of his daggers.
But the guards weren’t running toward the server room door. They were rushing elsewhere.
Thomas. With a burst of speed, Roger hurried back to where they’d left him. As he did, the sounds of a fight broke out. A body thumped to the floor, and Roger turned the corner in time to see a vampire fall with a wooden arrow in their heart. He stepped over them and grabbed a different guard attempting to blur past him. He snapped the guard’s neck and moved on to the next opponent.
Between Thomas and Roger, the other three fell quickly. Before Roger could relax, the elevator doors dinged in the distance. A faint red light pulsed at the far corners of the room. Perhaps subtle for a human, but Roger noticed it.
“We’re discovered,” Roger said to Thomas. “Go.”
“What about?—”
“I have this door.Go.”
Thomas nodded sharply and then hurried into the stairwell. Once the door shut, his footsteps were muffled, but they continued growing more and more distant as he made his way down.
The more concerning footsteps were the ones rushing from the elevators toward Roger. He spun his daggers in his hands, wished he’d thought to have a silver cutlass made, and turned to face the oncoming attackers. Four guards rounded the corner; all were vampires.
Hoping to disguise his voice a fraction, Roger roughly told them, “Last chance to walk away.”
One guard did pause but then fell into step with his coworkers.
A bulk of the vampires in the GLC were under a hundred and fifty years old, most being turned after Seamus had claimed Chicago the heart of his territory. These four were no exception, and even outnumbering him didn’t give them an advantage. Roger’s training with Nell had sharpened his reflexes, and he tore through them in an instant. His silver daggers burned out their hearts. Small puffs of red mist dissipated in the air.
Two more sets of running footsteps headed toward him, but Roger recognized one. Dmitri. In a fraction of a second, he and Josefina hurried around the corner and toward the stairwell. Roger stepped out of their way and motioned for them to go ahead of him. They didn’t hesitate, and the three of them sped down the stairs, catching up to Thomas as he reached the bottom.
They poured out of the stairwell and into the lobby. The sounds of the fight upstairs had masked the noise of the one happening on the lower level. Amber let a shotgun blast loose at two vampires that were closing in on her. Janiyah was trading blows with another security guard up against a wall.
The elevator doors dinged open. The vampires who ran out weren’t dressed as guards but like office workers. The glare of their red eyes and the variety of weapons in their hands gave away their intent. One raised a pistol, aiming for Thomas.
Roger dashed forward and sliced his daggers through the flesh of the one aiming for Thomas, and plunged a dagger into the vampire’s heart. The vampire howled, screaming in agony as the silver burned him, and he slid off Roger’s dagger with a sickening, dead thud to the floor.
