Ilona Andrews - Fate's Edge

She hit his shoulder with a closed fist. Pain shot through his biceps. Kaldar let go. “Ow.”

Audrey glared at him with sincere outrage. He might have overstepped just a smidgen.

“What the hell? We’re working!”

She took everything so seriously. “For luck,” he told her.

Audrey yanked her mask over her face. “Follow me and try to be quiet.”

They descended the slope, the raccoon sneaking through the night a few steps ahead of them. At the house, horses dashed to and fro, galloping along the driveway and jumping fences. The ward meant nothing to them, and they dashed back and forth, trampling the flower beds in their frenzy.

A long, ululating call of a pissed coyote rolled through the night. Gaston was always good at imitating animal calls.

Floodlights snapped on, bathing the scene in harsh white light. Men spilled from the caretaker’s house, yelling. At the guard tower, a sentry dressed in black yanked a rope. A siren wailed. The horses lost what little calm they had left. The scene turned into complete pandemonium. It was glorious.

Kaldar laughed soundlessly and padded through the brush, making less noise than a fox. The Mire didn’t suffer loud guests.

Audrey dropped behind a dense clump of brush. He landed next to her.

“Can you strut louder?” she whispered. “I think there might be one or two guards who haven’t heard you yet.”

“Lies,” he told her. “Nobody heard me. Not even you.”

A huge, pale horse charged out of the barn, scattering the guards like a pike scattered a school of fish. The horse veered left, galloping toward them, its mane like white silk. A stallion. Kaldar wasn’t a horseman, but even he had to admit: the stallion was one hell of an animal.

A door opened, and a half-naked man marched out from between the porch arches into the open, three guards following at his heels. The man waved his arm, pointing a gun at the guards outside the ward. The wind brought tatters of his voice from the distance, “What do I pay you for . . . get the fucking horses . . .”

Hello, Arturo Pena.

The guards set down their rifles. Pena bent down, grasped an iron spike, and pulled it out of the ground. The flow of magic around the spikes vanished. Pena pointed at the guards next to him. Two men chased after the herd while the third went back inside. A moment later, the guard from the tower slid down and joined the pursuit. Pena surveyed the scene, spat, and went back into the house.

Audrey moved, slinking through the darkness with Ling as her silent shadow. He followed. Together, they ran toward the house, angling to the right, away from the horses and guards toward the darkness of the pool. A few moments, and they sank into the deep shadows by the glass patio door.

AUDREY touched the lock on the glass door. Locked. Her face burned under the mask. She wished she could take it off, but that would’ve been foolish. The Mirror’s suits were beyond cool. They made her practically invisible. Kaldar wouldn’t be getting this one back. Not in a million years.

When Kaldar kissed her, she hadn’t reacted quickly enough. She’d been focused on the horses, and the bastard ambushed her. All her nerves had been keyed up, and the kiss had sung through her, hot and sudden. Kaldar kissed like the world was ending. And after she came to her senses, his face was so full of self-satisfaction that she knew she’d stumbled. It had been a crucial blunder, and now he’d be insufferable.

Her magic slid off her fingers in translucent tendrils of deep, beautiful green. The tendrils tasted the lock, seeped into the tiny space between the door and the frame. She pushed. The lock clicked, and she gently swung the door open and slipped inside. Kaldar followed and shut the door behind them. She had to give it to him: when the man closed his mouth, he could actually move quietly.

The living room lay shrouded in inky night shadows. Across the room, a wet bar of mahogany spanned the wall. Between the bar and her, a set of plush couches circled a coffee table, facing a colossal flat screen on the wall. A handful of pinpoint lights in every color of the rainbow glowed under the TV, where assorted electronic equipment sat on glass shelves. For an Edger, this was unimaginable luxury. Amazing what selling other people into slavery could buy you.

Ling trotted along the wall, sniffing at the air. Audrey kept still, listening.

Hello, house.

The house answered: the tiny buzzing of electronic gadgets, the whisper of the air-conditioning, the murmur of the generator filtering from the outside, the faint creaking of the walls . . . The sounds enveloped her, blending into a calm white hum, and she committed their pattern to memory. Any stray noise, no matter how tiny, would sound the alarm in her head.

Audrey padded through the room, toward the right-hand end of the bar, where the hallway led deeper into the house, diving under a wide staircase. The safe would be on the first floor. Gaston’s intelligence claimed the safe was large enough for a man to fit inside. Most of the larger varieties weighed thousands of pounds and required reinforced flooring, which wasn’t likely judging by the first floor’s ceiling. Besides, the logistics of dragging a safe of that size and weight up the stairs would drive anyone mad. You needed a forklift to move it.

A quiet creak announced a door swinging open above. Her mind snapped into overdrive, thoughts firing off in rapid succession. Heavy footsteps—male. Coming down to the first floor, fast, but not running or sneaking—not alarmed. Stomping—irate. Her gaze snagged on the bar. Arturo Pena wanted a nightcap. That had to be it.

Audrey crouched, pressing against the outer edge of the bar, and put her hand on the floor. Hide. Ling darted under the couch and lay down. Kaldar dropped down next to Audrey.

Arturo Pena jogged down the stairs. She caught a flash of hairy tan legs under a short white robe and a black muzzle of a handgun in his left hand, pointing down. The lights came on with a click.

Breathe in and breathe out. Nice and calm.

The cabinet door creaked, opening. A heavy glass clinked as it was set on the marble bar.

Breathe in.

A heavier clang—probably a crystal decanter. Swiveling top sliding out with a barely audible sound as it was being spun. The scent of scotch spread through the air, alcohol fumes mixed with a distinct aroma of burned honey.

Breathe out.

Glass clinked against glass, Arturo swallowed in a long gulp, exhaled, and headed back upstairs, hitting the light switch with a casual swipe of his hand. Arturo climbed the stairs. A moment, and he was out of their view.

The door thudded shut.

He had never let go of the gun. Talk about paranoia. She waited another moment and waved her hand at Ling. The raccoon emerged from under the couch and slunk into the hallway. Audrey paused, but the raccoon didn’t return. The way was clear. She rose and moved into the hallway, Kaldar a ghost behind her.

The safe sat in the back of a small room, on the right side of the hallway, a solid black tower. She crouched by it. Hello, old friend. TURTLE60XX, Super Vault, 76.25 tall, 39.25 inches wide, 29.0 inches deep. Capacity of 20.4 cubic feet. Weighing in empty at fifty-nine hundred pounds. The multilayered door was eight and a quarter inches thick. It would take hours to break through it with a drill, and if you did, at the end you’d hit a plate of tempered glass, which shielded the locking mechanism. Any attempt to access the locking mechanism by a tool would shatter the glass and activate the relocking mechanism. It was a monster of a safe, the kind diamond dealers used.

Audrey touched the door. Three locks secured the safe. A combination lock, standard antitheft precautions, but nothing major. An auxiliary key lock and a huge one, too. She’d seen one before: the locking mechanism connected to four steel rods, each as thick as her wrist. It would take a lot of pressure to open it. Finally, a digital lock, an optional feature. Not that it did anything superfancy, but the digital display looked awesome enough to impress Pena, because he’d paid an extra chunk of cash to have it installed.