Chapter 68

“Jo?”
The feeling of someone tapping her boot had her struggling to get her eyes open, but they were not being cooperative. When she finally managed to pry them open, it was dark outside again. But the snow had stopped.
It was Elliott who had been attempting to wake her for who knows how long. She imagined it couldn’t have been too long because the kicking of her boot was still relatively gentle. She looked around and noted she was the only one still under the wind shield. How long had she been sitting there? How long had she been asleep?
He offered her his hand and pulled her to standing. “Not that long,” he said, in answer to her last two questions that she hadn’t asked, she supposed. Most Vampires did need to sleep some, but all of Lucas’s friends were wide awake, as if they hadn’t been up all night. Even if all of them had been asleep in the vehicle on the way here--like she had been--someone had had to drive.
Trying to let her embarrassment go, she stepped to the edge of the mountain and looked out over the fortress, as many of them were doing. Without the snow and fog in the way, even in the darkness, the structure was much clearer than it had been before.
It was an ominous sight. A large mountain protected the majority of the palace, which seemed to be built into the mountain at the base, completely surrounded except for one narrow gate on the south side that led to a narrow, winding road leading off down the side of a smaller mountain, into some hills, and finally to the town of Belogradchik. It seemed like the only way to get in was that road, unless a person didn’t mind climbing up large, steep mountains and down the other side.
Luckily, none of them were people.
Still, even from here, she could see that getting in wouldn’t be the only problem. The fortress was surrounded by guards. A few of them were on top of the fortress walls that lined the perimeter of the palace where it wasn’t built into the mountain, but just as many were on top of the structure itself. She imagined a small courtyard must be situated around the front of the palace itself, which was created out of stone that matched the rock face of the mountain itself, and though she couldn’t see down into it from this angle, she had to assume it was also full of Vampire guards. It looked like at least a few hundred, maybe more, lots more, were stationed everywhere a person could see, which confirmed this was most likely the place where they’d find Holland--but how the hell would they get to her?
And how the hell would they get her out? This didn’t seem like something as simple as a pair of handcuffs, no matter what they were made of.
“There is resistance,” Lucas said quietly as he peered out across the expanse. “I can feel it.”
Jo turned to look at him, not exactly sure what he was getting at, but hazarding a guess. “Amongst the guards?”
“Yes. And some on the inside.”
It was an interesting thought. Some of them didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to be a part of whatever Holland was doing. “How can we use that to our advantage?”
“It will be difficult,” another of the Souled, a large man she thought she’d heard someone calling Lou earlier, said. He was even more imposing a character than Adrian, and that was saying something. With a bald head and one small hoop earring, he had a face that also looked like it had been chiseled out of rock, except for the pock mark scars. “Even if they do not wish to help that woman, they will not fold so easily.”
Jo almost asked what the point in having that information was, but she didn’t. They might tell her other things, things she might actually find useful.
“Well, we aren’t going to be able to find out anything about the interior of that building from here,” Cassidy remarked to Jo’s right. “It’s too far away. Even with our X-ray vision, we’ll need to get a hell of a lot closer to have an idea of where Holland might be and any escape routes she might be utilizing.”
Jo had a feeling the reason Holland had picked this location had more to do with how difficult it would be for someone to infiltrate it, not dozens of escape routes, but then, she only needed one if it was well hidden. “We could search the perimeter of that mountain and make sure there’s not a tunnel or something she can use to get out,” she suggested.
“But… she doesn’t need a tunnel we can see.”
The sound of Zane’s voice caught her off-guard. So rarely did he say anything at all, especially to the entire group and not just in her head. She had to search for a moment to find him. He was standing off to the side a bit, and behind her. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“Portals,” Zane reminded them. “If anyone knows how to use them, it’s her. For all we know, she can just disappear in and out of them at will. Isn’t that what your dad and Christian have been doing?”
“Fuck,” Jo whispered. She wouldn’t have ever thought about that, despite the two examples he just gave. “Yeah.”
“There’s not really a way to search for portal openings, is there?” Brandon asked from the other side of Cassidy.
“Not really,” Elliott answered his son. “So many of the goddamn things shift and open in different locations. If Henry can figure out how to summon them and open them at will, so can Holland.”
He meant Christian--Christian Henry--a Guardian Elliott had never been fond of.
“Well, all we can do is check for what we can find,” Cassidy suggested. “Maybe if I can get behind her shield….”
“Behind it?” Lucas asked for all of them. “How would you do that exactly?”
Cassidy was staring off in the distance, her eyes slightly clouded over in thought. “Go up… come down on the other side. See if she can detect me or not. If she can’t, or doesn’t think there’s any way I could be there, then she’ll keep shielding it the way she is now, radiating out around herself and all of the people near her. If I’m behind it, I might be able to get the information we need.”
The idea was an ingenious one, and one that sounded extremely dangerous. “Cassidy,” Jo began, but she didn’t have to say more before her husband interrupted.
“Are you shitting me? This is a reconnaissance mission. There’s no way in hell you can honestly think we’d let you go in there like that. If you get stuck, we’ll never be able to get you out.”
“What are the chances I’ll get stuck?” Cassidy asked, folding her arms.
“Uhm… didn’t we just pull you out of a collapsed cave?” Scott hadn’t said a word since Jo opened her eyes until then.
Cassidy turned and pushed him backward about ten feet until he collided with the same slab of rocks they’d been using to keep the wind from their faces. A cloud of white dust rained down on him from the overhang. “Son of a bitch!” Scott yelled, dusting snow off of his shoulders.
“He’s not wrong,” Jo reminded her aunt. “I don’t think I can let you do that right now, Cassidy. It’s too dangerous. Maybe once we have as many troops together as we can gather--”
“I’m not asking you, Jo. I’m going.”
The message was sent to her through her IAC and to no one else, her aunt’s way of giving her an opportunity to agree with her and save some face in front of the others, since technically Jo was allegedly in charge, though at the moment, if she went along with what Cass was telling her was about to happen, that wouldn’t technically be true, or at least it wouldn’t seem that way.
Jo swallowed hard, not knowing what to do. “How many of us are there?”
“Thirteen,” Lucas answered for her. “Are you really considering letting her do that?”
She didn’t answer him. Instead, she turned back to Cassidy. “Could you get the information you need from the roof, or would you have to go in?”
“I’m not sure,” Cassidy said, looking her in the eyes. “It all depends on how Holland is projecting her shield.”
“Cassidy, you are not going in there,” Brandon insisted. “I already thought I lost you once recently, and I really don’t want to go through that again.”
“You didn’t,” his wife reminded him. “You won’t--you can’t.”
“Even if they cannot kill you,” Lucas began, “that doesn’t mean they can’t hold you hostage and try while we scramble around out here like a bunch of buffoons, trying to get to you.”
“I’m going in,” Cassidy said, stepping closer to the edge of the cliff. “I’ll be back.”
“Cassidy--” Jo began as her aunt stepped off of the ledge.
She floated away from them, slowly at first, and then picking up speed. Brandon turned with his hands on his hips, seething. His dad tried to comfort him with a hand on his shoulder. “She’ll be okay. You know as good as I do, once that woman gets somethin’ in her head, ain’t no changing her mind.”
Brandon said nothing, and Jo didn’t either, but as her aunt got further and further away, she realized they needed to move. “If she needs our help, we need to be down there, not up here,” she reminded Lucas, pointing at the lone opening into the fortress.
“If she needs our help, there will be little we can do,” the Souled Vampire said, his tone grim. “But you are right. It will do us no good to continue to stand up here.”
With a deep breath, Jo joined the others in climbing down the side of the mountain, using the far side so that the Vampires below wouldn’t see the movement and notice them, assuming they hadn’t spotted them to this point. If they had, there would be no way of knowing it until Cassidy came close enough with them to make contact, and by then, she’d be trapped.
The snowy rock surface cut into her hands as she grabbed hold of one protruding rock after another hurrying down the face of the mountain as quickly as possible, not bothering with the smooth paths they’d mostly used to climb up. She was pissed at her aunt for going off on her own, but she was even more pissed at herself for letting her. What kind of a leader let the same person get herself into trouble over and over again? A bad one….