together to form the cages’ bars and base—true to mythology, most otherworldly beings recoiled from one or both metals to some degree. Most creatures of this size weren’t strong enough to leap into the shadows through the narrow spaces between those bars even if they’d had shadows to travel through. That meant freeing them was a multi-stage process.
I started with the nearest cage, drawing a dense black cloth from the larger bag on my belt and wrapping it around the light to blot out the illumination completely. Breaking the thing obviously would have done the trick faster, but even the lovers of antiquities often resorted to higher levels of tech when it came to ensuring their most valuable possessions didn’t escape. Chances were high an alarm would go off if the flow of electricity were interrupted.
The same possibility existed for the cage doors. Instead of messing with the lock, I unhooked the juiced-up knife I kept at my hip, hit the button to flood the blade with heat, and applied it to the bars on the side.
The titanium tool had been enhanced not just by black-market skills but a sorcerer’s supernatural efforts as well. Its blazing edge sliced through five of the bars in less than a minute. They bowed upward at a push with the flat of the blade.
The second I’d lowered the scorch-knife, the creature inside sprang through the gap. I got a clear look at it in that instant—a ball of raggedy gray fur from which six spindly legs and two bat-like wings protruded, a glitter of yellow eyes—and then it flitted off into the thicker shadows to enjoy its freedom far from here.
With a roll of my shoulders to loosen them up, I let out my breath. One down, a hell of a lot more to go.
Using the same technique, I made my way down the room one cage at a time. It was only when I’d hacked through what turned out to be the thirteenth—what a fitting number—that I glanced up and realized I’d come to the end of the line. Well, almost. I’d reached that vast curtain.
Bracing myself, I nudged one edge of it aside—and froze. More spotlights gleamed off more silver-and-iron bars ahead of me, but the three cages that awaited me there… I’d never seen anything quite like them. Set back at the far end of the room, a good fifteen feet from where I was now standing, they loomed almost as high as the ceiling and wide enough that I couldn’t have reached from one side to the other with my arms straight out.
My breath stayed locked in my lungs as I slipped past the curtain and walked toward them. What was this dude keeping in there? It’d have been hard enough keeping his collection of thirteen minor “monsters” properly fed and exercised so they didn’t totally dwindle away. Any creatures big enough to require cages like these—they could have gobbled him up the second he made a wrong move, if they were so inclined. And it wouldn’t take very long shut up in a cage to so incline them.
I’d already thought he was over-ambitious and possibly insane. Now I’d have to go with completely cuckoo, and not just for Cocoa Puffs.
As with the smaller shadowkind, the beings in the huge cages had contracted into blurry dark forms. I couldn’t tell whether the cages’ height was overkill or if all three were simply hunched down in that space, but they all looked like big balls of, well, shadow condensed in the lower third of the space. The ball on the left was about twice the width of the one in the middle, the one on the right somewhere in between. I caught a flicker of pale hair, a glimmer of neon-green eyes—
My foot landed on the smaller rug between me and the cages, and an electronic shriek pierced both my eardrums.
Shit! I scrambled back so quickly I could have given a professional tap dancer a run for their money, but the alarm continued blaring through the room and no doubt the whole of the mansion. A pressure sensor under the rug must have triggered it. I hadn’t even thought—I probably should have considering the maniac I was obviously dealing with here—
No time to curse him out. No time to do anything except the bare minimum I’d come for. Whatever the hell was in those cages, they deserved their freedom just as much as the smaller beings I’d released did.
With the alarm