Steelhands - Jaida Jones [182]
“I suppose it’s up to me to go first,” Royston said. “I hate that. I’ll wait for you to get closer—perhaps the building next to it?—so you can see when they vacate the area and make your move.”
“I’ll go in first,” Ghislain said, a certain relish in his voice that made me wonder anew about his character. “Crack some heads to clear the way for team reconnaissance.”
“This is just like the old days,” Luvander said, breathing on his hands. “Only on the ground, and without Ivory around to set fire to everything in sight.”
“It’d come in handy here though, you must admit,” Raphael said. To me—because I was standing so close to him and had made such a careful study of him early, in case he should slip again—it seemed to pain him more than the others to talk about his comrade. One of the ones who did not make it back from the final battle, I thought, and bowed my head just briefly in hopes we did not follow him this evening. “Nothing creates a diversion like a whole mess of things bursting into flame. You don’t even need a dragon for that. Just a match.”
“I will go first,” Royston confirmed. “And I’ll do my best not to catch anything on fire, myself.”
“Then me,” Ghislain said. “When it’s clear on the first level, I’ll give a signal.”
“How will we know what it is?” I asked, nervously polishing one of my buttons with the fingers of my glove.
“You’ll know,” Ghislain said.
“And then the rest of us slip in,” Laure agreed, rounding on the group. “Are you lot going to be quiet once we’re in there? Or am I going to be the one who’s gotta explain to Adamo we got pinched because someone wouldn’t shut up about his fish-god dick or how much eggplant stew he was gonna eat when he got home?”
“I hardly think that’s necessary,” Luvander said.
“We are trained professionals,” Raphael pointed out.
“And professional blabbermouths, too,” Laure said, as Luvander made a stitching motion over his lips, then pretended to throw away his invisible needle. “Anything new from Antoinette?”
“Nothing,” Royston confirmed. “It’s just the same sense of anger, only much louder here. We’re in the right place.”
“All right,” Laure concluded. “Margrave, it’s your turn.”
“I am so distressed,” Royston said, echoing my sentiments exactly. But, unlike me, he was able to square his shoulders and leave the comfort of our company, slipping off into the night. The snow soon obscured him as we slipped silently through the fall to stand in shadows closer to our target.
I hoped that all the snow wouldn’t prove a distraction to our distraction. Would it be possible to see the explosion Margrave Royston engineered when it was falling so heavily?
If I’d waited but a moment, I wouldn’t have had to ask.
I felt it under my feet, the reverberations of the shock rippling over the cobblestones, even though they were buried under so much snow. The noise itself came later—loud enough it nearly knocked me off my feet—and I could see the flash of something bright in the distance. I wondered what Royston had done and whether or not he was all right.
Then I turned my thoughts to myself. I was going to need them.
“Cue mass panic,” Raphael murmured, so quiet that I might have been the only one to hear him. Everyone else was too busy focusing on the door to the building in question—as lights came on in the windows, and the door itself opened an instant later, a few men running out into the night.
That, however, was followed immediately by all the lights going on in the building in whose shadows we’d previously been obscured—and all the other buildings nearby, too. With the staggered effect of a row of dominos, all the lights in the city were coming on, while the people on the lower floors of buildings began to flood the streets.
In the commotion, I realized, no one would notice another group of citizens.
With the crowd as his cover, Ghislain slipped away from us. He didn’t blend in because of his height and breadth, but he soon disappeared into a doorway, and no one seemed to notice.
I felt momentarily guilty that our actions