Three more steps brought me to the next corner. The main house was fifty feet ahead, but I tried to ignore it and concentrate on this building. Presumably the door was on the next wall. I stopped, listened. I could feel only low-level chaos, which might be coming from Karl.
When I reached him, he had the door cracked open, face against the gap, sniffing. When he looked at me, I knew what I’d seen wasn’t some random or past vision. Someone had been shot inside.
“Will you wait?” he whispered.
I shook my head. The low strum of chaos rose to a steady beat. I touched his arm and lifted my lips up to his ear.
“I’ll see it anyway, whether I go in or not.”
His chin dipped in a nod and that drum of chaos subsided.
He opened the door and stepped into the dark room, his head up, nose working. I could make out a dinette table and chairs, a small fridge and microwave, a sofa and a bank of maybe a half-dozen lockers. A staff lounge for the guards.
Karl’s gaze moved to a closed door. Light shone under it.
“Stay right-” He bit the words off, chewed them over, then said, “Cover me.”
I followed, gun ready, as he stopped outside the door, head tilted to listen as his nostrils flared. He turned the handle, then threw open the door.
A figure sat on the toilet, and my first impulse was to back out, apologizing. Then I saw the blood.
The man was slumped against the back of the toilet, mouth open. Male and under forty were the only characteristics I noticed, and not because of the extent of his injuries, but because I couldn’t tear my gaze from those injuries long enough to notice anything else.
He’d been shot twice in the face, at close range. The first bullet had shattered his cheek. The second left his nose a mangled flap of gore, dripping blood.
I remembered the blinding flashlight beam and the shot. Had he seen death coming? Had he felt the bullet? Had he suffered at all? I hoped not, but somewhere from within me came an altogether different wish, not that the man suffered horribly, but that maybe, just a little spark of something, a flare of chaos that I could-
I swallowed hard and rubbed my hands over my face.
“It must be-” I whispered. “One of the guards. Paige said-”
The man’s eyes opened. I fell back with a yelp.
Karl hauled me toward the door.
“What are you-?” I began. “He’s alive. We have to-”
My words came out shrill and jumbled. I fumbled for my phone, but my fingers were shaking so badly I dropped it. As I wrenched against Karl’s grasp, the man gave a low moan. My gaze flew to his.
His eyes were so blank and empty, I was certain that groan had been his last, that I hadn’t reacted fast enough, that I should have-
His lips parted, a bloody froth bubbled and I stared, transfixed.
“He’s gone, Hope.”
“Gone? Are you crazy?” I tried to pull away. “He’s alive. Can’t you see?”
I wrenched around, saw those blank eyes and knew Karl was right. Not a lick of chaos emanated from the man-no fear, no pain, just emptiness. But I kept struggling to get to him, because there was the off-chance I was wrong and I would not walk away. The impulse to help was still there, not yet buried under that lust for chaos, and I clung to it with everything I had.
Karl pulled me to the door. I could see him talking, but his words floated past unheard. Then came two that didn’t: Paige and Lucas.
I reached for my phone. “We have to call-”
He took the phone, stuffed it into my pocket and caught my hands when I went for it again.
“You won’t stop me from warning them, Karl. I won’t let-”
His grip went tight enough to hurt now, face coming down to mine.
“That guard is still bleeding, Hope. That means he was just shot, and whoever shot him was taking him out before going after Benicio-before heading into the house.”
“Which is why we have to warn-”
“And set off Paige’s cell phone? Yes, we have to warn them. But not that way.”
He scooped up my gun, which I hadn’t even realized I no longer held. When I reached for it, he held it just out of reach. His gaze searched mine then, without a word, he handed it back and we hurried from the building.
LUCAS: 8
I TOLD MYSELF I was overreacting. Laughed as I imagined what I looked like, slinking through the shadows under cover of a blur spell.
Were the guards watching me from the darkness of the yard, struggling not to laugh? Or inside, at the monitor station, busily taping the footage to pass around a Cabal e-mail loop: look at the guy, he’s so paranoid he can’t even walk up to his dad’s front door without hiding under a spell.
No one could have broken into my father’s house.
Paige had joked earlier that I hated to use the word impossible, in case I was proven wrong. But this situation came as close to impossible as I could imagine.
The front gates couldn’t be operated without a signal from within the house, and anyone climbing the fence would set off an alarm, notifying two patrolling guards, the house guard and Troy. But we’d climbed the fence…and no one was rushing out to stop us.
I pushed back the thought in favor of the hope that I was making a monumental fool of myself.
My father was fine.
Even if someone breached the fence, he couldn’t get into the house. My father refused to employ illegal or supernatural security methods in the yard-he couldn’t risk having a drunken teen scale his fence and slam into a barrier spell. But with the house, he had no such compunctions.
Even the Cabal vaults-which contained not only a fortune in bearer bonds, but all the powerful spells and supernatural secrets accumulated in centuries of Cabal-hood-were not as carefully guarded as this house. My father was more valuable to the Cabal than any bond or spell. Lives had been sacrificed to provide the highest security the supernatural world knew.
There was only one door, which had to be opened by the guard within. Once inside, the visitor found himself in a completely secured concrete box. To get into the house proper required another door to be opened, which could only be done by my father or Troy.
There was another way through the front door. Should my father be in the yard or on the beach, he’d hardly want to knock at his own door, so a retinal scanner allowed him access. It was also set to recognize one other person: me. As for why I might need to get inside without him, he never said, only that I’d find out if the need arose.