In the first second as the wavering blueish light washed over me, I thought I’d stumbled on a mad scientist’s lab already. Then my eyes adjusted to the dim light—and the stink of chlorine. The bastard had his own indoor pool, for fuck’s sake.
I skirted the still water and the glow of the lights beneath it. I’d made it halfway around the pool when a guard pushed past the far door. From his stern but not frantic expression and the energy to his stride, he was concerned about whatever he’d come down here to investigate but not yet aware it was an all-out invasion.
At least, until he spotted me. “Halt right there!” he shouted, his gun hand jerking up.
He had better instincts than Leland, but not good enough. I’d already grabbed a life preserver that’d been mounted on the wall beside me. I hurled it at him like a massive discus in time to smack his arm to the side.
The good news: I remained bullet-free. The bad news: His finger still squeezed the trigger, sending one of those bullets into the far wall with an unmistakable boom that echoed through the building around us.
There went our advantage of stealth. Our chances of victory were really ticking away now.
I dove at the guard’s legs, aiming to stay out of the line of fire while I knocked him on his ass. Unfortunately, there are rules about running on pool decks for a reason. My feet skidded on a slick patch, and I tumbled over on my ass.
Ruse materialized beside me looking ready to come to my defense however he could, but at the same moment, Bow leapt from the shadows in full centaur form. “I can’t touch your head in that helmet, but the diving board doesn’t have the same problem,” he declared, and spun so he could slam his hind horse legs into the guard’s gut.
The man hurtled across the water. The back of his skull smacked into the edge of the diving board so hard the helmet dented halfway through his head. He dropped like a sack of potatoes into the pool. Bow wiped his hands together with an unusually vicious expression.
Possibly too vicious. “Maybe a little lighter on the hoof power next time?” Ruse said as we dashed to the door the guard had emerged from. “We need at least one of these fools alive—and conscious enough—for me to charm them into leading the way to their prison.”
“Sorry,” Bow said, not looking as if he meant the apology all that much. “I just—I think that’s one of the guys who attacked Gisele.”
“And payback was a bitch. Just remember the best payback will be getting the rest of our kind free before we cave in the rest of their skulls.”
They both slipped back into the darkness. I hustled through a small change room, down a short hall on the other side, and burst through the next doorway into—a personal bowling alley?
Victor Bane must take plenty of time for his recreational pursuits in between attempts to destroy all shadowkind.
Three guards were just charging in from an entrance across the room. I ducked behind one of the bowling ball dispensers by the two lanes, the tang of wood polish saturating my lungs.
Another shot rang out—and then a gasp and a fleshy ripping sound reached my ears. Maybe I should question my life choices when that sound was actually familiar at this point.
I bobbed back up to see Laz twisting the neck of the third of the guards, gripping the man by the jaw so he could wrench his head off without touching the toxic metals of the man’s helmet. Two other headless figures already sprawled on the floor, leaking blood all over the gleaming boards.
The troll, whose skin had deepened to a darker blue and who’d grown at least a foot in both height and width in his full shadowkind form, grinned to reveal two rows of uneven teeth and tossed the heads one by one down the lane. The first clanged into the pins helmet-first and scored him a strike.
Ruse had reappeared. “Again,” he chided, “could we please be at least a tad more careful with the mortals? Spare one for me to do my work?”
Laz grunted. “Either I go straight for the throat or the gut, or they bash me with their stupid weapons before I can do much. Fucking armor makes it pretty hard to be subtle. I don’t see you felling any of the pricks.”
“Fair. Come on, let’s keep moving.”
We came out into a wider hall at the base of a stairwell. Thorn appeared next to us a second later. “We’ve searched the entire basement. Wherever the cages are, they’re not down here.”
I raised my chin, ignoring the increasingly frenetic beat of my heart. “Upward and onward it is, then.”
Footsteps thundered toward us before we’d made it to the first landing where the staircase split in two. Thorn took one side and Laz the other, and a moment later two more gouged bodies tumbled down next to Ruse and me.
“It’s raining corpses,” I said with a shudder.
“As long as they’re not ours.” The incubus grasped my arm. “Better catch up before they tear through the entire population of this building.”
We rounded the corner after Thorn, and Omen blinked into being at the top of the stairs. He’d kept his human-ish form, but traces of his hellish nature showed all over his body, from the orange blaze in his eyes to the mottled lava-gray and magma-glow twining across his skin.
“This way,” he said with a jab of his hand, fangs glinting in his mouth. He sprang back into the shadows in the direction he’d pointed to.
Racing after him, we found ourselves in a music room: a grand piano at one end, a circle of wing chairs at the other, books of music and a few other instruments propped along the wall. But we didn’t arrive alone. More guards dashed after us inside.
As Thorn introduced his crystalline fists to two of their throats, I snatched up a violin by the neck. When I whirled around, the nearest guard was almost on me, brandishing one of those brilliant whips. My pulse hiccupped, I slashed out with my free hand, and he jolted backward with a flinch at the wave of heat I’d sent at him without thinking.
I couldn’t care at this point whether Laz or any of the other gang members who might be watching from the shadows had noticed. Without missing a beat, I swung the violin at his helmet, knocking it to the floor and giving him a good wallop to the temple at the same time. The groaning of the violin as it cracked matched that of Thorn’s current opponent, who was crumpling at the warrior’s blow.
The guard I was facing off with swayed but righted himself, just in time for me to land a kick that smacked the whip from his hand. I threw myself at him with all my weight to knock him to the floor. While I yanked at the clasps on the silver-and-iron vest, Ruse danced around me, wavering in and out of view as he alternately dodged other guards and attempted to prevent our allies from obliterating this one.
The jerk managed to clock me hard enough in the head that my thoughts scrambled, but I wrenched off his last piece of armor at the same time. Ruse dropped with his knees, pinning the man’s chest, and gazed intently into his startled eyes.
“Hello, friend,” he said with the full force of his cubi charm. “You’re going to help us free the poor wounded creatures locked up somewhere in this place.”
“Hopefully quickly,” Omen snapped. He’d shoved back a bookcase at the far end of the room to reveal a hidden door. His gaze snagged on me. “Let’s go, Disaster. It’s time for you to take the starring role.”
I wished my gut hadn’t lurched so much at that statement. Wished this was one of my usual capers where it was just me vs. one minor asshole collector and not a mission where the fate of all shadowkind—of Snap, of Bow and Gisele’s friend, of the many other beings the Company might have captured and those they wished to destroy—hung in the balance. But here I was. I couldn’t even say I hadn’t signed up for it.