Page 15 of Dragon’s Rebel

Chapter 7

Rebel crawled through the ventilation shafts, keeping the blueprints she’d memorized in the forefront of her mind. She heard her former mentor’s voice in her head. This is why we do our prep, boys and girls. For when everything goes sideways.

She took a left at the next corner, knowing that in about fifty feet she’d encounter a maintenance ladder, and she’d have to make a choice.

Go down, and hope she could slip out one of the many ground floor exits, or better yet, one of the basement maintenance access points.

Downside: they’d be expecting that, and probably had the building surrounded.

Or she could go up. There were two advantages to that: she might be able to contact Thorne once she was outside, and let him know she needed an early exit. Or, if she had time, she could access her cable and winch, and lower herself to the ground in a place they weren’t expecting.

Downside: there were a lot fewer escape routes from the roof, and she didn’t know if she could count on Thorne to be there. What if he couldn’t hear her call? What if he wasn’t watching the roof? What if he’d stopped off to snack on a cow or something, and wasn’t coming back until the appointed time?

She was approaching the decision point now. Rebel paused and listened. Through the ceiling beneath her shaft, she could hear guards running through the halls, calling to each other. They had too many security forces—way more than the original intel had indicated.

The snatches of conversation she could overhear told her they were setting a perimeter around the building, and they were tracking her through the ventilation system as well. That made her decision.

She went up, towards the roof.

Beneath her, she felt the ladder vibrating. Someone was coming up after her. She branched off into another ventilation shaft that led to a different ladder, hoping to throw them off the track. Even a few seconds of surprise could make the difference between escape and capture.

Reaching the second ladder, she climbed as fast as she could, hoping to get to the roof before them, knowing that she couldn’t. They’d be going up by elevator, by stairs… she just hoped they weren’t surrounding all the maintenance hatches.

She called over and over to Thorne in her mind, but got nothing back. If he wasn’t there for her, her only option was the harness and cable. Even if he heard her as soon as she got outside, she couldn’t just stand there on the roof getting shot at while she waited for him to swoop in and rescue her.

She should never have counted on someone else to provide her escape.

She heard a hoarse barking sound below her, and she almost froze. No. Fucking. Way.

That sounded like a hellhound.

She’d only seen one once before, on the estate of a very, very rich man who’d turned out to be a sorcerer. It was the first time she’d learned that she could elude magical fields as well as electronic ones.

But she almost hadn’t eluded the hellhound. They were monstrous mutant shifters, trained to be attack dogs in both their human and shifter forms.

If she hadn’t stolen her magical Colt .45 during the same job, she would never have gotten away.

She had the Colt with her now, but this sounded like more than one hellhound.

A lot more.

Thorne! she called again.

Nothing.

She got to the top of the ladder, hoping she’d pass through the edge of the dampening field, but she didn’t feel anything. How far up did it extend? She reached up to the exit hatch over her head and turned the handle slowly, hearing the bolts that held it closed quietly disengaging.

She felt the ladder start to vibrate, and far below she could see a pair of glowing red eyes, looking up. The hellhound howled.

Holy fuck. She had to get out of here, no matter what was up above.

She heaved open the hatch and burst out of the shaft into the cool night. It should have been dark, but the top of the building was lit up like Christmas. Red and green flashing emergency lights everywhere, and at the far end where the helipad was, the arc lights were brighter than a baseball stadium during a night game.

A bullet pinged off the cover of the maintenance shaft. Rebel slithered out and lay flat, letting the cover fall and wedging her pry lever in the crack to hold it shut against the hellhound coming up behind her. Another bullet hit the roof inches from her head and she rolled behind an HVAC unit, coming to her knees and drawing her Colt.

She heard the snarl of a hellhound to her left. She whirled and shot. God, how many of these things did they have? The blue fireball from her gun hit the hellhound, knocking it off its four wolf-like paws and opening a smoking wound in its rear flank.

It rolled over and over, giving a high-pitched yelp. Hellhounds were almost impossible to kill without magic. And hard to kill even with it.