“So we just sit here. Again.”
“No,” Mom said. “We prepare.”
“They’ll hit us, sooner rather than later,” Bern told her. “If we can, we need to take some of them alive, so we can bargain. If we get ahold of someone valuable enough, we can trade them to Diatheke for your sister.”
Runa stood up. “I need some air.” She walked out of the room.
“Stay close to the warehouse,” Mom called.
“I’ll keep an eye on her.” Bern got up and followed her out.
I looked at Mom. Bern had voluntarily left the warehouse. Again. Since graduating from college, Bern did his best to impersonate a mushroom: he parked himself in the Hut of Evil with his servers and basked in the glow of the monitors, escaping only to use the bathroom and consume food. Going outside wasn’t in his repertoire.
Mom shrugged.
Ragnar got up. “I’m going to the kitchen to get snacks. Please don’t worry. I won’t go outside, and I’ll try very hard to not kill anyone.”
He left. It was just me and Mom.
“It won’t work,” I told her. “They’ll never trade Halle. She’s a potential witness.”
“I know,” she said. “We have to bleed them. We have to make it so expensive that they’ll drop it. They’re a business.”
“We’re gambling with her life.” Anxiety churned inside me.
“It’s not about Halle now,” Mom said. “It’s about keeping that wild wrecking ball and her brother alive.”
My stomach dropped. “I’m going to try, Mom. Halle’s still alive. There is still a chance.”
“Then you go and try. Heart and his people will be here tonight. That should give you some freedom of movement.” Mom sighed. “I miss doing small, quiet jobs. Insurance fraud. Cheating spouses.”
“I miss them too,” I told her. “But we are who we are. There’s no going back.”
Alessandro had taken the top floor in the three-story brick building that used to be a fire station years ago. Rogan purchased it but never did anything with it, and eventually we bought it from him.
I had walked through this building before when we purchased it. The first floor, with an unusually high ceiling, served as the garage for the fire trucks. The second, accessible by an iron staircase, housed the offices, and the third contained the rec room, sleeping quarters, and a big kitchen once capable of serving food to an entire fire team.
I climbed the iron stairs, with my hip screaming at me the entire way. I had left Shadow in the warehouse. She seemed susceptible to his bribes, and I had no idea what sort of bizarre thing he would try to feed her this time.
The original plan was to turn the fire station into barracks, but the building proved to be too old. Fixing it up would be more expensive than building a brand-new structure. Rogan let it go for next to nothing. At some point, Leon, obsessed with the fire pole, had tried to convince Bern to move there with him and turn it into a “hip bro cave.” That plan died when they realized rewiring the place was out of their budget.
The stairs brought me to a wide-open door. I stepped through and ended up in the rec room, flooded with daylight from huge windows. Someone had swept the concrete floor. On the right a large pack of bottled water waited on the counter of a kitchen right out of the seventies, complete with wooden paneling. Straight ahead, in the corner, an inflatable mattress rested on the floor. Between me and the mattress stood two plastic fold-out tables filled with weapons and equipment. A high-tech-looking laptop, parts of a drone, six, no, nine guns, including a BFR, four knives, two daggers, a machete, a garrote, and a compound bow. The assassin’s tool kit.
The assassin himself was nowhere to be seen. I walked to the tables. Whatever his faults were, Alessandro had excellent taste in blades. Everything was functional, sharp, and sturdy. And generic. No custom-made pieces, no family heirlooms. Nothing irreplaceable or that could be traced.
I reached for the Ka-Bar and tested the balance. Seven-inch straight blade angled at the tip. Heavy.
I turned to get better light. Alessandro sat on the kitchen counter, one leg bent, the other hanging free. I almost threw the Ka-Bar.
“Adorable,” Alessandro said. “Do that little jump again.”
I put the Ka-Bar down before the temptation got the better of me. “I brought you the recording.” I held up the thumb drive.
He jumped off the counter and stalked toward me.
I circled the tables, looking at his collection and keeping the furniture between us. “You seem to know a lot about Benedict.”
“Mhm.”
“What is he?”
“You were with him. What do you think he is? What did you feel?”
“Revulsion and fear. His magic manifested as dark phantom serpents. He opened himself, and a nest of ghost snakes slithered out wanting to bite me.”
“That’s why he calls himself the Adder,” he said.
“The Adder? Really?”
“It goes with the territory. Nobody wants to hire a Mr. De Lacy or Madame Laurent. They want to hire the Adder or Mort Noire.”
“Please tell me there isn’t an assassin calling herself the Black Death?”
“More than one.”
It seemed so childish except people were dying. “So, what’s your nickname? Instagram Famous? Playboy Killer?”
“Are you teasing me, you sexy beast?”
The careful train of my thoughts derailed, flipped over in the air, and burst on fire. Think of a witty comeback, come on . . . How did he keep short-circuiting my brain?
He laughed. “If looks could kill.”
I resumed our dance around the tables. “Benedict is a psionic, isn’t he? Probably a phobic subtype.”
Psionic mages affected survival emotions. Fear, disgust, rage, anxiety, shame. The primal, powerful urges that kept humans breathing thousands of years before tools and weapons came along. Psionics induced these emotions in their targets. Phobics specialized in fear. They had an innate ability to find your worst phobia and project it into your mind, dragging you into paralyzing madness. I’d dealt with a phobic before, although she wasn’t a Prime. Benedict’s magic elicited that same instinctual punch of revulsion and terror.
“Close,” Alessandro said. “His mother is a phobic. His father is a mind cutter.”
A menincissor mage. A particularly nasty branch of mental magic that attacked consciousness. Mind cutters punctured mental shields and induced pain and the inability to think. They weren’t lethal on their own, but they excelled at disabling their target.
“Are you running away from me?” Alessandro asked.
“No.” We had come full circle around the tables.
“Yes, you are. Are you afraid of what I’ll do if I catch you?” He raised his eyebrows at me. “Or are you scared of what you might do?”
I stopped. “I’m not afraid of anything.”
He vaulted over a table and landed next to me. I tilted my head and looked at him. Magic roiled just under his skin. His amber eyes all but glowed.
Kiss me.
“When a phobic and a mind cutter have a child . . .” He spoke softly, his voice warm and low, meant just for me. When he told someone he loved them, he might sound just like that. “. . . they have a one in a quarter chance of producing a crime against nature called a mind ripper. Benedict can penetrate mental defenses like his father and then scramble the mind, inducing panic like his mother. Benedict didn’t just happen; he was a planned project by a mind cutter House. They wanted a dark horse to handle their dirty deeds.”
He was standing way too close. Looking at him made it difficult to concentrate. “What happened?”
“They had a difference of opinion. Now House Weber is no more.”