Chapter 10
“Okay,” Prudence said, tugging on her gloves, then cracking her knuckles. “First order of business, we break in. No sweat.”
Easy for her to say. I looked around at the block we were in. The Meathook was a rough neighborhood, sure, and noisy from all angles – street vendors and people in bodegas haggling and yelling, cars honking, and for some reason, like, a lot of cats in heat – but it was exactly why a break-in was that much more feasible for us. That kind of chaos and noise would just blend in.
Bastion seemed unbothered, and he just jerked his neck from side to side, the joints in his shoulders audibly popping. It was starting to feel like the two of them were prepping for a fight, and more and more I was starting to feel woefully under-equipped for the task at hand.
We stopped in front of a condemned building, just this squat, concrete mess overgrown with whatever weird greenery could survive in Valero’s sometimes chilly, sometimes sweltering streets. It had shattered windows boarded up with thick planks, graffiti everywhere, the works, and somewhere along the way, we found something that might have passed for a door. At least that’s what the heavy padlock on the outside told me. Prudence tutted as we stopped just in front of it, eyeing the lock. She rapped her knuckles on the not-door.
“Really clever getting someone to magically lock you in like this, Hubert. Makes us think that no one’s in there, that you’re out for business. What do you do to get in and out, climb through a window?”
No answer. I turned to Bastion. He was tightening his gloves, too.
“Come on, Hubert,” he called out. “We know you’re in there.”
The response: more silence.
“Maybe he really isn’t in there,” I said, unsure of why, if I was so confident about his absence, I was keeping my voice so low.
“It’s what he wants us to think,” Bastion said. He looked around, down the street both ways, then nodded, seemingly satisfied that we had enough privacy, for whatever value of privacy one gets on a grubby street outside an abandoned warehouse.
“Go for it,” he said, nudging Prudence with an elbow.
She frowned. “Why me?”
Bastion shrugged. “I’m saving my strength. What if he puts up a fight? Remember last time?”
I wasn’t enjoying all this vagueness. “What about last time? What happened then?” Bastion looked away. Prudence cleared her throat. “Will somebody say something?”
“Damn it, Dustin, calm down,” Prudence said. “Just follow our lead. It’ll be okay.”
She held a hand out towards the padlock, fingers spread apart. I looked on, wondering what was supposed to be happening, and on the verge of verbalizing the very question when her fingers emanated a brilliant blue light.
I repeat. Tendrils of blue light pulsed out of nowhere, sheathing her fingers and knuckles, spiring over and under them like iridescent snakes. The light built to a white head, her fingers poised like an eagle’s talons, at which point she closed her hand around the padlock – and crushed it utterly, as easily as you’d crush a beer can.
See? Badass.
“Holy shit,” I muttered.
“Awesome, right?” Bastion drawled, his expression thoroughly uninterested, like he had already seen this a hundred times before. As Prudence’s partner, he probably had. Prudence just shrugged.
“So the gloves, they?
??re to protect you from the blue flamy things?”
Prudence blinked at me, then unclasped her fingers, letting the padlock fall to the ground in a sprinkle of twisted detritus. “Um, no. They’re to make sure I don’t injure myself. You ever get metal filings shoved into the palm of your hand? It’s not fun.”
“Oh. Right.” I scratched the back of my neck. “Of course.” I watched Bastion next, somehow expecting him to do, well, something, except that Prudence fiddled with the door and grunted.
“Damn it, Hubert. He’s got some kind of seal in place. Thing won’t budge.”
“A seal?”
“Like a barrier.” She gave the door a hard rap. It barely shuddered in its frame. “See? Won’t budge. Brandt. You take over.”
“What? Why me?”
Prudence scoffed. “You want me to spend all my juice, then what good will I be in a fight? Remember the last time?”