Nic took a deep breath, looked from the house to Carter and back again, and said, “Let’s find out what he discovered and go from there.”

“Fair enough,” Carter replied.

Allanon met them at the door in full wizard wear. Burke heard Nic chuckle behind him, but he ignored it and greeted Allanon with a reverent bow. “Oh, great and powerful Allanon Majere, guardian of the twelve kingdoms and—”

Allanon waved his hand and said, “Don’t worry about all that right now. Just get your asses in here.” Allanon pushed Burke to the side, looked up and down the street, and scanned the night sky. “Could you have been followed? I’ll have to scan you for bugs and trackers.”

Burke had never seen Albert like this before. There was real fear on his face, and he wasn’t even attempting to maintain character. The wannabe wizard led them into his home and down the hall to a room with a steel door that looked like it had been taken off a submarine. He grabbed what looked like a homemade version of the detection wands used at airports and scanned each of them before they were allowed to enter. Then he unlocked the door using an electronic keypad and spun the wheel in its center to unlatch the multiple steel rods holding it in place.

Burke had seen all this before, but he suspected that his companions found it all pretty strange. He couldn’t wait to see their faces once they entered the wizard’s lair.

Allanon pulled the hatch to the side and gestured for them to enter. Burke stepped through the opening into another world. He knew that the outer walls of the room formed a Faraday cage and had been designed to withstand EMP attacks as well as block any incoming or outgoing signals. But that wasn’t really what made the room unique.

Burke looked back at his companions and smiled at the expressions on each of their faces. “Holy shit,” Nic said.

The custom-built room was perhaps thirty-by-thirty with twenty-foot ceilings and designed to look like an enchanted forest, something straight out of a Disney attraction. Trees, many with intricate faces, lined the outer walls. The floor was a foam rubber, made to look like rocks and dirt. The ceiling appeared to be a night’s sky, complete with an illuminated moon and stars. But the pièce de résistance was the lifelike sleeping dragon curled in the back corner of the room.

Allanon’s workstation rested in the center of the space and was nothing like its surroundings. Thirty-two-inch computer displays had been mounted five rows high and four rows across. Beneath the desk, a row of tall computer towers lit with blue LEDs whirred and clicked. The chair was a cross between an iron throne and a La-Z-Boy recliner.

“I need to bring LJ to see this,” Nic said.

Allanon pushed past them and dropped into his chair, “You guys have no idea what you’ve stumbled into, do you?”

“Enlighten us. What did you recover?” Burke asked.