Page 19 of Cold Curses

FIVE

I wasn’t a bomb expert—hell, I wasn’t even a bombnovice—but that looked like it would do a lot of damage.

“We need to get the bodies out,” I said.

“That might trigger the blast,” Hansen said, and pointed at two wires that linked the men to the bomb. We’d gotten lucky, apparently, that rolling one over hadn’t set it off.

“Shit,” Gwen said. “You’re right. But let’s get pictures.” She pulled out her screen to quickly snap shots.

“Everybody out!” I yelled toward the humans still in the building, and pushed Theo toward the doors. “You take the humans outside. Get them away from the building. I’ll get the humans inside.”

“Lis,” he began, but I shook my head.

“I’m immortal,” I said. “You aren’t.”

I didn’t wait for a response, but looked around, spotted the fire-alarm switch on the far wall.

Tick.

I ran for it.

The alarm was covered by a glass box. I smashed it with a jacketed elbow, then pulled the switch. The alarm was brilliantly loud, which was great for alerting humans. Bad for allowing me to also hear the ticking of the countdown.

“Let’s say thirty seconds,” I murmured as Theo, Gwen, andHansen shouted instructions to the humans and cops outside, demanding everyone move back from the building.

With them out of the presumptive blast zone, I counted to myself as I ran deeper into the warehouse, looking for humans who hadn’t already been moved outside or were ignoring the alarm.

“Everybody out!” I said. “This isn’t a drill. Everybody out!”

I snatched heavy-duty ear protectors off one man’s head, pulled him out of his seat in a forklift. He swore, but when he recognized the siren, nodded and ran for the door.

Twenty seconds.

A couple of bulky human men took their time emerging from a break room, sodas in hand.

“Fucking drills,” one of them murmured, wincing at each screech of the alarm.

“Not a fucking drill,” I said. “You’ve got fifteen seconds until this building blows sky-high and takes everything with it.”

I could see they wanted to argue—I was a stranger with a sword—but the alarm kept ringing.

“Run,” I said, putting a little glamour into it, and they did.

“Elisa!” Theo had found a bullhorn. “Get out of there!”

I didn’t see anyone else, and I was out of time. So I turned back toward the front of the building and ran like my life depended on it. Which…you know the drill.

“Eight seconds!” came the call. “Seven. Run faster, vamp!”

I smiled in spite of the circumstances, hurdled one pallet, then another, and finally reached the door.

“Five!” Theo said, standing entirely too close to the building for a mortal.

I grabbed his hand, yanked him forward, and sprinted to get as far as we could from the building in the seconds we had left. We reached a stack of containers, slid to the ground behind them, covered our heads.

“One,” Theo said.

There was a moment of intense silence. And then the loudest thing I’d ever heard. The concussion was so powerful, it seemed to rattle my organs, and actually shook the stack of containers. One toppled, and I rolled away before it smashed to the ground in front of us. A storm of debris followed. Glass, metal, and wood rained down. And then a flock of ceramic figurines pelted the ground around us, leaving little weeping angel heads, now divorced from their bodies, to stare up at us accusingly.