Chapter 11 Rosemary #4
When we got to the window, Erik bent down on one knee so that I could use his thigh as a stool to reach the lock that had been easy to open for as long as I could remember.
The window was two panes that met in the middle or swung inward if you wanted the window open.
On a fully functioning window, there would’ve been a seal between the panes, but in this particular window, Ian and I had shoved a knife through it when I was ten and he was eight, because we were convinced that someday we’d be housebreakers.
It had felt very mysterious and cool until Aunt Halle had seen what we’d done to her antique windows.
Long story short, the seal between the panes was gone, and I could easily unlatch the lock between them with a credit card. Sliding the card in beneath the latch, I slowly drew it up, holding my breath as the latch caught for a moment and then let go.
I opened the window slowly, listening carefully for any sound of someone coming to investigate.
When no sound came, I pulled myself up to my waist and shimmied my top half inside.
Bracing my hands on the top of the washing machine, I pulled my legs inside, cringing as they made a swishing noise as they dragged along.
I’d just landed on my feet next to the ironing board when Erik’s head and chest appeared inside.
He was much more graceful as he pulled his body inside than I was. Perhaps he’d been a housebreaker at some point.
Erik lifted his head and winked at me, and I was struck by how much he looked like his son.
Daniel hadn’t been lying when he said he had his father’s coloring and build, but he’d definitely been understating it.
My father-in-law cocked his head to the side as if asking what the hell I was doing.
Right.
I led him toward the doorway, listening for sounds of the people in the house. There was definitely someone just outside the laundry room, probably standing guard in the mudroom that led to the back door of the house.
Without a word, Erik moved past me. He opened the door swiftly and silently, stepping through it like it was nothing, and almost as soon as I’d made it out of the room, Erik was already wrapping his arms around the man. It was over in an instant.
If I hadn’t been around Vampires my entire life—mercenaries at that—I would’ve been scared as hell at the speed and efficiency Erik was capable of.
We moved through the entire first floor like wraiths.
There were two more men downstairs. One at the front door, and one who seemed like he’d been tasked with roaming the house at random.
I took care of one with my knife, but the other was too fast for me and a freaking giant to boot, so I let Erik handle him. Fighting fire with fire and all that.
Shaking out my arms, I jerked my chin toward the ceiling, where we could hear more men stomping around. A lot more men. Erik and I had already taken care of five of them, but there were at least double that tearing apart the upstairs.
Grant had counted ten.
Kids were never reliable narrators.
It was a good thing I loved the little punk.
The stairway leading up to the second floor was too open for Erik and me to move on safely, so I led him back toward the laundry room.
There was a doorway just off the mudroom that looked like it led to nothing, but actually was a hidden staircase that came out in the huge linen closet at the top of the stairs.
I stopped halfway up and pointed at the eleventh stair, shaking my head. Then I stepped completely over it. I paused and waited for Erik to do the same thing.
They’d built the staircase back when servants weren’t supposed to be seen more than necessary, but it had creeped Aunt Halle out, so the Cavendishes rarely used it.
Ian and I, on the other hand, had smoked quite a few cigarettes in that tiny stairwell where we knew neither of the little boys would come looking for us.
That squeaky eleventh stair had once gotten us caught with the contraband, and we’d been grounded for two weeks.
They never realized or didn’t care that grounding both of us, but still letting us see each other, was no punishment at all. We could make our own fun without whatever had been taken away.
God, I hoped Ian and Daniel were okay. I was too preoccupied to look at my watch and see how long they’d been gone already.
Outside the linen closet, I paused again and looked to Erik. He nodded to me. He couldn’t hear anything on the other side.
The door caught on the mess they’d made of the closet. They must’ve already searched it, but somehow hadn’t realized there was a door hidden behind a row of shelves. I stepped inside the room and cringed as my boots dug into all the clean linens that covered the floor.
The men were louder now, and we could easily hear their conversations as they called to each other from different rooms. To the left of us was Seamus and Grant’s room, and I could hear the men throwing shit around.
Glass broke. A loud thump that had to have been one of the bedframes being overturned.
“Steady,” Erik said quietly. He paused with his hand on the doorway to the hall.
Once we were out there, we’d be surrounded on all sides. There was no way to hide in the wide hallway that bisected the upper floor of the house. If even one of the intruders was out there, it would be impossible to maintain our cover.
Beau and Ambrose should’ve already been inside the house, but there was no way to know. Hopefully, they’d gotten inside Ian’s apartment and were waiting for a sign from us. If not, Erik and I were kind of screwed.
“I’ll go right,” Erik said after a moment. He turned toward me and quickly grabbed the back of my head, planting a kiss on the hair just above my forehead. “For luck,” he whispered with a wink.
He waited only long enough for me to raise my weapon before he was opening the door wide and stepping out.
The next few minutes were an impossibly loud blur.
There were three men in the hallway, and two of them opened fire as soon as Erik had dropped the first. The Vampire behind me was the embodiment of precision.
Without even looking at him, I knew the grace with which he moved as he aimed and fired, keeping his body between me and the hallway behind me.
I was a little less precise. I took out the first man and the second, but the third came out too quickly, and I felt a bullet graze the meat at my hip, just below the edge of my vest. It took four shots for me to hit him because I’d automatically jerked when the bullet grazed me, and it messed up my aim.
The hallway behind where I stood was much longer than the one before me, and Erik was firing twice as quickly as more men streamed out of the rooms. He stumbled, and his back brushed mine before he was steady on his feet again.
I barely registered the feeling before two more men came out of Uncle Dalton’s room and the spare room next to it.
They weren’t all coming at once. While Erik and I stood in the center of the chaos, they were strategically sending out one or two at a time.
I swallowed hard as one of the men got a shot off as he went down. It lodged somewhere above our heads.
Then, Beau and Ambrose were there. I could hear their voices from the other end of the hall as it quieted. In seconds, they were beside me, and Erik had his hand on my shoulder as he covered my back and we made our way toward Uncle Dalton’s room.
By the time we were finished, my ears were ringing, and I could barely hear a thing.
I stood in the center of my uncle and aunt’s room, barely able to catch my breath.
“Safe room?” Erik asked, looking at the walls.
“It’s not in here,” I gasped, shaking my head.
“Where is it?” Ambrose asked as the sound of a rifle shot filtered in through a broken window.
The thing about the safe room was that I’d been taught since I was old enough to understand words that it was not to be shared with anyone.
Not my teachers, not my doctor, not the police, not the fire department, not my priest—if I’d had one.
Absolutely no one outside of Uncle Dalton, Aunt Halle, my mom and dad, Ian, Grant, and Seamus could ever know where the door to the safe room was. All of our lives could depend on it.
So it took me a moment to form the words because everything inside me was screaming not to.
“Downstairs,” I rasped, leading the way.
Adrenaline was coursing through my veins as I stepped over bodies and carefully peeked over the railing to the stairs. There was no sound coming from down there, but that didn’t mean anything. Someone could’ve been hiding.
Erik passed me and hurried down the stairs first.
It didn’t feel good to be proven right when automatic gunfire came from the media room to the left of the stairway.
“Motherfuckers,” Beau spat as he took the stairs two at a time. He reached Erik just as he’d dropped down behind the railing. Thankfully, between the two of them, the shooting stopped.
“You can let go of me now,” I told Ambrose through my teeth. His hand felt like it had burned a hole through the skin of my arm.
“Sorry,” he said quietly as we followed the others. I turned off lights as we moved through the house, going out of my way to make sure that we weren’t lit up like a fish tank for anyone outside to see.
When we reached the center island of the kitchen, I had to force myself to reach beneath the counter and press the minuscule button.
“And turn and go up to the open door boldly, and knock to the echoes as beggars for roses,” I said, knocking twice, then four times more.
“What?” Beau asked. “Are you quoting Robert Frost?”
I didn’t have to reply because the end of the counter began to swing inward from the floor. As soon as it had swung parallel to the counter above it, Aunt Halle’s head came into view, her eyes filled with fear.
“Rosemary?”
“Sometimes during the day I will look at the house and the house will look at me, and the house will weep.”
“Yes, it does,” she whispered back.
“I can feel it,” I told her hoarsely, my throat tight with tears of relief.
“Oh god,” she replied. “Come on, boys.”
Aunt Halle climbed up the ladder first, her eyes widening when she saw the Vampires with me.
“Daniel’s family,” I told her, putting my hand on her shoulder so she wouldn’t rise into view of the windows. “Stay down there for a sec.”
“Rosemary Halle, I wiped your ass.”
“And Uncle Dalton taught me to operate,” I countered, my eyes on Erik’s back as he stared through the window. “Now stay put for a minute.”
“Flower?” Grant asked in surprise. He looked around as he crawled out. “Whoa.”
“Quiet,” I ordered. Erik was watching something, but I couldn’t tell what it was.
“Seamus, get out here,” I murmured, keeping my voice low. “We need to move.”
“Where’s Uncle Gary?” Grant asked worriedly.
“He’s here,” I assured him as we ushered my aunt and the boys along the wall opposite the windows. “We’ll see him soon.”
“Fucking hell,” Ambrose hissed as his arm flew out and slammed both Grant and Seamus closer to the wall. “We’ve got more.”
“How many do you see?” Beau asked.
“Two trucks, you?”
“I see three,” Beau called from the other room. “No, four.”
“Why the fuck are there more of them?” I asked no one in particular.
I glanced at the kitchen island, which looked completely normal again, but instantly discarded the idea of sending Aunt Halle and the boys back in there.
The whole reason we were in the house was to get them out of the situation.
That’s what we needed to do, and we needed to do it fast before the new men made it inside the house.
“Out the back door,” Erik called softly. “Quickly now.”
As we shuffled silently toward the mudroom, I could see more than four sets of headlights out front. In a matter of minutes, we’d be surrounded.