by Alex Rivers
“One at a time,” I said. “I’m last.”
Isabel went first, grabbing the rope, and began climbing it nimbly.
“I was worried for you,” Kane said. “It sounded like a bit of action took place there.”
“Nothing I couldn’t handle,” I answered.
“I’m starting to think that’s generally the case.”
I looked away, trying to hide my embarrassed smile. “Harutaka, how are we doing?”
“Looking good,” Harutaka said. “The baroness is in a large, comfortable-looking room on the third floor. She’s sitting on a sofa, talking… I’m presuming she’s talking to the vampire.”
“Baroness? Are you okay?”
“She can’t hear you,” Harutaka interjected. “She muted the chat.”
That made sense. The vampire’s ears would be sharp enough to hear us through her earpiece.
“I’m up,” Isabel said.
Kane grabbed the rope and began climbing, Sinead’s bag on his shoulder. I half-expected him to struggle with it. He was much larger than Isabel, after all, and it would take a lot of strength to pull his body up the rope. But his movements were smooth and agile, and in a few seconds he was already ten feet up.
“I thought the vampire would lunge at her once they were out of sight,” Harutaka said.
“I guess this one is gentlemanly,” I answered.
“Aren’t you worried he might… drink too much?”
“The tincture should make him woozy,” I said, trying to keep the unease from my voice. “She should be able to pull back after a few seconds. He won’t have a lot of time to drink.”
“I’m on the roof.” Kane sounded breathless. Strong or not, those cigarettes probably weren’t helping his lungs.
I grabbed the rope and began scaling the wall. As a teenager I had practiced climbing daily, learning how to wedge my fingers into the smallest cracks, how to push myself up with only one limb, how to lunge for handholds. Climbing this knotted rope was a walk in the park. I shimmied up, enjoying the height and the rush.
Then a movement drew my eye. I glanced sideways. Through a small window, I gazed into a large, lavishly furnished room. There was a huge bed covered in silk bedsheets. An oak wardrobe, its surface carved with intricate designs. A large, comfortable sofa.
Maximillian Fuchs sat on the sofa, Sinead, the baroness, beside him.
She leaned toward him, murmuring something in his ear. He seemed hypnotized, the scent of her blood probably tantalizing him beyond belief. I doubted he understood a single word she said.
He whispered something, smiling. His fangs glittered in the light. The baroness cupped his cheek, gazing into his eyes. Then she lowered the front of her dress, uncovering the tops of her breasts. She tilted her head back and said one word. I read her lips. Drink.
He moved with lightning speed, one hand snaking around her, his face plunging to her chest, his fangs biting through her delicate skin. I let out a whimper of fear. Although I knew we had staged it, I suddenly felt insane for endangering my friend this way. Putting her in a room with a vampire, after spiking her blood to be more enticing—what was I thinking?
He drank in a frenzy, his body clenching with something that looked like pure passion. I counted the seconds. One… two… three… four…
It should be enough. I glanced at Sinead’s face, expecting to see her expression alert as she prepared to pull him away.
She gazed at the ceiling, her eyes wide and blank, biting her lower lip in ecstasy. Something was wrong.
“What’s going on?” Harutaka whispered in my ear. “She isn’t pulling him away.”
“He did something to her! She looks… drunk.” I clenched my jaw. “Turn her voice chat on. We have to snap her out of it.”
“I can’t. Only she can turn it on.”
“Damn it!” How many seconds had gone by? Ten? Fifteen? How much was he drinking from her? He’d kill her.
I hesitated, then thumped at the window.
Neither of them seemed to care. He sucked more and more. Was she becoming pale? I thumped the window again, harder. Nothing. She wrapped her hands around his head, pulling him toward her, instead of pushing him away. What the hell was happening? Horrified, I watched the vampire about to drain my friend dry. My heart beat wildly, my breathing shallow, a bitter taste in my mouth.
The fear pulsed in me, in my hands, and before I could stop it, my right hand burst into flames, burning the glove off instantly. I quickly let go of the rope, clutching it only with my left hand and my legs. An orange glowing spot materialized where the flame had touched it, a wisp of smoke rising from it. But it held.
My left hand became infernally hot as well. Pulling back my burning fist, I hit the window as hard as I could. I heard the glass crack slightly.
Sinead’s eyes sharpened. She glanced at the window, saw my face, my blazing hand, then gaped downward, at the head of Maximillian Fuchs.
She yanked him back and pushed herself away. I let out a small breath of relief. The vampire seemed dazed, confused. My potion had done its job.
Sinead fumbled at her ear, and suddenly I could hear her heavy breathing in my earphone. She had unmuted the chat.
“I’m fine,” she mumbled, sounding far from fine.
Her voice calmed me down enough to quench the flames on my hand. I could only hope none of the guards below had seen this momentary flicker of fire. I glanced at the vampire. “He isn’t,” I said. “He drank much more than he should have. He’ll fall asleep in a few seconds. Get the combination from him, now!”
She nodded at me through the window, then turned her eyes to Maximillian.
“Maximillian,” she said. “I have a question for you.”
“Wha…?” His voice was heavy, sleepy.
“There’s a combination to the vault’s door, Maximillian. I want to know what it is.”
“I shouldn’t have drunk so much,” he mumbled. “But you tasted so good. I need more.” He fumbled toward her.
She gently held him back. “Soon, darling,” she said. “But first I just need to know this one small thing. And then you can drink your fill. What’s the combination to the vault door?”
“The combination?” His eyes were closing.
“That’s right, darling. Just give me the combination.”
“It’s four digits.”
“Okay. What are they?”
“It’s… hang on. The room is spinning.”
“You’re very tired, Maximillian. Just give me the combination, and you can sleep.”
“It’s… six… three…”
He tumbled to the floor, his arms spread to the side, a trickle of Sinead’s blood on his lip. He was unconscious, and he had given us only half the combination.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Through the glass pane, my eyes met Sinead’s. For a second, it seemed as if she were about to cry. Then her jaw clenched firmly, and she studied the unconscious vampire at her feet.
“Do you think we’ll be able to wake him?” she asked, her voice soft in my earphone.
“Not likely. That was a powerful soporific, and he ingested a lot more than I had intended. Can you stand up?”
“Sure.” She rose to her feet and then gasped, and wobbled.
“Sit down before you faint,” I hissed at her. “You lost a lot of blood.”
She sat back on the sofa. There were twin puncture marks on the top of her breast, and a trickle of blood ran down from it to her dress. She was definitely pale, and her eyes fluttered. She looked like she was about to faint, and my heart plunged. But then she stilled herself, palms on the sofa, and began breathing deeply, shutting her eyes.
“Take your time,” I said.
“Said the girl hanging ten yards above the ground, waiting for me to move,” she mumbled.
“I’m very comfortable here, don’t worry about it.” But now that she mentioned it, I suddenly noticed how tired my muscles were. I shifted my grip on the rope, transferring some of
the weight to my legs. I would have to climb up to the roof soon.
“Okay.” She opened her eyes. Very slowly, she stood up, stilling herself against the bedpost. She approached the unconscious Maximillian, and crouched by his side. Her movements were slow, and her fingers trembled. She began going through his clothing, finally retrieving a keycard from his right pants pocket.
“Okay, got it,” she said.
“Good.” Harutaka’s voice buzzed in our ears. “Sinead, the door to the greenhouse is not far from where you are. There is no one on your floor, you’re good.”
“See you in a bit.” I smiled at her encouragingly. Then I began climbing again. My muscles were trembling, but it was still an easy climb. In the background, I heard Harutaka guiding Sinead through the house, and her answers. Her voice sounded a bit more firm, or at least that’s what I wanted to believe.
I reached the ledge of the roof in three seconds. Kane crouched above me and offered me his hand. I took it, and he hauled me up. For a moment we stood facing each other, him holding my right hand, his breath heavy and warm. Then I pulled away.
“Thanks. I need another glove.”
He wordlessly produced a pair of gloves from the bag, and I took the one for my right hand. I’d anticipated this sort of accident as well, though this was the only spare we had.
I looked for the edge of the rope. It was attached to a small pipe on the roof’s surface, my chain coiled tight around it. I grabbed the rope, and touched my chain gently. It quickly slid up my hand, and twisted back into a bracelet. I retied the rope to the pipe, this time without my chain. Then I began pulling it up.
“What will we do about the password?” Kane asked me.
“Plan B,” I said shortly.
Isabel cleared her throat. “I told you, I don’t know if it can be done.”
“You can do it.” Coiling the rope calmed my frayed nerves. I began feeling a bit better. The password was a small setback, nothing more. “Did you find the greenhouse door?”
“It’s over there,” Isabel said, pointing in the darkness.
I followed her finger with my eyes, saw the large glass dome of the dragon’s greenhouse about twenty yards away. I finished coiling the rope and put it on the roof’s surface. “Let’s go.”
I led the way, Kane and Isabel walking silently in tow. We reached the door and I peered inside through the glass. It was hard to see anything in the dark, but I spotted a murky figure making her way to us slowly. It was Sinead. She reached the door, and searched around her. Finally, she pressed a button on the wall, and the door clicked, opening slightly.
The way into the mansion was unlocked.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The greenhouse was humid and warm. The relief of being away from the cold night air evaporated almost instantly, replaced by a sense of stuffiness and discomfort. The others shuffled past me as I hugged Sinead gently.
“How are you holding up?” I asked in a low voice.
“A bit dizzy,” she answered. “I’ll be good once I rest a bit.”
“You were amazing in there.”
“Yeah, I was great, how I almost let him kill me.” She seemed pale, shaken. “I couldn’t stop him, Lou. For a few seconds, all I wanted was for him to keep drinking. I can’t explain it.”
“Vampires are rumored to have ways of making their victims docile. I guess the rumors are true.” I squeezed her hand. “You did good.”
She smiled weakly.
I looked around me. It was hard to see the plants in the dark, but I glimpsed strange shapes. Huge twisted cones, long toothy leaves, gnarled branches looking like claws. Some of the plants seemed almost to move in the darkness, leaning toward us, as if noticing the intruders. The atmosphere was oppressive, hostile.
“Okay.” I glanced at my three companions. “Sinead will rest here. The rest of us go on to the vault door in the basement. Once we open the vault door—”
“If we open the door,” Isabel said.
“We will. Once we do, Isabel will join Sinead. Both of you will go down the rope, assume the roles of the baroness and her personal assistant, and drive away. Kane and I will crack the safe, grab the scales and the box, and teleport to safety.”
“My PowerPoint presentation explained it all much more succinctly.” Sinead grumbled.
“We can all watch it again once we’re out of here,” I muttered. “Harutaka, how are we doing with the security guards in the manor?”
“There are still two in the dining hall, with the guests,” he said. “One in the security room, watching the monitors, and a fourth patrolling the floors. But he seems to be spending a lot of the night in the security room with his friend. They’ve procured a bottle of wine from the banquet.”
“Where’s the dragon?”
“Still in the dining hall, talking to the attorney general.”
“Has anyone noticed that the mansion’s security chief is missing?”
“No… but if that patrol guard finds him unconscious on the floor, there might be questions.”
“We’ll take care of it,” I said. I pictured the blueprints in my mind, and thought of the room where I had seen the vampire bite Sinead. I could find the way there easily. “The floor is empty, right?”
“So far.”
“Let us know if that changes.” I turned to Sinead and held out my hand. “Can I have the card please?”
“I almost forgot.” She laughed shakily, and retrieved Maximillian’s magnetic card from her pocket. She handed it to me. “Be careful.”
“See you in an hour.” I tucked the card into my own pocket.
I crossed the greenhouse, Kane and Isabel behind me. I did my best to keep my distance from the creepier-looking plants, imagining one of them suddenly snapping at me. At the far end of the greenhouse, I found the stairs leading to the third floor. Eight stairs. With each one, the familiar sense of exhilaration and excitement that came with breaking into someone’s home intensified. It was difficult to acknowledge to myself that I had missed this feeling, the rush of knowing that getting caught here would mean prison or death, the giddy feeling of traipsing through someone else’s home without his awareness or consent, his valuables a mere touch away.
And what valuables they were.
Dragons live for centuries. And they dedicate their entire lifetime to collecting things. But they weren’t like typical hoarders, with rooms full of stacked newspapers, or balls of twine. No. They hoarded things of beauty and value. Every room we walked into was decorated with works of art, with cases displaying intricate pieces of jewelry. One room had a collection of Ming vases and other ceramics. Another had two curved swords crossing each other, hanging on the wall, their scabbards lined with jewels. Paintings hung on almost every wall, the colors vibrant, the details staggering.
The decorations weren’t necessarily in good taste. One room had two paintings I guessed belonged to the Renaissance period, hanging next to a huge postmodern painting of a yellow square and a red dot. The room’s carpet was Persian, and in the middle stood an enormous jade statue of an elephant. Dragons were known for their ferocity and attraction to treasures, not for their interior design capabilities. Ddraig Goch probably couldn’t care less if a marble statue of a Greek goddess didn’t match the Japanese swords that lined the walls in the room. In fact, maybe he liked it that way. Maybe it was just another way to demonstrate how he viewed us. After all, I didn’t bother to decorate my bedroom in a way that matched the expectations of the occasional cockroach that visited it.
“Look at all these things,” Kane said, staring wide-eyed at a jeweled crown in a display case.
“Don’t touch anything,” I reminded him. “He’ll know.”
He flashed me an irritated look, and I shrugged.
We finally reached the room of Maximillian Fuchs. He still lay on the floor, unconscious. The drug he had consumed should keep him sleeping for a few more hours at the very least.
I approached his inert body, motioning Kane
to join me. He grabbed the vampire’s feet, while I slid a hand under his neck.
His head instantly twisted to the side, the mouth gaping open, reaching for my forearm. I hissed in fear and pulled my hand back, letting his head drop to the floor. His mouth snapped several times, making sharp clicking sounds. His eyes were still shut, the body inert. Kane dropped the vampire’s feet again, and we shared shocked glances.
“Jesus,” I muttered.
“What is it?” Harutaka whispered in my ear.
He couldn’t see the vampire, I remembered. “Looks like this thing’s reflexes are still sharp, even when he’s unconscious,” I said. “We should probably stay away from his teeth.”
We ended up pulling him up to the bed by his feet. It was clumsy work, and his head banged against the bedside twice. He could blame only himself for the headache he would have when he woke up.
Once Maximillian Fuchs was comfortably sleeping in his bed (feet on his pillow, shoes still on) we turned to the stairs. I knew the layout of the mansion by heart and didn’t hesitate as I strode across the hallway toward the stairs that would take us to the first floor. At one point, Isabel touched my shoulder and pointed upward. From the ceiling’s corner, a tiny lens watched us. It made me think of Harutaka, looking at us on his monitor, verifying that any security feed nearby us was overridden with a loop of twenty-minutes-old footage, turning us digitally invisible. Without him, all the guards in the complex would have surrounded us by now.
We reached the stairs in less than a minute. They went down two floors, and would take us straight to the lobby on the first floor. We began to descend them in a hurry, when Harutaka’s voice buzzed in the chat.
“Guys, the patrol just left the security room and is coming your way. Hide, now.”
I had just reached the second floor, and dashed toward the closest door. I opened it to find a small bathroom. I slid inside and was shutting the door when it was pushed open violently, smacking me in the forehead.
Kane slid inside and swung the door closed. It made an audible click as it shut, and my heart sank.