Chapter Twenty-Seven
The greenhouse was humid and warm. The relief of being away from the cold night air evaporated almost instantly, replaced by a sense of stuffiness and discomfort. The others shuffled past me as I hugged Sinead gently.
“How are you holding up?” I asked in a low voice.
“A bit dizzy,” she answered. “I’ll be good once I rest a bit.”
“You were amazing in there.”
“Yeah, I was great, how I almost let him kill me.” She seemed pale, shaken. “I couldn’t stop him, Lou. For a few seconds, all I wanted was for him to keep drinking. I can’t explain it.”
“Vampires are rumored to have ways of making their victims docile. I guess the rumors are true.” I squeezed her hand. “You did good.”
She smiled weakly.
I looked around me. It was hard to see the plants in the dark, but I glimpsed strange shapes. Huge twisted cones, long toothy leaves, gnarled branches looking like claws. Some of the plants seemed almost to move in the darkness, leaning toward us, as if noticing the intruders. The atmosphere was oppressive, hostile.
“Okay.” I glanced at my three companions. “Sinead will rest here. The rest of us go on to the vault door in the basement. Once we open the vault door—”
“If we open the door,” Isabel said.
“We will. Once we do, Isabel will join Sinead. Both of you will go down the rope, assume the roles of the baroness and her personal assistant, and drive away. Kane and I will crack the safe, grab the scales and the box, and teleport to safety.”
“My PowerPoint presentation explained it all much more succinctly.” Sinead grumbled.
“We can all watch it again once we’re out of here,” I muttered. “Harutaka, how are we doing with the security guards in the manor?”
“There are still two in the dining hall, with the guests,” he said. “One in the security room, watching the monitors, and a fourth patrolling the floors. But he seems to be spending a lot of the night in the security room with his friend. They’ve procured a bottle of wine from the banquet.”
“Where’s the dragon?”
“Still in the dining hall, talking to the attorney general.”
“Has anyone noticed that the mansion’s security chief is missing?”
“No… but if that patrol guard finds him unconscious on the floor, there might be questions.”
“We’ll take care of it,” I said. I pictured the blueprints in my mind, and thought of the room where I had seen the vampire bite Sinead. I could find the way there easily. “The floor is empty, right?”
“So far.”
“Let us know if that changes.” I turned to Sinead and held out my hand. “Can I have the card please?”
“I almost forgot.” She laughed shakily, and retrieved Maximillian’s magnetic card from her pocket. She handed it to me. “Be careful.”
“See you in an hour.” I tucked the card into my own pocket.
I crossed the greenhouse, Kane and Isabel behind me. I did my best to keep my distance from the creepier-looking plants, imagining one of them suddenly snapping at me. At the far end of the greenhouse, I found the stairs leading to the third floor. Eight stairs. With each one, the familiar sense of exhilaration and excitement that came with breaking into someone’s home intensified. It was difficult to acknowledge to myself that I had missed this feeling, the rush of knowing that getting caught here would mean prison or death, the giddy feeling of traipsing through someone else’s home without his awareness or consent, his valuables a mere touch away.
And what valuables they were.
Dragons live for centuries. And they dedicate their entire lifetime to collecting things. But they weren’t like typical hoarders, with rooms full of stacked newspapers, or balls of twine. No. They hoarded things of beauty and value. Every room we walked into was decorated with works of art, with cases displaying intricate pieces of jewelry. One room had a collection of Ming vases and other ceramics. Another had two curved swords crossing each other, hanging on the wall, their scabbards lined with jewels. Paintings hung on almost every wall, the colors vibrant, the details staggering.
The decorations weren’t necessarily in good taste. One room had two paintings I guessed belonged to the Renaissance period, hanging next to a huge postmodern painting of a yellow square and a red dot. The room’s carpet was Persian, and in the middle stood an enormous jade statue of an elephant. Dragons were known for their ferocity and attraction to treasures, not for their interior design capabilities. Ddraig Goch probably couldn’t care less if a marble statue of a Greek goddess didn’t match the Japanese swords that lined the walls in the room. In fact, maybe he liked it that way. Maybe it was just another way to demonstrate how he viewed us. After all, I didn’t bother to decorate my bedroom in a way that matched the expectations of the occasional cockroach that visited it.
“Look at all these things,” Kane said, staring wide-eyed at a jeweled crown in a display case.
“Don’t touch anything,” I reminded him. “He’ll know.”
He flashed me an irritated look, and I shrugged.
We finally reached the room of Maximillian Fuchs. He still lay on the floor, unconscious. The drug he had consumed should keep him sleeping for a few more hours at the very least.
I approached his inert body, motioning Kane to join me. He grabbed the vampire’s feet, while I slid a hand under his neck.
His head instantly twisted to the side, the mouth gaping open, reaching for my forearm. I hissed in fear and pulled my hand back, letting his head drop to the floor. His mouth snapped several times, making sharp clicking sounds. His eyes were still shut, the body inert. Kane dropped the vampire’s feet again, and we shared shocked glances.
“Jesus,” I muttered.
“What is it?” Harutaka whispered in my ear.
He couldn’t see the vampire, I remembered. “Looks like this thing’s reflexes are still sharp, even when he’s unconscious,” I said. “We should probably stay away from his teeth.”
We ended up pulling him up to the bed by his feet. It was clumsy work, and his head banged against the bedside twice. He could blame only himself for the headache he would have when he woke up.
Once Maximillian Fuchs was comfortably sleeping in his bed (feet on his pillow, shoes still on) we turned to the stairs. I knew the layout of the mansion by heart and didn’t hesitate as I strode across the hallway toward the stairs that would take us to the first floor. At one point, Isabel touched my shoulder and pointed upward. From the ceiling’s corner, a tiny lens watched us. It made me think of Harutaka, looking at us on his monitor, verifying that any security feed nearby us was overridden with a loop of twenty-minutes-old footage, turning us digitally invisible. Without him, all the guards in the complex would have surrounded us by now.
We reached the stairs in less than a minute. They went down two floors, and would take us straight to the lobby on the first floor. We began to descend them in a hurry, when Harutaka’s voice buzzed in the chat.
“Guys, the patrol just left the security room and is coming your way. Hide, now.”
I had just reached the second floor, and dashed toward the closest door. I opened it to find a small bathroom. I slid inside and was shutting the door when it was pushed open violently, smacking me in the forehead.
Kane slid inside and swung the door closed. It made an audible click as it shut, and my heart sank.
“I think he heard that,” Harutaka whispered.
We stood in the narrow space, our bodies inches from each other. I felt Kane’s heavy breathing on my skin and realized I was clutching his left hand. Was I doing it to quiet him, or to calm myself? I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t let go. Very carefully, I turned my head and peered through the tiny crack in the door. I could spot slow, careful movement. The guard, as he crept toward us.
I couldn’t really see his face; the crack was too narrow. Was he curious? Suspicious? Wary? Impossible to tell. But he was definitely coming our way. He had heard the door shut, and was investigating.
“He has his gun raised,” Harutaka whispered.
Would I be able to disarm him with my chain before he shot? No chance. And even if I miraculously managed to, he could shout for help.
Very carefully, I lifted my left leg, leaning it against the opposite wall. Kane stared at me in confusion, his body wedged between my thighs, my leg touching his waist. I put a finger to my lips, and then gently leaned forward, my head brushing against his chin, and eased the Glock from my ankle holster.
Understanding blossomed on his face, mingled with worry. Needless to say, using a gun right now would alert everyone to our presence. I wasn’t thrilled about it either. I peered through the crack and saw the guard almost at the door. My hands became hot, the fire threatening to burst free again.
The lights outside the bathroom suddenly flickered strangely. The guard paused. Another flicker. The light was turning on and off sporadically in a different room, somewhere behind the guard. I could glimpse movement as he turned around, saw his hand holding the submachine gun, fingers tensing at the grip.
The light kept flickering. On. Off. On. Off.
The guard moved away from the door, toward the light.
“I don’t know how long I can distract him like this,” Harutaka whispered in my ear. “Better get out now.”
I signaled Kane, and he gently opened the door. He slid out the doorway, and I followed close behind. The guard was only ten feet away, creeping in the direction of the flickering light. It looked like someone was playing with the light switch. Which, in a sense, was exactly what was going on. Except the person toggling the light was almost a mile away, sitting by a computer.
Isabel materialized by my side. She had been hiding in the shadows, not far from the stairway. We crept downstairs, reached the lobby, and half ran to the hallway that led to the northern part of the mansion.
“That was fucking close,” Kane whispered.
We found the stairway to the basement without any trouble. At the bottom waited a solid metal door, runes etched above it, a metal keypad by its side. It was the door to the vault.