Sapphire Flames

by Ilona Andrews

  I hugged the dog to me with one hand and dialed our lawyer with the other. Sabrian listened to my recap without a word.

  “Any injured civilians?”

  “Not that we know of.”

  “Fine,” she said. “I’m on it. I’ll be emailing you documents. Read, print, sign, scan, email back, get the originals to me by courier, today.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me, just be on time with papers and payment.”

  I hung up.

  Next to me, Alessandro drove as if we were enjoying a pleasant excursion on the Pacific Coast Highway, winding our way through picturesque hills with a blue ocean on our side. A relaxed smile played on his lips.

  “What are you so happy about?”

  “We’re alive. I told you it would work.”

  “Your car is ruined.”

  “It’s just a car. It’s replaceable. You’re not.”

  What did it mean? Why did he even care? He saw me for fifteen minutes during the trials, then for another fifteen minutes when he showed up asking me to go for a drive, and then we hadn’t spoken for three years.

  “How are you involved in this?”

  The smile died. It was like the sun being turned off. I felt like a moment of silence was in order.

  “Not that again,” he said.

  “Yes, again. I have to find Halle.”

  “What part of ‘drop it’ don’t you understand?”

  “The part where you keep interfering with my investigation and shooting people I need to interrogate.”

  “Interrogate? I must not understand the meaning of that word, because from where I’m sitting, you blunder around asking people questions until they try to kill you.”

  Oh, you ass.

  “You haven’t even thanked me for the elephant. When someone saves your life, you’re supposed to be grateful. Do they have laws against expressing gratitude here?”

  Argh. “Thank you so much, Alessandro, for providing help I didn’t need. I so appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule of Instagram posing and luxury car wrecking to murder every person who could conceivably shed some light on this investigation. Thank you ever, ever so much.”

  We glared at each other.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Wait, I know. Since you insist on doing the opposite of what I tell you, let’s try this. Don’t stay home, Catalina. Don’t drop this case. Don’t stay safe. Is it working? Please tell me it’s working.”

  “God, you are an asshole.” It just kind of came out.

  Alessandro drew back. “Such a dirty mouth. Oh, the possibilities.”

  “You have no possibilities with my mouth! Nobody has any possibilities with my mouth!” I did not just say that.

  He laughed. He laughed at me.

  “Halle’s seventeen, Alessandro. She’s innocent. Whatever her mother did or didn’t do, she shouldn’t be paying the price for it. Tell me what’s going on so I can find her. Don’t you have any compassion at all?”

  “The sooner you realize that I’ll tell you nothing, the easier it will be. Give up, Catalina. It’s being handled.”

  He turned onto our street.

  “Stop the car.”

  The Alfa slid to a stop with a metallic groan. I unbuckled my seat belt.

  “Catalina, let me take you to the door. I know your leg hurts.”

  I climbed out of the car clutching my dog and my sword.

  “Don’t be a hero,” he called.

  I wished I had a free hand so I could flip him off. I marched toward the security booth, grimly determined to not limp.

  “Hey,” he shouted. “At least we finally had our drive.”

  “Drop dead.”

  I marched to the booth, the grinding noise of the Alfa driving away receding behind me.

  The two guards in the booth stared at me. I saw my reflection in the glass as I passed them. Most of me was covered with a uniform layer of dirt and dust from lying on the floor of the mall. Blood splattered my face, my neck, and my white turtleneck. Bits of Celia’s skull and brains hung in my hair. Two bullet holes punctured my coat, right in the middle of the chest and a little to the left.

  Terrific. Just terrific.

  The dirty, matted dog whined softly in my arms.

  “I know, right?” Some pair we made.

  If I walked like this through the front door, my family would suffer a collective apoplexy. I needed to clean myself up. My best bet would be to go through the motor pool, at least wash my face and hands, and then try to sneak upstairs to my room. That meant circling the warehouse.

  I turned into the narrow space between the warehouse and a concrete wall separating it from the next parking lot and limped on.

  Ow. Ow.

  I never quite realized how large our place was.

  Ow.

  Did we really need a warehouse this big?

  The little dog whined again, overcome with some sort of canine sadness.

  “Shh. You’ll blow our cover.”

  I finally turned the corner. The huge industrial bay doors stood open and the motor pool inside seemed deserted. Everything was in its regular place: Brick and Romeo, Grandma’s pet tank, covered with tarps, the armored Humvee we used for dangerous jobs, and Grandma’s latest commission, a medium-size track vehicle waiting in the middle of the floor.

  A lopsided tangle of blue yarn on circular needles lay on the worktable. Nevada once told Grandma Frida that other grandmas knitted things for their grandchildren. Ever since then she made valiant efforts to knit presents for each of us, and the current Gordian knot was supposed to be my sweater. Usually she took it with her when she was done for the day.

  I stopped and listened. The motor pool lay silent. Nothing moved. The coast was clear.

  Maybe Grandma Frida had run inside to use the bathroom.

  I limped through the doors and headed toward the sink. Grandma Frida chose that moment to jump out of a track vehicle’s cab. She stared at me, her blue eyes widening.

  I had to distract her, quick. “The Honda might be totaled, but I left two Guardians without drivers at Keystone Mall. They’re all yours, just don’t forget to disable their GPS . . .”

  Grandma Frida walked past me and pressed the intercom.

  “Please, please don’t,” I begged.

  My grandmother mashed the intercom button. “Penelope, the baby is hurt.”

  I wasn’t a baby. I was twenty-one years old, but it didn’t matter. To Grandma Frida all three of us would always remain babies. “I said please.”

  Grandma’s eyes held no mercy. “She’s got two bullet holes in her coat and someone’s brains in her hair. Come quick.”

  Damn it.

  The world was full of interesting words used to describe complicated things. There was tartle, a Scottish word for the panicked pause you experience when you have to introduce someone, but you don’t remember their name. There was backpafeifengesicht, a German term for a face you’d love to punch. There was gigil, a Filipino word for the urge to squeeze an item because it is unbearably cute.

  I didn’t know if there was a word for the whirlwind my very upset family created while they tried to treat my wounds, clean me up, and interrogate me all at the same time while talking over each other, but if there was one, I would definitely have to learn it. I refused to answer any questions until after they let me shower. My demand was met with howls of protest, but I held firm in the face of adversity, and when Bug conveniently sent the drone video of our fight with Celia, the family surrendered and released me so they could watch it.

  The little dog was a girl. It took fifteen minutes of strategic mat cutting to reveal that fact. After I trimmed the worst of her fur, I had taken her into the shower with me. At first, she cowered in the corner, but by the end of it, she decided bath time wasn’t so bad. The water that ran off her on the first rinse was black and smelled like a sewer. I had to shampoo her with Dawn dish soap twice.

  After the shower, she dashed into
my loft, running in circles while I dried myself off. One of her parents had to have been a dachshund and the other a Scottish terrier or some similar breed. Her little body was long with short legs that looked delicate. Her black and now glossy fur grew longer and coarser on her back and butt, where it curled backward in clumps. Her ears were floppy, her jaws long and framed with sideburns reminiscent of a Scotty, and when she opened her mouth, her teeth were huge in proportion to her head. It looked like a bear trap from old cartoons.

  She was also painfully thin. Getting rid of the mats must’ve cut her weight by a third. Her ribs stuck out and vertebrae protruded from her spine.

  I ended up chasing her with a towel for three whole minutes, until inspiration struck, and I threw it on the floor. She burrowed under it and I caught her and dried her off.

  Someone knocked on my door. Well, that didn’t take long.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s me,” Mom said.

  I knew this was coming. The last thing I wanted was to talk to Mom.

  After Dad died, everything had been in shambles. The business was failing; our house was gone; we had to change schools, which to most people would be no big deal and to me was catastrophic; and most importantly, Dad wasn’t there. When my mother deployed, Dad took care of us. When I had a problem, I went to Dad before I went to Mom. Up to that point, Dad knew more about me and he always managed to talk me off whatever ledge I had climbed on.

  I’d been twelve years old and the idea that he would never be there again was apocalyptic. It felt like my world had ended.

  And then Mom somehow picked us all up and made it okay. It took me nearly half a decade to realize Mom herself was not okay.

  My mother had spent months as a POW in the Bosnian Conflict. It left her with a permanent limp and enough invisible scars to last a lifetime. She never dealt with it because her husband became sick, so she’d had to go from being deployed six months out of a year to being a full-time parent, and the sky was falling. It came back to haunt her at the worst possible moment. She lost her PI license and the only way she could provide for us. Nevada had to become the breadwinner before she even finished high school. My mother was no longer a soldier or a PI. It made her feel helpless.

  The conversation we were about to have would make her feel helpless again, and there was nothing I could do to avoid it. She’d climbed my ladder with her limp and she wouldn’t go away until I leveled with her.

  “Catalina?”

  I got up off the floor and opened the door.

  “Let me see that hip,” Mom asked.

  I turned and pulled down my sweatpants. “It’s just bruised. Look, I can put weight on it and everything.” I heroically stood on one foot.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Nothing broken.”

  “Your grandma took your sister and two guards and left. She said something about two Guardians at the Keystone Mall.”

  That was exactly the line of questioning I was hoping to avoid. “Uh-huh.”

  Mom pinned me with her stare. “Why are there Guardians at an abandoned mall?”

  To lie or not to lie? I hated to lie to Mom.

  “You went to Diatheke and then what happened?”

  “I left.”

  “Did someone follow you? Is that why you went to Keystone?”

  Crap. My short answers clearly didn’t work. “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you come home?”

  Because I was followed by twenty highly trained killers who would’ve carved through our security and stormed the warehouse with children inside. “I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  My mother’s face fell. She knew.

  “I’ll ask you one more question, but I want an honest answer. If Rogan’s people were here, would you have come home?”

  I shut my eyes. “Yes.”

  She stepped close to me and hugged me. If I had any tears left, I would’ve cried.

  “Was it bad?” she asked quietly.

  “Yes.”

  Mom let go of me. “I’ll fix this. I promise you. It will be fixed tonight.”

  She turned around and went down the ladder.

  I looked at the little dog. “I suck.”

  The little dog squatted and peed on the floor. Right.

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “You’ll figure it out.”

  I cleaned up the mess and took her downstairs. At the kitchen table Bern, Leon, Runa, and Ragnar crowded around Bern’s laptop. On it, Celia was paused in mid-leap.

  I got some rotisserie chicken out of the fridge, pulled a generous chunk of the breast meat off the bone, and shredded it into a small bowl. The dog spun in circles at my feet.

  The sounds of a chain saw came from the screen.

  I put the dish on the floor. The dog attacked it like her life depended on her victory over the cold chicken. I got myself a plate and set about assembling two tacos.

  “Pause it. Right there,” Leon said.

  “It just . . . appears in his hand,” Ragnar said, his voice full of wonder. “How is he doing that?”

  “It seems completely subconscious,” Runa said. “He needs a weapon and poof!”

  “Poof?” Bern said.

  Runa turned to him. “Yes. Start it for a second. Notice how he’s looking at the chain saw. He’s clearly never seen it before.”

  “So, you think it’s a passive field effect?” Bern thought out loud.

  “It would make sense,” Runa said.

  “What would an active effect of this look like?” Bern wondered.

  “It doesn’t matter if it’s passive or active.” Leon leaned closer to the screen. “I want to know if he’s teleporting items he has seen before, or does he snatch them up within a certain area of effect.”

  “Why?” Ragnar asked.

  “Because I need to know if I have to worry about this asshole teleporting my guns into his hands when I fight him.”

  Everyone pondered that.

  “Maybe he doesn’t teleport them,” Ragnar said. “Maybe his magic duplicates them.”

  “That would be a hell of a thing,” Leon said.

  “What kind of magic is it anyway?” Runa said. “I thought he was an Antistasi.”

  “He is,” I said.

  They turned to me.

  I put my plate down. I wasn’t hungry anyway. “The Antistasi magic occurs roughly five times as often as truthseeking. It’s not the rarest, but Antistasi Primes are exceptionally rare. There are three truthseeker Houses in the entire continental US, and only two Antistasi Houses. There are five Houses in the whole of the European Union, two in Africa, we don’t know how many in China, and another three in the Russian Imperium. Of all of these, House Sagredo is the oldest.”

  “Your stalking of Alessandro is truly impressive,” Runa said.

  She had no idea. “The point is, we know what the Antistasi can do because of what they choose to reveal to us. Perhaps whatever Alessandro is doing is the ultimate expression of that talent and the handful of Antistasi Primes are keeping it secret. Perhaps he’s in a league of his own like Rogan. What matters is, he’s dangerous.”

  Leon smirked. Oh no, you don’t.

  “Forget Instagram,” I said. “Forget all the yachts, and cars, and women. It’s a smoke screen. This man is lethal. Diatheke sent an experienced, well-armed strike team after me. I watched Alessandro kill eight of them. He impaled two of them with a piece of broken pipe, murdered the remaining pair with a knife, and then he shot the four people I beguiled. One shot, one kill, every bullet in the T-zone.”

  If you drew a rectangle around both eyes and another around the nose, you would get a target area in the rough shape of a T. Shots to the T-zone were almost always fatal.

  “From how far?” Leon asked.

  “About twenty yards. He’s precise, calm, and he can use a wide variety of weapons. And he can negate our magic whenever he feels like it. The Antistasi are only supposed to negate mental magic, but when I asked him if he could nullify t
he metamorphosis mage, he said, ‘Not in her current form.’ Which means he could have nullified her prior to transformation. Metamorphosis is arcane, not mental. If you see him, do not engage him alone. He’ll kill you. I mean it, Leon. Don’t get into a pissing match with him alone. Take it as an order.”

  He smiled at me.

  “Leon!”

  He raised his hands. “Okay, okay. So did you figure out what happened to the two million?”

  He changed the subject way too fast. He would try to take on Alessandro the moment he saw him and then die trying to outshoot him. Leon was lethal, but Alessandro was versatile, more experienced, and stone cold.

  They were waiting for an answer.

  “They’re claiming Ms. Etterson withdrew the two million dollars in cash.”

  “In cash?” Bern asked.

  I sighed. “Yes. We need to look further into Diatheke. It’s not what it seems.”

  I slipped out of the kitchen and headed to my office. The little dog trailed me. I really had to give her a name. I was just about to duck into my office when I heard my mother’s voice coming from the conference room through the half-open door.

  “. . . a strike team,” my mother was saying. “She had to kill some of them, I’m almost sure of it. Then she fought a metamorphosis mage.”

  I snuck forward on my toes and leaned to look through the glass wall. Mom sat at the conference table, an open laptop in front of her.

  “Is she okay?” a familiar male voice asked.

  She was Skyping with Sergeant Heart.

  “She’s alive. She won’t tell me anything. I watched my daughter chop off a monster’s head with a sword.”

  Mom paused. Her tone had an odd note in it. If I didn’t know better, I would say it stopped just short of being fear, except my mother would never show fear to anyone outside the family.

  “We need protection,” she said. “I can’t tell you for how long, but I promise you that however long it is, we will pay you . . .”

  “Penelope.”

  He said it with warmth in his voice, and I almost did a double take. Sergeant Heart didn’t do warm. He did efficient and scary.

  It must have startled my mother too, because she stopped talking mid-word.