Page 257 of Caelum

DRE

Geneva, Switzerland

Seven wishes to destroy the Screamer,

Solomon’s ring to lure Drekavac to you,

Bucegi where he sleeps.

The translation hitus all in different ways.

The whole ‘seven wishes’ shit just confirmed that what we’d done at Caelum was actually a weapon we were going to have to use again.

And from what Bartlett and Avalina had told us, a potential three further times.

Why?

Drekavac was their grandchild.

One of the three Original Ghouls.

Who was, apparently, on our ‘to kill’ list because that was what we were doing now. Not just killing Ghouls, but Ancient ones. Ones that went so far above even the ductores we’d thought ran the roost but who, in fact, answered to one of the three Originals.

There was only one aspect of this entire shit show I couldn’t complain about—I’d feared my purpose would die the second I left Caelum. Ithadn’t. I now had a deeper purpose. One that involved eradicating the world itself of Ghouls…

When it boiled down to it, this was taking my purpose to the max.

So, yeah, most of us were freaked out, a little wired about what had happened when ‘Adam and Eve’ had translated every single leaf on our Eve’s body and had come up with a riddle worthy of a treasure map, but for Stefan, it had knocked him down with the force of a Mack truck.

We hadn’t even had to Google Bucegi because, I shit you not, that was where Stefan had been born. Or, to be precise, a town near the Bucegi mountain range. This wasn’t going to be a pleasant drive down memory lane for my brother, and he’d been affected ever since our initial meeting with Bartlett and Avalina.

Said translation, however, was why I found myself in a bank vault, two weeks later in the heart of Switzerland. Around me were steel walls, with doors thicker than the Hulk himself, and more security and firewalls than the Pentagon. My bear didn’t appreciate being lumped in here, stuck inside, but neither did Eren’s Lorelei or Stefan’s Incubus.

The things we do for love, I thought with an internal eye roll.

“Which one is it?” Eren whispered into his mouthpiece as he eyed the vault, which was surprisingly boring except for the thick walls and tech that secured the place.

“Just give me a minute.” Sam’s voice was low but throbbed with tension. He’d been working non-stop for fourteen days, and though the pressure wasn’t getting to him, I knew sleep deprivation would and could knock him on his ass if he wasn’t careful.

The last thing any of us needed was to get stuck in here because Sam needed a nap.

My potential prison had a low ceiling, and in the background, there was a hum that, without Sam’s input, would have told me the oxygen was controlled in here. When we’d walked in, we’d come face to face with an L-shaped room. There’d been a huge pile of gold ingots in the corner of the ‘L,’ and to its right, there was a wall of lockers each around a square foot in size, with four to a row and eight to a column. There was a shelving unit that looked surprisingly flimsy, but one I hoped was reinforced with tungsten or titanium or whatever, which was loaded down with stacks of cash. I’d seen Stefan eye it a time or two, his pickpocketing tendencies twitching to life in the face of where we were, but thus far, he’d behaved.

Behind the shelves was a wall of smaller lockers. These were six inches by six inches, tiny in the grand scheme of things, and where Samuel, after he’d shown us the blueprints of the vault, had said Edgar Wassermann wasmore than likely storing some of the goods his father, a leading Nazi, had stolen from the Jews he’d helped ship to their deaths at Dachau.

I felt no guilt in stealing from a piece of shit like that, but I just wished Sam would hurry the hell up so we could get on with the stealing and get out of here.

“Okay, I’m through the firewall.” Then, he grumbled, “This place needs to work on their security.”

“Now’s not the time for a critique, S,” I growled, not using his full name just in case there was a layer of security Sam hadn’t managed to access.

He huffed. “It’s in one of the smaller boxes as I expected. Number 232.”

With the knowledge in mind, our attention switched to Stefan who, as he’d been for the past two weeks, was looking twitchy as fuck. Still, I was relieved when he didn’t flake out on us and without even a glance, headed over to the lockers, dropped down to a crouch, grabbed his gear from his pocket, and got to work picking the lock.

It blew my mind that this was how they guarded the shit inside the lockers, but it figured if you spent forty million on security, you didn’t think there was much to worry about.

Idiots.

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