“Stay here, he said. I don’t know…it’s sucking up all the light…”
“Maybe it’s a gateway to Hell,” Rowan muses.
Jay’s voice reaches them seconds before he does. “It’s a twenty-foot moat, and it’s full of fucking alligators.”
“You have got to be kidding,” Finn breathes. “What’s stopping them from getting out of the moat?”
“Not a damn thing, which I think is the point. Saw two huge ones in the grass on the way back.” He points over his shoulder, where Grayson can now see two gigantic dark shapes shifting on the grass.
“But the good news is, I think there’s a drawbridge that slides out from under the door. Bad news is there’s no control panel on this side, so it’s probably triggered with remote control access. We’ll have to go back the way we came. There’s nowhere to land on the other side, even if we could jump it.”
And then climb the sixty feet to the top.
“I could try to teleport, blow the pad out, and then teleport back.” Grayson lets a small burst of electricity snap betweenhis fingers. It illuminates his mates’ faces, all wearing various expressions of frustration.
“No. There’s nowhere for you to land on the other side.” Jay shakes his head.
“I could try to teleport to the top of the wall and see if I can find a way in for you…”
“That’s a bad idea. You’d be alone, and we don’t know what kind of security is waiting. We stick together,” Finn insists, arms crossed over his chest.
Jay rubs his hand over the back of his neck. “Besides, it’s too high. You said you’re not even getting half that yet, let alone vertically. No. We think of something else.”
It surprises Grayson that all the ways he can think about solving this problem now include his magic when in the past he would have relied on his intellect and teamwork. It’s something he’ll have to watch going forward. Nimue had cautioned him that using his soul for the mundane puts him at risk of drawing too much—and of missing out on the parts of life that make being a person fun.
Finn huffs out a breath beside him, his long fingers stroking his chin like a bespectacled mastermind. This close to the beach, the wind has picked up, making his hair billow like a mad scientist.
“You said it’s remote control access, like a garage door opener?”
“I can’t be sure, but there’s no keypad, and it stands to reason they don’t leave the drawbridge down during maintenance because of the gators. The lawn crew would need to be able to open and close it from out here.”
“Maybe we could trigger it from out here, too.”
“You have an idea, Finnie?” Jay asks.
“We’d better decide fast, because I think we have company.” Rowan points to three large alligators moving toward themacross the lawn, their long, sinuous bodies shifting unhurriedly toward them in the darkness.
“Yeah.” Finn nods, choosing an alternate trajectory away from the advancing reptiles and moving toward the door. “But it means we’ll be down a phone.” Leo and Luca had the other two inside the castle walls. “But it’ll be worth it if we can get inside.”
“What good is a phone?” Rowan asks, eyes glinting in the dark as he watches the alligators.
“I have a plan…but I’ll need some of Gray’s magic to make it work…”
“It’ll tip Withers off if I use The Plain…”
“You won’t need much, a spark or two. Do we have any other choice? We can’t get in the front door without causing a scene, so this is it.”
The silence is heavy as his mates weigh their choices, and each man comes to the same realization.
“Okay, Finn, let’s do it.” Rowan grins. “MacGyver that shit.”
With a chuckle, Finn pops off the back of the phone, cracking the housing to locate a narrow piece of metal inside near the battery.
“This is a trace line Bluetooth antenna. If Gray can run the right amount of electricity through here, we might be lucky enough to trigger the door with low-frequency radio waves.”
Grayson tries to keep the skeptical look off his face, and he’s not the only one. It sounds fantastical. And fuck, is his mate smart.
“Uh…guys? We should hurry. I can’t take on more than five or six of these guys by myself,” Rowan mutters, eyes on the dozen alligators emerging from the moat, more interested now that the bipeds are moving around and much closer.
