Bitter Bite (Elemental Assassin #14)(89)

chewing into the marble.

Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!

Bria and Owen both stepped up and fired at the welder, and he joined his dead

friends on the floor.

As soon as the last man was down, I grabbed my knife, got back onto my feet,

and sprinted to the door that led downstairs to the basement. I plastered

myself against the wall next to the door, waiting for it to burst open and for

giants to come pouring into the lobby from the basement.

Nothing happened.

No footsteps, no bursting door, no giants.

Behind the counter, the saw kept whining, and the welder’s torch kept

hissing. The whirring machinery must have largely masked the sounds of the

fight, and no one was rushing up the stairs to check on things. Good. The

longer we had the element of surprise, the better our chances were of rescuing

Finn.

Bria, Owen, and Silvio rushed over to me.

“Now what?” Silvio said, pulling a gun from against the small of his back.

I flashed my bloody knife at my friends. “Now we go downstairs and find Finn.

”

*

Silvio turned off the power tools and stayed in the lobby to keep watch and

make sure nobody else came into the bank and took us by surprise.

Bria, Owen, and I hurried back to the men’s bathroom. My sister and I did the

same procedure as before, with me cracking the marble with my Stone magic,

then her widening the cracks with her Ice power. Even though I wanted to blast

the floor away as quickly as possible, I made myself work slowly and steadily,

not making any more noise and not using any more magic than absolutely

necessary, so that Deirdre wouldn’t sense us using our combined elemental

power. But the process went much quicker this time, since Owen was here to

help grab the jagged chunks of stone and move them out of the way.

As soon as we’d made a big enough hole in the floor, I dropped down to the

basement level below, with Bria next and Owen bringing up the rear. Bria

checked the bathroom stalls, but there were no blood and no bodies to be

found. She nodded at me, and I crept up to the door, eased it open, and peered

outside.

Just like on the lobby level, this bathroom also opened up into a hallway,

which was deserted. Bria and Owen nodded and raised their guns. I opened the

door, and we all left the bathroom.

As soon as I stepped out into the hallway, a cold gust of air swept over my

face, which could only mean one thing. Someone was using Ice magic down here.

Deirdre.

We tiptoed down the hallway in a line. Once we reached an intersection, the

three of us crouched down and peered around the corner. Offices branched off

this corridor, but it was still a straight shot all the way down to the main

vault fifty feet away.

Big Bertha more than lived up to her name. The five-foot-thick marble walls,

floor, and ceiling encasing the vault were the thickest in the entire building

and reinforced with silverstone rebar. The vault itself took up a large chunk

of the basement, the front of it fifty feet wide and the interior more than

three times as long. Big Bertha’s rectangular shape matched the hundreds of

safety-deposit boxes lining her walls.

A heavy metal door about ten feet wide was set into the center of the vault.

That door had already been drilled and blasted open, judging by the tools and

shrapnel littering the floor, the scorch marks on the surrounding walls, and

the stench of hot melted metal that filled the air.

But another door lay behind that first one.

Well, it wasn’t really so much a door as it was a thick, tight mesh of

silverstone bars that covered the entrance from top to bottom and side to

side. Way too much silverstone to cut your way through with a power saw or a

welding torch, unlike the cash cages upstairs. A keypad was attached to the

right side of the mesh, the light on the front red, indicating that the mesh

was locked down tight.

Several boxes were stacked to one side of the vault, each stamped with the

words Property of Briartop. Deirdre and Santos had brought all the jewelry

from the museum exhibit down here. Of course they had. They wouldn’t have

wanted to let any of those precious stones out of their sight, not for one

second.

I didn’t see Deirdre or Santos, but they had to be here somewhere, perhaps

farther down from the vault in the hallway that branched off to the right and

led to the lobby stairs. But I didn’t care about them right now, just the

chair off to the left side of this hallway. The chair had been partially

turned toward the front of the vault, but I could still clearly see the person

sitting in it.

Finn.

My brother looked like he had been wearing his usual suit before his jacket

and tie had been taken from him and his white shirt had been ripped open and

torn apart.

All the better to torture him.

Thick ropes bound Finn’s wrists and ankles to the chair, immobilizing him.

Pale blue-white splotches dotted his skin from his forearms all the way up to