Chapter 51: Infiltration

In Kingsmere, outside a pretty well-built house.

Sera and I had been standing in the shadow of the building across the street for five minutes now, waiting for the last of the windows to go dark. Warm light spilled out from behind the curtains, and every so often a silhouette drifted past, there and gone. Somewhere behind us a carriage rattled over the cobblestones, and neither of us so much as shifted our weight until the sound had died away completely.

Then the final light went out.

Sera turned her head just enough to catch my eye. I nodded, and we crossed.

We kept to the quiet stretches of pavement, letting the city’s own noise swallow our footsteps. At the side of the house, Sera flattened herself against the wall and threw out a hand to stop me before I’d even slowed down. She crouched beneath the nearest window and worked the frame with small, patient movements, easing the pressure up bit by bit until the lock finally gave with a click that sounded far too loud to my ears.

The window slid open. She climbed through first. I followed, and the moment my shoe touched the floorboards inside, the wood let out a low groan beneath my weight.

I froze.

Sera’s eyes cut to mine, sharp and unreadable in the dark. For a long five count, neither of us breathed.

Then, from somewhere deeper in the house footsteps sounded.

Sera pointed two fingers at the wall beside us and we melted into it just as a door swung open down the corridor. Light spilled beneath it in a thin gold line, and the footsteps drew closer, closer, until they were right outside the room we were pressed against. I could hear the faint rasp of cloth, someone shifting their weight in the doorway. My hand found the grip of my revolver and stayed there.

The footsteps moved on. The light retreated. A door clicked shut.

Only then did Sera let out a breath through her nose and gesture for me to follow.

The corridor beyond was worse, barely lit, the moonlight through the windows carving pale streaks across the floor that did nothing to help us see where the boards were weak.

We crossed it the way you would cross ice, one slow foot at a time, stopping dead whenever the house so much as sighed around us.

Once a floorboard cracked beneath Sera’s heel and my stomach dropped straight through the floor with it, but nothing came of it. She kept moving.

At the staircase, she tested the first step before committing her weight to it. The wood cracked anyway, a soft splintering sound that seemed to echo through the whole house, and her head snapped toward the landing above. I heard it too. A shuffle. Then nothing.

She drew her foot back, waited, and tried again, closer to the edge of the step this time where the wood wouldn’t flex. In silence, she took one step and then another.

I went up behind her with my hand still resting on the revolver, and halfway up a gust of wind rattled a window somewhere below us, loud enough that I nearly spun around to check. Sera didn’t so much as flinch. She just kept climbing, and I made myself follow her lead instead of my instincts.

At the top, a narrow corridor ran the length of the floor, and at the far end sat a closed door with light bleeding out from underneath it. Sera stopped a few feet short. I looked past her at the door, at that thin gold line, and felt my pulse pick up.

She reached for the handle.

"Who’s there?" A voice came from inside, flat and startled, and Sera’s hand stopped an inch from the wood like it had hit glass.

My fingers tightened around the revolver beneath my coat. Neither of us moved. The voice didn’t come again, but something scraped against the floor on the other side of the door, a chair, maybe, pushed back in a hurry.

Sera glanced at me. I gave her the smallest nod I could manage.

She turned the handle. The door opened.

Ethan Meuskate was sitting on the edge of the bed, and his head came up the instant the door moved. For half a second we just looked at each other, the three of us frozen in that strange, breathless pause before a fight actually starts. Then something shifted in his face, recognition, or fear, or both, and his hand came up. Light gathered in his palm and stretched itself into the shape of a longsword before he had even fully risen.

I was already moving.

The bell left my hand before I had finished the thought, striking the floor near him with a clean, bright ring that seemed to hang in the air far longer than it should have.

Ethan went rigid mid-motion, the half-formed sword still hovering beside his frozen fingers, his eyes the only part of him still capable of moving, and they were wide with a panic he couldn’t do anything about.

Sera didn’t waste the opening.

Her hand snapped out and a charm sailed across the room, striking the floorboards and bursting into a flash of light bright enough that Ethan’s eyes screwed shut on reflex, paralyzed or not.

I crossed the room while the light was still fading.

Ability Theft!

It only lasted a moment, a pulling sensation somewhere behind my ribs, like something being drawn out of him and folded into me.

The ability I acquired was random because of my rank. However, it wasn’t dissapointing but rather something that made me excited. Sleeping Mist!

Before I lost it because of the six second limit, I opened my palm and green mist curled up out of it, thin ribbons of it drifting toward Ethan’s face and wrapping around his head.

I watched the tension bleed out of him as it worked, his rigid stare softening, his eyelids growing heavy. The sword of light guttered out. His knees buckled, and Sera caught him before he hit the floor, pulling his weight against her without a word.

She looked at me.

I looked at the door.

Nothing stirred in the corridor beyond it.

We didn’t linger to make sure. Sera reached the window first, easing it open with Ethan’s dead weight braced against her hip, and climbed through. I dropped down after her, turning back once to check the house behind us.

For just a moment, a light flickered on behind one of the upstairs windows.

We didn’t wait to see if anyone looked out. We melted into the dark with Ethan between us and didn’t stop moving until the house was well behind us.