Deirdre looked at Santos. “What were you saying about getting the show on the road?”
The giant ignored her gloating and reached into a duffel bag sitting on the floor. He grabbed a crowbar out of it, then stepped into the vault. He had moved out of my line of sight, but the screech-screech-screech of metal filled the air as Santos dug his crowbar into the first safety-deposit box, then the next. His giant strength let him pop the heavy metal boxes out of the wall as easily as I could crack a can of soda.
“So the bank vault was your endgame all along,” Finn said, his voice brimming with bitterness. “But why go to all this trouble? You could have just stolen the jewelry from the armored truck. You could have had Santos do that, collected the insurance money, and kept your cover intact. So why rob the bank too? Why blow your contacts and everything else you set up in Ashland? Why take such a big risk?”
“Big risk, big reward. You should know that. Every money man does.”
Finn glared at her, but she laughed, reached out, and patted his cheek. She put a bit of Ice magic into the gesture, making him hiss with pain and jerk away from her cold, cold touch.
“Don’t worry, Finnegan, honey, and don’t look so glum,” Deirdre crooned. “Soon you won’t have to worry about me or anything else. In fact, you won’t feel a thing. I promise.”
She patted Finn’s cheek a final time, then headed into the vault to collect her bounty.
26
Deirdre stepped to one side of the vault and moved out of my line of sight, just like Santos had. A second later, blue-white flashes of light started appearing in the vault, as she used her Ice magic to crack open the safety-deposit boxes just like she had the silverstone bars. Meanwhile, Santos kept up his own steady assault with his crowbar. Looked like they were going to force open all the boxes first before they started rifling through the loot inside them.
“Now what?” Bria whispered. “The second they see us coming, they’ll kill Finn. One blast of Ice magic from Deirdre would be more than enough. All she has to do is step out into the center of the vault, and she can hit him.”
“Now we do some shock and awe of our own,” I whispered back. “This way.”
Bria and Owen followed me back to the men’s bathroom. Owen gave Bria and me a boost through the hole we’d created, then we reached down and helped him climb up. Together, the three of us left the first-floor bathroom and stepped back out into the lobby.
Silvio was standing by the front doors, his phone in one hand and a gun in the other. He hurried over when he saw us. I marched to the center of the lobby, which was directly on top of the basement vault, and the others gathered around me.
“What are you going to do?” Bria asked.
I studied the floor, listening to the low, dark mutters of violence that had sunk into the marble from the thieves taking over the bank and killing the guards, along with me cracking through the bathroom floors.
“I’m going to bust through the floor and drop down right on top of Deirdre and Santos in the vault. If I’m lucky, I’ll bury them in the rubble and kill them outright. But even if they survive, they’ll be too surprised and too busy dealing with me to worry about anything else, including Finn. It should give you, Owen, and Silvio enough time to get him to safety.”
Bria gave me a worried look. “You saw what Deirdre did. She blasted through those vault bars like they were made out of paper. And she still has plenty of magic left.”
We could all hear exactly what she wasn’t saying—that Deirdre might very well kill me with her Ice magic.
“I know, but this is our best chance to rescue Finn—our only chance. We have to take it, or Deirdre will kill him as soon as she and Santos are done looting the vault.”
Bria didn’t like it, but she nodded her agreement. So did Silvio and Owen.
Silvio made sure that our watches were all still synchronized, and then he, Owen, and Bria hurried over to the bathroom to slip through the hole in the floor and back down to the basement.
I gave them three minutes to get into position, just like we’d planned, then closed my eyes a moment, gathering my thoughts and my magic. Big Bertha was the most secure part of the bank, encased in marble and silverstone, and I would need almost all my power to blast through it. So I reached and reached for that mix of cold and hard magic flowing through my veins, letting it pool in the palms of my hands, until my spider rune scars were glowing a bright, brilliant silver with the cold, continuous ripple of my magic. Then I tapped into the Ice and Stone magic stored in my spider rune ring and necklace.
When I had gathered up all that power, I slowly turned my hands over so that my palms—and my spider runes—were facing the floor.
I raised my hands, steeling myself, then snapped my hands down, blasting all my magic at the floor directly below my feet.
Crack!
Crack! Crack!