"Good thing you're back!" Alec met with us on the front steps. "Sleeping Beauty is up."
"Already? How can he be up?" Chase rushed up the steps. "The tranquilizer should have kept him asleep for at least another hour."
"Well, he's not exactly up," Alec said, "but unless we're dealing with a poltergeist here, he blew up all the lights in the house."
"So, the chip is still running," I said as I followed them inside.
"I don't know what's going on, but Del is freaking out." Alec stopped in the middle of the corridor when we wanted to turn to the right. "Not there. Over here." He nodded in the opposite direction.
"Where did you put him?" I asked.
"The dungeon."
"What dungeon? We don't have a dungeon."
"Okay, fine. The basement." Alec rolled his eyes. "But ours is way cooler than the Salvatore brothers'." He smirked at Chase.
"I swear I don't know anything about any dungeon," I whispered to Chase. And just when things were going so well between us.
Down in the basement, a small compartment had been turned into a prison cell. Gabriel was tied up to a bed, still unconscious by the look of it, and surrounded by several pieces of hardware and not much else. Del was one of them.
"Mistress, the chip is sending out signals on all frequencies," he reported.
"It's trying to communicate with someone," I said, checking the data on the screens. "The host is unusable so … Can it break the house protection?"
"Not yet, but it surely is trying. I built this machine to jam the signal." He showed me the machine next to him. "But … it might hurt him. And the robotic laws don't let me use it."
As a robot, he had built-in protocols that didn't allow him to hurt people. It looked like I would have to do that. I locked eyes with Chase, and when he gave a short nod, I turned the switch. The lights flickered twice, and a moan came from the bed.
"It works," Del said.
It didn't only work, it hurt too if we believed that moan.
"Keep him as comfortable as possible," I told Chase and asked Del, "Did you record what he was sending?"
"Six teras already."
"Encrypted?"
"Yes."
"Okay then, let's take a look and see what it's trying to do." I headed to the stairs and from there to my office to the main computer.