3. Max
Max
“Shit.” Caspian dragged a hand through his wine-red hair.
The Nightingale crew traded grim looks.
“If we can’t see the tower,” Marco asked, “how do we get into it?”
“We wing it.” Nikolai’s crimson eyes fixed on Agent Odalys. “Your people inside must know roughly where it sits.”
Odalys nodded. “One of my informants can get us close to where it’s rumored to stand.”
“Or we catch an elite and make him walk us in,” Frost suggested.
I turned it over.
My demon could peel back any glamour. No one had ever seen through Lady Vaelith’s disguise—Aelindor said so—not even the heirs. It had come apart for me.
“I can probably see the Glass Tower,” I said. “Glamour doesn’t work on me.” I turned to Odalys. “If your informant can get us close, that’s good enough.”
“Caspian has the nose, and I have the eyes,” Nikolai said. “That’ll do.”
We’d built contingencies on contingencies before we set out. Two ways into the castle. The bridge or the tunnel.
The bridge meant checkpoints. Odalys had forged papers for all of us, but papers only worked if the enemy guards didn’t look twice, and our crew invited second looks.
Dress us in farmers’ homespun or servants’ grays and we still came out soldiers.
Too fit, too watchful. Bryn aside, the rest of us were all built like Spartans.
Nikolai and I would be the tallest people at any checkpoint, and the guards would notice us even split into separate groups.
“Tunnel,” Nikolai said. “And you have someone waiting on the other side to let us through?”
“Yes, sir,” Odalys said. “Drop through a manhole ten blocks out and walk four miles underground. The tunnel ends inside the eastern wall at a locked door. Josette will open it from the other side, as planned.”
“Can we trust her?” Caspian asked.
“She’s solid. I recruited her three years ago,” Odalys said.
“Twenty years in that palace before that, laundry woman up to executive housekeeper. All she wants now is revenge. Her daughter Wren served at the king’s table.
Sixteen years old. That night Xander was hosting a demon, a high-ranking one, and she’d never seen one before.
Her hands shook, and she set the guest’s plate down a little too loud.
Xander opened her throat with his warlock claws to save face, and the demon laughed. ”
No one had anything to say to that.
“Let’s go,” Nikolai said.
“We got this,” Caspian said.
We’d spent days studying the palace layout back at base, memorizing guard rotations our agents in the Haven had bled sources for years to chart.
Ten blocks of old cowboy country, and Caspian stopped twice to smell it.
The second time, Nikolai halted the whole line.
“What?”
“The ground’s wrong.” Caspian rolled his shoulders like his shirt had shrunk. “It’s been wrong since the bayou. Every yard we cover, my wolf wants to bolt.”
“Your wolf’s got sense.” Odalys kept walking, and we caught up. “The king claimed this land twenty years back. Big ceremony. Cost a hundred people their throats.”
“Claimed it how?” Jace asked.
“Same way he claims anything. He owns the dirt now. It’s loyal to him.”
Frost’s pale eyes swept the empty street. “Enslaved soil.”
“All the way to the gulf.”
“Can it see us?” Bryn’s voice dropped.
“It can feel you.” Odalys pointed her chin at a stand of dead pecan trees leaning over a fence. “Best it can do is turn a place unfriendly. Nothing grows here that he hasn’t given permission to grow.”
“Our heirs would never enslave their own ground or people,” Enna said.
We reached the manhole and dropped through one by one.
The tunnel was old-world work. Mud, rust, mildew. Water dripped somewhere ahead in the dark. In places the ceiling hung low enough that we had to stoop.
Captain Holt lasted about two hundred yards.
“I hate a ceiling,” she muttered.
“You’re an eagle, Holt,” Jace said.
“It’s fucking intense in here.” Caspian’s voice came from just behind my shoulder. “Smells like a drowned dog.”
“Now you know how I feel when I stand next to you,” Nikolai said.
The crew laughed, then choked it off when the sound went down the tunnel and came back.
“Breathe through your mouth and stop thinking about the weight of the city,” Enna called out. “Works for me.”
“That worked until you said it,” Jace said.
Bryn dropped back beside me. Her fingers were tight on the hilt of the dagger strapped to her hip. She’d been counting her steps under her breath for the last minute.
“How are you so calm, Max?”
“A decade underground has made this more familiar than open sky,” I said. “I once dug my own tunnel out of slavery, and here I am in another one, finishing the job.”
Missy was four miles and one wall away, closer than she’d been since the day I left her. Everything could still go wrong. I put that thought away and kept walking.
Odalys led with Nikolai at her shoulder. Bryn and I held the middle, the rest of the team folded around us, Caspian and Marco at the rear.
Behind me, Caspian walked close enough that his heat reached me, yet not one part of him touched me. The shifter prince had always been a toucher. Hands slung over shoulders, lips on a cheek. We hadn’t kissed yet. He wanted to, badly.
Now he kept the gap.
Hours seemed to pass before the tunnel ended with a narrow stair climbing to an iron door. Someone behind me let out a breath.
Odalys took the stairs two at a time, stopped at the top, and knocked.
Five long taps. Two short. Three long.
A second later, the door swung open.
An older woman in a gray uniform stood on the other side, a ring of keys at her belt. Grief had ravaged her face, but her eyes held steady.
“Josette,” Odalys said.
Josette nodded, looked us over once, and waved us through. “Quickly.”
Inside the wall, the palace closed around us.
As planned, Odalys, Holt, and Bryn stayed behind to guard the tunnel door. Bryn squeezed my wrist once before she blended into the shadows.
The rest of us followed Josette through the servants’ veins of the castle. Narrow back corridors. A linen room breathing soap and steam. Service stairs worn shallow. Beyond the plain doors we passed, the palace glowed red and gold.
Twice she stopped us with a lifted hand and tucked us out of sight, once into an alcove, once behind a rack of hanging linens, while a patrol’s bootsteps went by on the other side of the wall.
We moved west in silence until Josette brought us to a dim junction where the servants’ corridor met the grand west gallery.
We split again. Fewer bodies drew fewer eyes.
Caspian, Nikolai, and Josette came with me. Frost and Marco made the second team, Jace and Enna the third. Both would sink into the dark corners of the palace, our lookouts and our support, ready to cut off pursuit or carve us a way out.
Two hours, back at this junction. And if anything went wrong, Nikolai’s order stood. Retreat to the tunnel and leave without us.
Just the four of us now, moving into the west wing.
Hold on, little viper. I’m almost there.