by Alex Rivers
“Try taking off your shoes. It’ll make you feel more comfortable,” I suggested. “Make fists with your toes.”
“Fists with my toes?”
“It’s a Die Hard reference.”
“Oh. I never saw that movie.”
I gaped at him, incredulous. “You never saw Die Hard? The best Christmas movie ever made?”
“Die Hard doesn’t sound like a Christmas movie.”
“Come on! ‘Now I have a machine gun, ho ho ho’?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
I shook my head in disbelief and raised the binoculars to my eyes. The guards at the front gate waved a black car inside, and I noted its license plate number in the logbook while Kane removed his shoes and socks. I glanced quickly at his feet. They were large, much larger than mine. When he sat on the bed, our bare feet were quite close. I had a sudden urge to slide my foot up his ankle, and that, in turn, led to other images flickering in my imagination.
We kept at it for a few hours, exchanging the binoculars between us, sometimes talking, sometimes remaining silent for long stretches. This was the main reason for the shared shift. There was no real rationale to have two people here—one would have been enough, especially during the day, when staying awake was less of a hurdle. But I wanted us to get to know each other better, to cement us as a team. When push came to shove, we would need to rely on each other, and be able to predict each other’s actions.
What do people who spend long hours together talk about? We discussed our taste in books and movies, which hardly intersected. I read thrillers and mysteries; he read literary books about the struggle of everyday life. I liked action movies and rom-coms; he preferred science fiction and fantasy. Finally, we found one movie we both agreed was fantastic—Cool Runnings, about the Jamaican bobsledding team, which we’d both seen as kids.
He told me about his sister and her gift for playing the viola, stunning the room into silence with her craft, everyone around her listening with rapt attention. When she’d finish the piece she was playing, she’d inevitably smile in an embarrassed, innocent way, as if she was flustered that everyone had listened to her play that silly tune for all that time. When I asked him if she still played, he muttered that she’d been hospitalized, and refused to discuss it further.
I told him about my own childhood, before my parents died, all my recollections positive and bright and happy. I had no bad memories of my parents. I’m sure they occasionally shouted at me for no reason, or acted in ways that, as a child, I found annoying. But those moments had been erased by time and by life in foster care. And every good memory—every picnic on the beach, every night curled in my mother’s arms, every day I was sick and my father took care of me—they had all become chiseled into my mind, a source of comfort.
He asked what happened to them, and I said shortly, “They died when I was eight.”
I guess neither of us felt close enough to discuss the darker moments of our history.
For lunch, we ordered from a nearby restaurant that delivered. I had oven-cooked salmon with garlic, and Kane had a medium-rare steak.
“Who’s paying for all this?” he asked, chewing.
“Our employer.”
“Very generous of him.”
“Trust me. Generosity is very far from his mind.” I picked up the binoculars, scanning the mansion for the hundredth time. “Once we’re inside, we need to be able to open the vault door. It has a keycard lock, a combination lock, and is also warded by a set of runes called… Södermanland Futhark?”
“It’s Futhark, not Futhark.”
“God, you’re like an old, unshaved version of Hermione. Do you know how to counter them?” I took another bite of the salmon. It was perfect, still a bit juicy, melting in my mouth.
“Yes. And those kind of runes are easier to break without alerting the person who inscribed them. You see, runes, unlike wards, aren’t constantly maintained by a sorcerer. They’re inscribed, and then they just—”
“I know the difference between runes and wards, thank you. No need to mansplain it to me.”
“Right.” He grinned. “But I can’t break combination locks and keycard locks.”
I nodded. “That’s not up to you. Ddraig Goch’s security chief has a keycard, and knows the combination. So we’ll have to find a way to get to him.”
“Like what?”
“Every man has a weakness. Maybe he’s having an affair and we can blackmail him. Maybe he has crippling gambling debts that we can use. Maybe he’s addicted to heroin. There’s always something. We’ll find it.”
“You sound very sure.”
“This isn’t my first rodeo.”
For dessert I opened my brand-new backpack, retrieving a bag of M&Ms and two Snickers bars. In retrospect, eating those was a mistake, as both of us were jittery afterward—not an ideal state for an additional five-hour shift of surveillance. I tried to pass the time by coming up with ideas of how to infiltrate the mansion without going through the front or back doors. They quickly became more and more ridiculous, as my sugar-addled mind hopped from tunneling, to blasting our way through, to me dueling the dragon one-on-one.
And then my eye caught a movement somewhere unexpected. A section of the greenhouse wall suddenly moved, opening, and a gardener walked outside. I pressed the binoculars harder into my eyes. I hadn’t noticed a door there at all.
The gardener fiddled with the greenhouse’s door, making sure that it remained open. Then he lit a cigarette.
“Look at that.” I gave Kane the binoculars. “There’s a door to the greenhouse. The blueprints didn’t note that.”
“The door’s not warded,” Kane muttered, looking carefully. “So we might be able to get in through there.”
He returned the binoculars. I glanced through them again. No door handle, no lock. How would someone on the roof open it? The gardener had intentionally left it open while he was smoking.
“I wish we could see how it’s opened from the outside,” I muttered. “There’s probably a hidden button somewhere.”
“Watch the gardener,” Kane said. Then he began to murmur under his breath, a string of syllables I didn’t catch.
“I am watching the gardener. But the door’s open.” I gritted my teeth in frustration.
Kane’s voice rose as he chanted, the words strange and arcane. The mystical energy in the room crackled against my skin.
“Kane… what—”
And then suddenly the greenhouse door, hundreds of yards away, slammed shut.
“Did you do that?” I whispered.
“Yeah.” He breathed heavily. “God, I hate telekinesis. It always leaves me itchy and dry all over. What’s the gardener doing?”
“Mostly… swearing at the door,” I said, watching as the gardener paced to and fro, shaking his fist angrily, shouting at the door as his face grew red. Finally, he retrieved a phone from his pocket and called someone.
A few minutes later, a woman dressed as a maid opened the greenhouse’s door. She and the gardener exchanged a few words, and the gardener walked inside, closing the door behind him.
“He had to get someone to open the door for him,” I said, disappointed. “No way to open it from the outside.”
Still. It was unguarded, and there were no wards. If only we could get someone to open it for us…
The sun slowly set, plunging the mansion’s lawns into darkness. Only some lamps, few and far between, lit the main path to the front door. I could still see the front gate, and an occasional silhouette moving across one of the mansion’s windows, but that was it. My eyes were tired, my forehead throbbing. Then, just as I was about to pass the binoculars to Kane, the front door opened, and a man came out. He strode to the gate and began talking to the guards. His manner was unmistakable—the manner of a superior.
“This is probably the security chief.” I handed the binoculars to Kane. “This is the guy who has the keycard and combination to the vault. His name
is Maximillian Fuchs.”
“Sounds very German.” Kane watched him for a while. “Looks full of himself.”
I took back the binoculars, ingraining his face in my memory. I regretted not getting a camera with a zoom lens. It would have been handy to have this man’s picture.
The security chief went around the yard, inspecting the walls, probably verifying that nothing blocked the security cameras. Then he marched back into the mansion, closing the door behind him. His movements had been sleek, sharp, and fast. Even after he disappeared, the guards on shift seemed more alert, as if his presence had jump-started their motivation.
Nothing much happened after that. I was tired of watching the mansion, and was already trying to decide if we needed to keep up the surveillance for much longer. I checked the time. We had thirty minutes until Isabel came to take the next shift. I handed the binoculars to Kane.
“Here, watch them. I want to shower.”
“Seriously?”
“My bathroom back home is as cramped as a broom closet. I want to be able to shower in comfort for once.”
I went into the bathroom, which was as large as my entire bedroom, and took off my clothes. I stepped into the shower and turned on the hot water. The water pressure was violent and constant, unlike the shower back home, which alternated between dribbling and spurting water as if spitting at me. I let the powerful current of water wash the tiredness from my body. I found a shampoo bottle that smelled of lavender, and washed my hair twice. Finally, my skin practically pink, I turned off the water and stepped out, dripping over the rug on the floor. I grabbed the large towel, dried my hair and my body, and wiped the steam off the mirror to take a long look at myself.
A refreshed, wet Lou Vitalis stared back at me from the reflection. I smiled at her, then looked around for my bag, which was nowhere in sight.
I’d left it in the room.
Groaning, I wrapped the towel around my body, tying it carefully. Then I slipped out of the bathroom.
Kane blinked as I crossed the room, clad in a towel, my wet hair plastering my face. Ignoring him, I bent to pick up the bag I’d left by the side of the bed.
The knot I’d tied broke free, and the towel’s edge flopped loose. Cool air breezed against my ass and my right boob. Squeaking in horror, I fumbled at the towel, my bare nipple standing to attention in the cold. I just managed to keep the left part of the towel flattened to my body, hiding my feminine charms, though probably not as thoroughly as I would have wanted. My left breast was well hidden, but given that it was quite similar to the right one, Kane could probably deduce its general shape. Finally, I managed to grab the corner of the towel and quickly covered myself, feeling all the blood rushing to my face.
Kane studiously gazed out the window, the binoculars pasted to his face. I would have liked to assume that my performance had been lost on him, but the amused smile that he failed to hide hinted otherwise.
My cheeks crimson, I hurried to the bathroom, where I quickly took off the traitorous towel and put on a pair of jeans and a dark green T-shirt. Then, retrieving a comb from my bag, I hurriedly brushed my hair a few times, giving it a semblance of order.
I strutted from the bathroom, trying to look as if I couldn’t care less about my impromptu show.
“Oh look,” Kane said, still looking out the window with the binoculars. “It’s almost a full moon tonight.”
Chapter Twelve
“No one told me hunting hippos was part of the plan,” Kane said.
We sat around the large table of the HHT meeting room. Kane peered, fascinated, at the paperweight that decorated each table in the office complex—the man with his foot on a hippo.
“We’re not hunting hippos,” I said.
“Good. Hippos are dangerous.”
“Can I start the presentation?” Sinead asked.
I blinked. “What presentation?”
“The PowerPoint presentation I made.”
“You made a… PowerPoint presentation? To explain how we intend to break into the dragon’s vault?”
“Lou,” Sinead said patiently. “I’m the CEO of Hippopotamus Hunting Trips. How do you think I got to where I am?”
“You printed a bunch of business cards that said so.”
“That’s true. But it’s also because of my amazing organizational skills. Now hang on, let me figure out how this works.”
It took a few minutes to connect the projector to Sinead’s laptop, and when she finally succeeded, the screen on the wall displayed the words The Plan for Breaking into Ddraig Goch’s Vault. A small smiling dragon stood in the bottom left corner, with a tiny orange blaze coming from his mouth.
“Catchy title,” Kane quipped.
“I wanted it to be clear,” Sinead said. She hit a key and the slide changed, the new one titled How to overcome the dragon’s senses. There was that green dragon again at the bottom, with crudely painted squiggly lines emanating from his head. Sinead’s graphics skills were giving me a migraine.
“What dragon senses?” Isabel asked.
“A dragon knows whenever someone enters his lair,” I explained. “It’s the way they’re wired. So once anyone places a foot in Goch’s mansion, he knows. He can sense their aura or something.”
“Can we confuse his senses with magic or anything?” Isabel asked.
“No,” Kane and I both said together. I gave him an irritated look, and then added, “Think of the lair as an extension of the dragon’s body. No matter what we do, he’ll know when we enter.”
“Then we should break in when he’s far away. That way, by the time he gets back—”
“Ddraig Goch hasn’t left Boston in the past twenty-two years,” I told her. “In fact, he rarely even leaves his mansion. He doesn’t like to be far from his hoard.”
“Happily,” Sinead interjected, “we can work around it.”
“Right,” I said. “In six days, there’s a large banquet in Ddraig Goch’s mansion. At least a hundred people are invited. He’ll be expecting a bunch of people in his mansion that evening, so it won’t matter if we show up. Also, he won’t be sleeping.”
“Don’t we want him to be sleeping?” Isabel asked, almost on cue. “Usually that’s when burglaries happen, right?”
“Dragons sleep in their vaults,” I said. “And they often sleep for days. We want to make sure he’s awake when we break in—awake and busy mingling with his guests, away from his vault. Of course, we need to get invited to that banquet.”
“How do we do that?” Isabel asked.
“I’m working on getting Lou onto the guest list.” Sinead smiled proudly.
“Well, not the guest list exactly,” I pointed out. “Sinead’s trying to get me a job as a waitress at the banquet. I’ll be our man on the inside.”
“Okay,” grunted Kane. “So you’re a waitress. Congratulations. How do the rest of us enter the mansion?”
“We’re hoping we can hack the dragon’s computer, get another name onto the guest list,” I answered.
Kane raised an eyebrow at Isabel. “Are you a hacker?” he asked. “Because these two just spent ten minutes hooking a computer up to a projector. They don’t strike me as hacker material.”
Isabel looked offended. “I hardly know how to turn on a computer,” she said with the strange pride technophobes sometimes display. She studied each of us in turn, and then added sharply, “There’s no hacker here. Aren’t we missing a crew member? I was under the impression there should be five of us.”
“That’s explained in slide number seven,” Sinead complained. “You’re all ruining my presentation.”
“Our fifth member is in a bit of a pinch,” I mumbled.
Sinead rolled her eyes. “That’s Lou’s delicate way of saying he’s essentially a dead man.”
“Why?” Kane asked.
“His name is Harutaka Ikeda,” I answered. “And he’s—”
“That’s an interesting coincidence,” Kane interrupted. “Because I heard the Sha
des recently caught someone by that name in their sacred library.”
“That’s our guy,” I said cheerfully. “Silly Harutaka. Always getting himself into trouble.”
Isabel stared at me, biting her bright bubblegum-colored lips. “Lou, the Shades will execute him. No one is allowed into their library.”
“That’s why we need to get him out,” I said. “The Shades are keeping him in one of their warehouses. They’ll hold his trial during the next full moon.”
Sinead clicked frantically through her slides until she got to one that said Step 3—Saving Harutaka from the Shades. There was a hand-drawn man, painted black with a deranged red smiley face—presumably her attempt at drawing a Shade.
“The next full moon is tomorrow,” Kane said.
“Right. And they’ll probably execute him immediately after.”
“Just throwing an idea out there.” Kane folded his arms. “Maybe, instead of messing with a deadly cult, in addition to breaking into a dragon’s vault, we just find an alternative crew member?”
“We can’t,” I said. “The server’s security has been magically enhanced. We asked around. Harutaka’s the only one who can handle that.”
“But the Shades…” Isabel muttered.
“Not the nicest group of people,” I agreed mildly.
As cults go, the Shades were definitely one of the creepier ones. Like many before them, the Shades wanted immortality—and they’d actually found it. It just required one simple exchange. They relocated their souls from their bodies into their shadows. Shadows never got old. Shadows never died.
Strangely enough, their bodies stayed attached to their shadows. After all, with no body, there can be no shadow. Except now, the shadow made all the decisions. It thought and spoke and moved, and the body followed it and mimicked its actions like a… well, like a shadow.
The Shades were unnerving. Their human bodies were blank, empty things, as if they were in a coma, except they moved around, puppeteered by the shadows. It was also impossible to know what went on in their minds. Once they turned into shadows, their desires and motivations became unclear. Who knew what a shadow wanted, what it craved? But one thing was quickly established—they really didn’t like it when people entered their sacred library. People who did that always turned up dead. People like Harutaka.
