Page 9 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

6

NICO

The bookshop died years ago, and no one told the building. I read its death in the swollen door, and the dry-rot sweetness that rolls out to meet me when I lean the frame open. Cheap black paint covers the inside of the window, scabbed now into flakes.

Two heartbeats above me. Second floor. Both fast, both trying to be quiet and failing in the specific manner of men who have just learned they are not as good as they were paid to be. So. Some of the hunters stayed behind. Good.

I climb the stairwell and it tells the story before I reach the top, I read it the way Cassandra reads a ledger—line by line, nothing skipped. A stair tread wedged crooked, jammed on purpose to buy three seconds. A lamp cord pulled taut across the seventh step, ankle height, knotted to the banister. One of the men above me is favoring a leg, and I would wager he met that cord at a run.

She's gone. I knew that from the street, from the thread leaking out of the place. But standing inside the wreck of her escape, I begin to understand how.

A single room over the shop. On the floor nearby the room lies a burner phone, face-down, battery pulled and tossed beside it, dead as the building. No number to trace, no signal to follow. And in the wall, a dumbwaiter shaft stands open, its little door wrenched off the runner, the rope still trembling.

She went down it, barely wide enough for a child, and chose the one route nobody would chase.

I should be measuring the relic's signature. Instead I am looking at a dumbwaiter, and the word in my head is clever.

I put it down where it belongs, and turn toward the two men holding their breath behind the toppled bookcase.

"You can come out," I call, "or I can come in. Only one of those ends with you standing."

A pistol rises over the shelf. I am across the room before the hammer drops, and the shot tears into plaster because I have already moved his wrist to where I want it. He is big, well-kitted—plate carrier, throat mic, a sidearm machined for rounds I know on sight: wooden bullet, made for things that do not fall to ordinary lead. Men do not carry ammunition built for my kind unless someone has told them we could be here.

I break his arm at the elbow, once, clean, and let him drop. The second man is the smarter of the pair. He opens his fingers and lowers his weapon to the floor.

"Wise," I say, and crouch to his level.

Fear comes off him sour beneath the gun oil. His papers, when I draw them from his vest, are good—Belgian, recent, professionally forged. His phone is encrypted and dark. And inked small against his collarbone is a mark I have seen exactly twice in all years I've been alive: a circle broken open at the top, like a mouth parting to speak.

Both times before, the men wearing it died believing the world deserved to be told what we are.

"Who hired you?" I ask.

"A voice on a phone. Nobody saw a face." He swallows. "The money came clean. We were told the stone would be warm when we got here."

I let nothing reach my face. "Warm."

"Awake. Active." His gaze flick to his broken friend, then back to me, and now he gives me the only honest thing he has. "They knew before we did. Whoever's behind this is inside something—they felt it wake up before the people who are supposed to feel that sort of thing."

That detail slides in cold and stays there. The relic's waking should have been mine to carry up the chain.

"Your orders for the thief," I demand.

"Recover the relic. The woman was never the contract." He hesitates, and what comes next he clearly wishes he could swallow back. "They said if she still had it on her, we could keep whatever was left."

Again, I feel that thing low in me that pulls tight at the word left, the thing I refuse to name. I tell myself it is only the offense of sloppiness. A loose end belongs to the one assigned to close it. To me.

I leave them both alive. A breathing man carries a message back up a chain I cannot yet see, and a chain is worth more to me than two corpses on a floor. My phone vibrates as I straighten. Gabriel, of course.

"You have her," he says, instead of hello.

"I have the dumbwaiter."

A beat. Then he laughs, warm and entirely unbothered, the way he laughs through funerals and firefights alike. "She went down the dumbwaiter. Nico, I think I'm a little in love."

"Focus."

"I'm focused. I'm focused on a human who's slipped a Prague crew, a frightened broker, and you inside 2 days. People are talking—quiet talk. Three houses have put out feelers for the stone since last night, and the word in every one of them is the same: it's awake. Old relics don't wake by accident, brother. You know exactly what that means."