Total pages in book: 177
Estimated words: 171450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 857(@200wpm)___ 686(@250wpm)___ 572(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 171450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 857(@200wpm)___ 686(@250wpm)___ 572(@300wpm)
She needed to move. Someone would notice her any second standing in the empty hall, holding the ancient artifact that Amberdash had already made a big stink about. And yet she could not move forward as she had planned. She couldn’t move at all.
“Have you come to help put your king on the throne? As all good heroes are wont to do.”
“Can I?” she whispered.
“Perhaps.”
“Kierse, you need to move,” Graves said into her ear.
Time was limited, but how could she move with this magnificent thing in her hands? They had covered every contingency except the fact that she would have to hold the stone. Something this powerful wanted to be used. It wanted her to activate its power, and she, too, wanted that. But she couldn’t.
With a gasp, she dropped it back into the casing where it sat dormant once more. She stared at it in abject shock. She had touched many magical objects in the last year, but only the cuffs had truly emptied her the way the stone had.
“Kierse,” Graves said again, concern in his voice.
Kierse cursed under her breath and stripped out of her fancy jacket. She picked the stone up inside of the expensive material, glanced up to see the security team beginning to step into the room, and then drew a door.
She was gone before they ever saw her, the stone hidden in the confines of her suit coat.
The next second, she stood at Graves’s side inside the lounge as if she had always been there. Gen slowly disappeared from sight, where she’d change back into scrubs and join the medical team. Lyra stood beside her, too, and turned into her, opening her enormous bag. Kierse dumped the stone in it with relief.
“How long is this going to take?” Lyra asked. “I have to use the toilet.”
Then she marched away from them with the stone in her bag. She argued with the security team a moment, but Lyra was too persuasive without even Kierse’s magic to let her get away with anything. She disappeared from the lounge and was gone from sight.
Graves put his hand to her cheek when she finished shimmying back into her jacket. She was shaking and hadn’t even realized it until he’d touched her.
“You’re here. You’re safe,” he said.
Her magic sputtered upward at least. Even using it to jump twice hadn’t completely drained it since it had been in the service of stealing the stone.
“It was so old.”
He nodded. “Ancient.”
“It called me a…hero.”
Graves tilted his head. “Apt.”
She shrugged her shoulders back and tried to get right with herself again. Her skin felt ill-stretched to her body. “It asked if I was going to put my king on the throne.”
This time, his eyebrows shot up. “Truly?”
“It said that was what good heroes did.”
“Hmm,” he said contemplatively. “We’ll figure it out once we get out of here.”
She swallowed, trying to find the strength she’d had to pull the heist off. Because holy shit, she’d pulled it off. And all they had to do was let Lyra literally walk out the door with it.
“How much longer do you think?” Kierse asked.
“Schwartz said a full sweep of the assembly was twenty minutes, but if they do the entire building, it can be up to an hour.”
A few minutes later, Lyra came into their earpiece. “Delivered to the van. All set.”
“Excellent, Lyra,” Graves said. “I’ll wait for confirmation from Edgar that it makes it home.”
Lyra returned from her “bathroom run” shortly after that, her giant empty bag flopping against her side as she strode over to her parents. Quint glanced between her and them as if he could sense something was wrong.
It was exactly twenty minutes before they were allowed to reenter the General Assembly hall. Kierse’s jitters had calmed since they’d been cleared. They took their seats again and waited for the second part of their plan to go into effect.
It only took a minute for Amberdash to begin ranting from the front of the auditorium. His eyes jumped up to hers, and she had to keep a sly smile from her lips. She furrowed her brow and tried to look perplexed at his concerns. Not only would the security footage show that she had been at Graves’s side the entire time, but because Amberdash was paranoid, he had taken his own video in his office off the network and routed to his house. In theory, it should have been more secure. But not to Walter. Her excursion upstairs hadn’t been recorded at all.
“You did this!” Amberdash said as he stomped up the stairs.
“Sir, you are going to have to take your seat. We can investigate the missing things from your delegation seating, but I assure you no one was in this room other than the security detail,” a guard explained to Amberdash.
But Amberdash would hear nothing of the sort. He stomped right up to Graves’s seat. Graves slowly rose to his feet to meet him face to face.