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Rollick and Sorsha come over as well. The demon studies my expression. “I take it that it’s time.”
I swallow past the nervous lump in my throat, my hand rising instinctively to where my cat-and-yarn charm is tucked behind my coat. “Yeah.”
“Well, you know the plan. We’ll be here to lend whatever help we can.”
Andreas looks us over. “Does everyone have what they need? We’ll want to get moving as soon as I’m finished.”
The guys incline their heads all around our loose circle. Drey reaches for Dominic first.
Thanks to the procedures Balthazar put us through, Andreas can turn other people invisible as well as himself. But the effect only lasts so long—and he’s stretching his strength to the limit working his power on all seven of us.
When we tried it out back at the Spanish mansion, the invisibility held for less than an hour. We hoped that swapping the power between us so we could each work it on ourselves might make it more potent, but we quickly discovered that as soon as Andreas passed it on to anyone else, his own invisibility faded.
So we’re stuck with a time limit on our concealment. And we worked out who Drey should erase first based on who can most easily fall back without screwing up the plan.
He works quickly through our group, moving to me and Sorsha last. She’s got the most firepower—literally—out of all of us, and I’m the swiftest and fastest killer.
I’ve returned Griffin’s locating skill to him because I don’t have any map of the base to use it on. But he has his own methods of finding Balthazar now that the man is close.
His soft voice carries from the seemingly empty space where he’s standing. “I can feel him down there—the same kind of impressions I got from him in the villa. He’s tense but pleased about something… in an unnerving way.”
“Probably plotting how many people he’s going to send his army to murder next,” I mutter as my body fades from view.
Andreas gives my arm a quick caress as he lets go of me, and we set off.
The six of us shadowbloods can keep track of each other through our awareness of our powers. Sorsha follows along with a faint tendril of warmth she wraps around my invisible wrist.
We clamber quietly down the slope past the ledge where I tracked Balthazar’s movements. Past a surveillance camera that’s got nothing to see and motion sensors reliant on visuals.
But those aren’t the only security measures Balthazar has taken against beings who aren’t affected by silver and iron. Closer to the base entrance lies a ring of pressure sensors.
Zian lets out a quiet hiss to draw us to a halt. There’s a faint glimmer of ruddy light as he uses his vision to sever some of the wires.
Sorsha will be melting others with her phoenix fire, but she doesn’t give any visible sign of that. Only a brief waft of heat gives any indication that she’s done her work.
She clicks her tongue to indicate that she’s finished. We can’t talk at all now, not when we aren’t sure how closely Balthazar might be monitoring audio around his hideout.
Two men stand guard in the arch of the entrance carved into the mountainside. The heavy hooded parkas they wear against the mountain chill work in our favor.
As Dominic saps the life out of them from a short distance, the ruff of their hoods hides the slackening of their faces. Jacob uses his telekinesis to “walk” them back against the stone walls. He snaps off shards of rock that he jabs through their coats from behind to hold them steady.
To any watching cameras, it’ll look as if they’re simply leaning at their posts.
A quiver passes through the air as Zian accepts Jacob’s power. Getting the door open without setting off any alarms depends on him.
With Rollick’s connections, the demon was able to dig up various purchase and construction agreements and determine what sort of locks Balthazar favors. Zian spent the better part of the last two days studying their inner workings.
I can only stand there, nerves twanging, while he peers through the steel slab of the door with his X-ray sight and brings Jacob’s telekinesis to bear on the intricate pieces.
For a minute, there’s nothing but the howl of the wind beyond the doorway and a deepening chill that Sorsha can’t risk warming away when we’re this close. Then, after a muffled exhalation of relief, the door whirs open.
We hurry past it and send it sliding shut in our wake.
The hall on the other side provokes an uncomfortable twinge of familiarity. The carved stone surfaces look an awful lot like the passages that wound through the mountain at the island facility where we were held by a different former captive.
Clancy wasn’t quite as insane as Balthazar is, but he was just as eager to use us for his purposes. I can’t say any of my memories of him are remotely happy.
Griffin takes the lead, with tiny nudges of our emotions that give us a sense of where to follow him. At his mental touch, the side doors strike me as dull, the hall ahead of us more enticing.
