Grey flung himself down the stairwell after them, not touching the stairs with his feet on the way, and there came the sounds of efficient and brutal violence from below, beneath the howling and banging of the fireworks.
“Clear!” Grey shouted.
I went to the top of the stairs and looked down. Grey had both guards lying back to back at the bottom of the stairs, in front of the first security door. He was busy using their handcuffs to cross-bind their wrists to one another.
I spattered him with the last few rounds from the roman candles. He rolled his eyes and gave me a disgusted look.
“Oops,” I said, and discarded the exhausted bundle of fireworks.
Nicodemus appeared on the stairs beside me, looking down at Grey. He arched an eyebrow. “All three, still alive. Going soft, Grey?”
“They set off the silent alarm,” Grey said. “Means the authorities are coming. It will be easier for Binder to convince them to sit and talk rather than simply assaulting the place if we have prisoners instead of corpses.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Nicodemus said. He turned and called, “Mr. Binder, bring your associates in, if you would, and prepare to defend the building. Miss Ascher, we are ready for you now.”
I put the butane torch out, put it back in my duffel, and then slung my staff down off my shoulder. Nicodemus was eyeing me as I did.
“Fireworks,” he said.
“You think you’re the only guy in the world who can get things done without his supernatural gadgets?” I asked him.
He waved a hand at the smoke in his face and said mildly, “Let us hope that their firefighting systems do not include—”
An alarm began to blare, and sprinkler heads all around the first floor started up, spraying chilly, slightly stale-smelling water everywhere.
“—sprinklers,” Nicodemus finished on a sigh.
Hannah Ascher came in, moving quickly, and eyed me with disgust. “Fireworks? Seriously?”
“Loud and distracting, remember?” I called after her, as she descended the stairs. “I am the king of loud and distracting.”
“Not only do I have to burn through a wall,” she muttered. “I’ve got to do it in a downpour, too.”
“Get tough. It should help muffle the excess magical energy,” I said, maybe a bit grumpily.
Ascher shot a look back up at me, and gestured at the sprinklers. “You did this on purpose?”
“Yeah, well. Sometimes, when I get bored, I stop and think.”
She held up a small spray can. “How am I supposed to lay out a circle on the floor when there’s a layer of water over it? Did you think about that?”
“Deirdre,” Nicodemus said.
Deirdre promptly swarmed halfway down the stairs, and then there were several sharp sounds of impact, as her metallic hair shot out, surrounding Ascher, and slammed onto the floor around her. The flat ribbonlike hairs spread out, edge down, scraping along the marble tile like a squeegee, sweeping the standing water away.
Ascher looked like she nearly had a heart attack when Deirdre did that, and cast a glare up at the Denarian. But then she took the can and sprayed a layer of what looked like some kind of aerosolized plastic or rubber onto the floor. She laid it out in a large circle around her, overlapping the circle onto the wall and continuing it up to a few inches above her head. It was lopsided, but technically a circle didn’t have to be a perfect one to contain the magic. It was just a lot more efficient—not to mention professional—that way.
Ascher, who was looking damned appealing in her wet clothes (and dammit, how could I blame my reaction on the Winter mantle when it was being held at bay by iron?), went over the circle again, making sure the plastic spray was especially thick at the joints of the floor and wall. Then she nodded once, bent, and twisted her wrist so that a couple of drops of her blood fell from the manacles onto the circle. It snapped up into place at once, a screen of invisible energy, and she promptly unlocked her manacles and dropped them onto the floor at her feet. Then she narrowed her eyes, touched her finger to the wall inside the circle, and murmured a quiet word.
Light sprang out from her fingertip, sudden and fierce, and steam began to hiss up where droplets of water fell onto her hand or the wall. She began to move her fingertip slowly, and I watched as marble and the drywall and the concrete and metal beneath it began to crack and blacken and part. Glowing motes and sparks flew back from her, falling thickly on her hand and her arm, then blackening and dropping to the floor, burning holes in her sleeve but leaving her flesh, as far as I could see, untouched.
I lifted my eyebrows at that. I mean, I guess I could turn my finger into an arc welder, sure, but that wouldn’t mean that my entire hand wouldn’t burn to a crisp as I did it. That kind of inurement to the elements required an entirely different order and magnitude of talent—talent very few wizards, in my experience, possessed.
Man. When Ascher said she mostly worked with fire, she wasn’t kidding.
Binder and his troops came into the bank while she was working, and Binder immediately scouted out the place and started assigning groups to various defensive positions. As he did that, Anna Valmont slid silently across the floor until she stood near me. She looked at the thorn manacles on my wrist.
“I can’t stand to look at those things,” she said. “It must hurt.”
I bit down on a sharp reply. She wasn’t looking for that by standing near me. “Yeah, pretty much.”
She fiddled with her gear and licked her lips. “How long, do you think, before you can take them off?”
“No idea,” I said. “Depends on Ascher, I guess.”
There was a loud snapping sound and a squeal of parting metal from below, and Ascher half snarled, “That’s right, bitch,” and began putting her manacles back on in a businesslike fashion.
It had taken her less than three minutes to slice an opening large enough to admit a big guy into the reinforced wall.
She smeared the circle with her foot, and the excess energy of the spell dispersed into the air to be immediately smothered by the falling water. Then she put her hand on the cut section and began to push.
Grey slid in front of her and said, “Best let me go first, Miss Ascher.” He set his shoulders and almost casually shoved the cut section of wall down, and it fell through to the hallway beyond with a satisfying boom—and was instantly echoed by the hollow, coughing blast of a shotgun from the hallway beyond.
Grey was flung off of his feet to the ground, where he promptly became the origin point of a growing puddle of blood.
Ascher let out a choked sound and flattened herself desperately to the side of the opening, into the shelter of the unexposed side of the stairwell.
The shotgun boomed twice more, and then Deirdre was through the opening. The shotgun went off again, and then a man screamed.
Then silence.
I snarled wordlessly. I rushed down the stairs to check on Ascher, and then peered through the hole in the wall. Deirdre crouched beyond it, on all fours like a wary cat, her hair spread out around her and moving slowly, like strands of kelp in a gentle current. A fourth guard lay unmistakably dead on the floor in front of her, his shotgun still gripped loosely in his hand.
“Grey,” Nicodemus said, his voice tight.
Of course he was worried about Grey. Grey hadn’t done his job with the retina scanner yet.
Ascher was shaken but untouched. I gave her shoulder a quick squeeze and turned to Grey, trying to remember what I knew about first aid and tourniquets.
I needn’t have bothered. Grey had already begun sitting up even before I turned around, and his hair was mussed. Other than that, and the bloodied clothing, he looked entirely healthy. His expression was annoyed. “Damn, that hurts.”
“Whiner,” I said. “One little load of buckshot to the chest.” I offered him my hand.
Grey stared blankly at my hand for a second, as if it had taken him a moment to remember what the gesture meant. Then he took it and I pulled him up to his feet. He wobbled once, and then shook his head and steadied.
“You okay?” I asked.
He gestured at all the blood on the floor. “Hit my heart. I’ll be fine in a minute.”
“Man,” I said, impressed. “Takes a licking and keeps on ticking.”
Grey showed me his teeth, then turned, poised and contained once more, and stalked through the doorway after Deirdre.
Hannah Ascher got slowly to her feet and stood staring down at the smeared puddle of blood on the floor. She swallowed and started back up the stairs.
I put out a hand and stopped her. “It’ll take the cops time to get here, but you probably don’t want to be standing around on the first floor when they do,” I said.