Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Kit
Dropping my warps, I flew across the room and locked the door. Ballester let out a shocked cry at my sudden appearance.
Lienna launched out of her chair, plucking the Rubik’s cube from her satchel. I crossed the office again, rounded the opulent desk, and slammed my hands down on the arms of Ballester’s chair.
“Tell us where the vault is,” I bit out, “and how to open it.”
“Y-you’re Kit Morris!” he gasped, his furry eyebrows lifting so high they threatened to crawl into his hairline. His gaze snapped to Lienna. “And you’re—”
“How long do we have?” she asked as she faced the door.
The security mages were approaching fast—which, of course, raised the question of how the shit Ballester had summoned them.
“I don’t know,” I growled. “Thirty seconds? Maybe less.”
A blinking red light on the underside of Ballester’s desk caught my eye. It was affixed to a small plastic box with a big black button on it. A silent alarm. What kind of archaeologist needed a silent alarm in their office?
I grabbed a fistful of Ballester’s button-up dress shirt and wreathed my other hand in flame. “Tell me where the grimoire is before I turn your goatee into a burning ring of fire.”
“No, that’s not real,” he sputtered, trying—and failing—to squirm away from me. “It’s an illusion.”
I brought my fingerling inferno closer to his face so he could feel its warmth. “It’s very real, but it wouldn’t matter either way. It’ll still feel real. Now, where is—”
The thundering of heavy footsteps interrupted me. A fist banged against the door, and a voice shouted something that I assumed translated to “Open this damn door!”
The cavalry had arrived, and we had no idea where the hell the grimoire was. That secret was still squirreled away in Ballester’s noggin.
“Ajuda!” Ballester shouted. “Ajuda’m!”
Shouts answered him from the other side of the door, followed by an even more insistent collision between fist and wood. I hit Ballester with a warp of his tongue swelling to five times its normal size to silence him, but the damage was already done.
“We need to split up,” I told Lienna.
“What?”
“We need to split up.” I grabbed Ballester by the back of his collar and hauled him out of his chair. “You get through the guards and make a break for the exit. I’ll take this dipshit to a quieter spot and get the grimoire location out of him. I’ll find you once I have it.”
Alarm rippled across her features. She opened her mouth—and a kick slammed against the outside of the door, splintering the frame.
“Be safe,” she gritted out.
“You too,” I replied, then cast a widespread invisi-bomb across the museum, hiding only Ballester and me. This time, as much as I hated it, Lienna was the bait.
With another super-kick from a security guard, the door crashed open, revealing Mr. Creatine, who had a potion pistol pointed straight at Lienna. He pulled the trigger.
I telekinetically snatched the liquid-filled sphere out of the air and dropped it into my physical hand.
“Ori impello te detrudo!” Lienna shouted.
The air rippled as an invisible force rocketed out of her cube and hit Mr. Creatine with the unstoppable force of One-Punch Man’s fist. He flew backward, taking out several of the mages behind him, and crashed into the wall.
Lienna dashed through the doorway, and I shoved Ballester through after her.
All around us, mages were lighting up with elemental magic, all of it aimed at Lienna. Before they could unleash their attacks, I hit them with a Blackout warp.
For one glorious second, I erased all their senses, and they staggered or fell with cries of terror—but agony was already blooming through my skull from the strain, and the warp fell apart, almost taking my invisi-bomb with it. But it had bought Lienna a few seconds to speed past the guards.
They scrambled over one another to get to their feet, most of them giving chase while a few rushed into Ballester’s office to search for the invisible archaeologist.
I clamped down on my fear for Lienna. She could handle a few mages—masculine shouts of surprise and pain were already echoing down the hall—and I had a job to do.
Pocketing Mr. Creatine’s potion ball, I steered Ballester left, moving in the opposite direction from the havoc Lienna was wreaking on the rent-a-mage crew. At the end of the hallway, we reached a T-intersection with a camera watching over it.
“Left or right to the vault?” I asked Ballester.
“Right.”
I reignited the flames entwining my fingers, transformed them into a single red-hot sphere, and flung it at the camera. Then I telekinetically ripped the scorched device from the wall and slammed it against the tile floor in a heap of melted plastic and twisted metal.
Ballester recoiled.
“You sure?” I shoved him forward. “We don’t wanna get lost.”
“L-left,” he stammered. “I meant left.”
That led us to a stairwell and a door that opened into the basement level, where muted lamps cast dull orange light on the sandy stone of the excavated ruins that comprised the museum’s main attraction.
My grip tightened on Ballester’s pale blue dress shirt. “I don’t see a vault.”
“The other side,” he said. “There’s a door. You can see it from here.”
Sure enough, on the exact opposite wall from us was a large black door, barely visible in the dim illumination.
Thankfully, M’s schematics included the cameras on this level, so I knew which ones I needed to take care of. As I pushed Ballester around the perimeter of the ruins, I telekinetically repositioned them to point at the ceiling instead of at us.
Once we reached the black door, I saw another keypad on the wall and maneuvered Ballester toward it. “Open up.”
He glanced over his shoulder at me, a sheen of nervous sweat dampening his forehead. “There are guards in there twenty-four seven. Just let me go and—”
I shoved him so close to the door that his thick middle bounced off the frame.
“You have two options,” I whispered. “You either unlock this door right now, or I take you to a private location where we can have a nice, long chat—and you know what they say about a second location.”
With a fervent nod, he entered the access code with trembling fingers. A buzz and a click followed. I propelled him across the threshold, then swung the door shut behind me with my elbow.
The dim glow of a flickering lightbulb illuminated a concrete landing the size of a closet.
Beyond that was a corridor that looked more like a round tunnel—or like a long concrete tube designed for the world’s biggest pinball—and it stretched so far that the end was lost in the gloom.
It was solid, damp concrete, and the flat bottom was lined with miniature gutters that collected the moisture seeping down the walls. The stench of wet mold was inescapable.
What in the Night at the Museum was this? In what world did the Museu d’Història de Barcelona need a secret, dystopian tunnel? The strangeness settled into my stomach, but I ignored it. I didn’t have time to entertain my half-assed paranoia.
“I’m not seeing any guards, Ballester,” I remarked coldly.
“But—but there are always—”
“What else is in this vault?” I demanded as I forced him along our subterranean hike.
“Artifacts—valuable artifacts—over a hundred.” A desperate, hopeful note crept into his voice.
“Modern ones and archaic ones dating back centuries. The oldest is a Celtic execution artifact—appraised at over four million euros. And—and a Toledo steel rapier from 600 CE if you prefer Elementaria artifacts. I saw it after examining their latest acquisition, an ancient astrolabe. There’s also—”
My feet rooted to the floor, and I jerked Ballester to a halt with me.
“Did you just say an astrolabe?” I barely heard myself ask the question. My stomach was somersaulting again, and this time, I paid attention to that gut-deep feeling of wrongness.
“Yes,” Ballester babbled. “The museum paid an outrageous sum for it. Truly priceless. A pre-Islamic relic discovered—”
“It’s here?” I interrupted.
“Yes. Inside the vault with everything else. Please let me go. Please.”
Dread and exhilaration plunged through my veins, transforming my blood into adrenalized jet fuel. The truth behind the museum was becoming crystal clear—and the resulting image was far more sinister than I could’ve imagined.
A silent alarm in Ballester’s office.
An abundance of jacked-up security mages.
A vault hidden in a secret tunnel beneath the museum.
A treasure trove of valuable magical artifacts, including an execution artifact and Bodil’s grimoire.
And most damning of all: the astrolabe.
This wasn’t just a museum. It wasn’t just a safe place for Ballester to settle down after backstabbing Teddy.
It was a secret Consilium lair.
I sucked in a deep breath, trying to slow my pulse below the tempo of a Motorhead track. Ballester had alerted the security guards to our intrusion, but as far as they knew, Lienna was the only burglar. No one but the bushy-browed archaeologist knew I was here.
Yet.
A clairsentient scan of the area provided marginal reassurance—we were alone down here. Dropping my invisi-bomb, I shoved Ballester into an awkward jog. “How much farther to the vault?”
“It’s at the end of the tunnel,” he whimpered. “Please let me go. I don’t know the combination. I can’t open it. Just let me—”
Fresh urgency flared through me. “You can’t get into the vault? You didn’t think to mention that before now?”
“They don’t share that with anyone!” he protested. “It’s above my pay grade!”
I didn’t have to ask who “they” were. It didn’t surprise me that this self-absorbed jackass wasn’t among the Consilium elite, but it put a damper on my plans to get into the vault. On the plus side, I didn’t need to haul him around with me any longer.
I pulled Ballester to a rough stop and let go of his collar. He stumbled away from me as I withdrew Mr. Creatine’s potion ball from my pocket.
The archaeologist eyed it fearfully. “What is that?”
“A sleep potion, probably. I’m not a hundred percent sure.” The little spheroid lifted into the air, floating a few inches above my upturned palm. “By the way, Teddy Sorensen sends his regards.”
I zipped the potion ball into his neck. It burst against his skin, the goopy yellow potion soaking through his shirt collar. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he slumped to the ground.
“Hm. So it was a sleep potion.”
I jumped over his unmoving form and ran full-tilt toward the shadowy end of the tunnel. A handful of closed doors, scarcely visible against the concrete in the dim lighting, appeared along the curved walls, but I didn’t slow. My eyes were finally able to discern a glint of metal ahead.
The vault.
It spanned the width of the tunnel, forming a dead end of heavy steel. Half a dozen hefty rods protruded from a circular mechanism shaped like a captain’s wheel in the center of the door. It was etched with Arcana arrays.
I have a lot of less-than-legal life experience. I’ve conned, stolen, broken and entered, impersonated, lied, lockpicked, escaped custody, and committed fraud. But never once in my criminal or MPD career have I tried to break into a bank vault.
As I mentally rifled through every skill set I had—and how none of them were the slightest bit useful—a pale blur in my peripheral vision brought me up short. Fifteen feet from the vault, I turned left to face one of the doors that lined the tunnel.
An open door.
I stood in the threshold, staring with my jaw slack.
The room beyond formed a circle roughly twenty feet in diameter with a smooth black floor.
Surrounding it was a raised ledge just a bit higher than I was tall—a gallery.
Simple metal chairs, evenly spaced along the gallery, stood empty and waiting, as though a performance would soon begin.
High above, panes of glass in the domed ceiling gave the moon and stars a view as well.
The whole setup had the disconcerting vibe of a miniature Roman coliseum.
But that wasn’t what had seized my lungs. That wasn’t why I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the center of the room.
Drawn in white on the smooth floor was an array in the shape of a four-pointed star—one of the most complex spells I’d ever seen. And in the middle, right beneath a skylight that allowed the silvery glow of the moon to fall upon it, lay a bronze artifact.
The astrolabe.