Page 33 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

His patience thins.

"You'll reconsider by morning," he says.

"Sure. I reconsider all kinds of things before coffee."

He smacks around the face twice, then the candles bow. Every one of them, at once, leaning the same way, though no door's open and there's no wind. The radio drops to a flat hiss. One of the guards snaps rigid, head turning toward the far end of the nave — and Lucien flicks his head to the door.

Past the stone, something heavy meets something heavier. It sounds like a wall deciding to leave. Then another, closer. I know that hush. I've ridden next to it in a car going too fast and a safehouse. I hold my face still, let the cuffs bite, and think, furious at how much heat the thought carries: there you are.

"Move her," Lucien says, and now there's rush in it.

Hands haul me up. But I've already walked out of that dark with everything I needed — a smear on a threshold for Nico to read, a symbol burned in my eyes, and the one gift Lucien handed me free of charge: he can't open the secrets without me. That's not nothing. That's a hinge. The chapel door comes off its frame.

22

NICO

The door cascades off the wall, and I'm through the gap before the iron finishes falling. Immediately, I smell blood that belongs to her. Riley is chained by both wrists, upright, furious, a split across her lip and a gash above one brow. Her head comes up when she sees me. The thing I've kept leashed strains hard against the hold.

Lucien stands a single pace from her, one pale hand resting on the back of her as though he's already measuring the room for ownership.

"Serrano," he says. "Prompt, as ever."

I answer him with the two men between us instead of words. The first I take before his weapon clears leather — a hand at his throat, the wall providing the rest. The second fires. The round buries in the wall because I'm no longer standing where he aimed. I respect the bullets enough not to be hit because I know they're wooden.

Gabriel comes through the side entrance like he holds the deed to it, fast and grinning and entirely lethal, cutting two mercenaries off Riley's flank. "Right's yours," he calls. "I've got the exits."

Cassandra's voice arrives clean and level in my ear. "Nico, the suppression field is still live. There's a clamp on a tripod by the altar — that's your dampener, the thing that killed the relic. It isn't only smothering the stone. It's reading it. They're pushing the signal out in bursts. Whatever it pulled off the obsidian while she was close, copies are already leaving the building."

"How long?"

"Seconds. Break the clamp."

I move toward the altar, and Lucien reads the shift before anyone else does. Not fear. Calculation. He is over nine hundred years old and too disciplined to mistake a rescue for a battlefield worth winning. His gaze flicks to Riley, to the shattered dampener, to the black case already disappearing through the low priest's door behind the altar.

He has what he came for. That is the only reason he steps back. He picks up a barrel, and swings it toward Riley, building a choice for me. Lucien or Riley. I choose Riley, and get there before it takes her out.

"Nico—" Her voice, raw and sharp. "Side door, the box is hot, kill the box—" and then she isn't talking, she's moving, because one of her cuffs is already open. A pick. She's had a pick the whole time, worked the pin loose. She wrenches free, twists, and drives her heel into the nearest candle stand. It topples across the cable run, scattering flame and shadow, and half the chapel drops into a chaos that suits me far better than it suits them.

I reach the clamp. It's exactly what Cassandra described — squat, matte, a small green light pulsing on its face like it's pleased with itself. I bring my fist down through it. The casing folds, the light dies, and the gray hiss cuts to a silence so total I can hear Riley breathing.

A seam of pale light crawls the obsidian and lays one broken mark across the ash on the floor. The stone is awake again, and the timing of it frustrates me. It just gave its next clue to a machine before I could smash it.

"They got it," I say. "The reading. Before I⁠—"

"I know." Grim, now. "It transmitted. He has a fragment of the resonance. Not enough though. Only to chase it."

Across the room, Lucien pauses in the priest's door. He looks at Riley, then at me with my body planted in front of her, and something close to satisfaction moves over his face. He learned what he came to learn tonight, and it was never only the stone.

A woman steps past him toward the same exit — Sabine, pragmatic to the last, a hard set to her mouth that says she likes none of this, the obsession least of all. She doesn't draw on me. She takes the door, and her payment, and her doubts, and she's gone.

Every instinct I own howls to chase, to end this poison in this scraped-out room. But I need to get Riley to safety.

"Out," Gabriel says, hauling a table aside. "Now, both of you. I am not carrying two corpses out of a church. Terrible for my reputation."

I reach Riley, and her hands are shaking while raking the tables for whatever Lucien stripped before he ran. "He took something off the box," she says. "I watched one of them pull a card⁠—"

"Ok."