Dragonback 03 Dragon and Slave Read Online Free Page A

pushed down with the foot in the
stirrup, he rose a couple of feet up the side of the wall.
    Balancing on the stirrup, he lifted the cylinder in his right hand
a couple of feet higher than the left-hand one and pressed it against
the wall. The glue cup attached, and he again pulled himself up to its
level. That left his left-hand cylinder down at about waist height.
Pressing the release, he snapped the glue cup off, leaving it fastened
to the wall. Another glue cup popped out of the cylinder from behind to
take its place; lifting the cylinder and his left foot, he fastened it
to the wall again and continued up.
    The disadvantage of the bootstrap was that it left a trail of glue
cups pointing straight at the thief's entry point. The saving grace was
that, most of the time, Jack was long gone by the time anyone was awake
enough to notice them.
    The bay window consisted of small panes of plastic set into a
spiderweb framework made of curved bars of metal-clad hardwood. The two
outer sections of the window could be opened for ventilation, though
they were currently locked shut.
    There were also three separate alarms on the window. One was on
each of the movable sections, guarding against unauthorized opening
from the outside, while a third protected against breakage of any part
of the window.
    Again, no problem. A quick but careful wiring of the metal edges
of the framework to another of Uncle Virgil's gadgets, and the breakage
alarm was history. From his backpack, Jack retrieved a tube of goop
whose label identified it as antibiotic first-aid cream. Attaching
another glue cup to a strategically located window segment, he
unscrewed the tube and squeezed a thin line of the stuff around the
edges.
    The acid ate silently through the plastic, sending up thin
tendrils of brown smoke as it went. Crinkling his nose against the
stink, Jack hung onto the wall like a giant spider and waited. The acid
finished its work, and Jack pulled the section free. Easing a hand
inside, he disabled the alarm on the nearest window section. Then,
releasing the catch, he pulled the window open and squeezed through.
    As he'd predicted, he found himself easing himself down into a
wide, deep bathtub designed to look and smell like a Brummgan swamp.
The tub was empty, fortunately, though he made sure to hang firmly onto
the edge as he crossed, in case it was still wet and slippery.
    The bathroom door led, logically enough, into a bedroom. At the
far end of the room, to one side of another window, was a bed built on
the same scale as the bathtub. Even for a Brummga, Jack decided
uneasily, this gatekeeper must be an unusually large specimen. Keeping
a wary eye pointed that direction, listening for any change in the
rhythm of the snoring, he stepped carefully out onto the thick bedroom
carpet and began to sidle crab-style toward the bedroom door. The
office and safe, he knew, would most likely be on the first floor.
    "Stop," Draycos murmured in his ear.
    Jack froze in midstep. "What?" he whispered back.
    "There—in the carpet ahead," Draycos said, his voice so faint it
couldn't have been heard more than two inches away. "A glint of metal."
    Jack frowned, his foot still raised. What in the world was the
dragon seeing?
    And then he spotted it. A glint of metal, all right, resting along
the top of the carpet.
    A tripwire?
    Carefully, he set his foot back onto the floor. Just as carefully,
he eased down into a crouch for a closer look.
    It was a tripwire, all right. In fact, it was a set of five
tripwires, running not quite parallel to each other along the floor,
directly across the path from the bathroom to the bedroom door.
    Jack smiled tightly. No one put tripwires in their own bedroom.
Not even Brummgas were that stupid. This had to be something Gazen had
thrown together in the half hour since making his deal with Uncle
Virge. A bonus challenge, something the average thief would never
expect.
    Luckily for Jack, he wasn't an average thief. Stepping