Were the guards watching me from the darkness of the yard, struggling not to laugh? Or inside, at the monitor station, busily taping the footage to pass around a Cabal e-mail loop: look at the guy, he’s so paranoid he can’t even walk up to his dad’s front door without hiding under a spell.

No one could have broken into my father’s house.

Paige had joked earlier that I hated to use the word impossible, in case I was proven wrong. But this situation came as close to impossible as I could imagine.

The front gates couldn’t be operated without a signal from within the house, and anyone climbing the fence would set off an alarm, notifying two patrolling guards, the house guard and Troy. But we’d climbed the fence…and no one was rushing out to stop us.

I pushed back the thought in favor of the hope that I was making a monumental fool of myself.

My father was fine.

Even if someone breached the fence, he couldn’t get into the house. My father refused to employ illegal or supernatural security methods in the yard—he couldn’t risk having a drunken teen scale his fence and slam into a barrier spell. But with the house, he had no such compunctions.

Even the Cabal vaults—which contained not only a fortune in bearer bonds, but all the powerful spells and supernatural secrets accumulated in centuries of Cabal-hood—were not as carefully guarded as this house. My father was more valuable to the Cabal than any bond or spell. Lives had been sacrificed to provide the highest security the supernatural world knew.

There was only one door, which had to be opened by the guard within. Once inside, the visitor found himself in a completely secured concrete box. To get into the house proper required another door to be opened, which could only be done by my father or Troy.

There was another way through the front door. Should my father be in the yard or on the beach, he’d hardly want to knock at his own door, so a retinal scanner allowed him access. It was also set to recognize one other person: me. As for why I might need to get inside without him, he never said, only that I’d find out if the need arose.

After motioning for Paige to stay back, I stepped in front of the camera and waited. If, by chance, the perimeter security was malfunctioning, and all was well inside, the guard would spot me and open the door.

I counted sixty long seconds. Paige stayed where she was, asking nothing.

I activated the scanner.

A whir as the lock electronically opened. I cracked open the door and cast a sensing spell, checking for signs of life. It came back negative.