Page 71 of Guild Boss

Lucy took a step. The floor squeaked and groaned beneath her boot. She jumped back quickly.

“Stay where you are,” Gabriel said. “There’s a reason the fire marshal put up that condemned sign out front.”

He dug the pry bar out of his pack again and used it to probe the ashes.

He found what he was looking for beneath the wreckage of what had once been a small bathroom.

“Here we go,” he said.

He applied the pry bar to the trapdoor in the floor. Otis rushed over to see what was going on. Gabriel got the trap open and aimed his flashlight down into the darkness. A flight of cracked concrete steps led to the basement. Tendrils of a familiar energy wafted upward.

Otis chortled excitedly.

“Did you find Pitney’s hole-in-the-wall?” Lucy called from the alley door.

“Looks like it. There’s definitely a lot of Underworld heat. Come on over, but follow my footprints.”

“On my way.”

Lucy picked a path through the ash and soot. When she reached hisside, he got a pleasant little shiver of awareness and knew she had heightened her senses.

“Definitely tunnel heat,” she said. “But even if Pitney had a secret vault down below, how can we find it? We’d need the coordinates.”

“Finding things is what I do, remember? If Pitney frequently came and went from a chamber in the tunnels, there will be a trail.”

“How will you be able to recognize it?”

Gabriel took one of the pendants out of his jacket. “If Pitney was the tuner who worked this amber, his vibe will be infused into it.”

Lucy smiled. “Excellent.”

“Let’s go.”

He went down the steps, senses at high rez. Otis scampered ahead of him. Lucy followed.

Pitney’s hole-in-the-wall was easy to locate. He had secured it with an impressive mag-steel door and a serious-looking lock. Green quartz energy seeped around the edges.

“I don’t think your pry bar will work on that door,” Lucy said.

“It’s a frequency lock. I’ve got a jammer that could open it, but we’re not going to have to go to any trouble.”

“Why not?”

Gabriel grabbed the steel handle and hauled the door open. “Because whoever went through this door last either did not know how to reset the lock or wasn’t worried about locking up. I think we can assume that person was the killer. He was looking for Pitney’s vault. The question is, did he find it?”

The heavy vault-style door swung open. Acid-green energy spilled through a ragged, two-foot-wide crack in the quartz wall. A shivery thrill rezzed his senses. He had spent a lot of his life in the Underworld, but he still got the rush.

He glanced at Lucy. There was a gleam in her eyes that told him she felt it, too.

Otis fluttered through the opening first. Gabriel and Lucy followed. Once inside, they stopped to double-check their nav amber and the locator. Otis could always be counted on to lead the way to an exit, but years of professional training and experience ran deep. You never went into the Underworld without well-tuned nav amber and a functioning locator.

“All set?” he said.

Lucy touched the amber in her bracelet and nodded. “Yes.”

He gripped the pendant in one hand and focused on the unique frequency of Pitney’s tuning vibe. A thread of identical energy appeared on the green quartz floor.

“Got it,” he said.

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