Page 19 of Dark Horizon New Dawn

"I want you dead, but first, I want some information." Kian turned to Kalugal. "The stage is yours. Go ahead."

Lokan had seen the guy through the camera feed and hadn't recognized him, which meant that he was a junior commander of no importance in the Brotherhood. Still, he wasn't a complete moron because he could speak English quite well, and that wasn't common in the Brotherhood, even though immortals learned languages easily.

Well, not all immortals, as evidenced by Syssi's difficulty with learning Spanish.

"With pleasure." Kalugal leaned his elbow on his knee and rested his chin on his fist. "What did you report to the Brotherhood about us?"

The Doomer looked at Kalugal with defiance in his eyes. "I don't know who you are, so how could I have reported anything about you?"

The guy knew that Kalugal was a compeller, and he was trying to be smart and work around the compulsion, but it wasn't Kian or Kalugal's first rodeo, and the tactic was not going to work on them.

"Nicely done, evasive answer," Kalugal said. "I'll make sure to be more precise with my questions. After you discovered the bodies and figured out that they were killed by immortals. What did you report to your superiors in the Brotherhood?"

The veins in the guy's neck bulged as he tried to fight the compulsion. "We didn't report anything until we conducted an investigation and found Luis."

Kalugal sighed and cast Kian a sidelong glance. "This is going to take longer than I expected." He shifted his gaze back to the Doomer. "What did you learn from Luis?"

"We pumped him for everything he knew, and then we reported what we suspected."

That was bad news. Kalugal had wiped Luis's memories of them and the incident. He shouldn't have remembered anything useful to the Doomers, but apparently, he had remembered something that had made the Doomers suspicious.

In any case, Kian was glad for Kalugal's insistence on getting Luis away from Acapulco. If Bud reported the tour guide to his superiors in the Brotherhood, whoever was sent to investigate what happened to the unit of missing Doomers would no doubt search for Luis because he was the only connection they would have.

"That still does not tell me what you learned from Luis," Kalugal said. "What did he tell you that you did not know before?"

The Doomer shook his head like a dog trying to dislodge a tick, but Kalugal's compulsion was a force only a few were immune to, and fortunately, Bud wasn't part of that exclusive club.

"He didn't remember much beyond picking up a bunch of tourists at the harbor and taking them to Tehuacalco," Bud said. "He said that he was injured when some bandits started shooting at them, but he and the tourists managed to escape. We figured that he'd been thralled and his memories had been tampered with."

Kian released a relieved breath. Luis didn't remember anything useful about them.

"What else did he tell you?" The element of compulsion in Kalugal's voice was so strong that it reverberated through the cell.

The Doomer looked like he was about to vomit, but instead of emptying the contents of his stomach, he vomited words. "Luis overheard someone talking about picking up a woman from the Grand Allure all-inclusive resort in Cabo San Lucas."

That was not good.

"Did he tell you the woman's name?" Kalugal asked.

"He didn't remember it."

"What else did Luis tell you?"

"Nothing. That was all Luis remembered." The Doomer looked Kalugal straight in the eyes, but Kian knew he was lying, which should be impossible under the power of Kalugal's compulsion.

Bud must have found a loophole.

Kian leaned sideways toward Kalugal. "He could have sifted through Luis's memories without having him talk. Ask him about that."

"Good point." Kalugal turned to the Doomer. "What else did you pick up straight from Luis's mind when you looked at his memories?"

"Names," the Doomer spat.

"Tell me all the names you or any of the others picked up from Luis's head."

The power of Kalugal's compulsion was so strong that Kian felt like reciting names, but thankfully, the question had been very specific and referred only to the names the Doomer or his friends had learned from Luis.

"Kevin, Gunter, Jacki, Edna, Rufus, Doug, and Frankie."

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