Page 6

Asher

When my visions hit, they ranged in intensity from only a tickle to something that burrowed into my skull. Anything linked to Calisto never deviated from excruciatingly painful. Like it was my body’s way of ensuring I got the message and couldn’t choose to ignore it. It was for that reason that it took what felt like hours to get from the house to the car, the sensation of someone having hammered a spike into the center of my forehead still present by the time I’d gotten behind the steering wheel.

I spent a few precious seconds dragging oxygen into my lungs and clearing my vision before I started the engine and eased the powerful car out into traffic to repeat a journey I’d already done twice today. I called Cade from a few streets away, leaving a message when he didn’t pick up. “It’s started. I just thought you should know.” I hesitated, deliberating over whether there was anything else I needed to say. “I’ll call you later. Don’t call me. I’ll be busy.”

For all the physical intensity of the vision, it had been sketchy. Blaring alarms and flashing lights in a building I knew like the back of my hand, and a panicked Calisto going to ground in my office. That last part of the vision I’d had years before it had ever been my office. In that earlier version, there’d been nowhere for Calisto to hide. Well, I’d fixed that. Precognition might not be an exact science, but there were things you could change if the information was clear enough. And there were things that always remained infuriatingly out of reach, like the when. I’d spent three years waiting for this night to arrive, the why of it only becoming clear when things had kicked off with O’Reilly.

Visions were like jigsaws. If you were lucky, the pieces all belonged to the same puzzle. If you weren’t so lucky, you not only had to work out how they fitted together in terms of chronology, but also which pieces belonged to which, so you weren’t trying to squeeze a piece of pond into the sky. In some twisted way, I should probably be glad of the toil the visions of Calisto wrought. At least it clearly labelled them as his jigsaw. Which made them mine as well.

Apart from the muted noise of the alarm going off outside the building, there were no external signs of anything being amiss. No men left to guard the exit. No smashed windows. O’Reilly had obviously been one hundred percent sure of where her intended target would be, unease crawling its way up my spine as I questioned how that was possible.

I drove past the front entrance of the building and around the side of it, bringing the Porsche as close as I could to the access point no one except Cade and me knew about before jumping out. The time spent locking the car felt like an unnecessary burden, but I did it anyway. Better to be safe than sorry. As I strode toward the gate, I reached for the chain I wore around my neck so I had it with me at all times.

A quick yank had the chain breaking and the keys in my hand. The first key unlocked the gate. Stepping through it took me to an iron grille that had anyone stumbled across this entrance would have made breaking in nigh on impossible. The second key unlocked the grille, the heavy bars swinging open with a loud creak to allow access down a flight of stone stairs.

The third key unlocked a door at the bottom of the stairs that led straight into the basement of the PPB building—the interior dark and silent as I eased the door shut behind me without locking it. I’d locked none of the three access points, expecting a hasty retreat once I had Calisto with me. If I had Calisto with me.

That was the other thing with precognition. There was no guarantee things would go smoothly just because I’d seen parts of it. Sometimes there wasn’t enough time between the vision itself and the event happening for me to put things in place to ensure the outcome I wanted. Assuming I even knew what the outcome should be.

Frequently having to rely on others was another factor. Like Griffin getting there quickly enough to rescue Ben from Flynn O’Reilly. I could give Griffin all the ingredients he needed—an address; a fast car ready to drive immediately; a weapon to deal with Flynn—but when it came down to it, I was only the messenger.

I wasn’t a messenger tonight, though. I was a key player, and I was about to meet the man I’d avoided for the last couple of years. Why? Because that’s what the vision had shown me, that the upcoming meeting would be our first. So I’d manifested that. Anything else risked changing the outcome. The equivalent to throwing an assembled jigsaw in the air and expecting it to look the same when it hit the ground.

I flicked a switch on my right to flood the basement with light. I’d left nothing to chance, checking the lights worked once, sometimes even twice a week, and making sure they were on an entirely different system from the main building. Darkness might not have stopped me, but it would have slowed me down. With every corner of the large space lit up, I jogged to the stairwell at the far side. I’d toyed with having a lift put in, but decided against it. There were too many things that could go wrong with a lift. Not so with stairs. Stairs were solid and dependable. You always knew where you were with stairs.

The alarm was louder now I was in the building and grew even more strident as I ascended the first flight of stairs to reach the ground floor. And then suddenly, it wasn’t, the silence except for my footsteps on the stairs and the sound of my breathing, jarring.

Nerves kicked in on the third floor, the necromancer’s department lying on the other side of the wall. I wasn’t used to feeling nervous, John’s plethora of names for me all linked to ice somewhat earned. Not amusing, but earned. I prided myself on remaining calm in the face of chaos and panic. I was the man capable of ignoring almost anything to get the job done. The pragmatic one.

But I was nervous, the personal element making this an entirely different proposition. The stairs came to an abrupt halt, and I felt my way along the wall, darkness needed up here. Relief had me close to smiling as the smooth surface of the wall gave way to a small button. One press and this section of wall would slide open.

If my abilities hadn’t let me down and I’d assembled the jigsaw correctly, I’d be only a couple of meters away from Calisto and directly in his eyeline when he turned his head. If I was wrong, then… Well, that would be years of planning down the drain, and would leave me with quite the headache to solve.

All I knew was that O’Reilly wouldn’t be getting anywhere near Calisto if I had anything to do with it.

Not today.