Warbound: Book Three of the Grimnoir Chronicles Read Online Free PDF Page A

compared to the monotonous hard-labor hell that was life on the inside.
    Been a long time. He’d never thought he’d be back here, certainly not as a free man.
    At least this time he wasn’t here as a convict. He was here as a recruiter.
    Jake Sullivan parked the car before the gatehouse and waited, feeling the eyes on him. The Special Prisoners’ Wing of the Rockville State Penitentiary didn’t get very many visitors. Cautious guards approached from both sides, polite enough, but carrying Thompsons and ready for anything. There was no such thing as a complacent guard at a facility where the average prisoner could have super strength or set you on fire with his mind. From what Sullivan knew, at least one of the gatehouse men would be deaf, and therefore immune to the manipulations of any Mouth trying to con his way through.
    Papers presented, he waited while they triple-checked everything. It only took a few minutes. Of course they’d known to expect him. The Warden was thorough like that.
    The gate was built solid enough to stop a bulldozer, and it took a good five minutes to get it open wide enough for his car to make it through. There was a second fence inside the first, this one made of wire, and he had to wait for that gate to be pulled aside as well. Originally they had kept attack dogs inside the wire, but had been forced to get rid of them after a Beastie had used them to maul some of the guards. After that they’d electrified the wire, until one day a Crackler had sucked up the extra voltage and used it to blow a hole in the main wall during an escape attempt. So now it was just a fence.
    That was the thing about containing criminal Actives. You just never knew what they were going to come up with next. Rockville collected the worst of the worst, the most violent, dangerous, magically capable hard cases that a judge couldn’t come up with a good enough reason to just execute.
    There was a loud clank as the main gate began to close behind him. A cold lump of dread settled in his stomach. He took a deep breath and waited for the guard to wave him through the secondary fence. He wasn’t the sort to get rattled easily, but Jake Sullivan had served six long years inside that wall. Just over there was the rock quarry where he’d spent thousands of hours doing backbreaking manual labor. He’d killed a lot of men inside these walls, all in self defense, but regardless, that sort of thing lingers with a man.
    The gate closed like the lid on his coffin.

    The Warden’s office was exactly as he remembered it, dusty and old-fashioned. Every flat surface held stacks of books and papers, most of which were about magic, all taken from the prison’s extensive library. Sullivan had read them all at one point or another. Since the Special Prisoners’ Wing was dedicated to holding Active felons, no expense had been spared in the collection of information about magic. The Warden was a scholarly man, not out of any sort of innate curiosity, but rather because his job required it. It took a keen mind to come up with defenses for all of the various ways his special prisoners could cause trouble, but the Warden took his job very seriously and was now something of an expert on the topic.
    The last time Sullivan had been in this room was when he’d been offered J. Edgar Hoover’s deal for an early release, his freedom in exchange for using his own Power to help capture wanted Active criminals. Sullivan had jumped at the chance. Some of the other cons had called it selling out, but they were just jealous. Anything beat breaking rocks.
    The Warden had greeted him warmly and waved the escort guards away. After all, the Warden had known Sullivan had enough respect for law and order to not be scared of him trying anything while he’d been a prisoner. So he certainly wasn’t about to worry about him doing anything now that he was a free man. Sullivan took a seat in a chair meant for a normal man, and it creaked dangerously under