The Rebel Queen (Outlaw #1) - Lexi Blake Page 0,146

comfortable dealing with the human world as you are.” I looked around the space I found myself in. Lee was right. There was a lot of C-4. “You know the bag of holding can carry all of this and we won’t even feel the weight.”

It wasn’t even stealing since Dev had paid for it. I wished Sarah had left the bag in my closet because I could have shoved a good deal of my clothes in there. And my shoes.

“Awesome. Let’s get moving because I think I saw a flamethrower. Sasha thought buying one was a bad idea,” Lee admitted. “Probably because of the whole peripheral vision thing. All right. The staircase is to our left, and then we’ve got a long haul up.”

The thought did not make me happy. “No one can hear me whine, right? Because I need you to understand that I don’t get a ton of cardio in.”

Although I had run for my life several times when we’d been on the outer planes.

“I’ll be able to.” Lee frowned my way. “The cloak might keep in sound, but I will be in there with you.”

“You know your namesake would have given me a piggyback ride.” He would have, and then he would have taken the stairs in a dead run and I would have barely noticed the floors flying by.

“My namesake was a werewolf with super speed,” Lee shot back. “As has been pointed out numerous times, I’m human right now. You’re walking.”

And he was true to his word. He made me walk up all those stairs. I think it was his revenge. It was odd to be back here. It had only been a few weeks, but I could feel that time had moved in this place. I couldn’t even see anything with the exception of the stairs, but the building had a heavy feeling to it that it hadn’t before.

There was a part of me that wanted to walk the halls, to see what he’d done with Dev’s baby. Dev had bought this building long ago, and much of our lives together had played out here. The first night we’d met, he’d brought me to Ether and shown me a whole new world. It had been in his office upstairs that he and Danny and I had first made our bargain—a pretend relationship that had become the center of our lives. All three of our children had been born here, and we’d intended this to always be their home.

We’d brought the supernatural world together right here in this building, and Myrddin had taken it from us, had twisted it. This place had become infested with all the wrongs he’d done, and I hated that.

“You okay?” Lee asked as we reached the nineteenth floor.

This stairwell only went to nineteen. The penthouse had another escape that didn’t connect to the other floors. It was part of Dev’s security. He’d worked so hard to protect us, and it had still failed.

“I’m good.” My legs had held up pretty well. Vampire blood gave a girl a nice boost. “But we need to be very careful from here on out.”

We hadn’t seen anyone in the stairwell. It had been eerily quiet the whole time. But we were about to go into what should be an occupied floor. According to Sasha’s intelligence, Olivia Carey lived on this level along with a couple of other witches. Liv might have gone on some mysterious mission, but her neighbors could be around.

It was harder to fit two adults under the cloak than it had been me and a kid. We would have to move cautiously, but first we had to get through the door.

I was in front of Lee. His bigger body draped the cloak over me and he could still see, though “seeing” in the cloak was an odd thing. It was like looking at the world through a filter. Everything seemed muffled and slightly distorted. I opened the door as slowly as I could, not wanting to make a sound.

That was the moment I realized we weren’t even close to being alone.

Chapter Twenty-Four

“Zoey?” The woman who stood in the hallway kept her voice low. “It’s okay. This floor is empty for now, but we need to hurry.”

I went completely still for a moment. Christine stood in front of the door I’d opened. I’d seen her just days before, but she’d changed. She would be fifty now, and it struck me that I’d known her for half her life. Or rather she’d known