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“She’s a real piece of work,” Grey sighed, gathering his new device into a black bag as he stepped out into the night air. Ghost and I followed, going around to the trunk to collect the duffles filled with packing foam to protect the eggs once we had them.
Ghost pulled on a pair of tight fitting leather gloves and flexed her fingers.
“Masks?” she asked the others as they came around to the back.
“Grey shook his head. “Won’t need them. I’m going to shut down the whole system while we’re in.”
“Won’t that set off some warning bells?”
“Not until your aunt realizes her shit’s gone. They’ll check the footage from the security cams and find a gap in the feeds.”
“I wish I had one of you back in Lennox,” Ghost mused. “Would have made a lot of our jobs goa lotsmoother.”
She’d mentioned before how she and her Dad used to run jobs together. Conning unsuspecting shop owners and the wealthy elite. But the reminder made me thirsty for something other than blood. I bit my lip ring, watching her double check the placement of all her blades before nodding confidently at me, scrunching her eyes at the look I was giving her. “You ready, Rook?”
“Soready.”
This was going to be fun.
“Let’s move,” Corvus commanded, hunching low as we circled the hedges, stealthily moving over the lawn in the moonlight to the side entrance. The one the staff used to bring groceries into the house. Ava Jade keyed the code into the small pad above the door handle from memory, but it chirped at her when she was finished. The light turning red.
“Shit.”
She tried again. Red light.
“Stop,” Grey said before she could enter it a third time. “You’ll have Thorn Valley PD crawling all over this place if you get it wrong three times.”
“I’m not getting it wrong,” she growled in a whisper. “That was the code.”
“Then the old bag is smarter than we gave her credit for,” Grey whispered, shuffling in front of Ava Jade to access the code panel. “She must’ve changed it after the shit show that was Thanksgiving.”
He used a flat bit of steel to carefully pry the box back, revealing a shining green panel with connected wires. He dug in his bag, connecting his device with some copper clips. “Just give me a sec.”
“Come on, come on,” Ghost repeated restlessly, bouncing from foot to foot. We had five minutes to get inside before the motion detection on the camera above our heads sent an alert to the alarm company.
“Got it,” Grey announced, detaching the device to reveal a green light.
“Move in,” Corvus urged. “We have to get to the coms room.”
We spilled into the mansion, greeted with the stagnant scent of musty old furniture made worse by the cover of expensive potpourri.
“Through here,” Ghost whispered, leading the way even though we’d gone over the location three times already. I followed her lead through the kitchens and dining room, across the marble floor in the foyer and to the little closet sized room around the dark side of the curving staircase.
Grey got to work right away, accessing the system with ease. He erased the couple minutes of footage that showed us coming up the side lawn and got ready to make it all go black.
“Can’t you loop this footage too?” Ghost asked, but Grey shook his head. “It’s an old system. Making it go dark is the best I can do.”
“Hold on,” I barked, grabbing my brother’s wrist before he could shut it all down. “Look.”
I pointed at the old bubbled screens and the fuzzy images they displayed of the mansion in darkness. There were angles of almost every room in the whole place. And there wasn’t a soul to be found in any of them.
“You don’t think she left town?” Ghost asked, leaning in to get a better view.
“After what happened?” Grey asked. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she left the state.”
“Shut it down,” Ghost told Grey, sliding from the room like a wraith in the dark on silent feet. “Rook, let’s sweep the place. The staff quarters are down the hall, all the way to the end on the right. I’m going to check my aunt’s room. They were the only ones without feeds.”
I guessed the old bitch drew the line at her staff watching her sleep.
