“Begone, demon,” said Vayl.
Her nostrils flared, as if she was trying to scent the future. Could she take al of us? Or at least hold us off until her minions appeared to even up the odds?
I smiled at her. Not like Lucil e, who can be sweet in even the direst of situations. Like Jaz. Head tilted down, so you could barely see the thin stretch of the lips accompanied by narrowed bring-it-on eyes.
She hesitated. Another breath. Two. And then she wheeled around, ran to the access door, shoved it so hard it embedded itself into the wal . A moment later she was gone.
“Quickly,” Vayl said, tucking his cane under his arm so he could unrol the map. He motioned for Sterling to hold his light underneath it as I searched for weaknesses in its structure.
“Here,” I said, pointing to a slight bubble in the bottom corner. “Does anyone have a knife?” The guys eyed each other’s swords. “Seriously? We don’t have, even, a pair of nail clippers between the four of us?”
Kamal stepped forward, bowing a little as he offered me the handle of a sturdy work knife, which, had I been forced to guess, he probably used on a daily basis to cut the scrap pieces off of the hides.
“You rock,” I told him as I sheathed my sword and took the tool from his hand.
He frowned. “I am a rock?”
“No. It means, you’re cool like a rock star. You know, like Beyonce.” When his eyes went wide, I quickly added,
“Or a guy rocker would be, maybe, a better comparison, sure, I can see that. So, you rock like Usher.” The whole time I was talking I was also working Kamal’s knife into the bubble and slicing the top layer of leather free of the map. I did glance up once. Kamal was smiling, so he must’ve appreciated my final comparison.
Sterling and Vayl held the edges of the map to keep it taut.
Yousef was checking out the broken door and muttering to himself, no doubt about the amount of force necessary to drive it into the wal in the first place and whether or not he could survive blows like that if he decided to switch his obsession from me to Kyphas midstream, so to speak.
Cole stil had his back to us, only now he seemed to be watching the activity below. Hopeful y that meant he’d focused at least half his mind on the job.
I went back to work. Frankly I’d have much preferred staking out some dirtbag’s hotel room or fol owing the trail of our latest national security threat. Both might require the same sort of speed and finesse I now had to bring against the old scrol , but neither would’ve held the fate of my soul in their hands at the end of the mission. I felt sweat trickle down the smal of my back as I slipped the blade gently between the layers, trying to keep it even, to see where one page left off and the other began. I was almost glad when the headache began. I took it as an omen that I was succeeding, moving closer to freedom, while Brude could only pound helplessly against the wal s of his prison while he watched his hopes slip farther away.
“Okay, Kamal, I want you to take the cut edge and start pul ing up on it. Firm but gentle, got that?” I asked, looking up to make sure he understood what I meant. He nodded. I blinked, waited for the two of him to meld back into one. My head pounded in time with my pulse, painful enough now to make me want to lean over and puke. So maybe it was the source of my double vision. But maybe not. I closed my eyes again.
“Jasmine?” Vayl’s voice, soothing as a cool cloth to my forehead, al owed me to take a ful breath for the first time since we’d begun the operation.
“I’m okay,” I said.
As I’d asked him to do, Kamal lifted the top layer of the map, giving me a better view of my work, al owing me to cut quicker and more decisively. Less than a minute later I was done. I handed the knife back to him and continued to lean over while Vayl, Sterling, and the tanners glued themselves to the new picture, muttering to each other like a bunch of scholars who’ve just found an attic ful of never-before-seen Lincoln letters.
“The demon’s got them al back in a group,” Cole reported from his perch by the wal . “It won’t be long before they make a move.”
I walked my hands up my thighs.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. Since it was easier to look down, I identified its owner by the red high-tops toed up with my shoes. I reached out, grabbed a handful of T-shirt, and climbed myself a little higher. “Cole,” I whispered. “I feel terrible.”
“Me too.”
My chuckle came out more like a sigh because anything else would’ve shaken me up too much. When I final y met his eyes, stark and sad in a face made for joy, I tried to smile and hoped it came out real. “Let’s just get each other through this. We can do that. Right?” Doubt dropped his eyes. But they came right back up to mine and didn’t waver when he said, “Yeah. You and me, Vayl and Sterling, Bergman and Cassandra.” He stopped.
Nodded. “We can do this.”
We locked arms, and though I was the one with spears shoving themselves through my skul , it seemed like the give-and-take was mutual as we helped each other shuffle toward the bowed backs of Vayl, Sterling, Yousef, and Kamal.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I kept teling myself Vayl had lived nearly three hundred years now. And it would take me longer than that to know him wel . Stil , even though his broad back was turned to me I would bet my savings his eyes were the clear blue of a Nordic sailor. The kind who sees past the waves and beyond the horizon, which is why he’s stil on the ocean long after his neighbors have given up and taken factory jobs.
