Steal the Light (Thieves #1)(56)

“Do we have any idea what they’re saying?” I kept my eyes on the screen, studying the marks.

Dev walked up behind me and pressed a mug of coffee into my hands. My mind was still foggy from sleep and the potion. The mug felt warm and solid.

He put a hand on my back as he leaned in and looked at the monitor. “I know what they’re saying, most of it anyway. They’re speaking Gaelic. It’s not exactly what my mother’s people speak, but it’s close enough. Fun fact: the Gaelic language is a derivation of ancient Elvish.”

“Thanks, professor.” Daniel took up position on my other side, trapping me between him and Dev. “Could you cut the trivia and tell her what they said?”

Dev ignored the bait and slid into the seat in front of the monitor. He pointed to the female. “This one seems to be the leader. She’s been telling the other two what to do. If I had to guess, the men are bodyguards. I think the word they used was escort, but I can’t be sure.”

“Did you get a shot of the box?” I asked.

“Yes.” Daniel bit the word out.

I finally looked up at him. Usually, right before a job there was a sort of calm that settled over Daniel. It was the same way for me, rather like an actor about to go on stage. We were nervous right up until we were about to go on and then we realized that we knew our lines and it was all going to be all right. The night before a job there was tension, but there was also excitement, even for Daniel. He liked to pretend that he did this just to keep me out of trouble, but he liked the rush, too.

But I could tell from the way he held his body that he wasn’t looking forward to the curtain going up on this particular performance.

“All right, is it in a safe or did they trap it?” I really hoped the answer was the safe. It was so much easier to deal with a nice, predictable safe than to have to figure out the Indiana Jones crap.

Dev pointed to the screen. “See, it’s right there.” He indicated a large box sitting on the coffee table.

I leaned forward to get a better look, and Dev obliged me by zooming in on the object. It was a large, rectangular box with ornate carvings. I couldn’t see a place where the lid to the box would come off. It looked like a single block of wood. I supposed that was where the whole part about "only those with the purest of intentions could open it" came in. This was the box described in the files. It was just sitting there. It was right out in the open. They weren’t even looking at it.

“Awesome, huh?” Neil still wore his hotel uniform and the contacts that turned his normally blue eyes brown.

In our line of work, we took a few precautions. Our disguises weren’t Mission Impossible good, but we did try to cover the major bases. The goal was to not be seen at all, but the reality was in a fight or flight situation, the only thing most people remembered was hair color, eye color, and size or shape. There wasn’t a lot we could do about size or shape, but the rest could be fixed. Neil’s hair was black tonight and tomorrow it would be a chestnut brown.

I looked around Neil and noticed Daniel was frowning at me. We shared the same concern. It wasn’t right. They should protect the box. They should guard the box. It was sitting in the middle of the room like a big old cupcake with a note saying “please eat me.”

Things just weren’t that easy.

Dev tapped the screen. “They just sat it down and haven’t touched it since. There’s a problem, though. I heard them talking about moving the box tomorrow morning at dawn.”

“I thought the box was scheduled to be moved two days from now,” Sarah said as she came in the room. She adjusted her short blonde wig and looked oddly normal in black tights and a black sweater.

“They talked about that, too,” Dev said. “It was a little confusing but they were talking about the veil being its thinnest in two days, but the leader thinks he can get through it tomorrow morning in the in-between time.”

“The veil between worlds?” I asked.

Dev turned the chair around. “Yes. There are Fae tribes who travel this way, or so I’m told. It’s complex, but there are times when the dimensional walls are thin, and if you know when and where, you can move through one plane and into another. Apparently the veil will be thin somewhere close to here starting tomorrow morning.”

It was how the Fae had left the Earth plane millennia ago. There were some who theorized that the supernatural beings on Earth were creatures from other planes that had gotten lost and adapted. If these faeries were trying to cross dimensions then it only made sense that they would try it during one of the in-between times. The story went that the veil between worlds was always thinnest at dawn and dusk, when the night and day changed places and all things were, for that brief time, possible.

It explained why the Fae had moved up their timetable. It explained why Daniel decided we needed to move now. It didn’t explain why that damn box was sitting in the open looking so ripe for the plucking.

I couldn’t help but let my gaze go back to Daniel.

“Something’s wrong,” he said, reading my mind.

“Definitely.”

Neil and Dev argued the merits of the easy job with Sarah while Daniel and I managed to meet in the middle of the room.

“It’s too easy,” he said quietly.

Nothing was that easy in our line of business. We weren’t opportunistic thieves who broke into convenient houses and hoped that the owners left valuables lying around. We spent months planning jobs because the things we stole were the things an owner protects. Items of arcane value tend to be obsessively guarded. When we stole an amulet of protection a few years back, we had to go through three layers of wards, countless locks, a pit bull, and a safe. We made ten grand off that job, but here was a million dollars sitting in the open, waiting for the taking.