6. Max
Max
“There.” I pointed. “Twelve floors, give or take.”
That one was my demon’s doing. No glamour ever built had held up in front of it.
Caspian and Nikolai peered along my arm, both narrowing their eyes.
“Empty sky,” Nikolai murmured.
“Not to me,” I said and turned to Josette. “This is where you leave us.”
She didn’t move.
“Josette.”
“I can still…”
“You’ll be killed,” Caspian said, not unkindly.
She looked between the three of us, caught between terror and everything she’d risked to get here.
“I’ll make him pay,” I said. “I promise you.”
Her chin came up and her eyes shone. “May the true God bless you.”
Then she slipped away into the dark.
We went on. I’d never been as quiet as the heirs, but Nikolai had drilled vanishing into me until it stuck, and the demon watched my back out of pure self-interest.
Three long blocks on, I stopped us in the inky shadow under a colonnade and signed what I could see.
A pair of squat buildings cut off the tower’s bottom floors from this angle. From the sixth up, the windows opened to me like a lit display case. Pedestals and cabinets in rows, floor above floor, artifacts gleaming behind glass.
And beings.
Standing figures shelved in among the treasures, still as mannequins.
I made myself breathe evenly and kept looking. The top two floors sat dark behind frosted panels. Whatever he kept up there, he didn’t want it seen.
Caspian tipped his chin at the low buildings crouched around the grounds and signed back. Guardhouses. Manned, and not lightly. He’d scented the traffic on the paths, coming and going in shifts.
We moved on, shadow to shadow.
One block out, the garden gave onto a granite path, and we stopped at its edge with a clear view.
Two guards stood at the Glass Tower’s entrance. To Caspian and Nikolai, they were standing on nothing, guarding an empty plaza of pale stone.
Both princes fixed on them anyway. Predators sighting prey. These weren’t elite. Fives at best, on any scale worth using.
They talked in low voices, and everything in their posture signaled boredom.
The shorter one shook a cigarette out of a crumpled pack. The taller one caught his wrist.
“Put it away. You want the Saint seeing that?”
“The Saint will forgive me.” The short one chuckled. “Besides, he’s a thousand miles north, collecting his bitch out of dump country.”
“You’re new.” The taller one sighed. “Half this palace pays its rent by reporting. Somebody sees a light out here, it goes in a report.”
“Sees it from where?” The short one tucked the cigarette behind his ear anyway.
“Who gets near this place? The wards turn people around before we ever see their stupid faces. And if some dumb bastard does get this far, all he sees is two idiots standing in empty space. At least with a smoke I’d look like I’m doing something.
” He grinned. “And then we get to kill him.”
Caspian let out a low chuckle.
Both guards’ heads came up.
“Somebody’s out there,” the taller one said.
“Chill your right tit. It’s the wind.” The short one didn’t even turn. “Next shift’s an hour and seven minutes out and I’m counting every second of it. Soon as I’m off, I’m going to that new strip club. Bigger tits, cheaper booze…”
Both of them seized at once.
Spines arching, mouths open on screams that never found air. The veins stood out under their skin like cords, went dark, and sank flat.
Seconds. That was all it took. Two guards dropped in a heap on the pale stone, drained white, and neither of them ever saw where it came from.
Blood Reaper wasn’t a callsign they’d handed Nikolai to be nice.
Caspian glanced at the bodies, then at him, and shrugged.
“Show-off.”
Nikolai was already standing over them by the time the word landed.
Twelve floors of glass climbed into the dark above us, and only I could see them.
I looked at the door at the bottom of all that glass, and at the ward sitting on it, and I knew before either of them asked what it would cost to open.
Blood, my demon whispered, delighted. Yours.
I nodded to the princes: this was it.