Page 112 of Bought for Blood

I get my hand onto the back of the nearest chair.

“When?”

“First light is at twenty to seven. The sun is up nine minutes past.”

“How long does it take?”To kill him.I don’t say that part.

“That depends where they’ve put him in the room. It takes a while. But it’s effective.” She looks up at me. “That’s why they use it.”

The clock over the door says twenty-five to twelve.

Seven and a half hours.

“Then I need people, and I need a car,” I say. “Now. Tonight.”

“Sit down and tell me what you can do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Finding him isn’t going to be difficult if Viktor already knows. I don’t need you to get in the way. Unless there’s something you bring to the table.”

“I can make people not see me.”

“Convenient. For you. How does that help me?”

“I… I can hide things around me. People.” I’m improvising, but I’m not letting them go out there without me.

“Really?” She tilts her head, interested now. “How many people can you take with you?”

“I’ve never held it over anyone but myself,” I admit. “Four. I can take four.”

“You’re guessing.”

“I’m guessing high. If I say two, you’ll send two, and two won’t get him out of a building.”

Faine considers this. “It’s a risk…”

“Of course it’s a risk. But why do you need me at all?” The clock over the door keeps moving. “That man by the lamp crossed halfthis room, and I never saw him do it. You’re faster than anything alive. Go over the fence yourselves.”

“We would be fast.” Her voice doesn’t change. “For about a minute. Then somebody sees one of us, the lights come on, and the people who run that place do what they always do when a building is touched. The captives go onto trucks or into the ground. And the man we came for is already sitting in a room the sun is about to enter. They wouldn’t have to fight us. They’d have to hold one staircase for half an hour.”

“With the same sunrise at our backs,” Odile says. “If it goes slow, the light finishes all of us. Him first. They’re already set up to handle our kind. Theycouldslow us.”

I look from one of them to the other.

“So you have to be inside before anyone knows you exist.”

“Which none of us can manage, and you can.” Faine unfolds her hands for the first time. “Aurora could do it another way: numbers, vehicles, a plan built over days. That can’t be done by dawn, and it can’t be done quietly, and somebody in that mountain has been handing their plans to the people in that quarry. It’s why I’m here instead of there. So we go the other way. A small number, on foot, from the trees, and nobody sees us cross the ground.”

“You’ll do it.”

“I sent him in there.”

“You’ll have my people as well,” Odile says. “And me.”

“Odile.”

“He is two hundred years of my life, and he is lying in a room somewhere waiting for the light.” Her voice hasn’t gone up at all. “Don’t make me say it twice at this hour.”