protruded from the walls. Inside, the butchery continued. Blood soaked the carpet. Corpses stared with unseeing eyes as we passed. Priceless art lay discarded like trash, ripped from the walls.
We turned into the Ottoman room. The massive rug had disappeared. The remnants of an arcane circle smoked, etched into the floor. To the right, my mother slumped in a chair, Arabella kneeling by her. To the left, Runa wrapped her arms around a sobbing Ragnar. Blood drenched him from head to toe, dripping from his hair and clothes.
A heap of clothes smoked slightly in the center of the circle. I had seen this before. Someone had used an arcane circle to teleport out. Unless the teleporting mage was a Prime, teleporting killed almost as many people as it transported safely. It was a desperate last resort, it required a high-caliber teleport mage, and it couldn’t transport anything inorganic. When someone teleported a human, clothes, breast implants, and pacemakers stayed behind.
Mom saw me.
“Is anybody hurt?”
“No,” she said. “This wasn’t us. The place was like this when we got here. The boy and Alessandro turned this place into a graveyard.”
Panic punched me. “Where is he?”
Mom shook her head.
What does that mean?
“Is he dead?” Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God . . .
“He saved me,” Ragnar said through his sobs.
“Where is he?” I barked.
“They teleported him.” Arabella stood up. “They contained Ragnar and were going to take him to the lab, and then Alessandro showed up and murdered everyone in the damn building. When he broke into this room, the teleport mage panicked and teleported herself and Alessandro out.”
The teleport circle took forever to set up and it corresponded to a marker at the destination. You couldn’t just change the arrival point on the fly.
I turned to Ragnar. “Were they going to teleport you?”
“Yes.”
The teleporter had to point to the lab. If Alessandro survived, he would arrive naked, dazed, and without weapons. He had already taken on a building full of killers. He had to be near his limit.
We had no time. We had to find the lab now.
If they tried to magic warp him . . .
I shoved that thought aside. “Ragnar, did they say where the lab was?”
“No. I’m sorry, this is all my fault . . .”
I tuned him out, scouring my memories. There had to be something, something I heard, something I saw, something that would point me in the direction of that damn lab.
Going to Linus was out of the question. He told me to wait. I didn’t wait. I would have to answer for that. There was no way to predict how he would react.
Benedict would know. Benedict—
It hit me like a freight train. I spun to Arabella. “I need you to drive me.”
She didn’t ask where. She jumped to her feet and followed me to the elevator.
“You are out of your mind,” Arabella said.
The Shenandoah State Correctional Facility, nicknamed the Spa, rose in front of us. About an hour and a half north of Houston, the Spa knew it was a prison, but it really wanted to be a luxury resort. Wrapped in a picturesque stone wall ten feet high, it was built in the style of the Spanish masonry star forts, a four-story-high pentagon with bastions at the corners of the walls. A luxurious park occupied the space between the wall and the citadel, complete with a track, a driving range, and a tennis court. As we drove past the guard at the gate to the main parking lot, elderly people on the track waved at us.
When the Texas magical elite chose to serve time, they did it at the Spa. The residents were predominantly older, not necessarily nonviolent, but shrewd enough to recognize that spending a few months at the Spa for their transgressions was much more pleasant than pitching a fit and being shipped off to the Ice Box in Alaska or the Iron Locker in Kansas. This was the place our grandmother chose to pay her debt to society.
Arabella parked. “She’s not going to help you. Even if she wanted to, she’s locked up here. What do you think she can do?”
“I have a plan.” I got out of the car and headed for the arched doors. My body ached, and my legs shook a little. I had passed out two minutes into the drive and didn’t wake up until Arabella turned the music all the way up about two miles back.