“Did someone follow you? Is that why you went to Keystone?”
Crap. My short answers clearly didn’t work. “Yes.”
“Why didn’t you come home?”
Because I was followed by twenty highly trained killers who would’ve carved through our security and stormed the warehouse with children inside. “I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
My mother’s face fell. She knew.
“I’ll ask you one more question, but I want an honest answer. If Rogan’s people were here, would you have come home?”
I shut my eyes. “Yes.”
She stepped close to me and hugged me. If I had any tears left, I would’ve cried.
“Was it bad?” she asked quietly.
“Yes.”
Mom let go of me. “I’ll fix this. I promise you. It will be fixed tonight.”
She turned around and went down the ladder.
I looked at the little dog. “I suck.”
The little dog squatted and peed on the floor. Right.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “You’ll figure it out.”
I cleaned up the mess and took her downstairs. At the kitchen table Bern, Leon, Runa, and Ragnar crowded around Bern’s laptop. On it, Celia was paused in mid-leap.
I got some rotisserie chicken out of the fridge, pulled a generous chunk of the breast meat off the bone, and shredded it into a small bowl. The dog spun in circles at my feet.
The sounds of a chain saw came from the screen.
I put the dish on the floor. The dog attacked it like her life depended on her victory over the cold chicken. I got myself a plate and set about assembling two tacos.
“Pause it. Right there,” Leon said.
“It just . . . appears in his hand,” Ragnar said, his voice full of wonder. “How is he doing that?”
“It seems completely subconscious,” Runa said. “He needs a weapon and poof!”
“Poof?” Bern said.
Runa turned to him. “Yes. Start it for a second. Notice how he’s looking at the chain saw. He’s clearly never seen it before.”
“So, you think it’s a passive field effect?” Bern thought out loud.
“It would make sense,” Runa said.
“What would an active effect of this look like?” Bern wondered.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s passive or active.” Leon leaned closer to the screen. “I want to know if he’s teleporting items he has seen before, or does he snatch them up within a certain area of effect.”
“Why?” Ragnar asked.
“Because I need to know if I have to worry about this asshole teleporting my guns into his hands when I fight him.”
Everyone pondered that.
“Maybe he doesn’t teleport them,” Ragnar said. “Maybe his magic duplicates them.”
“That would be a hell of a thing,” Leon said.
“What kind of magic is it anyway?” Runa said. “I thought he was an Antistasi.”
“He is,” I said.
They turned to me.
I put my plate down. I wasn’t hungry anyway. “The Antistasi magic occurs roughly five times as often as truthseeking. It’s not the rarest, but Antistasi Primes are exceptionally rare. There are three truthseeker Houses in the entire continental US, and only two Antistasi Houses. There are five Houses in the whole of the European Union, two in Africa, we don’t know how many in China, and another three in the Russian Imperium. Of all of these, House Sagredo is the oldest.”
“Your stalking of Alessandro is truly impressive,” Runa said.
She had no idea. “The point is, we know what the Antistasi can do because of what they choose to reveal to us. Perhaps whatever Alessandro is doing is the ultimate expression of that talent and the handful of Antistasi Primes are keeping it secret. Perhaps he’s in a league of his own like Rogan. What matters is, he’s dangerous.”
Leon smirked. Oh no, you don’t.
“Forget Instagram,” I said. “Forget all the yachts, and cars, and women. It’s a smoke screen. This man is lethal. Diatheke sent an experienced, well-armed strike team after me. I watched Alessandro kill eight of them. He impaled two of them with a piece of broken pipe, murdered the remaining pair with a knife, and then he shot the four people I beguiled. One shot, one kill, every bullet in the T-zone.”
If you drew a rectangle around both eyes and another around the nose, you would get a target area in the rough shape of a T. Shots to the T-zone were almost always fatal.
“From how far?” Leon asked.
“About twenty yards. He’s precise, calm, and he can use a wide variety of weapons. And he can negate our magic whenever he feels like it. The Antistasi are only supposed to negate mental magic,