Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 91002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 455(@200wpm)___ 364(@250wpm)___ 303(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 455(@200wpm)___ 364(@250wpm)___ 303(@300wpm)
“This…this is my phone,” he stammered.
The face leaned closer until one eye took up the whole screen, like a T. Rex in Jurassic Park.
“It’s a handheld computer, you elitist,” the voice said. The face came back into full view. “Get those cameras off the cloud! From now on, you keep a hardwired system or none at all. Back up to a tape like it’s 1990, you get me? Bet you didn’t know they got cameras inside that bish. They do. I’ve been watching you wander around the house. Invasion of privacy, much? You need to do a sweep before you settle down, bro. Cameras are small now. You’ve got to be detail-oriented these days. At least they aren’t in your bedrooms. I call that an almost win.”
“Who…” He didn’t know what to say, but he rose slowly, knowing he had to get Nessa.
“Ah-ah-aah.” The one eye took up the screen again. “Stay where you are. The Captain will get her own surprise in…like…” She glanced to the side. He caught sight of a smallish ear with a skull-and-crossbones earring. “When I’m damn good and ready, that’s when.” The face came back, smiling. “You had a few tagalongs in your setup. Someone has been spying, my dude. Besides me, obviously. Don’t worry about them—I gave them the boot a week or so ago. They’re good, but they’re not me good. To keep up with me, you gotta be me, know what I mean?” She grinned.
He did not know what she meant. Not even a little bit. He didn’t know what the hell was going on, and he was too shocked to do anything but stare mutely. This had to be a mage. No one else would call Nessa “the Captain.”
A mage this obviously odd, this far on the outskirts of what was considered normal, would be of a level of eccentricity on par with Jessie’s crew. It meant an incredibly powerful magic wielder. A confident one. One who had crawled in through Nessa’s defenses—hell, not even her defenses. They’d slid into Sebastian’s cell phone, with all its security settings. Into the energy provider’s mainframe, or however the power situation worked. This was a level of hacking that Sebastian hadn’t seen in the mage world. This type of thing existed in the land of Dicks and Janes, where people broke into the government and went to federal prison for a lifetime.
His brow turned clammy.
The person winked. “I’d start jogging, if I were you. Whoever was tagging along on your systems will know where you are. They can’t spy with their fingers, but they can surely spy with their googlies, you get me?” A finger came into the screen to point at her eye. “Changing locations keeps ’em guessing.” He heard typing. “Byeee!”
The face vanished, showing his home screen again. The lights flared. Appliances beeped as they came back on, the power restored. An alarm or something sounded from down the hall before he heard a big crash.
“Nessa!” His phone clattered across the floor as he jumped up and raced toward her room. He put out his hands, ready to do magic.
When he barged in, Nessa was picking herself up off the floor, wiping her eyes. She looked at him in confusion as she staggered toward her desk. Her systems were aglow, and they started beeping madly.
“What the hell is going on?” she said in a sleepy voice.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. My phone’s alarm went off for some reason. I startled awake to turn it off and rolled off the bed. I didn’t realize I was so—”
The light from the monitors bathed her horrified expression right before she swore.
Sebastian swung his gaze that way. A map showed the location of the video, which pictured the inside of a small living room. Three masses of human pulp hung from hooks. Crimson stained the cream carpet, splattered the walls, cut across the couches, and dripped from the bodies.
“It looks like they’ve been pulled inside out,” Nessa said in a dismayed hush.
Indeed, it did. The scene was grisly, surely the handiwork of a remorseless killer. The perpetrator had created a scene that was so graphic, hinting at pain so absolute and horrific, that it was a spectacle.
A white sign gracefully spun in midair, like magic. It must’ve been hung from the ceiling with fishing line, invisible to the camera, or else the video had been modified after the fact to erase it.
It read, We tried to spy on Elliot Graves and the Captain.
Nessa’s gaze traced every inch of the scene. The breath escaped her as she pulled out the chair to sit.
“Get the light,” she murmured.
He did as instructed. “Do you think that was the Ivy House crew?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Yes. They’re making our retribution more gruesome than we ever have. They’re making us look more sinister.”
He swallowed thickly. That was saying something. They’d never pulled any punches, or so he’d thought. Seeing that image, though…