In about thirty seconds five men, doubtlessly either blood members of the Reese family or their extended family of employees, have begun chasing the feu-follet all over the property. They’re shouting like maniacs, their flashlight beams slashing the darkness like a laser show. The chase noisily continues for almost a minute before a sixth figure, a vacant silhouette in the night, arrives.
“For God’s sake,” I hear Calvin Reese say. “It’s just a fucking wisp.”
“Sorry, sir,” someone answers. “We’re supposed to…”
“You’re supposed to be keeping the property safe. How are you supposed to be doing that when you’re out here chasing a garden variety wisp? Get it the hell out of here.”
“But sir, we can’t catch…”
“As long as that thing’s running around the property we can’t reset the alarm triggers,” Calvin explains. He and I had made this arrangement back at Jacks, when I’d told him what my crossing the boundary of the wards would do. The alarms had to come down from the inside, before I shorted them out. “Now get that goddam thing or you’ll all be rotated to cleanup duty in the stables. Got me?”
With a new inspiration the men sprint off across the lawn, fanning out into intricate patterns as they try to corral something that can’t, by its very definition, be corralled. Calvin walks back towards the house, flashlight beam leading the way. If he looks back I can’t tell.
Before he’s taken ten steps I pull my hood up over my head and start running lightly through the thin woods, following the concrete fence by the plentiful light of the December moon. I go what I judge to be a quarter of the way around the property, then use my momentum to leap straight at the concrete wall. One step is enough to propel me halfway up, and I catch the top easily and haul myself the rest of the way. The wall is wide enough to sit on, but I keep my body flat on its surface just in case someone in the house picks that moment to look out over the homestead. Then I re-secure my grip on the wall and let myself drop down inside the wall.
The grass softens my landing, making it nearly soundless. I can see a distant riot of flashlight beams as the guards madly pursue the feu-follet through the deepening night. There are five of them. If I’m lucky it’ll take them a few minutes to figure out that they can’t catch it and instead opt to simply chase it away from the property. Working together and using the fence as a backstop they could probably wrangle it through the gates in about five or six minutes, after which they’d reset the ward which would immediately short out because of me. Calvin would drag his heels before resetting the ward, but he couldn’t buy much time without drawing attention to himself that he couldn’t afford. Call it less than ten minutes to get in, get Celeste, and get out.
Certain that nobody’s looking, I dart forward. My legs pump, my lungs working like bellows, sweat breaking out all over from the effort. The yards pass too slowly under my feet. The muscles don’t jump like they used to. Too many years. Too many waffles. Damnit, maybe Lisa was right. I’m in great condition for thirty-five, but the memory of myself at twenty is still close enough for me to feel old and slow as I trail farther and farther behind my youth.
After a relative eternity I leave the grass behind and run onto the circle of gravel that surrounds the house. I flatten myself against the wall and wait for my pulse and breathing to come down to normal only to realize that I’ve only cracked Problem Number Two and I don’t have that kind of time. I follow the wall around to the back of the house, careful not to silhouette myself against any of the ground floor windows.
The rear of the house is as opulent as the front is Spartan. An in-ground pool only slightly smaller than most lakes, a hot tub feeding into it, a tennis court with actual bleachers. Most important, a garage with a utility door. I sneak up to it, already digging out my lock picks.
Nine minutes. The lock gives me only a few seconds worth of trouble before the tumblers snap free. No sirens blare, no lights blaze to life. I shake my head. Magic users. No sense of the mundane. I slip inside and find myself in a darkened garage. Three problems down, one more to go. Though if I’m lucky, that problem’s already been handled.
My first thought when planning this escapade was to make my move at midnight, when the family was fast asleep, but Calvin told me that security is actually tighter in the dark hours. I chose to attack the house at this particular time because this was when the Reese family sits down to dinner every night. In theory, the whole lot of them (five of them, if I remember correctly – Clive and his four sons, with baby Celeste taking meals in her room) should be gathered around some ungodly long table right now, eating long and well and hopefully far away from where I am.
I can see four cars sleeping peacefully in the showroom-sized garage, two SUV’s, the sleek predatory form of an Italian sports car, the hulking powerhouse of a classic model Mustang. A row of motorcycles lines the far wall: crotch rockets, built for adrenaline and to hell with personal safety. Enough personal mobility for more than half a dozen people at a time. A door across the garage from me has light peeking through the jamb. I weave through the vehicles, running an appreciative finger along the lines of the Mustang as I pass by. That’s when I see the first evidence of the Reese house’s security system.
If Calvin hadn’t warned me about it I might have missed it. It’s in the upper right corner of the garage, half hidden in the dimness. A peeker. I know from talking to others who aren’t susceptible to its camouflaging magic that it appears to be a simple motion detector, the kind alarm companies install in millions of homes, but I’ve never seen that side of them. To me, they always appear as an eight-inch eyeball, milky white with a monstrous red pupil, affixed to the wall by thick clusters of waxy pink neural fibers. Its unblinking gaze covers the entire room, taking in everything.
Except me, of course. I’ve dealt with them before. It won’t see me. At most, I’ll appear as a distortion in the footage the peeker’s sending back to its remote brain. Yes, it has a brain, complete with large viewing screens. Think of it as an expensive, and really disgusting, magical DVR.
I cross the floor and take a moment’s pause at the door, listening intently. Silence on the other side, so I grasp the handle and gently turn it, careful not to let the bolt make any noise. I ease the door open and slip quickly through.
Eight minutes. I’m in a laundry room, industrial strength: four washers, four driers, a steam-cleaner, smells of bleach and spring-fresh detergent. None of the machines are running, which I like. Nobody will be checking in on their delicates. Lots of cabinets, open wire shelving holding a hardware store’s worth of cleaning products, mops and brooms hanging from clasping hooks on the walls, hangers for wet coats and a yard-long strip of fake grass for muddy shoes. There’s also a hand-carved wooden rack holding about a dozen wands, staffs, and staves, as well as two bolt action rifles and a fire extinguisher. Safety first.
There are two doors in this room, one in the wall right in front of me and the other on an in a corner about fifteen feet away. I pull up a mental picture of Calvin’s map. The one on my right leads into a study, the one in front of me to a hallway. Though I’d love to see what Clive Reese stocks his bookshelves with, now isn’t the time. I go straight ahead and stop at the door, listening. Voices this time, two of them. Male and female, thankfully receding. In theory, headed to the dining room in the southeast side of the floor.
According to Calvin, Celeste has been relocated from her normal bedroom on the second floor to a guest room on the third to better isolate her. None of the security force I saw seemed very familiar with a feu-follet, but even so they must be close to bringing it to ground by now. It’ll take a few more minutes for them to get themselves settled back in, so all I have to do is avoid the remainders for another…I check my watch. Seven minutes and change.
Once the voices have gone silent I crack open the door and peer into a small but richly decorated hallway that seems to run a straight line through the length of the house. Several yards away the hallway opens up into the
huge central room. I can even see the back of the sweeping double staircase that winds up all three floors of the mansion. Past that the hall resumes. Doors dot both sides of the passage, all crisply painted white and all of them closed.
The floor is a rich, dark wood that seems to glow from endless polishing, perfectly complementing the flawlessly painted eggshell walls. The length of the hall is hung with poster-sized oil portraits of rich folk doing rich things, like foxhunting and playing polo. They might be memories of Reese family activities or they may be the products of an artist’s imagination, but they’re exceptionally well done and even more expensive, if I’m any judge.
There’s more hanging here than paintings. Another peeker is mounted on the ceiling just outside the laundry room. Clive really has security in mind. Maybe the paintings are more valuable than I thought. I check out the hall, trying to bring back every detail of Calvin’s crude napkin map. The door immediately on my left should be the servant’s quarters, an old married couple who are the only full-time residents of the house aside from the owners. Other doors lead to a music room, Clive’s study, a small service elevator and, at the farthest end, the family library.
Even if the elevator is silent enough to get me upstairs without alerting anyone, and it won’t be, I can’t reach it without passing right past the kitchen area and inevitably running into someone who won’t want me there. There are small, support stairways on either side of the building, either for the servant’s use or for those times when a massive, architect’s nightmare of a staircase just isn’t the way you want to go, like right now. Going up that way would only expose me to anyone who happens to be in the area for far too long, so side-stairs it is.
I ease the door open just wide enough do admit my body and tiptoe into the hallway, ears open. I’ll hear someone in a house this size before I see them, but for the moment the place is eerily silent. I’d actually like a little bit of noise. A little noise is cover, but silence is a trap.
The closest set of stairs is only a few feet away, directly opposite the servant’s door. I’m only in the hallway for a second, ducking into the open staircase as quickly as I can. They’re very well constructed, I note as I start bounding up them. Not a squeak to be heard. Forty steps later I’m pausing to catch my breath at the second-floor landing.
As I’d predicted, I can hear what’s coming before I see it. Sounds echo down the hallway, tiny impacts deadened by luxurious carpet. The second layer of the house’s security. I hang back in the stairwell as it passes into view.
It looks like a classic medieval knight, complete with broadsword and a long, triangular shield, only two feet tall and assembled with great skill from well-carved and highly polished quartz. An automaton, a magically constructed device given just enough sentience to perform menial tasks, like guard duty, then stand by the wall like an expensive decoration when it’s not needed. Someone should have given Clive Reese better advice. The things guarding your home should have more intelligence than animated rock. Magic users. Never heard of a good, old fashioned guard dog?
I stay out of sight. Automatons like these are individually designed, and I have no idea how these ones perceive the world. If they only sense magic, which would be my guess, then I could moonwalk past it and be perfectly fine. If they see the same spectrum we do, then it’ll raise the alarm while cutting me to ribbons with that sword. The blade may only be a foot and a half long, but I’ll bet it’s sharp enough to shave with. It passes by the stairwell, no doubt programmed to patrol this floor only. I take a moment to breathe, then climb to the third floor a little more slowly than I climbed to the second.
At the top I take a precious few seconds to orient myself. The top floor is only about a third of the distance of the bottom ones, the interior of the house almost pyramidal in design. On my right the central room yawns away, only a half-wall and a small, decorative railing separating people from a fatal drop. There are only three doors on this floor: the elevator double doors, one in the middle of the hall and one on the far end. That’s my target, according to Calvin. I step fully into the hall, ready to cover the final distance, and the step brings me into full view of the man standing at the end of the hall outside the bedroom door.
He looks solidly built, a short-sleeved button-down shirt all but popping at the biceps. His eyes pop wide when I come around the corner and into the hallway. No doubt he thought guard duty inside the house was the worst job he could pull. He probably thought it was punishment. I have to prove him right.
I don’t waste time thinking, launching myself into a sprint despite my screaming leg muscles. Action is much faster than reaction but he’s a good fifty feet away and apparently has good reflexes, so he has time to describe a complex, two-handed pattern in the air in front of him. My clothes catch on something, probably some kind of confinement spell, but just being in contact with my body imbues them with some minor magical resistance so there’s not much more effect than that as I punch through his spell like a rhino through a tent. I don’t give him a chance to try another. I hit him in a rush, leaping into the air ten feet away from him and driving my right knee into his chest with all my focused weight and all the momentum I’ve built up behind it. He folds like a pocket knife before slamming back into the wall with thunderous impact, dropping to the floor as still as a concrete block.
My watch tells me I have just over six minutes left as I reach the last door. I open it without knocking, grab the watchman’s collar, drag him inside and close it behind me.
Six
I’ve never met Celeste Reese before, never even seen a picture of her. Calvin had described her to me, but he clearly doesn’t have an artistic eye.
She has thick, pale blonde hair that falls well below her shoulders in delicate ringlets, elegantly framing a long, graceful neck and the soft skin of her throat. Her face is thin but vibrant, the girl next door that you never lived next door to. Her mouth is a soft, curved rosebud beneath a pert nose and eyes the hue of deep ocean waters. More than anything it’s the eyes that draw you to her, sparkling with humor and intelligence and just a hint of a sultry promise underneath it all.
They would have been the most dangerous eyes I’d ever seen, if I hadn’t spent the last six months dating a gorgon.
I put her at about five-two. Her body is lithe, almost waifish, slight but provocatively assembled, showcased by snug blue jeans, knee-high boots of soft black leather and a dark ivory blouse over a fairly flat chest. Her hands are slender but strong, twisting an ivory handkerchief until it practically cries. If she’s alarmed by a man dressed all in black right down to a hood and ski mask barging in uninvited while dragging an unconscious man into her bedroom she doesn’t show it.
“Celeste?”
“You’re Ian DeLong.” Her voice is surprisingly throaty for such a petite frame. “Calvin didn’t do you justice.”
“I wouldn’t want to trust a sketch artist with his eye, either.” It takes effort, but I wrangle the guard’s beefy arms behind him and lash his wrists together with his own belt. There’s a hamper near the door. I grab a thin, purple sock off the top of it and stuff it in his mouth. No need to get noisy now. I drag him away from the door.
“Did you kill him? It sounded like you killed him.”
She sounds more curious than scared. Money doesn’t care about the help, I guess. “What’s his name?”
“I don’t know. He’s one of Dad’s goons. Why does that matter?”
“People’s names should always matter.” I stand up once I’m satisfied that he’s not going to bother us for a minute or two. “Now, if you don’t mind, we have less than six minutes to get you out of here.”
She stands with a smooth motion, holding both hands out to me. “You’re going to have to do something with these, then.”
Both of her wrists are encircled by bracelets that look like seamless cobalt-blue stone, about two inches wide and half an inch thick, polished to a high shine. I lean in for a closer look, close enough to smell her
perfume. It’s a light, clean scent, like fresh citrus on an ocean breeze. I’m careful to keep my hands at my side so that I don’t touch the bracelets before I get a look. Better safe than sorry. There are no obvious enchantments – no inscriptions, runes, etchings, or paint. I say as much to Celeste.
“Dad doesn’t need to go fancy with stuff for around the house. He saves that for paying customers.”
“And what happens when they’re removed?”
“If I were to grab a chisel and break them myself the ring on his right hand will light up. Same thing will happen if I step outside the house. Calvin tells me that you can do better than that, though.”
“Maybe. I’m not sure.” I still haven’t taken my eyes off the bracelets even though we have to be approaching the five-minute mark. I’m weighing probabilities. In a perfect world, my touch will cause the bracelets to simply drop off her wrists with Daddy Reese being none the wiser. I’d settle for them remaining intact on her wrists but deactivated.
I’m well aware, though, that this is not a perfect world.
“You have free reign of the house, right?”
“They turn on if I get within ten feet of a door, but other than that, yeah.”
I stand up. “Okay, this is the plan. We make our way downstairs, then just before we reach the door I’ll shut them down. I’d like to think that when I do shut them down it’ll be so complete that your dad never gets the signal, but I have no way of knowing whether or not that’s the case. If they cooperate and nobody notices, we slip out. Kenta is waiting down by the gate. If the signal goes through, we run. Got it?”
No More Devils: A Visit to Superstition Bay Page 5
