by Bree Despain
I look at the time on my phone. It’s 8:07 now. Joe has been buying us time and additional distraction. Tobin and Lexie are in place now, midway up the stairs, surrounded by a knot of students who are trying to get a better view of the band.
I look for Garrick, hoping I do not see him, but spot him headed down the south corridor with an empty food tray. A little late on his timing. He disappears through a doorway. I watch the time on my phone. If he does his part right, then something should happen in exactly a minute and a half.
Daphne makes it to the stage to join Joe. The drummer hands her a microphone.
The time turns over to 8:09. I look toward the south corridor.
Nothing.
Harpies, I’m going to kill Garrick.
Five more seconds, and just as the band is striking up and the crowd is cheering in a frenzy, I feel a rumble under my feet and a popping sound, and Garrick comes dashing out of the boys’ bathroom.
Never mind.
Even from this far away, I can see that his feet are wet. He approaches one of the security guards who has descended the south stairs. He swings his arms widely, gesturing toward the bathroom, and I presume that he is frantically explaining that a water pipe has burst under one of the sinks. Hopefully leaving out the part in which he had caused it to happen by boiling the water in the pipe with his lightning power.
The guard pulls out his radio and does exactly what I had hoped. In a matter of seconds, the guards at the top of the south stairs descend in a hurry. They follow Garrick in a rush to the bathroom.
The band starts playing, and with all the attention in the room focused on them, I am the only one who notices as Tobin and Lexie slip away from the crowd on the stairs and up into the corridor leading to the mayor’s office.
I am inclined to follow them, my anxiety egging me on to make sure they don’t mess up their end of the plan, but as Daphne’s voice fills the rotunda, singing a duet with Joe, a calming sensation ripples through my body. My rationality returns to me. Calix and Terresa are watching my every move. If I were to follow Tobin and Lexie, it would only lead the Skylords right to them.
Instead, I hope to Hades that they can get the job done.
chapter thirty-one
TOBIN
When the band starts playing, Lexie and I rush up the remainder of the stairs. Lexie almost trips in her superhigh heels until I grab her hand to steady her. I don’t know why she chose such ridiculous shoes for our mission, but I’m betting it’s so she can get an inch of height over me. At the top of the stairs, Lexie slips off her terrible footwear and we disappear—sprinting—into the hallway that leads to my mother’s office before anyone notices we’ve slipped past the no-admittance signs.
“We’re clear,” I say, looking behind us to check that we haven’t been followed. “Let me just catch my breath for a second.”
“Holy crap, that was a rush!” Lexie bounces up and down, clearly very excited. I glance away, not wanting to be caught in a stare. Maybe it’s just the excitement of the evening taking over, but I can’t help thinking about the first (and only other) time Lexie and I had snuck away from a party together. She’d dared me into jumping into a swimming pool fully clothed, and we’d swam under the moonlight, cracking jokes about the “cool kids” whose party we’d crashed.
But that was when we were only thirteen. Back before Lexie had joined up with Pear and the Sopranos freshman year—back when she’d still wear Princess Leia T-shirts to school and I thought she was the coolest girl in Olympus Hills.
I hear footsteps running toward us from farther down the hall.
“Someone’s coming.” I look back and forth, hoping to find a room to duck into quickly, but Lexie grabs both of my arms and shoves me against the wall. She kisses me, hard, and wraps her hands under my ears, nearly knocking my fedora from my head with her sudden movements.
Stunned, I almost push her away, but then rethinking, I kiss her back. The memory of my first kiss flits through my mind—a peck against Lexie’s lips under the water of that pool. (Another dare from Lexie that I couldn’t back down from.)
Had the memory of that night gotten to her as well?
A guard jogs past us, heading toward the commotion downstairs. “Nice, Tobin,” he says under his breath, and I realize he must be one of my mother’s staff whom I’m friendly with. Perhaps that’s why he passes us without stopping. When he turns the corner, Lexie pulls away. My lips tingle as blood rushes back into them.
“Wow,” she says.
I think she’s echoing my thoughts until she goes on. “I can’t believe that actually worked,” she says. “I always thought it was so lame when they do that in movies, but it was the only thing I could think of when I heard that guard coming.”
“Well, I’m glad you did,” I say.
“I’m sure you are,” she says, slipping on her shoes so she’s taller than me again. She opens her clutch purse and pulls out a lipstick.
“I meant, I’m glad you thought of something in time …,” I start to protest.
“I’m so sure that’s all it was,” she says, freshening up her lipstick without a mirror. She gives off the air like deciding to kiss me was no big deal on her end.
This attitude, which she’d picked up from Pear, was the exact reason we had stopped being friends after that summer.
Lexie presses her lips together and then slips her lipstick back in her purse. “So where’s your mom’s office?”
“Just around that last corner over there.”
We approach the door. I pull out Sage’s Code Cracker Prototype 3.0—as it’s labeled with masking tape and magic marker in Sage’s once-juvenile handwriting—from my jacket pocket.
“Here’s hoping this works,” I say, attaching it to the door’s electronic keypad.
Lexie grabs my arm and looks back and forth down the hall. I can feel her excitement trembling through her hands. I run the program on Sage’s machine and watch as the numbers spin. Slowly, each number space locks on a specific digit, and I think about how nuts this situation is. I’m standing here in a tuxedo, a beautiful girl on my arm—one who just made out with me in the hall, no less—and I am cracking into a locked office with a techno gadget. Too bad we didn’t rappel in from the ceiling.
Playing Bond is definitely more fun than being Q.
Now if only we can make our getaway in an Aston Martin that can shoot rockets …
The keypad on Sage’s machine flashes green, and I hear a click.
“That was fast,” Lexie says, squeezing my arm. But there isn’t a guard coming this time to necessitate her touching me.
“We’re not done yet. That was just the door to the office. We still have to get into the vault.” I open the door, let the two of us in, and then close and lock it behind us as an extra precaution. I walk to the back of my mom’s office and push at the side of the bookcase behind her desk. It glides out of the way, revealing a vault door large enough to walk through.
“Seriously? She hides the safe behind a bookcase?” Lexie says. “It’s like we’re in a real spy movie.”
“I was just thinking the exact same thing,” I say.
Lexie smiles at me, and I smile back. Maybe there really is still a bit of the old, geeky, fun Lexie in her somewhere.
I attach the code cracker to the vault’s keypad and start the program again. This is clearly going to take much longer than the door. A few minutes pass in silence, but the device has only identified the first three numbers out of six. I start to worry about that guard who passed us in the hall—he might reconsider and come back to look for us.
Lexie starts to pace the room, her excitement shifting to anxiety. “How much longer?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a couple of more minutes? Maybe more like ten?”
“I’m not sure we have that much time.”
“I know.” The excitement and adrenaline of the whole experience are wearing off. I hadn’t anticipated it to take this long.
Two more numbers
lock into place, one after the other. Only one left. With a gasp, Lexie stops pacing and looks at the door.
“Did you hear that?” she whispers.
“What?”
“Sounded like footsteps. I think someone’s coming.”
“It’s almost done. Come here.” The last number locks in place, and the vault clicks open. I push the door in and shove Lexie inside, just as I see a silhouette at the fogged glass in the office door. Someone is definitely coming. I step inside the vault and try and slide the bookshelf back over the door’s opening, while leaving it open just a crack.
“What are you doing?” Lexie whispers frantically. “They’ll see.”
“I don’t want to get trapped in here. If I close it all the way, I may not be able to get it open again,” I say, realizing that I probably should have mentioned that I’m a tad claustrophobic when we started planning this heist. And Lexie wouldn’t exactly be my first choice for witnessing my panic attack if we get trapped in a vault together.
“If you get us caught, I’ll have the Sopranos skin you alive.”
There’s the Lexie I’m used to. “Shhh.”
Even in the dark, I can see Lexie’s scowl. I turn back and watch through the crack as the office door opens. I swear under my breath. It’s my mother.
I figured if somebody catches us in her office, I’d try to pass it off as if I were running an errand for my mother (how else would I have been able to unlock the door?), but this is a more difficult complication to talk my way out of. Especially now that we’re in the vault.
Mom walks in, carrying her briefcase and talking to someone on a walkie-talkie. “Yes, I know. Get maintenance down there and fix it!”
The other end of the line says something garbled that I can’t understand.
“Then shut the water off to the south hall. I don’t see why this is so hard, Johnson. Just get it done.” She drops her briefcase forcefully on her desk.
Another garbled response.
“I’ve had it with your incompetence, Johnson. Do you really think this is something I should have to deal with? I’m going to be there in three minutes. If this isn’t resolved by then, you can bet we’ll be freeing up your future.”
That is my mother’s favorite euphemism for firing someone. She storms out of the door, slamming it behind her.
“Holy Prada, that was close.” Lexie lets out a huge sigh, like she’d been holding her breath the whole time.
“Let’s get the scroll and get out of here before anyone else comes back.”
“You mean this?” Lexie holds out a small wrapped scroll of papyrus, sitting in an open velvet box.
I raise my eyebrows. “How did you find that so quickly?”
“What? You didn’t think I was just going to stand here and do nothing while we waited,” she says, clearly impressed by herself.
I have to admit that I am equally impressed.
I take the scroll from her hands and check the markings on the outer seal. “This is it.”
“I gotta admit, I expected it to be bigger,” she says. “Aren’t scrolls supposed to be big and long?”
“Size doesn’t matter,” I mumble. “It’s probably a fragment of something larger.” But I’m grateful for the small size when I slide the box containing the scroll in my inside jacket pocket.
“Good work, by the way,” I say.
With one hand on her hip, Lexie cocks her head and blows me a kiss. She saunters past me and slides the bookcase out of the way. I pull the door closed behind me and make sure the bookcase is back in its original position, and follow Lexie out into the hall.
“That was fun,” she says. “I could get used to this kind of thing.”
“Thinking of taking the Sopranos to the next level?” I say, raising my eyebrows.
“Let’s just say the wheels are turning.”
Lexie and I start down the hall. She slips her hand into mine and leans her head against my shoulder. For a moment, I think she’s being genuine with this show of affection, but then I see the guard from before coming around the corner. His name is Carson or Conway, and he’s worked security for many of my mom’s parties at the house.
“You two,” he says, when he sees us. “Find a different spot to make out.”
“Yes, sir.” I give him a mock solute, and Lexie stands up straight and does the same. We both burst out laughing.
“Just get out of here, okay? This corridor is supposed to be off-limits for dance attendees.”
I nod, and we walk away, back toward the balcony that overlooks the dance. Maybe it’s just because she needs my support in her heels, or maybe it’s because she remembers that there used to be something between us all those years ago, but to my surprise, Lexie keeps her hand wrapped around mine as we descend the stairs.
chapter thirty-two
DAPHNE
I manage to make it through the song with Joe’s band, and no one in the audience seems to notice the one line I flubbed in the middle. Instead, they break into uproarious applause. I take a bow and excuse myself from the stage before Joe leads the band into a “slow song for all you couples out there” from his Saturn’s Ring album. I’ve got my eyes on the south stairway, waiting for Tobin and Lexie to make their return, when I step onto the dance floor and a hand wraps around my elbow. A deep voice asks, “May I have this dance?”
The voice sounds like Haden’s, but there’s something off with his tone, and I turn toward the speaker, to find myself in the arms of a stranger.
I try to pull away, but he grips me tighter.
“Who are you?” I demand.
“You don’t see the resemblance?” he asks, with smile. “My brother and I are twins, after all.”
“Rowan?” I say, with a gasp, seeing it now. He’s not an identical twin to Haden, but they are definitely brothers, Rowan being the blonder, brown-eyed, slighter-built one. I can feel the strength of his arms as he sweeps me onto the dance floor against my will.
“What do you want?” I ask. I don’t want to go along with the box step he tries to lead me in, but it’s preferable to being dragged, so I step in time with his movements.
He pulls me closer. “You know what I want.”
I stomp on his foot, hard, with my heel.
He loosens his grip. “To negotiate a trade.”
The hairs on my arms stand on end, and I look over Rowan’s shoulder to see Haden approaching, through the crowd of dancers. Electric heat crackles around him, and the tone ricocheting off him sounds downright lethal.
I shake my head at him, telling him to stay back. I’d like to think that Haden would know better than to start a fight in a crowd like this, but I have a feeling Rowan knows exactly how to provoke him into doing just the wrong thing.
And if Rowan is ready to negotiate, I’m not going to risk losing this opportunity.
Haden stops midstride at my behest. But he doesn’t leave, either. He stands in the middle of the dance floor, his fists clenched and red, while other dancers try to navigate around him.
“What are your terms?” I ask Rowan.
“The Compass for the talisman.” He sends me out in a twirl and then brings me back into his arms. “Plus fifty thousand dollars, cash.”
So he’d figured out that his funds have gone dry?
“You do have my talisman?”
“Perhaps,” I say, trying to sound like I’m being coy and not like I’m lying as I swing under his arm. Rowan’s talisman is still as fried as a charcoal briquette, and we are no closer to finding Simon’s talisman than before, but Rowan doesn’t need to know those things.
Rowan brings me back into his arms. “But there is one more thing that I want in addition to the money and the talisman.” He presses his hand into the small of my back and leans me into a dip. “A kiss,” he says, his lips almost touching my throat.
“Bite me,” I say, losing any pretense of being polite.
“Is that an invitation?” he whispers, and pulls me back upright.
&
nbsp; The song ends, and Rowan lets go of me. “Thank you for the dance,” he says, with a bow that makes me wonder if he learned his party skills by studying Jane Austen movies. He is doing a fine job of impersonating Mr. Wickham. “Discuss my proposition with my brother. I will wait in the entry hall until nine for your … decision.”
He turns on his heel and heads for the entry hall. Haden starts after him.
“Wait, Haden,” I say, grabbing his shoulder. “I’ve made a deal for the Compass.”
But I know he isn’t going to like the terms.
“Who’s the major hottie you were dancing with?” Lexie asks as she and Tobin approach the coat-check closet. I’d texted them to meet us here as soon as I saw them coming down the stairs. Dax had volunteered to take over manning the station from Ethan when Garrick reported that someone was trying to spike the punch.
“Rowan,” I say, like his name tastes bad on my tongue.
“Seriously?” Lexie says as they squeeze into the closet with Haden and me. “And I thought Haden would be the more dashing of the two—”
“Did you get the scroll?” Haden asks, cutting her off. He seems to be barely holding himself together since I told him about Rowan’s demands. I have a feeling that had been Rowan’s exact intention when he’d demanded a kiss from me. Either that, or having to come up with fifty thousand dollars of Simon’s money on the fly is what has Haden on edge.
Tobin pats his jacket. “Locked and loaded.”
I nod with approval and then tell them about what happened with Rowan. “The only problem: I insinuated that we had a talisman. Now I’m thinking that was probably a mistake. How are we supposed to trade something we don’t have?”
“I’m certain he will try to double-cross us as well,” Haden says. “This can still work. We can use his same tactics against him. Dax went out the kitchen exit and is already outside in the parking lot, waiting to follow Rowan when he leaves. If we know where he’s living, we can go for the Compass when he least expects it.”
