“Catchy title,” Kane quipped.
“I wanted it to be clear,” Sinead said. She hit a key and the slide changed, the new one titled How to overcome the dragon’s senses. There was that green dragon again at the bottom, with crudely painted squiggly lines emanating from his head. Sinead’s graphics skills were giving me a migraine.
“What dragon senses?” Isabel asked.
“A dragon knows whenever someone enters his lair,” I explained. “It’s the way they’re wired. So once anyone places a foot in Goch’s mansion, he knows. He can sense their aura or something.”
“Can we confuse his senses with magic or anything?” Isabel asked.
“No,” Kane and I both said together. I gave him an irritated look, and then added, “Think of the lair as an extension of the dragon’s body. No matter what we do, he’ll know when we enter.”
“Then we should break in when he’s far away. That way, by the time he gets back—”
“Ddraig Goch hasn’t left Boston in the past twenty-two years,” I told her. “In fact, he rarely even leaves his mansion. He doesn’t like to be far from his hoard.”
“Happily,” Sinead interjected, “we can work around it.”
“Right,” I said. “In six days, there’s a large banquet in Ddraig Goch’s mansion. At least a hundred people are invited. He’ll be expecting a bunch of people in his mansion that evening, so it won’t matter if we show up. Also, he won’t be sleeping.”
“Don’t we want him to be sleeping?” Isabel asked, almost on cue. “Usually that’s when burglaries happen, right?”
“Dragons sleep in their vaults,” I said. “And they often sleep for days. We want to make sure he’s awake when we break in—awake and busy mingling with his guests, away from his vault. Of course, we need to get invited to that banquet.”
“How do we do that?” Isabel asked.
“I’m working on getting Lou onto the guest list.” Sinead smiled proudly.
“Well, not the guest list exactly,” I pointed out. “Sinead’s trying to get me a job as a waitress at the banquet. I’ll be our man on the inside.”
“Okay,” grunted Kane. “So you’re a waitress. Congratulations. How do the rest of us enter the mansion?”
“We’re hoping we can hack the dragon’s computer, get another name onto the guest list,” I answered.
Kane raised an eyebrow at Isabel. “Are you a hacker?” he asked. “Because these two just spent ten minutes hooking a computer up to a projector. They don’t strike me as hacker material.”
Isabel looked offended. “I hardly know how to turn on a computer,” she said with the strange pride technophobes sometimes display. She studied each of us in turn, and then added sharply, “There’s no hacker here. Aren’t we missing a crew member? I was under the impression there should be five of us.”
“That’s explained in slide number seven,” Sinead complained. “You’re all ruining my presentation.”
“Our fifth member is in a bit of a pinch,” I mumbled.
Sinead rolled her eyes. “That’s Lou’s delicate way of saying he’s essentially a dead man.”
“Why?” Kane asked.
“His name is Harutaka Ikeda,” I answered. “And he’s—”
“That’s an interesting coincidence,” Kane interrupted. “Because I heard the Shades recently caught someone by that name in their sacred library.”
“That’s our guy,” I said cheerfully. “Silly Harutaka. Always getting himself into trouble.”
Isabel stared at me, biting her bright bubblegum-colored lips. “Lou, the Shades will execute him. No one is allowed into their library.”
“That’s why we need to get him out,” I said. “The Shades are keeping him in one of their warehouses. They’ll hold his trial during the next full moon.”
Sinead clicked frantically through her slides until she got to one that said Step 3—Saving Harutaka from the Shades. There was a hand-drawn man, painted black with a deranged red smiley face—presumably her attempt at drawing a Shade.
“The next full moon is tomorrow,” Kane said.
“Right. And they’ll probably execute him immediately after.”
“Just throwing an idea out there.” Kane folded his arms. “Maybe, instead of messing with a deadly cult, in addition to breaking into a dragon’s vault, we just find an alternative crew member?”
“We can’t,” I said. “The server’s security has been magically enhanced. We asked around. Harutaka’s the only one who can handle that.”
“But the Shades…” Isabel muttered.
“Not the nicest group of people,” I agreed mildly.
As cults go, the Shades were definitely one of the creepier ones. Like many before them, the Shades wanted immortality—and they’d actually found it. It just required one simple exchange. They relocated their souls from their bodies into their shadows. Shadows never got old. Shadows never died.
Strangely enough, their bodies stayed attached to their shadows. After all, with no body, there can be no shadow. Except now, the shadow made all the decisions. It thought and spoke and moved, and the body followed it and mimicked its actions like a… well, like a shadow.
The Shades were unnerving. Their human bodies were blank, empty things, as if they were in a coma, except they moved around, puppeteered by the shadows. It was also impossible to know what went on in their minds. Once they turned into shadows, their desires and motivations became unclear. Who knew what a shadow wanted, what it craved? But one thing was quickly established—they really didn’t like it when people entered their sacred library. People who did that always turned up dead. People like Harutaka.
“I talked to some people,” Sinead said. “The Shades are holding Harutaka in a large warehouse located in Malden. We know that there’s very little electronic security. Most of the security is composed of patrols and guards.”
“Even one Shade is enough to stop us,” Kane pointed out. “They’re rumored to be hellishly strong, and I don’t think they can be hurt.”
“We only need to temporarily disable the Shades,” I said. “We need darkness.”
In complete darkness, there were no shadows. Several eyewitness accounts claimed that when a Shade’s shadow disappeared in the dark, the body froze. It would start moving again once the light returned and the shadow reappeared. That meant that there was a common thread between Shades and four-year-olds: Both were afraid of the dark.
“There are six spotlights around the warehouse.” Sinead clicked to a slide with a detailed diagram, displaying a map of the warehouse from above. “And inside it’s lit by rows of strong neon lights.”
“Tonight should be a cloudy night,” I said. “And the moon rises at two a.m.”
“Twelve minutes past two,” Isabel interjected automatically.
I grinned at her. Naturally, the fortune teller knew the movements of the celestial bodies much better than I did. “So the plan is simple. We kill the electricity to the warehouse and its vicinity. All the Shades go to sleep. We break in, take Harutaka, get out. Easy-peasy.”