stepped through and ended up in the rec room, flooded with daylight from huge windows. Someone had swept the concrete floor. On the right a large pack of bottled water waited on the counter of a kitchen right out of the seventies, complete with wooden paneling. Straight ahead, in the corner, an inflatable mattress rested on the floor. Between me and the mattress stood two plastic fold-out tables filled with weapons and equipment. A high-tech-looking laptop, parts of a drone, six, no, nine guns, including a BFR, four knives, two daggers, a machete, a garrote, and a compound bow. The assassin’s tool kit.
The assassin himself was nowhere to be seen. I walked to the tables. Whatever his faults were, Alessandro had excellent taste in blades. Everything was functional, sharp, and sturdy. And generic. No custom-made pieces, no family heirlooms. Nothing irreplaceable or that could be traced.
I reached for the Ka-Bar and tested the balance. Seven-inch straight blade angled at the tip. Heavy.
I turned to get better light. Alessandro sat on the kitchen counter, one leg bent, the other hanging free. I almost threw the Ka-Bar.
“Adorable,” Alessandro said. “Do that little jump again.”
I put the Ka-Bar down before the temptation got the better of me. “I brought you the recording.” I held up the thumb drive.
He jumped off the counter and stalked toward me.
I circled the tables, looking at his collection and keeping the furniture between us. “You seem to know a lot about Benedict.”
“Mhm.”
“What is he?”
“You were with him. What do you think he is? What did you feel?”
“Revulsion and fear. His magic manifested as dark phantom serpents. He opened himself, and a nest of ghost snakes slithered out wanting to bite me.”
“That’s why he calls himself the Adder,” he said.
“The Adder? Really?”
“It goes with the territory. Nobody wants to hire a Mr. De Lacy or Madame Laurent. They want to hire the Adder or Mort Noire.”
“Please tell me there isn’t an assassin calling herself the Black Death?”
“More than one.”
It seemed so childish except people were dying. “So, what’s your nickname? Instagram Famous? Playboy Killer?”
“Are you teasing me, you sexy beast?”
The careful train of my thoughts derailed, flipped over in the air, and burst on fire. Think of a witty comeback, come on . . . How did he keep short-circuiting my brain?
He laughed. “If looks could kill.”
I resumed our dance around the tables. “Benedict is a psionic, isn’t he? Probably a phobic subtype.”
Psionic mages affected survival emotions. Fear, disgust, rage, anxiety, shame. The primal, powerful urges that kept humans breathing thousands of years before tools and weapons came along. Psionics induced these emotions in their targets. Phobics specialized in fear. They had an innate ability to find your worst phobia and project it into your mind, dragging you into paralyzing madness. I’d dealt with a phobic before, although she wasn’t a Prime. Benedict’s magic elicited that same instinctual punch of revulsion and terror.
“Close,” Alessandro said. “His mother is a phobic. His father is a mind cutter.”
A menincissor mage. A particularly nasty branch of mental magic that attacked consciousness. Mind cutters punctured mental shields and induced pain and the inability to think. They weren’t lethal on their own, but they excelled at disabling their target.
“Are you running away from me?” Alessandro asked.
“No.” We had come full circle around the tables.
“Yes, you are. Are you afraid of what I’ll do if I catch you?” He raised his eyebrows at me. “Or are you scared of what you might do?”
I stopped. “I’m not afraid of anything.”
He vaulted over a table and landed next to me. I tilted my head and looked at him. Magic roiled just under his skin. His amber eyes all but glowed.
Kiss me.
“When a phobic and a mind cutter have a child . . .” He spoke softly, his voice warm and low, meant just for me. When he told someone he loved them, he might sound just like that. “. . . they have a one in a quarter chance of producing a crime against nature called a mind ripper. Benedict can penetrate mental defenses like his father and then scramble the mind, inducing panic like his mother. Benedict didn’t just happen; he was a planned project by a mind cutter House. They wanted a dark horse to handle their dirty deeds.”
He was standing way too close. Looking at him made it difficult to concentrate. “What happened?”
“They had a difference of opinion. Now House Weber is no more.”