Chapter 64: Caught All of Them

Before the man could send another slash our way, thorny vines lunged in from the left, low and fast, closing around the rest of his crew all at once.

"Move, move, move!" one of them shouted, his voice cracking into something closer to a squeal as a vine looped around his ankle and yanked his feet clean out from under him.

Another went down with a grunt, folded over a display case, swearing into the glass hard enough to fog it.

A third tried to twist free and only managed to tangle himself worse, thorns catching on his sleeve, his coat, the strap of the bag slung across his shoulder, until he looked less like a thief and more like something a very aggressive rosebush had decided to adopt.

The leader wasn’t one of them.

He turned his head just enough to see his men go down, and whatever calm he had been wearing all night cracked for a second, jaw tight, eyes wide, the look of a man watching a plan die in real time, watching it happen and understanding, all at once, that there would be no clean way out of this room.

"Tch. Amateurs," he muttered, more to himself than anyone, and when a vine lashed toward his ankle, he didn’t dodge it.

He cut it.

A single flat swing of his arm, wind compressed hard along the edge of his palm, and the vine dropped in two curling halves against the marble, twitching once before going still, like something that hadn’t quite finished dying.

He was already sprinting before they had finished falling, boots slapping the floor, breath coming in short, hard bursts as he made for the window at the end of the hall, the one place in the room that still promised him a version of tonight where he walked away.

"He’s running!" Mary called out, voice sharp with urgency, already turning to track him.

"Not for long," I said, and I meant it, even if my heart was hammering hard enough that I wasn’t entirely sure I believed myself. There’s a difference, I’ve found, between saying something with conviction and actually having any.

Light gathered in Mary’s palm, drawn thin and fast into the shape of a spear. She threw it the second it had an edge, no wasted motion, the kind of economy that only comes from having done this exact motion a hundred times in practice for a night she had hoped would never actually come.

It cut low across the marble, chasing him.

"Not this time," I whispered.

His fingers twitched instead of slashing.

He stared at his own hand like it had betrayed him personally, like it belonged to someone else entirely and had simply forgotten to inform him of the switch.

I felt it land in my own chest a heartbeat later, unfamiliar and restless, wind sitting where it had never sat before, pressing against the inside of my ribs like something trying to find room that wasn’t there yet.

I had stolen it.

"What—" he started, and that was all he managed before the spear caught him across the shoulder, spinning him half around.

He slammed into the edge of a display case with a grunt, glass rattling under his palm, and for a second I thought he’d go down right there, that the whole thing would end in one clean, anticlimactic thud.

He didn’t. He shoved off the case, breath ragged now, favoring his hit shoulder, and kept running anyway, close enough to the window that moonlight caught the sweat sliding down his jaw.

"He’s not stopping," Arthur shouted from somewhere behind me.

I raised my hand, and the stolen wind answered, unfamiliar and rough, like gripping a blade I had never held before and swinging it anyway, trusting the shape of the motion more than any real skill behind it.

Three slashes tore loose, arcing toward him low and wide.

"Move!" he snarled at himself, and he did, twisting hard at the hips, body folding into the kind of desperate, ugly motion that only survival instinct produces.

The first slash missed by a hand’s width, fabric tearing along his sleeve with a sound sharp enough to make me flinch. The second missed wider, clipping nothing but air and the edge of a velvet rope stand, which toppled with a clatter neither of us had time to care about. The third would have caught him square across the ribs, clean and final.

It never got the chance.

"Got you," Theodore growled, closing the last few feet in a burst that ate the distance before the man had even registered a second threat coming from an angle he hadn’t thought to watch.

His forearms shifted as he moved, skin tightening into that faint grey sheen, muscle and bone hardening underneath in the half second it took him to close the gap, a transformation so practiced by now it barely registered as strange anymore.

He didn’t waste breath on anything clever.

His fist connected with the man’s jaw.

Crack!

The leader’s whole body went slack, legs folding like someone had cut the strings holding him up, and he hit the floor and didn’t move again, the fight, whatever fight had been left in him, gone all at once.

For a second, none of us said anything. The hall held that particular silence that follows violence, heavy and slightly unreal, like the room itself needed a moment to decide the danger was actually over.

My hands were shaking, just slightly, adrenaline still crackling somewhere under my skin, and when I finally let out the breath I had been holding, it came out unsteady, thinner than I meant it to.

"Is he out?" Mary asked, already lowering her light barrier, though her voice still carried an edge of caution, the kind that doesn’t fully relax until someone else confirms it’s safe to.

Theodore nudged him with his boot. "Out."

"Good," Arthur said, and I heard the relief in it too, the tightness finally leaving his shoulders in one long exhale. "Then let’s tie them up before any of them get clever."

The one who had gone down first grumbled when the rope cinched tight around his wrists.

"This is unnecessary," he muttered, with the wounded dignity of a man who had, ten minutes earlier, been actively robbing a museum at gunpoint.

"Tell that to the museum," Mary said flatly, not even looking at him as she pulled the knot snug.

By the time we reached the leader, he was already stirring, a low groan slipping out as consciousness dragged itself back in slower than it had left.

His eyes fluttered halfway open, unfocused, and he mumbled something that might have been a curse or might have just been noise, the kind of half-formed sound that doesn’t quite qualify as language yet.

We didn’t wait to find out.

Rope went around his wrists, then his ankles, pulled firm enough that struggling would only tighten it further, and one by one we dragged all seven of them into a line beneath the painting they had never managed to reach, seven very undignified thieves laid out under the very thing they’d risked everything for.

"Well, we did it," I said, quieter than I meant to, the words arriving with more disbelief in them than I’d intended.

Arthur bumped my shoulder with his. "Of course we did."

Theodore flexed his sore hand and grinned despite himself. "Worth every bit of that."

Mary just exhaled, long and slow, and allowed herself the smallest smile of the night.

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Author’s Note: As the goal for this week’s power stones has been reached, a bonus Chapter will be released tomorrow.