Chapter Eleven
The sun broke through the morning clouds, illuminating the sky in the sort of crisp magical light that was perfect for picnics, walks in the park, and surveillance.
Ddraig Goch’s mansion was located in the so-rich-you-could-never-afford-to-live-here town of Weston. Less than a mile away, on a green-grassed hill, stood another mansion, which belonged to a lawyer who knew Breadknife through ways best left unexplored. Since he was currently on vacation, he had agreed to let us use the place. It was anyone’s guess what dirt Breadknife had on him that made him so complaisant.
By sheer luck, due to a combination of topography and aggressive gardening, there was one bedroom on the top floor of the lawyer’s mansion that had a direct line of sight to the premises of Ddraig Goch’s home. And this was our base of operations. The room enabled us to maintain a constant surveillance on the mansion’s personnel, slowly figuring out the shift changes of the security guards, what time the gardeners showed up and left, the exact path of the patrol routes… anything that might be important.
Through the twin lenses of my binoculars, I looked at Ddraig Goch’s home for the first time, making small notes on the blueprints that were spread on the king-size bed by my side. The bed was inviting, the bedsheets tightly spread and clean, the mattress possessing that perfect balance between soft and firm.
Sinead and Isabel had taken the night shift, and now it was my turn, with Kane as my shift partner. I’d showed up at six in the morning to relieve my friends, who were blurry-eyed and cranky, as expected. I’d asked Kane to show up at seven-thirty. I felt a bit tense about spending a long day with him, and I wanted to have a bit of time to myself before he arrived, to settle into the relaxed atmosphere of a long, eventless day.
As I waited, I practiced breathing steadily, and relaxing the different muscles of my body. I had to be able to control my emotions by the time we broke into the dragon’s mansion. I couldn’t let the entire job be blown because my hands suddenly decided to combust.
When does a house stop being a house and become a mansion? Is it a simple matter of number of rooms? Six rooms means it’s a house, eighteen means it’s a mansion? Or maybe it’s the size. If it takes a few minutes to cross from one side to the other, it’s definitely a mansion. Or it could be style—the expensiveness of the furniture, the intricate carvings framing the doors and windows, the serving staff roaming the halls.
Ddraig Goch’s mansion had left those distinctions far behind. It was one-hundred-percent mansion, and inching its way toward being a palace.
The front lawn was immense, a bright green carpet of carefully mowed grass. At the edges grew enormous red maple trees, their leaves creating an explosion of orange, red, and pink. Towering above the garden was the mansion itself, a light-brown three-story structure spotted with arches and ancient-looking windows and terraces. An enormous porch, large enough to contain my entire apartment, protruded from the third floor. A greenhouse sat on the roof of the mansion, its glass panes clean and translucent, a myriad of strange plants growing inside.
I had stared at the blueprints of the mansion for hours and knew the layout well, but the place still took my breath away.
The sound of footsteps coming up the stairs made me lower the binoculars and glance at the time. Twenty past seven. He was early. A second later, Kane appeared in the doorway, a smile on his face, holding a Starbucks bag.
He set the Starbucks bag on a tasteless mahogany dresser that stood against the wall by the door. “It’s the first time I spend a whole day with a woman in a bedroom, and all she wants to do is peep at the neighbors.”
“How long did it take you to think of that quip?” I asked, raising the binoculars again and looking through them.
“About ten minutes. My quick wit doesn’t really show up until noon.” I heard the bag rustle as he rummaged through it. “I didn’t know how you drink yours, but you struck me as someone who likes her coffee strong.”
“You were right,” I said. I still held the binoculars to my eyes, but I heard his soft steps on the carpet and smelled the strong scent of coffee. I lowered the binoculars and took the cup from him. “Thanks.”
“I also got us some muffins.” He sat on the edge of the bed, moving aside the blueprints, and his leg brushed against mine accidentally. He had taken off the trench coat. Underneath he wore a white T-shirt that accentuated the width of his shoulders. His face was lit by the sunlight filtering through the window, and his grass-green eyes seemed to shine. It took me a few seconds to realize I was staring at him, almost mesmerized, and I pulled my eyes away, doing my best not to blush.
“See anything interesting?” he asked.
I blinked, my tongue suddenly tied. Oh—he was talking about the mansion, not about his face.
“Uh… nothing we didn’t know about beforehand. Take a look.” I removed the binoculars’ strap from my neck, handing them to him. He leaned forward to look out the window, and I shifted my chair slightly to give him some space.
“Oh, wow,” he muttered. “That’s a big-ass mansion.”
I sipped from my coffee, and determined that Kane had pegged my taste perfectly. Black coffee, strong, bitter, perfect. I felt almost tearful with gratitude.
“What else do you see?” I asked, my voice flat and innocent. I needed to know this guy was the real thing. Was he an actual sorcerer, or was he just a guy who thought it was cool to mutter in Latin?
He took a few seconds to answer, and when he did, his voice had an edge. “There’s an aura of magic shimmering from all the windows. It’s well hidden; whoever cast it was a master. I assume it’s some sort of ward.”
I nodded with satisfaction. I couldn’t see the aura myself, but I knew it was there. It had been mentioned in Breadknife’s notes. The fact that Kane could see it indicated he had a sharp third eye, a good sign of his powers.
“The windows are all warded against intruders,” I said. “Anyone who tries to enter or leave through them dies. Anyone who breaks them dies.”
“Dies of what?”
“Does it matter?”
“Just professional interest. Is it a heart attack? Does it make your brain explode? Does it make you combust? Turn you into a toad?”
“Turning into a toad isn’t dying.”
“Fine. Do you turn into a dead toad? I just want to know how powerful the magic is.”
“I don’t know. It’s a ward that kills you,” I said testily. “Maybe it disintegrates you, maybe you die of sniffles. The point is, it’s terminal. You die. Cease to be. Can you break the spell?”
“It depends.” He kept looking through the binoculars in concentration. “Maybe. Yes, I think so. With enough time. But whoever cast the spell would instantly know it’s been broken.”
“That’s not good. We don’t want to alert anyone.”
“Then we’re not entering through the windows.” He lowered the binoculars and glanced at me. “There’s no spell on the front door.”
“There’s no spell on the back door either.” I leaned toward him and took the binoculars from him. His eyes lingered on mine for a moment, and I met them, my gaze steady. Then I drew back, and put the binoculars back to my eyes, looking at the doors. “The problem is, there’s always guards stationed by the doors. No one enters or leaves without their permission.”
“We’ll have to take care of that.”
I shook my head unhappily. He was right, of course, but I preferred to avoid it if possible. I could think of a myriad of ways to take care of the guards, and all of them posed risks I didn’t want to take.
Kane got up and fetched the muffins. They were still warm, and I snagged the chocolate chunk one, leaving the walnut muffin for Kane. In this world’s vicious food chain, I am chocolate’s natural predator. We ate our muffins in silence, and then Kane pulled out his strange cigarette pack. He put a cigarette in his mouth, but I quickly leaned forward and plucked it out.
“No smoking here.”
“Seriously?” He seemed outraged.
“We had very clear instructions. We’re guests here, after all.” I rummaged in my purse and took out a pack, which I handed to him. “Here. I made these some time ago. Smokeless cigarettes.”
“What, like vaping?”
“No. These are actual cigarettes, but the smoke dissipates once you expel it. No smoke, no smell, no problem.”
He lit one suspiciously. Its tip glowed bright green as he inhaled, a strange quirk of the magical tobacco I’d created. He breathed out, the smoke instantly disappearing.
“These taste like ass,” he said.
“Well, they’re a bit old, I guess,” I admitted. “But it’s real tobacco, so you still get the lung cancer and stains on your teeth.”
“You should find a job in marketing.” He took another drag from the cigarette. Despite his complaint, he didn’t seem about to stub it out. He used his empty coffee cup as an ashtray, puffing on my handmade cigarette with a thoughtful look in his eyes.
“So…” he said, five minutes later, the cigarette gone. “Now what?”
“Our shift is just starting.” I smiled at him. “Learn to appreciate your quiet time with me. We’ll be here for ten more hours.”
“Ten?”
“Isabel and Sinead were here all night. You got the better shift, trust me.”
He groaned, got up, paced the room. Sat down. Got up again.
“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.”