Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Kit
I’ve spent a good chunk of my life invisible. I don’t mean that in some poetic woe-is-me sense; I mean that in the “I can Ctrl-X myself from people’s perception” sense. So, I know a thing or two about remaining unseen.
And in the absence of one-in-a-billion psychic powers, I’ve found the best way to draw absolutely zero notice to yourself is to pull the hood of your new jacket down over your head and be as unremarkable as the thousands of other pedestrians hastening home through the dreary five-in-the-evening drizzle of a mega metropolis.
Standing in an urban garden space in downtown London, I watched the damp passersby with their monochromatic umbrellas.
The sun had set an hour ago, and the wet sidewalks and streets reflected the multi-hued glare cast by thousands of windows, building exteriors, spotlights, streetlamps, traffic lights, and advertisements, their combined luminescence banishing the darkness to shadowy nooks and crannies.
Even the fifteenth-century church across the narrow one-way street was brilliantly lit.
Its stained-glass windows and limestone exterior contrasted starkly with its neighbors: three of the shiniest and most skyline-defining superstructures of England’s capital city, which did their best to wrench your head off your neck with their awe-inspiring grandeur.
The building to my left, however, didn’t command attention. It was a plain box with tinted windows, black steel, and a zilch rating for architectural flair. Hiding in plain sight, it understood the power of invisibility.
The perfect location for an international MPD department.
The corner of my mouth quirked up as I glanced at the unoccupied spot in the little green space next to me.
“Come here often?” I asked the emptiness.
Except it wasn’t empty anymore. A man in a fashionable black wool overcoat and gray scarf had covertly materialized in its place.
His salt-and-pepper hair was neatly combed, his beard trimmed, and if not for the dagger-sharp edge to his gray eyes, he would’ve been perfectly camouflaged among the hordes of investment fund managers and insurance underwriters that filled London’s financial district.
Darius gave me a nod. “You made it.”
A shoe scuffed the concrete, and another figure distinguished itself from the crowd, standing on my other side.
Lienna had been waiting fifty feet away under the shelter of the cloud-scratching glass monolith behind me, because yeah, we’d reached that level of paranoia.
Sticking too close together when we were out and about made it too easy for a mythic with ill intentions—say, a freshly squeezed archmythic bent on bloodthirsty revenge—to nuke us both into oblivion.
In fact, the three of us standing in close proximity, even as throngs of cubicle-dwellers speedwalked past us, made me profoundly nervous.
“Darius,” Lienna murmured in greeting. “Sorry we’re late.”
“So, what’s the plan?” I rubbed my hands together, partly because of the cold, partly because of the anxiety. The unpleasant drizzle had petered out to a few scattered raindrops. “I’m guessing we’re not pre-gaming with tea and crumpets.”
A pair of women in business-casual garb walked out of the boring black building across the garden from us, ID cards hanging on lanyards around their necks, umbrellas popping up to shield them from the rain.
I gave them a quick clairsentience check but found no nefarious intent. Darius also watched them closely.
“Twenty-three stories,” he said, “with some of the best security in the MPD. As expected for the Special Investigations Department.”
I scrutinized every citizen who had the audacity to slow down or change course anywhere in our vicinity. “You ever work here back in your SI days?”
“Often enough to know what we’re up against,” Darius said. “Gaining access to the building from the underground garage, main entrances, or emergency exits would be a waste of effort. There are too many layers of security between the ground level and the upper floors.”
“How do we get to Director Griva then?” Lienna asked. “Ambush him on his way out?”
“Director Griva isn’t in London.”
I snapped my gaze back to him. “Uh, what?”
“According to my source,” he added, checking his watch. “Though Griva has proven extremely difficult to track.”
Lienna frowned. “Then why are we in London? Griva is our target.”
“Not tonight.” Darius glanced once more at his watch, then canted his head as though listening for something.
CLANG!
The sharp blare of an alarm made me jump half out of my skin.
Red lights flashed above the entrance to the boring SI building across the garden.
A moment later, people started streaming out the doors and into the square.
I’d done enough public school fire drills to know what an evacuating crowd looked like, and this was certainly one of them.
How the hell had Darius pulled that off?
“Kit!” Lienna hissed.
I spun around. Darius was already half a dozen steps away, striding not toward the SI headquarters but its glass-and-steel neighbor. I craned my neck back and looked up—way up. The architectural behemoth had to be at least twice as tall as the unassuming SI tower.
Lienna waved at me to hurry up, and I dashed toward the open-air lobby of the ultra-modern titan.
Passing two sets of escalators carrying hordes of homebound office workers down from the second and third floors of the skyscraper, Darius led us to a pair of elevators, which were more or less transparent boxes that scurried up the exterior of the stupidly high building.
One of the lifts deposited a group of businessfolk into the lobby, and they immediately rubbernecked at the SI headquarters’ flashing lights and blaring klaxon.
“Not to be that guy,” I said as I sidled up next to Darius, “but why are we touring this building?”
Instead of explaining why he was taking us into the SI building’s next-door neighbor, he boarded the elevator. Lienna and I joined him, and he punched the button for the top floor.
As soon as the door slid shut and the discordant alarm was muffled, I hit him with my more pressing concern. “If we’re not going after Griva, who’s our target?”
Darius stared through the glass walls as the elevator launched upward.
The set of his jaw, the pallor of his complexion—they wrote the weight of invisible burdens on his face.
For the first time since I met him, Darius looked older than his age, the past several months having stolen more than their fair share of time and energy.
I could relate.
“Twenty years ago,” he finally said in a low voice, watching the endless lights of London stretching out below us, “I tried to destroy the Consilium by cutting off its head. It came back with its roots in the MPD anchored even deeper. Now, Griva and Kade have reinforced that lesson: taking the Consilium down from the top will fail.”
“But what else can we do?” I asked. “Kade already wiped out most of them. We only need to deal with the last two.”
“There will always be more.” Darius loosened the scarf around his neck. “But there’s one thing the Consilium needs to function. One thing that, once destroyed, will permanently cripple it and, I hope, lead to its eradication.”
“And what’s that?” Lienna asked, voicing the question on the tip of my tongue.
“Secrecy. The Consilium can only function from the shadows. To destroy it, we must expose it to the mythic world.”
“Your allies tried that the first time around,” she protested. “All the people who reported suspicious incidents and corruption went missing or were killed. Our precinct tried too. But all our reports on Agent Soze disappeared, and the investigation was dismissed.”
“We tried to expose the Consilium to the MPD,” Darius countered. “We were reporting the wolf to the pack. What we need is proof—unambiguous, verifiable evidence of corruption at the MPD’s highest levels.”
With a chime, the elevator opened its doors to reveal the top floor of the tower: a minimalist event hall made of glass, concrete, and steel utterly devoid of people.
Darius fixed his sharp stare on us. “And we need to give that proof to the guilds. All the guilds.”
Lienna and I followed him off the elevator and into the hall, the doors closing silently behind us.
“And we’re going to find that proof here,” I guessed, my gaze drifting through one of the floor-to-ceiling windows. I gestured at the SI building, red alarm lights still scintillating in the square way below us. “Or down there, I guess.”
Darius’s attention caught on the stiff white bandage bound tightly around my right hand. “Yes.”
An electric burst of nerves rushed from my gut and cascaded across my arms. We were officially on the precipice of pulling something off that would change, well, everything. “So we’re going to sneak in and swipe some kind of ‘Consilium Evidence’ folder off Griva’s desk?”
“The folder isn’t on his desk. Getting into his office would be too difficult, so I had it moved.”
“Had it moved?” Lienna repeated. “By whom?”
“When I discovered the Consilium’s resurgence earlier this year, I suspected the SI was compromised.” Pivoting toward an unmarked door, Darius led us into a concrete maintenance hall. “I contacted a colleague who’s been positioned close to Griva for years and asked her to listen for information.”
The door at the end of the hall had a security panel next to it.
Darius produced a keycard from his coat and tapped it against the panel.
Damn, he worked fast. I knew from our brief call on the pier in Greece that he’d been in London for barely a week, yet he’d not only acquired access cards for this building but also gained access to the SI building’s alarm system.
And who knew what other preparations he’d made for our evening’s undertaking.
“What did your friend find?” I asked.
“More than I could have dared hope for.” He pushed through the door into a barren stairwell on the other side.
Lienna and I marched after him, our footsteps clanging as we ascended the metal stairs.
“Most mythics don’t realize how powerful the SI is,” he continued. “Griva has the same level of intelligence and assets as the CIA, the FSB, Mossad, or MI6 at his fingertips.”
On the stairwell’s first landing, we passed by a thick metal door, the rattle of mechanical equipment whirring and whooshing behind it.
“And he used that power to collect secrets for leverage against the rest of the Consilium. He created a file—an insurance policy—of blackmail and insider information on each of them. It’s a treasure trove of evidence from within the Consilium that we could never have discovered on our own. We can use it to expose them all.”
A blackmail file—that explained why one of Griva’s spooks had been snooping around Kade’s and Druthers’s personal lives and unearthed the existence of Marsha’s residence. The memory of her cheerful kitchen and the wreckage that remained after Kade had destroyed it made my stomach turn.
“If your collaborator friend got her hands on this treasure trove, where is it?” I asked. “Are we meeting her somewhere?”
Darius shook his head. “Unfortunately, the best she could do was move it from Griva’s office to the classified documents archive inside the SI.”
“So, the plan,” I said slowly, “is for a trio consisting of the most wanted mythic in the world, his notorious accomplice, and the infamous Mage Assassin to break into a modern mythic fortress and steal its boss’s personal file o’ blackmail?”
“I never said it would be easy,” Darius said, taking us up yet more stairs. “Far from it. But we do have allies. The shift from intelligence agency to corrupt militia has been clear to those within the SI for some time. Many have chosen to leave. A few stayed to fight from the inside.”
I looked upward, hoping the end of this damn stairwell was within sight, but no such luck. “So once we get inside, will we have help?”
“Anyone friendly to our mission will have evacuated already. Those who remain will either be loyal to Griva or unburdened by any form of moral responsibility. Either way, we should assume everyone in the building is hostile.”
“Wonderful,” I muttered.
“We don’t have the luxury of time or stealth. We have tonight—only tonight—to extract the documents before Griva returns. This is, for lack of a better term, a smash-and-grab operation.”
I shared a concerned look with Lienna. While all three of us were undoubtedly combat-capable, none of us was of the “smash and grab” persuasion.
Darius was more of a “slash and dash” type, and Lienna had more of a “shield and wield” thing going on.
And I—well, now that I was an archmythic, I definitely had some “smash and grab” in my arsenal, but Darius didn’t know that.
At the top of the last step was another door with a security panel that also surrendered to Darius’s keycard without a fight.
“So who’s doing all the smashing?” I asked. “Do you have a mecha suit behind that door or something?”
Darius gave a wry smile. “No mecha suits, I’m afraid.”
He swung the door open. On the other side was a small vestibule with stairs leading up to a metal door. A large black duffel bag sat on the floor, and leaning against the wall beside it were two familiar figures.
I stared at Robin Page, a purple toque with a pompom perched on her brunette hair, and the black-clad character beside her—lean but powerful, radiating predatory readiness. He also wore a toque, though it lacked the color and pompom of his partner’s.
Zylas’s glowing red eyes fixed on me.
Holy hell in humanoid form.
Not only were we going to be grabbing ultra-secret documents from the most dangerous MPD building on the planet, but Darius had brought along a demon to do the smashing.