Page 76 of Dead of Night
West turned to look at me with a murderous expression.
“That’s how it works,” I chimed in.
“Fine.” He placed tiles on the board.
“I was going to build on that ‘Y,’” Kane complained.
West didn’t bother to hide his smirk. “Better luck next time. Now, tell me about The Corporation. Why are they here?”
Kane placed his word on the board and conceded the round. “It seems they’ve been here longer than we knew,” the demon replied. “They’ve been keeping a vault in the house on Thoreau Street. Their guardian is dead.”
“Guardians, plural,” I corrected him.
“Their guardians are dead,” Kane said, “and management is very likely going to be interested in how this occurred.”
“When you say they’ve been keeping a vault…” West began.
Kane placed his tiles on the board. “Triple letter score, wolf man.”
West snarled. “Call me that again and you’ll find those fancy cufflinks jammed up your nostrils.”
“That would keep me from smelling you at least.” Kane shot a glance at me and cleared his throat. “I mean, that seems like quite a tame response for you.”
“I’m being respectful while in the home of a lady,” West replied smoothly.
I snorted. “Have you met me?”
“I haven’t seen the treasure trove myself,” Kane said, “but Miss Clay has.”
“It’s otherworldly,” I explained. “That’s probably why no one here has registered its existence all this time.” I thought of previous attempts by the Bridger witches to find treasure. If their monster had been able to detect the riches, it would’ve gone straight to Thoreau Street. Too late for them. The monster and witches were all dead now, except for Phaedra, who’d objected to the witches’ plan to sacrifice Ashley Pratt.
West frowned. “Otherworldly?”
“It exists in another dimension, even though it’s in the basement of the house,” I explained.
“We believe it’s due to the crossroads,” Kane added. “The boundaries are weaker here, which allowed them to break through to another realm with less resistance.”
“That’s a huge liability for the town,” West said.
“So is the crossroads,” I pointed out. “And you don’t even bother to keep any sentries there.” I’d been floored when Kane revealed the true extent of the crossroads—that it wasn’t simply a place where two realms met but infinite realms—and that there was no godly figure that watched over it to protect Fairhaven from danger.
“The pack patrols regularly,” West said, somewhat defensively. “We don’t ignore the crossroads completely. If we’d known about Thoreau Street, I would’ve added it to our list.”
“The vault seems to have been there for decades,” I said.
“Then I guess we’ve been lucky that nothing has come of it until now,” West said. He set down his tiles with a flourish. “Eat shit, Sullivan.”
Kane looked at the word—daemon, the archaic spelling of demon. “Very clever.”
“We can’t let them send another guardian,” West said. “We need to get The Corporation to relocate their treasure, so they have no reason to come back.”
“A lovely idea, but how do you expect to do that?” Kane asked. “By all means, if we’re making impossible demands, it would be best for them not to have access to those funds at all.”
West laughed. “We don’t have the resources necessary to take on The Corporation. We’d be courting death.”
“We wouldn’t be courting death,” Kane objected. “We’d be insuring it.”
“Then what’s the answer?” I asked. “It seems to me we’re damned no matter what we do.”