“Seriously?” He seemed outraged.
“We had very clear instructions. We’re guests here, after all.” I rummaged in my purse and took out a pack, which I handed to him. “Here. I made these some time ago. Smokeless cigarettes.”
“What, like vaping?”
“No. These are actual cigarettes, but the smoke dissipates once you expel it. No smoke, no smell, no problem.”
He lit one suspiciously. Its tip glowed bright green as he inhaled, a strange quirk of the magical tobacco I’d created. He breathed out, the smoke instantly disappearing.
“These taste like ass,” he said.
“Well, they’re a bit old, I guess,” I admitted. “But it’s real tobacco, so you still get the lung cancer and stains on your teeth.”
“You should find a job in marketing.” He took another drag from the cigarette. Despite his complaint, he didn’t seem about to stub it out. He used his empty coffee cup as an ashtray, puffing on my handmade cigarette with a thoughtful look in his eyes.
“So…” he said, five minutes later, the cigarette gone. “Now what?”
“Our shift is just starting.” I smiled at him. “Learn to appreciate your quiet time with me. We’ll be here for ten more hours.”
“Ten?”
“Isabel and Sinead were here all night. You got the better shift, trust me.”
He groaned, got up, paced the room. Sat down. Got up again.
“Try taking off your shoes. It’ll make you feel more comfortable,” I suggested. “Make fists with your toes.”
“Fists with my toes?”
“It’s a Die Hard reference.”
“Oh. I never saw that movie.”
I gaped at him, incredulous. “You never saw Die Hard? The best Christmas movie ever made?”
“Die Hard doesn’t sound like a Christmas movie.”
“Come on! ‘Now I have a machine gun, ho ho ho’?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
I shook my head in disbelief and raised the binoculars to my eyes. The guards at the front gate waved a black car inside, and I noted its license plate number in the logbook while Kane removed his shoes and socks. I glanced quickly at his feet. They were large, much larger than mine. When he sat on the bed, our bare feet were quite close. I had a sudden urge to slide my foot up his ankle, and that, in turn, led to other images flickering in my imagination.
We kept at it for a few hours, exchanging the binoculars between us, sometimes talking, sometimes remaining silent for long stretches. This was the main reason for the shared shift. There was no real rationale to have two people here—one would have been enough, especially during the day, when staying awake was less of a hurdle. But I wanted us to get to know each other better, to cement us as a team. When push came to shove, we would need to rely on each other, and be able to predict each other’s actions.
What do people who spend long hours together talk about? We discussed our taste in books and movies, which hardly intersected. I read thrillers and mysteries; he read literary books about the struggle of everyday life. I liked action movies and rom-coms; he preferred science fiction and fantasy. Finally, we found one movie we both agreed was fantastic—Cool Runnings, about the Jamaican bobsledding team, which we’d both seen as kids.
He told me about his sister and her gift for playing the viola, stunning the room into silence with her craft, everyone around her listening with rapt attention. When she’d finish the piece she was playing, she’d inevitably smile in an embarrassed, innocent way, as if she was flustered that everyone had listened to her play that silly tune for all that time. When I asked him if she still played, he muttered that she’d been hospitalized, and refused to discuss it further.
I told him about my own childhood, before my parents died, all my recollections positive and bright and happy. I had no bad memories of my parents. I’m sure they occasionally shouted at me for no reason, or acted in ways that, as a child, I found annoying. But those moments had been erased by time and by life in foster care. And every good memory—every picnic on the beach, every night curled in my mother’s arms, every day I was sick and my father took care of me—they had all become chiseled into my mind, a source of comfort.
He asked what happened to them, and I said shortly, “They died when I was eight.”
I guess neither of us felt close enough to discuss the darker moments of our history.
For lunch, we ordered from a nearby restaurant that delivered. I had oven-cooked salmon with garlic, and Kane had a medium-rare steak.
“Who’s paying for all this?” he asked, chewing.
“Our employer.”
“Very generous of him.”
“Trust me. Generosity is very far from his mind.” I picked up the binoculars, scanning the mansion for the hundredth time. “Once we’re inside, we need to be able to open the vault door. It has a keycard lock, a combination lock, and is also warded by a set of runes called… S?dermanland Futhark?”
“It’s Futhark, not Futhark.”
“God, you’re like an old, unshaved version of Hermione. Do you know how to counter them?” I took another bite of the salmon. It was perfect, still a bit juicy, melting in my mouth.
“Yes. And those kind of runes are easier to break without alerting the person who inscribed them. You see, runes, unlike wards, aren’t constantly maintained by a sorcerer. They’re inscribed, and then they just—”
“I know the difference between runes and wards, thank you. No need to mansplain it to me.”
“Right.” He grinned. “But I can’t break combination locks and keycard locks.”
I nodded. “That’s not up to you. Ddraig Goch’s security chief has a keycard, and knows the combination. So we’ll have to find a way to get to him.”
“Like what?”
“Every man has a weakness. Maybe he’s having an affair and we can blackmail him. Maybe he has crippling gambling debts that we can use. Maybe he’s addicted to heroin. There’s always something. We’ll find it.”
“You sound very sure.”
“This isn’t my first rodeo.”
For dessert I opened my brand-new backpack, retrieving a bag of M&Ms and two Snickers bars. In retrospect, eating those was a mistake, as both of us were jittery afterward—not an ideal state for an additional five-hour shift of surveillance. I tried to pass the time by coming up with ideas of how to infiltrate the mansion without going through the front or back doors. They quickly became more and more ridiculous, as my sugar-addled mind hopped from tunneling, to blasting our way through, to me dueling the dragon one-on-one.
And then my eye caught a movement somewhere unexpected. A section of the greenhouse wall suddenly moved, opening, and a gardener walked outside. I pressed the binoculars harder into my eyes. I hadn’t noticed a door there at all.
The gardener fiddled with the greenhouse’s door, making sure that it remained open. Then he lit a cigarette.
“Look at that.” I gave Kane the binoculars. “There’s a door to the greenhouse. The blueprints didn’t note that.”