Steal the Light (Thieves) (23 page)

I ignored the invitation. “And Daniel?”

The flirtatious look on his face fled. “Daniel Donovan is the single most powerful vampire to rise in the last thousand years.”

I was speechless for a moment. That was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. “Daniel isn’t powerful. He can barely function as a vampire.”

Dev shook his head. “You don’t understand vampires, Zoey. The newly risen vampire always kills the first time he feeds. It’s why the Council swoops down like vultures the second they locate a new vamp.”

“Daniel didn’t kill. Daniel has never killed,” I stated.

Dev’s green eyes widened. “Oh, he’s killed all right, but not because he lost control. He had exquisite control from the moment he rose. A normal vampire takes hundreds of years to gain a single power. Some vampires have the power of persuasion. Some have incredible speed. They all have strength, but it is markedly more significant in some. Some can shape shift or call an animal. Some vampires even gain the power of flight after a thousand or so years.”

“So if Daniel lives a long time, he might be able to fly?” I wondered exactly where he was going with this. I knew Daniel was fast and strong. I guessed he was a fast learner.

“Daniel could fly the night he rose,” Dev said. “Vampires tend to have one or two powers after hundreds or thousands of years of living. Daniel had them from the moment he became a vampire.”

Tears sprang to my eyes as he spoke. He was lying. He had to be. Daniel would never keep those things from me. If this was true, then Daniel was farther from me than I ever imagined. “Daniel can’t do those things. He would have told me.”

He looked at me and there was sympathy in his green eyes. “Zoey, there was some discussion among the Council about executing him. There are some today who still believe it is the best course of action. Some members of the Council see him as a threat. It was only his ability to predict when a new vampire would rise that kept him alive. He’s the first in thousands of years with the ability, and the vampires need it. With the way the news covers murders these days, the vampires need forewarning to stay secret. Daniel gives them that warning. Some vampires wanted to place him at the head of the Council. There was talk of a crown. The vampires haven’t crowned a king in the last millennium, but it was discussed when Daniel rose.”

My mind spun. Dev had just turned my whole world upside down. “That’s insane. He’s…he’s Daniel. He likes science fiction and computers. He’s not some vampire king. He’s a nerd, for god’s sake.”

“I’ll let you read the dossier. I’m sorry, Zoey. I knew you didn’t know the whole story, but I never thought he’d kept you completely in the dark.”

He put a hand on my shoulder, and I moved away.

“Zoey, don’t blame me.” Dev’s green eyes were sad. I was sure he wanted to go back to the intimacy we’d been trying out earlier, but I just couldn’t. “I didn’t lie to you.”

But he’d been the messenger. “I know. I just need to think.”

“All right. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for any of this to hurt you,” he explained with a deep sigh. “I actually came in to give you this.”

He handed me a small packet. I looked at the bag in my hand. It contained dry herbs.

“Albert made it for you,” he said. “It’s for a dreamless sleep. I figured you needed it after whatever the demon did to you. You need rest, Zoey. You have to be at the top of your game if we’re going to pull this off. I’m going to go back out and make sure the surveillance is working. Take this and get some rest. When this is over, I’m going to take you on a trip, and we’ll get rid of those nightmares. We’ll go anywhere you like, sweetheart.”

He kissed me on the forehead, and I looked at the packet in my hand. I should have gone straight to the toilet and flushed it down. Who knew what was in those herbs? I’d known these people for so little time that there was no way I could trust them. So why did I walk to the bathroom and fill a glass with water? Why did I pour the packet into the water and watch it dissolve? Why did I swallow every last drop? Why did I trust that man so much?

I made my way back to the bed and didn’t really care if I’d taken a sleeping potion or poison. Either way, I was going to sleep, and for a while, I wouldn’t care about anything.

I sank into the sheets as blissful oblivion took me.

Long before I wanted to, I was jarred awake.

“Zoey,” Neil was saying as consciousness slowly drifted back. “Something is wrong. We have to go now. If we’re going to do this job, we have to do it tonight.”

Chapter Fifteen

It took everything I had to ignore Daniel as I walked into the living area of the suite. A million questions ran through my mind, but now wasn’t the time.

The whole living area was set up as a command center. There were three different computers throwing off low lights and humming quietly. The computer with the largest monitor showed the surveillance feed from the downstairs suite.

Neil talked to Daniel in hushed tones as I walked over to the monitor.

There they were. Our marks. Two men and one woman. Definitely Fae. They had long, elegant bodies and moved with sure grace. The men were dressed in khakis and polo shirts of varying color, but they tugged at the clothes as though the fabric bothered them. The female sported a brunette ponytail and wore a skirt and button down blouse.

A male with long, sandy blond hair and the female sat facing the open window. The bugs were obviously working as we could hear them plain as day. They spoke quietly in some language I couldn’t understand. The last man paced in and out of the camera’s range. He was the tallest, and if I had to bet, he was the blond one’s brother.

“Do we have any idea what they’re saying?” I kept my eyes on the screen, studying the marks.

Dev walked up behind me and pressed a mug of coffee into my hands. My mind was still foggy from sleep and the potion. The mug felt warm and solid.

He put a hand on my back as he leaned in and looked at the monitor. “I know what they’re saying, most of it anyway. They’re speaking Gaelic. It’s not exactly what my mother’s people speak, but it’s close enough. Fun fact: the Gaelic language is a derivation of ancient Elvish.”

“Thanks, professor.” Daniel took up position on my other side, trapping me between him and Dev. “Could you cut the trivia and tell her what they said?”

Dev ignored the bait and slid into the seat in front of the monitor. He pointed to the female. “This one seems to be the leader. She’s been telling the other two what to do. If I had to guess, the men are bodyguards. I think the word they used was escort, but I can’t be sure.”

“Did you get a shot of the box?” I asked.

“Yes.” Daniel bit the word out.

I finally looked up at him. Usually, right before a job there was a sort of calm that settled over Daniel. It was the same way for me, rather like an actor about to go on stage. We were nervous right up until we were about to go on and then we realized that we knew our lines and it was all going to be all right. The night before a job there was tension, but there was also excitement, even for Daniel. He liked to pretend that he did this just to keep me out of trouble, but he liked the rush, too.

But I could tell from the way he held his body that he wasn’t looking forward to the curtain going up on this particular performance.

“All right, is it in a safe or did they trap it?” I really hoped the answer was the safe. It was so much easier to deal with a nice, predictable safe than to have to figure out the Indiana Jones crap.

Dev pointed to the screen. “See, it’s right there.” He indicated a large box sitting on the coffee table.

I leaned forward to get a better look, and Dev obliged me by zooming in on the object. It was a large, rectangular box with ornate carvings. I couldn’t see a place where the lid to the box would come off. It looked like a single block of wood. I supposed that was where the whole part about "only those with the purest of intentions could open it" came in. This was the box described in the files. It was just sitting there. It was right out in the open. They weren’t even looking at it.

“Awesome, huh?” Neil still wore his hotel uniform and the contacts that turned his normally blue eyes brown.

In our line of work, we took a few precautions. Our disguises weren’t
Mission Impossible
good, but we did try to cover the major bases. The goal was to not be seen at all, but the reality was in a fight or flight situation, the only thing most people remembered was hair color, eye color, and size or shape. There wasn’t a lot we could do about size or shape, but the rest could be fixed. Neil’s hair was black tonight and tomorrow it would be a chestnut brown.

I looked around Neil and noticed Daniel was frowning at me. We shared the same concern. It wasn’t right. They should protect the box. They should guard the box. It was sitting in the middle of the room like a big old cupcake with a note saying “please eat me.”

Things just weren’t that easy.

Dev tapped the screen. “They just sat it down and haven’t touched it since. There’s a problem, though. I heard them talking about moving the box tomorrow morning at dawn.”

“I thought the box was scheduled to be moved two days from now,” Sarah said as she came in the room. She adjusted her short blonde wig and looked oddly normal in black tights and a black sweater.

“They talked about that, too,” Dev said. “It was a little confusing but they were talking about the veil being its thinnest in two days, but the leader thinks he can get through it tomorrow morning in the in-between time.”

“The veil between worlds?” I asked.

Dev turned the chair around. “Yes. There are Fae tribes who travel this way, or so I’m told. It’s complex, but there are times when the dimensional walls are thin, and if you know when and where, you can move through one plane and into another. Apparently the veil will be thin somewhere close to here starting tomorrow morning.”

It was how the Fae had left the Earth plane millennia ago. There were some who theorized that the supernatural beings on Earth were creatures from other planes that had gotten lost and adapted. If these faeries were trying to cross dimensions then it only made sense that they would try it during one of the in-between times. The story went that the veil between worlds was always thinnest at dawn and dusk, when the night and day changed places and all things were, for that brief time, possible.

It explained why the Fae had moved up their timetable. It explained why Daniel decided we needed to move now. It didn’t explain why that damn box was sitting in the open looking so ripe for the plucking.

I couldn’t help but let my gaze go back to Daniel.

“Something’s wrong,” he said, reading my mind.

“Definitely.”

Neil and Dev argued the merits of the easy job with Sarah while Daniel and I managed to meet in the middle of the room.

“It’s too easy,” he said quietly.

Nothing was that easy in our line of business. We weren’t opportunistic thieves who broke into convenient houses and hoped that the owners left valuables lying around. We spent months planning jobs because the things we stole were the things an owner protects. Items of arcane value tend to be obsessively guarded. When we stole an amulet of protection a few years back, we had to go through three layers of wards, countless locks, a pit bull, and a safe. We made ten grand off that job, but here was a million dollars sitting in the open, waiting for the taking.

“Halfer is fucking with us, Z.” Daniel ran a frustrated hand through his hair.

“I don’t know. We have to have a legitimate shot at getting the job done or I might be able to wriggle my way out of the contract.” After spending a little quality time with the demon, I doubted he was a wriggle-room kind of guy.

Daniel shook his head. “I don’t trust this. It feels bad.”

“I know, but what are we going to do? Are we going to watch them take that box into another dimension in the morning? We have no idea where the entry point will be. It could be a crowded street for all we know. This is a known quantity.”

“Do the job, don’t let the job do you,” Daniel said with a reasonable impersonation of my dad’s accent. It was my father’s mantra.

“So we go in and do the job and be ready for it all to go to hell.” It was our only option.

The phone on the table started to ring, and we all stopped. This was our chance.

Sarah made her way to the table and answered the phone with a crisp, professional voice. “Room service. How may we help you?”

I glanced at the monitor. The slightly smaller but still freakishly tall blond dude was speaking methodically into the phone. He seemed to be struggling with English. There was nothing in his manner that gave me the impression he knew anything was wrong. He seemed to be just another traveler ordering a meal from the hotel’s in room dining service. On the surface, he had no idea Daniel had rerouted the calls to this suite.

“Of course, sir, would you like the house salad with those?” Sarah asked. There was a reply on the end, and Sarah responded. “Yes, sir, it will be about fifteen minutes. Thank you.”

She hung up the phone. I watched the screen, looking for anything that could tell me this was a trap. In the background, the blond man was sitting in front of the television, switching through channels curiously, and his fellow travelers slowly joined him. They didn’t even look at the box on the table.