Chapter 28
Cass
Icouldn’t get into his system. Damn him. I was an excellent hacker, but Halliwell was always ten steps ahead of me. You could say what you wanted about him being a blood-sucking, power-mad, narcissistic monster, but he was freaking smart and very detail oriented.
Ten minutes. Twenty. Twenty-five. Somehow, Jana was still alive down there on Level Eight, or the place would be floating in the stratosphere by now, and me with it. I couldn’t even activate the vents to blow the poisonous gas out.
Halliwell had me blocked at every turn.
But I couldn’t just leave her. Jana had risked everything for me and Reggie. She’d given me the key to free my little sister. She’d paid for it with everything she had.
Jana was my sister too, whether she knew it or not, and I wanted her to live. To come back from this and be who she always should have been, if she hadn’t gotten sucked into the lethal vortex that was our father.
He’d killed enough of us. It had to stop.
My phone buzzed, and I almost screamed. I grabbed it and saw Jana’s number.
I picked up. “Hey! I’m still upstairs trying to find a fucking override, but I can’t—”
“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
She replied.
you’re not gone yet?
doors locked now. missed my chance
The letters appeared slowly now.
sux. thx anyway for trying to help
anytime sister
I entered.
don’t get sentimental on me. you’re supposed to be smart. outwit that motherfucker. Go crush him.
On it
I typed.
Smart, hah. On it, was I? Here it was again, that fucking bar set so high it made my eyes water and my stomach flip.
I was running toward my doom unarmed, poised between Jana’s ticking bomb and empty oxygen tank, Reggie’s killer nano-bots, and that cackling goblin out there, hungry for my blood.
I was supposed to outwit him, crush him, in this state?
God, I wished that Shane were here. Shane was brilliant in situations like this.
He’d just snap right into action, do some improbable, mind-blowing thing right off the cuff, like catapulting an ice sculpture into a car full of goons, or jumping out of a plane without a— oh… holy… shit.
My startled thought made me stumble. I recovered, picking up frantic speed.
“I see you, Cassandra,” Halliwell taunted me. “I see everything.”
“See this, dickwad.” I flipped him off once again and sped straight toward the French doors that opened out onto the huge terrace.
The open air was cold and damp. Wind rushed in my ears, the surf, the screeching of wheeling seabirds.
I closed the door, got myself behind one of the potted trees, pushed like hell.
It didn’t move. Then I saw Halliwell, emerging from his office, which gave me that panicked burst of energy I needed…
and I moved it, howling with the effort.
It slid, slowly, blocking the French doors from the outside.
I scrambled for the base-jumping single parachute backpack that I had stowed in that gardening cupboard.
I struggled to put it on. It was ice-cold, damp, and my hands were clumsy and shaking.
I’d watched the jumpers in horrified fascination during that depraved party, always with the thought in my mind that base-jumping was the very last fucking thing that I would ever do, in this life or the next.
Hah-hah. Just another of life’s amusing little pranks.
I snapped the clasps of my harness, tightening them and hoping it had been packed properly. I was trusting my life to some rando I never met. Then again, the alternative, i.e., being vaporized, really put that kind of risk into perspective.
A huge crash made me stagger back with a cry, losing my balance. I was showered with shards of glass. The French doors had shattered, and the bloodied stone goddess that I’d used to clobber Halliwell flew out, hit the ground, spinning and sliding in the glittering shards.
Halliwell swung the barrel of a gun at the sides of the big hole in the glass, smashing on either side to widen the hole, and then stepped through it, his feet crunching on the broken glass, teeth shining in a maniacal grin.
Blood streaked his face. He looked terrifying, his eyes bright, glittering, and utterly mad.
He advanced, pointing his gun right at me. Driving me back.
“Don’t move,” he said. “Or I’ll shoot you.”
“You’ll shoot me anyway,” I said. “You just want to run off your mouth first and I don’t want to hear it. Do your worst, asshole.”
“Language, Cassandra.” Bam.
I staggered back, hitting the stone balustrade with a gasp, sagging down. It felt like a punch to the shoulder, but when I touched it, it came away red, sticky.
I was shot. So this was the end of the line.
I thought about Reggie’s sweet smile. Shane’s kisses.
The hunger in his eyes. The wild, wonderful possibilities that I had to let go of now.
The beautiful future that was now no longer an option.
I hoped that Reggie would have a future, at least. My sweet baby.
I wouldn’t be there to see it, but she would have to live for both of us.
I had to pitch myself over that cliff. I didn’t want to die up here. Better to fall into the sea, or onto the rocks. Anything was better than dying here with Halliwell.
I struggled up onto my feet. My blood pressure was dropping. The world going dark. Not yet. Not yet. Stay strong, Cass. Almost done. Almost there.
I dragged myself up with the balustrade. My ears were roaring. So loudly. The sound was overwhelming and getting louder. Halliwell wasn’t looking at me anymore. He was looking past me, mouth open. Shocked confusion on his bloodied face.
A huge crack of gunfire sounded over the roar. Halliwell clapped his hand against his belly and staggered, eyes wide with disbelief. Blood ran over his hands.
I spun around, and saw a helicopter, hovering about thirty yards away. Shane lay inside the open door behind a rifle stand. Poised to shoot again.
Oh God. If he killed Halliwell, Jana’s bomb would go off, and take the helicopter right along with it.
Oh, no, no, no. I lurched over and put myself between Shane and Halliwell, who had fallen to his knees.
Shane gestured fiercely at me to get out of the way.
I shook my head, mouthing the word with as much exaggeration as I could.
Waving my arms, a go-away gesture. Repeating the word, over and over.
Bomb. Bomb. Bomb.