What the hell was he doing? My heart squeezed itself into a tight, painful ball in my chest. Please, please let it be okay. Let it all be okay.

The sound of gunfire emanated from the building on the tablet, tearing the silence. Everyone looked at us.

“That’s all I got,” Bug said.

The doors of Diatheke were gone. Glass shards littered the sidewalk. The metal grate hung crumpled to one side. Heart’s people streamed into the building past me. I wanted to run, but walking was the best I could manage, and the two bodyguards Heart assigned to me refused to move faster.

Bodies sprawled in the lobby, two men and a woman. Black fuzz sheathed the corpses. Runa or Ragnar had been through here.

A soldier waited by the elevator. He swiped a bloody keycard and the doors swung open. “Your mother and sister are on the top floor,” he said. “Leon is sweeping the building with a team.”

We stepped into the cabin and the elevator carried us up. I couldn’t even worry anymore. I was just numb.

The elevator opened to the aftermath of a slaughter. Bodies lay on the expensive carpet, some slashed, some shot, others sprouting the same black fuzz from downstairs. The door to Benedict’s office had exploded and broken shards 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.

My sister followed me. “Your plan involves making a deal with a rabid shark.”

“Sharks cannot get rabies. They’re fish.”

My sister waved her hands. “You know what I mean. Don’t do this. We’ll find him another way. We can go to Linus. He likes us.”

I looked her in the eye to make sure I had her attention. “Linus forbade me from attacking Diatheke. Right now we have to stay away from him. If he calls, don’t answer the phone and don’t tell him where we are.”

“What the hell happened at Linus’ ranch?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“What will he do when he finds out you disobeyed?”

I put my hand on the door handle and pushed. “One problem at a time.”

We walked into the lobby. Two surveillance cameras and an automated turret mounted on the ceiling registered our presence. The Spa seemed old but looks were deceiving. It was a state-of-the-art facility. By now our faces had been scanned and run through their database.

“Please don’t do this. Nothing good will come from it.”

She was right, but I had no choice. “Please wait for me. Don’t go anywhere.”

“No, I’m going to drive off and have ice cream.” Arabella rolled her eyes and headed for the elegant reception area equipped with its own coffee bar.

I walked to the officer trapped in a round cage of bulletproof glass.

“Catalina Baylor, Head of House Baylor,” I spoke into the small window covered by a grate. “I’m here to see Victoria Tremaine. It’s urgent.”

“Visitor hours begin at eleven,” the officer behind the glass told me.

“Did you not hear me? I’m here to see my grandmother.”

The officer took a step back, spoke into her headset, and then said to me, “Proceed. Follow the blue line.”

As I passed by the booth, an older white woman sipping her coffee leaned to her visitor, a dark-haired man about my age, and murmured, “Apple didn’t fall far from the tree.”

Ugh.

I followed the blue line, which consisted of a beautiful glass mosaic built into the travertine floor. It brought me to a heavy door, which swung open at my approach, releasing me into the inner garden. Roses bloomed on both sides of the brick and gravel path, behind a row of boxwood. I stopped and waited.

A door opened somewhere. A few seconds later my grandmother walked onto the path from the side. She’d lost weight. Six inches taller than me and two shades paler, my grandmother wore a white blouse of tiny hexagons defined by silver thread, soft grey slacks, and a brocade coat with silver and mother-of-pearl embroidery tracing a pattern over cream fabric. Her silver hair was twisted into an elegant coil on the back of her head. Her makeup was understated but flawless. The only concession to prison she had allowed were her shoes, light grey, expensive, but with a short heel. The type Grandma Frida would have called sensible.

Victoria Tremaine looked at me. Everything about her, from the way she stood to the way she stared, communicated unapologetic power. She turned and walked down the path.

I chased after her, caught up, and fell in step. I had demanded an audience, and now she put me in my place.

“What can I do for you, Head of House Baylor?”

I had rehearsed this speech in the car on the way over, after Arabella woke me up. Looking at her now, I knew none of it would work. She was a truthseeker and she would know if I lied. “I need your help.”