AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I swallowed. “Yes,” I ground out, through my teeth.
“You do know that you won’t be able to see her again, right?” he warned. “I require one hundred percent commitment. Nothing left over for frivolous pursuits.”
“Fine. You want me, you got me. One hundred percent. So what’s the mechanism of this implant? How have you been making her get sick? Let me just make some calls so I can dismantle that, and then we can get right to work, okay?”
He laughed at me. “Do you think I got to this point in life being stupid and trusting? Leverage, Cassandra. Nothing ever happens without leverage.”
“But I can’t,” I wailed. “I can’t do this. Not with this thing hanging over my head like a guillotine!”
“Sorry,” he said. “You must. You will learn to live with the discomfort, the uncertainty. And it’ll make you stronger. You’ll see.”
He gave me an encouraging smile. As if my desire for my sister to stay alive was a regrettable personality trait, but possibly correctable. As if he would actually be doing me a favor by pushing that button. Hurting me in order to help me. It made me furious.
He came closer, bending to open a desk drawer. Without stopping to think, I lunged for the stone goddess. I grabbed her by the head, and spun the heavy, bulbous stone body around—thunk.
It whacked the side of his head.
He let out a startled grunt, stumbling down against the desk, and I swiftly hit him again on the back of the head. And again. I let out a feral, grunting cry with each blow.
Halliwell slid heavily to the ground. I backed away, panting heavily. I was on the verge of screaming. He just lay there, his white hair a bloody mess.
Now, Cass. Now. Move your ass. Do what you have to do.
What was that? What did I have to do? Fuck me. I couldn’t think. Couldn’t plan.
Killing him was the smartest, most practical thing to do, I supposed, but I couldn’t cold-bloodedly bash in the head of an unconscious man. Not even a monstrously evil man. I should, but I couldn’t. That would make me like him.
Besides, there was the explosive tooth thing. Who knew how many people who would die the same moment he did? All their deaths would be on my head.
I knelt beside Halliwell, searching through his pockets. I found the passcard, Reggie’s remote control, my phone, his phone. I swiftly turned Reggie’s dial down to zero, hoping desperately that Halliwell hadn’t been lying about that.
How was I going to find out more about Reggie’s implant? With that doctor up there, right near Reggie, with instructions to kill her if… if what? What was the catalyst? What was the signal? How could I know? How would the evil doctor know? I wanted to scream, with fear, frustration, desperation.
It was like being stuck in a maze, and every option ran me into an electrified wall.
But he’d said that Jana had been trying to figure out what he’d done to Reggie. She had probably paid the ultimate price for trying to help me. But Halliwell had been so coy about it. He had never said that he had killed her. Not in so many words.
If Jana was still alive, she was the only one who could tell me about this implant. Maybe she was alive, and still had that phone I’d left under her pillow, with Invisibility Cloak loaded on it. I had tagged all my secret phones, so I pulled up the app on my phone, and scanned for them.
There they were. Seven phones, all clustered in my old apartment, still hidden in the secret compartment of my suitcase, in my closet. And the eighth was… ohfuck.
The eighth one was down on Level Eight.
CHAPTER25
Shane
“She went away with him? Cass? With Halliwell?” Reggie’s voice rose in a horrified squeak. She sat straight up in bed, eyes wide. Still pale, but much better than she’d been even just an hour before. “Then why are you here? Aren’t you going to go after her? Save her? Why are you wasting time here talking to me?”
I rubbed my face, trying and discarding several different ways of saying it, then realizing that there was no good way. “It didn’t look like she was abducted,” I said reluctantly. “It happened right after the worm took over our computer system. Seconds after that, she walked out of the hospital with him, apparently unforced, making not a peep to anybody she saw or walked past. She got in a car with him and drove away. No one hit her over the head or stuffed her into a trunk.”
“Of course not! He forced her! Because he told her that if she didn’t, he’d make me sick again!” Reggie said sharply. “It’s so obvious! Can’t you see it?”
“But how could he do that?” I asked. “There isn’t anything in your body that can explain your symptoms. No one has touched you since we got you from the clinic.”
“If we knew how it worked, none of this would be happening!” Reggie wailed.
I shook my head. “Honey, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to think?—”
