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“Stop. Stop trying.” Jana’s voice was even weaker now, a thin thread of sound. “Too late. Get out now, or you’ll die in here with me. Run, Cass.”
My eyes were streaming. “Fuck, Jana! I can’t!”
“Sucks, right? Thanks for caring. Thanks for giving me something real to do before the end. It almost feels worth it. And I’ll see Mom soon. So it’s okay. Really.”
“Jana.” I snorked up tear snot desperately, wiping my face on my sleeve. “Please. Don’t give up hope.”
“Never had any to begin with. Goodbye, Cass. Get lost.” The call cut off, and I let out a shriek of pure frustration.
But she was not wrong. Halliwell’s security had defeated me. The only way to get those codes was to force Halliwell to give them to me. And even if I had the stomach for that, Jana would be gone before I achieved it.
And, by definition, so would I.
I got up and headed for the stairs, pulling out the passcard for the garage level. Maybe I could find a car in there. But there would be no key, and hot-wiring a car was not in my current skillset. And no ice-sculpture van was coming to save me this time.
Maybe I could just run out on foot, sprint up the driveway toward the gate. It was a half a mile of road. That should be far enough to survive any bomb blast. I hoped.
I held up the passcard to the garage exit… and it flashed red.Shit.
My throat clutched, along with my gut. I tried again. Again. And again.
“Cassandra.” The voice sounded over the PA system, grotesquely amplified. Halliwell’s voice. Harsh, slurred… and fucking furious. “I see you’re trying to escape from the garage level. Don’t bother. There’s no way out. I’ve changed the access codes. All doors are locked to you now. I have also called my man at the hospital, the one who brought you to me. I told him to turn Regina’s dial all the way up. She’s dead by now. But it hardly matters, since you will be too, soon enough.”
My heart clutched. I hoped that Shane had come through for her. His curiosity alone would have impelled him to look for the scar. Once he saw it, he wouldn’t have wanted to risk being wrong about something so huge. I had to believe that about him.
Please. Let that be true.
“Such a waste,” Halliwell complained. “To think of what I offered you. All that you could have been, with my help, my mentoring.”
I ran down the corridor toward the closest camera and gave him the finger.
He chuckled. “Charming. If you’d grown up with more of my influence, you would have had more graceful manners. A more elegant vocabulary, too. You swear like a stevedore. It’s exhausting, you know?”
“Up yours, dickhead,” I yelled, as I ran past the next camera trying door after door, though I knew it was useless.
“Case in point. Look at you. Poor Cassandra. Just a rat in a trap now.”
I tried the door to the stairwell. Locked. The door that led the central courtyards, the lawn, the tennis courts. All flashed red, but I couldn’t stop trying. The nervous energy impelled me. It needed somewhere to go.
His disembodied voice chuckled. “You never know when to stop, do you?”
“You’re not the first person to tell me that today,” I said.
“I’m not surprised,” he growled. “Oh, by the way. Invisibility Cloak. I found it in the system, you know. Lovely bit of work. Inspired.”
I rattled the door to the library, the archives, the computer lab. “Up yours,” I yelled.
“When you’re dead, I’ll take it for my own, and make a pile of money with it,” he said. “I need some recompense for all my trouble. The Russian mob would love it. Or maybe some humorless, bloodthirsty jihadists. Someone you’d disapprove of, you snotty, moralistic little bitch. I’ll make a special point of selling it to someone like that.”
I turned, looked around at which ways remained open. There was only one. The bonkers, wrong, counter-intuitive one. The last thing on earth that I wanted to do.
If I couldn’t run away from him, I had to run straight toward him. Claws out.
But it was an exercise in frustration. Every door to a place that might have objects that could be repurposed as weapons, i.e., a kitchen, with knives and shears, or a gym with weights, was locked. I had nothing in my pockets except what I had taken from him. I wish that I’d brought the friendly stone goddess, at least.
If I could get my hands on any kind of a weapon, I could at least try to bully him into giving me those codes. I pulled out my phone and texted Jana as I ran.
hey
