Sapphire Flames

by Ilona Andrews

  Or perhaps I was deluding myself. I wanted him to be something more, because I wanted him. I would settle for the mere possibility of a future, a hope. Was it making me blind? Was I deliberately twisting the facts so I wouldn’t feel guilt about falling in love with a hired killer?

  No, love was too strong of a word. Definitely too strong.

  I had to stop thinking. Right now. “Why a shovel?”

  “What?”

  “On the rooftop when we fought the swarm, why did you conjure a shovel?”

  He paused, obviously deciding how much to say. “It’s the way my magic works.”

  “So it’s intention-based?”

  He sighed, resigned. “Yes. I imagine the action, and the magic does the rest. It’s very fast. Sometimes I’m not fully aware of my intent before the item manifests.”

  “So if you imagine stabbing someone, your magic produces something sharp?”

  “It might. A knife, an ice pick, a shard of broken glass. Whatever is in range. It’s magic, not science. It takes a lot of training because thinking too broad or too narrow is useless.”

  “What were you thinking of on the roof?”

  “A really large bug swatter.”

  The reek of Lawrence’s bones spread through the car, diluted by the wind but still strong enough to turn my stomach.

  “Tell me about Linus Duncan,” he asked.

  “I first met him at our trials and then again at Nevada’s wedding. He is charming and intelligent and very retired. Or at least so he claims.”

  “Is he retired?”

  “Men like Linus never truly retire. One time I asked Rogan about him, and he said Linus Duncan was the most dangerous man he knew.”

  Since we became a House, Linus had been a constant presence in our lives. Sometimes he stopped in for dinner without warning. Sometimes we received an invitation to his house. His magic was off the charts. Nevada thought the world of him because he helped broker a ceasefire between us and Victoria Tremaine. Rogan respected him but treated him the way one would handle a loaded gun, aware that a single mistake could lead to tragic consequences.

  With us Linus was always pleasant and charming. But no matter how likeable, a man who steered the Assembly full of bickering Primes had to be ruthless.

  The image of him dancing with Victoria Tremaine popped into my head. My grandmother had cut a bloody path through the country’s magic elite. People were terrified of her. Just mentioning her name killed the conversation.

  Who the hell dances with Victoria Tremaine?

  He had to have done something for Diatheke to want him dead. I had no idea how he would react to me bringing this information to him. Did I want him to be aware that I knew someone had put a hit on him? How mad would he be when he found out that we knew about this?

  I wish Nevada was here.

  I wanted my big sister. I needed her advice. I wanted her to hug me and tell me the right thing to do.

  No. At this point I knew more about all of this than she did. She was in Spain and I was here, on the ground. I had a front row seat to all of this. The responsibility for the decision was mine. If I called her, she would tell me the same thing. She would tell me to trust my instincts.

  Jocelyn’s words floated up from my memory and stung me again.

  “I didn’t climb over Nevada.”

  “I know,” Alessandro said.

  I glanced at him. I loved the way he looked right now, his profile etched against the light-studded night city. His expression had turned harsh, his eyes scanning the road in front of us. The wolf was out of the woods and on the prowl.

  “How?”

  “You hate being the Head of the House. Every bit of it.”

  I had to work on hiding it better.

  “Why did you do it?” he asked.

  “There was nobody else.” I had no idea why I was even talking about this. He didn’t care about my family problems, but it felt vitally important to make him understand.

  “What about Nevada?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I have time.”

  I sighed. “Three years ago, several powerful Texas Houses conspired to overthrow the democratic government. The plan was to destabilize the current social order and, when everything went to hell, step forward as the saviors of the state, the heroes who stood for law and safety. They had a leader they called Caesar, and their goal was to remake our republic into an imperium, the way the original Caesar and his legions remade Rome. Rogan and my sister stopped it. We never did find out who Caesar was, but the conspiracy itself died. There were arrests and trials. My own grandmother was part of it. She’s still in prison. It’s a very posh prison, but it’s a prison. It seemed so simple. Bad guys failed. Good guys won. We thought we won.”

  “Nothing is simple when it comes to Houses,” Alessandro said, his voice tinted with just a hint of bitterness. He hid it well, but I still heard it.

  “Yes. All those powerful Houses and Primes had friends and allies, and once the dust settled, they attacked. They couldn’t touch us because we were an emerging House, but they came after Rogan full force. They attempted a hostile takeover of his businesses, they accused him of illegal trade practices, they manufactured evidence that he was involved in human trafficking. He had known all along it would happen, but none of us anticipated it, and it hit Nevada the hardest. She was trying to do everything at once: help Rogan, build goodwill to make sure we were safe once the grace period was over, and earn money for us. Our business was mortgaged. We were in debt. The Houses didn’t have to attack us. They just didn’t hire us. We had to fight for every dollar.”

  He was listening to me and the words just kept coming out.

  “Nevada didn’t ask for help. She was going to fix it all herself. She’d been fixing things herself since she was seventeen, when she took over the business. She lost weight. She looked sick. We asked her to slow down. She said she would, but she didn’t. We went to Rogan. He asked her to stop. She promised she would but kept on going. She was trying desperately to make sure that all of us were okay.”

  My heart was speeding up. Talking about it was like jumping into an ice-cold well full of anxiety and fear. You would think time would have dulled it, but no.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Arabella and I came home and found her facedown on the floor.” The memory slashed across reality, raw and charged with pure panic: Nevada prone in the hallway and Arabella’s bloodless face and the terrifying sound of her screaming.

  “It was just like when we found out my father had cancer. Mom, Arabella, and I had gone school supply shopping and when we came back, he was passed out on the floor in the home office.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “What did you do?”

  “We freaked out and called an ambulance.”

  There was so much there that couldn’t be explained. The single thought running through my head on a loop, “Cancer, cancer, cancer . . .” Mom’s glassy eyes as she stared straight ahead, driving the car behind the ambulance; Arabella rocking back and forth in the hospital waiting room, hugging herself and mumbling, “My sister’s going to die. My sister’s going to die”; the waiting for the doctor; my cousins running into the waiting room, Leon freaked out and stuttering, Bern lost and somehow small; and finally, Rogan tearing through the hospital hallway like he was going to take the building down. That was the only time I’d ever seen fear on my brother-in-law’s face.

  “Was she sick?”

  “Yes. She had the flu. She hadn’t eaten in two days, she was dehydrated and running a fever, and she’d spent the night in the rain doing some bullshit surveillance.”

  Violence didn’t come naturally to me, but at that moment I had wanted to grab Nevada by her shoulders and shake her until her head popped off.

  “I’m glad you found her. I know it was terrible for you to see her that way, but you found her that way because you were supposed to. If you hadn’t, she would’ve done permanent d
amage to herself.”

  Who are you, Alessandro Sagredo? Why did you walk into my life?

  “We all told her she had to stop. She said she would take two weeks off. The hospital released her. Rogan carried her out to his car. It was terribly romantic.”

  Alessandro raised his eyebrows. “How long?”

  “Fourteen hours. I found her in the office going through case files the next morning. It’s like she was stuck in a hamster wheel and couldn’t get out. Talking to her was pointless. Everything I said just bounced off.”

  “She knew you were right, but she didn’t think she was wrong.”

  “Yes.” I sighed. “I realized that we had to act. Arabella had turned eighteen a couple of months before this happened. When our dad died, he was the sole owner of the agency and he split his shares equally between the three of us.”

  “You voted her out of the business?” He glanced at me, the disbelief clear on his face.

  “No! Of course not. Nevada took the agency over from Dad at its lowest point and built it back up. She’s the reason our bills were paid and there was food on the table. We could never lock her out.”

  “Then what?”

  “We took away her ability to financially contribute to the business.”

  He laughed under his breath.

  “She could take all the cases she wanted, she could use all of our resources, but instead of getting a set salary and letting the bulk of the fee go toward our debt, she had to keep everything she earned. I told her that if she wanted to work herself to death, there was nothing we could do about it, but we wouldn’t be complicit in her slow suicide.”

  He smiled.

  “What?”

  “An elegant solution. It’s very you. Was she mad?”

  “Livid. She tried to force us to rescind the provision, but we wouldn’t do it. Then she got this strange look on her face and said, ‘I can’t be the head of a family that doesn’t trust me.’ And then she walked out.”

  The hurt on her face would stay with me forever.

  “She didn’t speak to me for three weeks. She wouldn’t take my calls, she didn’t respond to my texts . . . Nevada gave me my first case, she taught me how to drive, she stayed up and talked to me when I would cry in my room over some teenage catastrophe. Once, she drove all over the city for hours looking for me when I used my magic accidentally and had to run away from a kid . . .”

  “What?”

  I shook my head. “It was stupid. I was fifteen, he was paying attention to me, and I went on a date with him. It got out of hand. I wanted him to like me, and my magic leaked. It was just a trickle, but it was enough. Everything was going well until I had to go home, and he grabbed me by my hair and tried to drag me into his car. I ran away and hid, and Nevada searched for hours until she found me.”

  He had an odd look on his face.

  “Anyway, Nevada was always there for me and I had hurt her. It was my idea. I had ripped a hole in our family.”

  “Arabella went along with it. I assume the rest of the family did too.”

  “Yes, but I was the mastermind.”

  “Did she call you that?”

  “Leon did.”

  “Your cousin is a hotheaded idiot.”

  “Leon is impulsive, but he wasn’t wrong.” I shrugged. “Nevada came to see me eventually. She told me she understood where I was coming from, but she couldn’t be the Head of the House anymore. As far as she was concerned, that was a vote of no confidence. Somebody had to be her replacement. I was the next oldest Prime. I had engineered the coup. There was nobody else.”

  “What happened to the agency?” he asked.

  “It belongs to all of us. Nevada is still a shareholder. I run the House Baylor part of it, and she’s in charge of Baylor Investigative Agency. She takes complicated cases, mostly pro bono, usually to help people who have nowhere else to go. A lot of her work revolves around Rogan too. They’re still dealing with the fallout from three years ago.”

  “It had to happen,” Alessandro said. “You can’t belong to two Houses at the same time, Catalina. Eventually you have to choose. No matter how close of an alliance you have with your family, once you’re married, your loyalty belongs to your spouse.”

  “Is that why you never went through with any of your engagements?” I was really brave. Or maybe it was the blood loss. I was bleeding from a dozen shallow gashes, and the stench of Lawrence’s bones made me feel woozy.

  “It was part of it,” he said.

  We turned onto our street.

  The burnt-out shell of a Guardian lay on its side on the left. Black, greasy smoke rose from it. Next to it a charred body in urban fatigues sprawled on the ground.

  The spike barriers were up, blocking access from the sides. Ahead, a Howitzer sat by the guard shack. Sergeant Heart had arrived.

  Alessandro raised his eyebrows.

  A huge, shaggy shadow charged from behind the shack.

  “Stop!” I grabbed Alessandro’s arm. “Don’t hurt him.”

  He slammed on the brakes.

  An enormous grizzly sprinted toward our car. I unbuckled my seat belt and jumped out. The massive bear reared up on his hind legs and loomed over me, blocking the floodlight at the top of the guard booth.

  I held out my arms. The grizzly leaned over and hugged me to him.

  I caught a glimpse of Alessandro, halfway to us, a chain saw in his hands.

  “This is Sergeant Teddy,” I told him, leaning my head against the soft fur. “He won’t hurt me. He’s a pacifist.”

  “Che gabbia di matti!” Alessandro said.

  We might be a bunch of lunatics, but it didn’t matter. I was finally home.

  The street in front of the warehouse was strewn with bodies. The streetlamps, which we turned on in an emergency, flooded the scene with bright electric light, and every detail of the corpses was clearly visible. Some had simply fallen, their expressions blank, neat bullet holes in their skulls. Those had to belong to Leon and my mother. They were the lucky ones. They died fast. The others lay contorted, their faces twisted into hideous masks by fear and pain. It took them a while to die and they knew it was happening. They felt it.

  Ex-soldiers in the dark uniforms of Rogan’s private army moved around them, quick and efficient, all wearing hoods, gas masks, and gloves up to their elbows.

  Runa sat in front of the motor pool on a huge tire, watching as Heart’s people hooked the bodies and pulled them onto plastic, vacuum sealing them like pieces of meat to be stored in the freezer. There was an odd look on her face, not exactly blank but tired and sort of satisfied.

  She saw me. “I told them to just burn the bodies, but they didn’t listen to me.”

  I came and sat next to her on the tire. Across from us at the other end of the motor pool Ragnar sat at the wooden table, his head tilted up. He was looking at the moon.

  “I told him to stay inside.” Runa shook her head at her brother. “He didn’t. Those three bodies over there”—she pointed at the far right, where three fallen bodies formed a clump of arms and legs—“they’re his. He asked me if that meant he was now a werewolf, and now he’s staring at the moon and won’t talk to me.”

  Alessandro walked over to Ragnar and sat down by him.

  Runa looked at me. “Nobody listens to me. What the hell happened to you?”

  “Flying scorpion ticks.”

  Runa raised her eyebrows.

  “Never mind that,” I told her. “What happened here?”

  Runa took a deep breath, puffed her cheeks out like a chipmunk and let the air out. “Let’s see . . . You left. Your security dude, the one with the A name . . .”

  “Abarca?”

  “Yes, him. He came in to talk to your mom. He wanted to hire somebody, she said no, he got all upset and started ranting about authority issues and how he was in charge of security, and your mom lost her patience and told him he was being replaced. He freaked out. He actually screamed at her. And she got this weird look on her
face.”

  Oh no, oh please no. “Is he alive?”

  “He was when he stormed out. Leon got between the two of them and told Abarca to start walking. Abarca said, ‘If that’s the way you want it, I’m walking and taking my people with me.’ Leon told him that if he did that, he shouldn’t count on severance pay. That the job wasn’t over until they were relieved. And then your mom said that deserters didn’t get severance pay. Abarca spat on the floor and took off.”

  “I left for two hours. Two hours.”

  “I know, right? Then your security guards rolled out, quick too. Fifteen minutes and they were gone.”

  He left us defenseless. They wouldn’t have been able to leave so quickly unless they’d prepared in advance. Abarca must have made up his mind that if he didn’t get what he wanted, he’d be gone. The entire team must have been packed and ready to go.

  They knew we were in danger. They knew there were children in the warehouse, and they just left us to die. I wanted to punch something.

  “Then Montgomery showed up.”

  “Augustine? Why?”

  “Apparently Matilda’s aunt asked him to pick her up. Your mom wouldn’t let her go until Matilda called her aunt and confirmed it.”

  Well, MII did have a division specializing in private security. Matilda would be safe with Augustine.

  “Half an hour after that, two teams attacked in four of those things.”

  Runa pointed inside the motor pool, where Grandma Frida was elbow-deep in the engine of a dented Guardian and humming softly. Two others waited on the left, in addition to the two she and Arabella brought from Keystone. The entire side wall of the motor pool was black with soot.

  Grandma saw me looking, gave me a big smile, and went back to singing lullabies to the personnel carrier.

  “Bug warned us when he spotted them, so we had time to set up. Leon took that street, on the left, and I took this one. Your mom was up there, in the attic thingy. She had wanted your grandma to take the tank out, but your grandma said, ‘Penelope, once you hit them with a tank, there isn’t much left, is there?’”