Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 108517 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 543(@200wpm)___ 434(@250wpm)___ 362(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 108517 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 543(@200wpm)___ 434(@250wpm)___ 362(@300wpm)
“What is that?”
“Styxine.” Alessandro rummaged through the contents of the first aid kit that had been dumped on the floor and pulled an empty syringe out. “Last line of defense against a mental assault. You inject it, and you’re dead to the world. A mental mage can’t attack a mind that’s not there.”
“How long does it last?”
“That depends. This shit is very bad for you. Sometimes you wake up after six hours. Sometimes you wake up after three days and don’t know who you are. Sometimes it lasts forever.”
“What do you mean ‘forever’?”
“You don’t wake up. You become a vegetable. No brain functions. This packet is double the recommended dose.” He frowned and held up an identical syringe. Also empty. “’Sto vecchio rimbambito took two of these.”
Oh my God. “Is there any way to reverse this? Can we give him something to snap him out of it?”
“If such a thing exists, I don’t know about it.”
Whatever I did next would determine if Linus lived or died.
The fear and anxiety that gnawed on me shattered like a glass bowl dropped on the ground, exploding into sharp shards. They sliced into me in an instant of pain, and I snapped into a calm place where only logic ruled.
To Alessandro and me, Linus Duncan was the Warden of Texas. To almost everyone else in Houston, he was the former Speaker of the Assembly, a man of impeccable reputation, who despite pretending to be retired, wielded a massive amount of political influence.
The current Speaker of the Assembly had been murdered, and now the former Speaker of the Assembly was attacked in his own home and found in a catatonic state. We had to contain this at all costs, or Houston would panic.
My first priority was to get medical treatment for Linus. My second was to hide his condition. And if Linus was conscious, he would tell me to reverse the order of the two.
Leon jogged down the stairs, saw Linus, and stopped. “Okay. That’s a hell of a thing.”
“Anything?” Alessandro asked him.
My cousin shook his head. “No. No signs of teleportation either. Looks like whoever it was killed Pete and walked out the door. I’d like to know how they managed that with the siege protocol active.”
The lockdown would’ve kicked in the moment Linus triggered it from the inside of the vault. He wouldn’t have risked taking Styxine unless he was in immediate danger, so he got into the vault, hit the siege panic button, and injected himself as soon as he could. Even if whoever killed Pete had immediately turned around and sprinted out of the house, the turrets would’ve gotten them before they ever made it to the gate.
“Also, I found this.”
Leon held up a Ziploc bag with a black DA Ambassador, a state-of-the-art .40 pistol from Duncan Arms. Pete’s gun.
“Where did you find it?” Alessandro asked.
“Behind a column by the front door.”
There was no reason for Pete’s gun to be there. He always had it. It rested on his nightstand when he slept. Someone must’ve killed Pete, picked it up, and then hid it behind the column before going out the door.
When the siege protocol was up, Linus’s turrets would ignore people with special clearance, but they would still fire on them if they carried a firearm. The attacker knew exactly how the system worked.
“The intruder had to have special clearance,” I said. “Like Alessandro and I.”
“Linus was betrayed,” Alessandro said.
“Who do you think?” Leon asked.
I shook my head. “We can figure this out later. Right now, we have to get him out of here.”
Linus couldn’t die. He just couldn’t.
“The house is a fortress,” Leon said. “Instead of risking transporting him, let’s just get a medic here.”
“I had to end the siege protocol to get into the vault and to let you in. Once the system is disabled, only Linus can reactivate it.”
Leon stared at me. “Define ‘disabled.’”
“Right now no door in this house can be locked. Doors that are already locked will remain locked, unless someone manually unlocks them, but the front door, the gate, the vault, everything that we opened, can’t be relocked. The turrets are off-line. The surveillance cameras are off-line. We are deaf, blind, and defenseless.”
Linus had no human guards aside from Pete and Hera, who was currently out of the country. They were his last line of defense, one he almost never used. He relied on his automated defenses instead, and right now all of them had about as much firepower as lawn gnomes. We were sitting ducks.
“Why the hell would he do that?” Leon asked.
“Because if he isn’t here to reactivate the system, he is either dead or incapacitated,” I told him. “He anticipated other people entering the house, like Warden personnel, paramedics, and law enforcement. Reactivating the system would be too dangerous. It could end in a bloodbath.”