Chapter 27
CHAPTER 27
Gathering the resources for the heist took a few nights, but as Roger finished strapping a third silver dagger to his belt, he couldn’t deny the comfort in being well armed and prepared. Josefina had used her connections to discreetly purchase an old brick building roughly three miles from their target, which made it an ideal staging ground. Once upon a time, the building had housed a dance studio. One wall had the remains of broken mirrors, and through them, bits of movement were reflected. Roger had to suppress his urge to alert to each tiny bit of activity in his peripheral vision.
Ready for the mission, he checked on the others.
Like him, everyone was dressed all in black, complete with black gloves and ski masks. Josefina already had her mask on her head, though it was rolled up for the moment. Seeing her with short hair instead of her long braid was still an adjustment for Roger. Along with a short sword, she had a collapsible truncheon and a heavy UV flashlight.
Roger had invited Nathaniel, but he had pointed out that he had a business to run, and it’d be suspicious if the attack happened on the one night he wasn’t tending bar. Nathaniel had recommended Janiyah to the job in his stead. She maintained an icy glare whenever she glanced Roger’s way, and her coldness seemed to extend to Thomas, Amber, and Vincent but not Dmitri or Josefina.
Thomas was a natural choice for inclusion, even if his mere presence continued to remind Roger of his failure to save Zack. After a few nights working together, Thomas was beginning to stand out as his own man, but there remained an aspect to him that slid under Roger’s skin and festered. Something about the way he stood was too much an echo of his son.
Against Roger’s better judgment, Thomas had insisted on adding Amber to their team. He pointed out that his daughter had tactical experience that they needed. When Dmitri had seconded bringing another trained hunter, Roger had conceded. Dmitri was the one who knew the building and security.
Since much of the planning had happened within Vincent’s earshot, he’d invited himself. Roger didn’t have the heart to deny the boy a measure of revenge against Seamus. No one was particularly happy about an untrained compatriot, but Vincent knew how to drive. Making him the wheelman meant a trained fighter was free to join them inside the building, and no one had disagreed with that idea.
Still, Roger found himself lingering near Vincent as the group finished their preparations. Vincent leaned against a wall and spun a set of keys around his finger. His color was better than it’d been, and his movements had a quickness to them he hadn’t had.
Softly, Roger said, “Remember?—”
“Stay in the van,” Vincent recited. “Keep the engine running. If anyone launches an attack on the van, blare the horn as long and loud as I can.”
“If the vehicle’s compromised?”
“Make my way back here on foot if I’m able. If I think I’m being followed, do my best to slip into a mortal bar or restaurant and blend in.”
Roger put his hand on Vincent’s shoulder and squeezed. A tiny thrum radiated from Vincent, not like an emotion at all but like a burst of static electricity. Pushing aside the strange sensation, Roger focused on the moment. “Stay safe, all right?”
Vincent almost smiled. “You too.”
A few other muted conversations were happening, and Roger eavesdropped to check on the moods of his companions. Josefina was stressing the importance that Dmitri filter a sliver of the funds to Nell in order to compensate for Roger’s debt, and he was reassuring her that was part of the plan. Whether Dmitri would live up to that, Roger wasn’t sure. But he had hope.
Amber was attempting to engage Janiyah in conversation, but while Janiyah wasn’t unfriendly, she treated Amber with a cool distance. She’d said during one of the planning sessions that she was doing this because Nathaniel stressed it would change things for the coven as a whole. In general, she didn’t give a shit about the elite vampires in leadership positions. Roger couldn’t help agreeing with her. The only one left in power that he cared about was Candide, and she would continue playing her cards to her advantage.
Thomas was checking his quiver for the third time. When Roger drifted toward him, Thomas said, “Wish we’d had a practice run.”
“They could discover Dmitri’s back door at any point,” Roger replied. “We can’t afford to lose any more time.”
“Hopefully, they haven’t already,” Dmitri added.
“You mean this could all be for nothing?” Amber said as she joined in their conversation.
Now, everyone was paying attention to them. Roger said, “Either we’ll be able to drain Seamus’s accounts, or we won’t. At the very least, we will send a message that he is not as invulnerable as he believes. Shaking even a fraction of his confidence loose is worth this risk.”
“Let’s hope,” Thomas said under his breath.
Roger scanned each of their faces. The grim note in Thomas’s voice had lowered the mood of the group.
Decades had passed since the last time he’d truly led anyone into a battle, and even then, he had been a captain for Seamus and moving on his orders. Coordinating the rescue mission had been Roger’s first true attempt to lead, and that had failed. If they failed again, he wasn’t sure what would be left of himself, let alone the others. In the best-case scenario, they all survived, and Seamus was robbed of nearly four billion dollars.
But there was the possibility of a horrific outcome. Not death—death would be terrible, but it would be a finality. If they were captured, that would lead to war between Nell’s coven and the GLC, which would result in too many innocents’ deaths. And there was no telling what sort of torment Seamus, Anton, and other sadistic vampires of the GLC would do to this brave group if given the chance. Roger didn’t have to think hard to envision a dozen different miserable, torturous scenarios.
All of them knew that there was a chance this mission would lead to worse than disaster. He might be leading them to their worst hells. But they were willing to try.
He couldn’t ignore that. Couldn’t let them think for an instant that their willingness to risk themselves meant nothing to him.
“We can do more than hope,” Roger said. “No one has made an attempt like this. Win or lose, we will make a difference. No doubt about that. Let’s do this.”
The attitudes of the others didn’t magically lift. In fact, Roger wasn’t sure he’d had much of an impact on them at all. Yet no one balked. No one rolled their eyes or stormed away. They were ready to follow him.
So he led the way out the door to the back alley, where their white rental cargo van waited. Vincent claimed the driver’s seat while Amber took the front passenger seat. Everyone else climbed into the cargo van’s open back.
Roger was the last to step up into the van. Closing the doors brought a thud that he tried not to compare to the slam of a coffin lid. Once we do this, there’s no turning back .
“Is the great pirate Roger is nervous about a robbery?” Josefina teased.
“Been a while since I’ve done one,” Roger said quietly. He glanced to Dmitri. “Must have been the 1920s.”
“The O’Malley twins’ place.” Dmitri leaned his head back against the side of the van, letting it bounce as the vehicle did. “I was thinking it must have been in Connecticut.”
“I was quite the terror on the roads in England.” Roger tried to grin. He resisted the urge to run his fingers across each of his silver daggers’ hilts to ensure they were still there. Instead, he rested his hand on the stakes in the wrist launcher that Thomas had given him. “That time, I was sent to bring Ezra home. But this is more like being on the ship.”
“Is it bad if I do miss those nights?” Dmitri said softly. “The rare ones.”
The ones where Dmitri and Roger had been new vampires who relished the moments of freedom they gained whenever the chaos of battle and plunder had taken over their ship. They’d been able to drink their fill, glutting themselves on blood. Ripping through the enemy and satisfying their hunger had always settled Dmitri for a few nights, provided their target hadn’t been a passenger vessel. For a short, glorious time, they’d been newly dead and never more alive.
But there was a gleeful wildness to those nights that Roger no longer trusted his memory to paint accurately. He had spent so long ignoring the pains inflicted on himself and others that holding on to the bleached notions of passionate, thrilling nights was a different sort of pain. How much of his pleasure had come from the blood of innocents? From those too much like himself, unable to trod another path in life?
Denying the shred of fondness that he had for those nights would only hurt Dmitri. There was no point in shattering him when he was barely holding himself together.
“I know which ones you mean,” Roger said gently.
“I don’t,” Janiyah said brusquely.
“I assume they’re talking about their pirate days,” Thomas replied with an edge of judgmental tone.
“We had to make money somehow,” Roger said. “Cobbling didn’t pay like stealing the goods from rich pricks.”
“Cobbling?” Janiyah asked.
“It’s an old word for shoemaker,” Vincent answered.
“Enough discussion,” Josefina declared. “We’re close, yes?”
“Three blocks,” Vincent said.
Roger slid his black ski mask on, and the others followed suit. The final few seconds were an eternity of anxiety.
The instant Roger felt the van come to a complete stop, he shoved open the back doors and stepped out onto the pavement. Everyone behind him fell into step and followed him toward the double doors. Amber left the passenger seat and took up the rear position as they swept into the lobby.
The security guards behind the desk were already reaching for phones and alarms. Roger rushed one, and Josefina zipped at the other. Not taking a chance, he had a silver dagger in hand and plunged it into the heart of the guard he’d caught. Only as he held on to the man did he catch his scent of the grave. A vampire. Someone just doing his job .
This was no time for guilt. Josefina dropped her guard to the ground, another victim motionless, and cleared the way for Dmitri. Keeping with the plan, Dmitri disabled what security he could at the front computer. If the guards had triggered any alarms, he would know.
After a few seconds of typing, he gave a thumbs-up. Then he ripped the computer off the desk and smashed it against the floor.
One step done, many more to go. Roger took a set of keys off one of the dead guards and led the way to the staircase. Amber and Janiyah remained behind in the lobby to protect their exit while the remaining four of them began a stealth march up to the sixth floor. As the only mortal, Thomas made the most noise, but even he was a whisper of a professional.
The keys gave them access to the floor, but Dmitri had been confident that they wouldn’t work on the door they needed. Roger handed them off to Thomas. With a nod, Thomas slipped them into his back pocket and pulled an arrow from his quiver. The hallway they were in extended in long sections either way, and he stayed to guard the stairway door.
Dmitri took point and headed down the left hall. When it joined at an intersection, he turned left again and halted.
A guard was walking the hall. As his hand went for his gun, Roger flung a dagger at him. It struck the guard in the shoulder rather than the heart. The scent of mortal blood filled the air, and hesitation stalled Roger’s plan.
Josefina surged forward and snapped the man’s neck. She took the walkie from his belt and held it out toward Roger.
The guard would have done his job and stood in their way, complicated everything. There was no reason to let him live, especially since he would have endangered the ones Roger cared about in this place. His death had been a necessity, and yet Roger had paused. I am so tired of collateral damage . Grimly, he took the walkie from Josefina. But there will be more before we’re done. And every drop of blood has to mean our freedom. I have to make it all count .
Silently, Dmitri strode forward, and Roger followed him. With Josefina bringing up the rear, they navigated their way to the server room door. A biometric lock barred their path. Dmitri put his hand on the pad, but it flashed red. He tried a second time. Same result.
Josefina took one of the smaller detonation charges out of her bag. Explosives had been the backup plan, but the floor was silent. The noise of a bomb, however small and targeted, was certain to drag attention. And attention meant more guards.
Securing their exits had seemed like the smart strategy, but their group was spread thin. A sudden image of an overwhelming number of vampires swarming the ground floor and Thomas came to Roger. The security wasn’t endless. If Roger and the others fought well enough, they might even win.
But so much could go wrong.
The door wasn’t seamless in the wall. The thinnest gaps existed—they had to—and in those gaps were places the light didn’t touch. Anton managed to use shadows to travel whole miles in an instant. He could call on them to do his bidding.
Roger had managed a facet of that. On instinct, he’d once slipped Seamus’s grasp through some form of shadow manipulation. I didn’t turn my arm into shadow. I pushed my arm into the shadow space . If he could do that, he could manage a few inches to the other side of the door, couldn’t he?
He motioned for Josefina to stay back and then put his hand on the crack of the door. The strange, otherworldliness awareness was at the edge of his mind, like a friend waiting for him to answer his phone. He picked up, letting it speak to him.
Something beyond his mundane senses opened. Reality became a web of stimuli, sticky with concrete details and gossamer with that weird elseness. The shadow under his fingertips had a cold, liquid feel to it. Despite its thinness, he sensed that the surface went deeper and the shadows extended into the room beyond.
He had dived into crystal-clear waters where the depth had been so much more than the waters seemed at first sight. Perhaps the shadows were the same. All he had to do was step to the edge of reality and take the plunge. He pushed into that thin space.
Moving into the shadow was like dropping into an icy ocean, though these ethereal seas were colder than any wave had ever been. While he didn’t need air in the real world, in this moment, his lungs screamed for oxygen. He opened his mouth to suck some in but found only murky otherness. The world was shapes in darkness with ill-defined edges except where the light touched. The shadows roiled away from the light, and yet some of them were biting at it. They seemed to have some level of consciousness or at least a feral instinct. They had to be the kind of shadow that Anton commanded into tendrils.
He realized that even in the act of turning around to look at the light, he had stepped past the door. The shifting blacks and grays defined the borders of the server room. All he had to do was find his way back to the normal realm.
When diving, his greatest challenge had been reaching deeper. The surface had always called him upward. Physics, Zack would have said. And he didn’t belong to this other-place. Closing his eyes, Roger felt a tug toward the surface. He leaned into it, and the cold fell away. Air brushed against the thin strip of skin left exposed by his ski mask.
He opened his eyes to darkness, but a familiar empty-feeling shadow rather than the inky living gray matter of that other realm. Gently, he reached out and touched the door. The handle turned easily, and he pulled the door open.
Dmitri and Josefina stared at him with wide eyes for an instant, but they recovered and moved into the room as soon as he stepped out of their way. Moving swiftly, Dmitri went to the back and took a laptop from his sling bag. He hooked up to one of the machines.
Josefina took a position by the door with Roger. She whispered, “You didn’t tell me you were gaining ancient powers.”
“This didn’t feel like a vampire ability,” Roger murmured. “Something weird is going on.”
“Whatever it is, you make good use of it,” Josefina replied.
“Hm.” Roger glanced around for any sign of a camera but didn’t see one. That didn’t mean the room was free of them. Zack had taught him that cameras could be smaller than a button and still capture quite a bit of area.
The long minutes waiting for Dmitri to finish with the servers were eternities unto themselves. Each one brought a new hellish imagining of what hell they would endure if they were discovered. Seven painful ideas were far too many, and yet an eighth added its weight. A ninth.
“How much longer?” Roger asked.
“A couple more minutes,” Dmitri replied.
“Anyone notice you?”
Dmitri didn’t answer aloud, but he had an intense desire to keep going and a thin want to suppress information. That was an emotion Roger was all too familiar in feeling from him. Back in the early 1700s, he would get the same way when they were robbing carriages and the job was turning against them.
“Damn it,” Roger swore under his breath. “Set the charges.”
“Are you sure?” Josefina asked.
“Ten minutes. Do it.”
Josefina nodded and set to work.
Roger poked his head out of the door. The stillness of the floor was disturbed, though he didn’t hear a distinct sound at first. Then there was a running footfall, and another. He stepped out into the hall and pulled two of his daggers.
But the guards weren’t running toward the server room door. They were rushing elsewhere.
Thomas . With a burst of speed, Roger hurried back to where they’d left him. As he did, the sounds of a fight broke out. A body thumped to the floor, and Roger turned the corner in time to see a vampire fall with a wooden arrow in their heart. He stepped over them and grabbed a different guard attempting to blur past him. He snapped the guard’s neck and moved on to the next opponent.
Between Thomas and Roger, the other three fell quickly. Before Roger could relax, the elevator doors dinged in the distance. A faint red light pulsed at the far corners of the room. Perhaps subtle for a human, but Roger noticed it.
“We’re discovered,” Roger said to Thomas. “Go.”
“What about?—”
“I have this door. Go .”
Thomas nodded sharply and then hurried into the stairwell. Once the door shut, his footsteps were muffled, but they continued growing more and more distant as he made his way down.
The more concerning footsteps were the ones rushing from the elevators toward Roger. He spun his daggers in his hands, wished he’d thought to have a silver cutlass made, and turned to face the oncoming attackers. Four guards rounded the corner; all were vampires.
Hoping to disguise his voice a fraction, Roger roughly told them, “Last chance to walk away.”
One guard did pause but then fell into step with his coworkers.
A bulk of the vampires in the GLC were under a hundred and fifty years old, most being turned after Seamus had claimed Chicago the heart of his territory. These four were no exception, and even outnumbering him didn’t give them an advantage. Roger’s training with Nell had sharpened his reflexes, and he tore through them in an instant. His silver daggers burned out their hearts. Small puffs of red mist dissipated in the air.
Two more sets of running footsteps headed toward him, but Roger recognized one. Dmitri. In a fraction of a second, he and Josefina hurried around the corner and toward the stairwell. Roger stepped out of their way and motioned for them to go ahead of him. They didn’t hesitate, and the three of them sped down the stairs, catching up to Thomas as he reached the bottom.
They poured out of the stairwell and into the lobby. The sounds of the fight upstairs had masked the noise of the one happening on the lower level. Amber let a shotgun blast loose at two vampires that were closing in on her. Janiyah was trading blows with another security guard up against a wall.
The elevator doors dinged open. The vampires who ran out weren’t dressed as guards but like office workers. The glare of their red eyes and the variety of weapons in their hands gave away their intent. One raised a pistol, aiming for Thomas.
Roger dashed forward and sliced his daggers through the flesh of the one aiming for Thomas, and plunged a dagger into the vampire’s heart. The vampire howled, screaming in agony as the silver burned him, and he slid off Roger’s dagger with a sickening, dead thud to the floor.
The other three vampires emerging from the elevators had been concerned with Amber and Janiyah, but now they saw Roger, Dmitri, Thomas, and Josefina coming out of the stairwell.
Chaos erupted. Dmitri bolted for the exit, throwing one of the vampires Amber had shot out of the way. The other latched onto him and dragged him to a halt.
Josefina engaged with a vampire leaving the elevator and cracked bone with her truncheon, while Thomas fought with his short sword and enchanted dagger beside her.
A vampire almost slipped past Roger, but he buried one of his silver daggers into her heart and held her in place until her heart burned away. The grunts, snarls, and strikes of the others in the lobby were a constant noise. Underneath them, he heard the pounding of footsteps. More were coming down the staircase. Roger glanced over his shoulder to his companions.
Amber missed with her next shotgun blast, and the vampire who Dmitri had tossed closed the distance with her. The vampire Janiyah was fighting dodged her strike but also failed to hit her. Dmitri continued to struggle to throw off the vampire hanging on to him.
The mission was done. Staying and fighting would only mean they’d become overwhelmed.
“Run!” Roger ordered.
His companions started to make for the doorway as the next wave of security and office workers reached the lobby floor. Amber and Janiyah made it out into the night, and Josefina blurred across the lobby to rush out with them. Thomas and Dmitri were caught up in fights with vampires who crowded them.
With a snarl, Roger punched one of the vampires harassing Thomas and stabbed through the throat of the other. Freed, Thomas started for the door.
A dozen vampires poured out from the stairwell. And still, the thundering of feet told Roger that more were on the way. He snapped necks and sliced and stabbed as fast as he could, but three still caught up to Thomas, and more reached Dmitri. One office worker near Roger swung a stapler at him and caught him in the forehead with it. His skin healed and pushed the bit of metal out within an instant, but it wasn’t the only wound he had to heal. Roger could push off from them, outrun them. He might be able to slip into the shadows and escape that way.
But that would mean leaving Thomas and Dmitri to their fates.
No . Roger roared and punched through a vampire’s chest, taking its heart clean from its body. He threw the organ against the far wall and pushed another with all his might. Three vampires flew from the one shove, and he seized the opportunity to head for Thomas.
Before he could reach him, a vampire sank its fangs into Thomas’s neck.
Another was poised to plunge a broken chair leg through Dmitri’s heart.
I will not lose . A desperate storm struck lightning in Roger’s soul. The world tilted, the colors changing. A halo of color surrounded each person in the lobby, becoming a sea of dim red. Thomas had an orange aura, and though Dmitri’s was red like the other vampires, he had a rainbow sigil on his chest.
The light was not what Roger sought. With so many people in the lobby, the number of shadows had quadrupled and lengthened. He reached out into those cold spaces like he’d reached for his own shadow. They roiled and twisted, not answering with voice as much as a distant touch.
He could bring them forth.
As he’d seen Anton do so many times, Roger pictured those shadows wrapping around the attackers. He commanded them to form into ropes and bind his enemies to the floor. Then he gave them the tide in his soul to power them, to coax them further into his reality and obey.
For a heart-wrenching split second, he’d thought they were going to ignore him. He screamed in the terror of his doubt and redoubled the mental wave he felt.
Ten voices echoed his scream as the shadows tore up from the floor in ropey tendrils and wrapped around the ten vampires fighting in the lobby. All ten went to the floor, caught and bound by the shadow tendrils.
Thomas and Dmitri were spared and stumbled away from the vampires who had been hurting them. Both of their expressions were blank with shock.
Dmitri recovered quicker, motioning for Roger to follow them.
Elation tore through Roger. He ran for the van, feet barely touching the ground, and flung himself into the back of the vehicle behind Dmitri and Thomas. Vincent was taking off down the road before Josefina finished shutting the doors, but she managed to swing them shut. Everyone was ripping off their ski masks, except Amber and Vincent, who were in the front.
The back of the van was washed in a multitude of colored auras. Dmitri, Janiyah, and Josefina had faint red, while Thomas remained orange. Amber’s was a golden shade. White light poured out from Vincent, though shimmers of rainbow colors pulsed inside that light. The rainbow sigil on Dmitri’s chest was brighter than it had been in the lobby.
Roger had a fraction of a moment to admire it before Thomas grabbed him roughly by the shirt and hauled him up so they were face-to-face. The strangely colored vision faded away into his regular sight.
“What the hell was that?” Thomas demanded.
“How long have you been able to command the dark?” Dmitri asked.
“What the what?” Janiyah said.
“There was this shadow thing,” Amber replied. “Did you see it?”
“How could I see it back here?” Janiyah snapped.
“I was talking to Vincent.”
“All I saw was you guys jumping into the van,” Vincent said.
The lightness in Roger dropped off into an aching tiredness that he didn’t usually feel unless he’d stayed up well past dawn. It wasn’t quite as bad as when he’d first woken from his coma, but he was growing hungry. The blood he’d had earlier that night was a diminished reservoir.
“Oh my God, Dmitri! Don’t lean back.” Josefina shoved Dmitri’s shoulders forward.
A piece of the chair leg was protruding from the center of the Dmitri’s back. With a quick and careful pull, Josefina freed it from his back.
From the angle of the injury and the length and width of the piece of wood, it should have struck Dmitri’s heart. He should have died. Josefina met Roger’s gaze, her eyes wide, so he wasn’t the only one who’d thought that. Why does Dmitri have a sigil and other vampires don’t? What did Anton do to him ?
“Hey!” Thomas shouted. His fear radiated, a dim flicker despite the tension in his voice. “Answer me!”
“It’s a new thing. A very new thing,” Roger managed weakly. He locked his gaze with Dmitri’s. “I couldn’t let anything else happen to you.”
Dmitri dipped his head and looked away, but he glanced back through his dark lashes after a second.
I shouldn’t let that unfetter my heart . Roger pushed away from Thomas and slumped against the side of the van. The plan was to head out of the city, swap to a different van, and drive back in later on. Roger hadn’t counted on needing blood, and he wasn’t about to ask the mortals with him for any.
The crashing boom from the bombs Josefina had set was just at the edge of Roger’s hearing. There was a chance someone might have been hurt, and Roger swallowed that guilt.
Amber tore off her ski mask as she turned around in her seat. “Did we do it? Is the money gone?”
Slowly, Dmitri smiled. “I did it. He has lost billions .”
We fucking won, and none of us died . A laugh bubbled out of Roger, and soon, the entire van was celebrating so rowdily that Vincent shouted at them to knock it off as he was driving. Their glee was quieted but not stifled. Sweet victory, I have missed the taste of you .