Sapphire Flames

by Ilona Andrews

  Selecting a code name would be personal. It would carry meaning to the person. Very few people chose an alias at random.

  “Then here’s your first order,” Linus said. “Identify Magdalene. Nothing else matters. You may use Fullerton to assist you if necessary. If you need money or access, let me know. You’ll tell nobody about what happened here today or about what you’ve learned. Not your sisters, not your cousins, not your mother or grandmothers. Are we clear?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But that’s not realistic. I’m not a tyrant, I’m in charge of a family. They’ll want explanations. They know that I came to see you. The moment I start accessing government databases, they will put two and two together.”

  Linus took a heavy leather binder from his desk and passed it to me. “Congratulations. House Baylor has been hired as a subcontractor for an unspecified government agency.”

  I opened the binder. Nondisclosure agreements, contract, lots of scary language, . . . generous compensation.

  “And if I tell them the truth, I would have to kill them?”

  “Quite literally.”

  My insides turned cold. He wasn’t joking.

  “Your mother and your grandmother are both veterans. They understand how it works. Get them on your side and the rest of the family will fall in line.”

  “What about the Ettersons?”

  “What about them?”

  “They’re victims in this case. I don’t want to involve them in this.”

  Linus’ face was merciless. “Runa Etterson is the Head of her House. She could’ve collected her brother and flown back to California. Instead she chose to stay here and take care of her family business. She involved herself. Every action carries a consequence.”

  He was leveraging my family and friends against my cooperation. I finally understood why Rogan watched him the way he did. Except it was too late.

  I forced my shoulders to relax, leaned back, and let Victoria Tremaine’s granddaughter rise to the surface. “Very well. We’ll view the Ettersons as part of my House for the duration of this investigation. Since you mentioned access, I’ll need entry to all the crime databases; the Assembly Prime criminal list, the FBI’s Mages of Interest, the Department of Motor Vehicles, the whole thing.”

  Linus took the seal from the table and turned it over. On the back was a username and password. “With this you will be able to log into the Warden Network, which pulls data from every government network you mentioned. Everything you look at will be recorded and examined by me. Do not use it outside the scope of this investigation.”

  “Understood.” My fairy godfather had just waved a magic wand and granted me top-secret clearance.

  “My dear, I’ve been doing this for a while. Do give me some credit.” Linus pinned me with his stare again. “I want to be crystal clear in regards to what’s at stake. If means of manufacturing the 971 serum became public, every unscrupulous House in the world would jump at the chance to have it.”

  “They would breed magic monsters for their private armies,” Alessandro said.

  “Exactly. Eventually, there would be more monsters than people.” Linus’ face turned hard and unyielding. “And that, children, I will not permit.”

  Alessandro and I didn’t speak on the drive back. He seemed lost in thought, and I felt like I had signed my soul away and sealed the contract with my blood. What had I gained? Was it anything at all?

  Just before I reached the warehouse, I took a detour to a coffee shop. Alessandro didn’t want anything, but I bought a huge latte full of sugar and whipped cream and all the things that were bad for me. And then I drank it in the parking lot.

  Alessandro stared at the giant cup with a mix of horror and morbid curiosity. “What is that?”

  “Coffee-flavored sugar and cream.”

  “I thought you only drank tea.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “You post pictures of your tea on Instagram. It’s really very exciting. Will it be English Breakfast or Earl Grey?”

  I should just delete my account. “Well, right now I need coffee.” I aggressively sucked the latte through a straw and nearly choked.

  “It will be fine,” Alessandro told me.

  “No, it really won’t.”

  By the time Linus had gotten through the first half of the explanations about the 971 serum, half a dozen terrifying scenarios unfolded in my head and they kept spawning others, each more disturbing than the last. The weight of responsibility crashed on me like an anvil falling from a great height. It was Alessandro, me, and Linus between my family and the total collapse of our society.

  “Of course it will be fine. You’re smart, resilient, and don’t forget conniving. Now you have the authority to be all those things in the service of humanity.”

  I shut my eyes.

  “If you keep doing that, someone will kill you. Or kiss you.”

  My eyes snapped open.

  “Ah, missed my chance.” Alessandro’s wolf eyes laughed at me.

  “Is everything a joke to you?”

  He thought about it. “Yes.”

  I slumped against the car’s seat.

  “He was right, you know,” Alessandro said. “Unless we stop this, it’s the beginning of the end. Dangle enough money and people will line up on the street to get warped. At first only a few Houses will have them, then others will have to match them and will get their own pet monsters, and then it won’t be if you have them but who has more of them, and who can breed the best strain, the most vicious, the most durable, with the greatest magic.”

  “It’s wrong. All of it.”

  “Yes, it’s very wrong. I never take more than one contract at a time, but I took this one. It’s bigger than Sigourney or Halle or me and you.”

  “I know. I’m scared for my family. What if I fail?”

  He dipped his head to catch my gaze. “‘We.’ What if ‘we’ fail. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll stay here with you until we see this through.”

  He would, I realized. I wasn’t alone. It didn’t undo the weight that settled on my shoulders, but it made it lighter. Alessandro would stay with me.

  I started the car and headed home.

  If we did fail and die, my sisters and cousins would inherit a nightmare world. In human history whenever one social group enslaved another, the slaves suffered until they could take no more, and it always ended in an explosion of violence. And the warped would be enslaved as living weapons, I had no doubt of it. They were too dangerous, and they operated at a diminished mental capacity. Without Jocelyn, Lawrence would have killed the first person who pissed him off and eaten their face.

  Atrocities would be committed to keep the warped in line and then more atrocities would follow when the warped were deployed. My stomach lurched, sending acid into my throat. Failing to contain the 971 serum would spark a biological arms race, while well-meaning politicians debated if it was more ethical to destroy the new monsters or heavily regulate their use.

  By all reasonable projections, our system of individuals with remarkable powers who existed parallel to the rest of society should have collapsed. What kept it stable was the deep-seated human urge of self-preservation. The Primes tempered their feuds and minded the safety of the general population because they were afraid to die.

  I didn’t even know if the warped had a sense of self-preservation. Cherry, the woman to whom Nevada used to bring chicken, didn’t. She stayed in the Pit, the flooded area of Houston, because she liked it, not because it was safe. The one time she had gotten out, because she wanted to eat a little dog running along the highway, she walked straight into traffic, oblivious to the oncoming cars, and a semi hit her so hard, she flew almost twenty feet. She was dead before she had landed.

  Lawrence knew Benedict ordered me to be captured alive. But during the fight, he just wanted to kill me and eat me. The idea that Benedict, scary, scary Benedict, would be angry with him didn’t even cross his mind.

  There wouldn
’t be enough Jocelyns in the world to keep the Lawrences from setting it on fire.

  We passed through a now heavily-fortified entry point, stopped by the security booth, where Alessandro and I were examined and questioned by two stone-faced guards, and then allowed to park in front of the warehouse.

  Alessandro went to change. I went into the conference room and called a family meeting.

  The room filled. I looked at the faces of my family, and I was so scared for them I couldn’t even breathe.

  “As of this moment, all of us are working for the US Government.” I placed the leather binder on the table. Victoria Tremaine’s granddaughter. Project strength. Radiate confidence. Reassure. “We’ve been retained by an unnamed governmental agency to perform a specific task. I can’t tell you anything more. You know where I went this morning and whom I met. Draw your own conclusions.”

  Nobody said anything. I looked to the left where Mom and Grandma Frida sat next to each other.

  “We’ve been drafted,” Arabella said.

  “We’ve been retained. We will be generously compensated.”

  “What if we say no?” Leon asked.

  “No isn’t an option. We have no choice in this matter. It’s decided and done. That’s the only way we can survive right now.”

  “What do they want?” Mom asked, her voice calm.

  “They want us to find someone. Sign the NDAs please so I can tell you more. Runa, House Etterson’s participation is optional. If you want out, you and Ragnar have to leave this room right now.”

  Runa drummed her fingernails on the table. “If we assist in this research, will anyone with real power remember it?”

  “Yes.” I would remember it and so would Linus.

  “Then we are in. We need friends in high places.”

  I waited until all of the NDAs were signed and returned to me. “We are looking for someone named Magdalene. She’s a monster maker.”

  Arabella was the one who found it. An old account on Herald, abandoned for six years. The user’s name was Magdalin and the posts consisted of House snark. Making fun of this Prime celebrity’s hair, that singer’s nose, calling a young darling of the Houston elite a “skank” because she slept with more than one guy. The sort of snark a teenager might post, but the voice was older. She read more like a woman in her twenties, playing to a younger crowd. Once in a while she posted a piece of juicy gossip, proving that she was “in” with the local House scene, and her adoring teenage mob went crazy.

  Eventually the posts slacked off and stopped altogether. Bern read through the last fifty, getting a feel for her voice patterns. The rest of us scoured the feed for any clues. Magdalin was careful to never mention names, other than the people she made fun of, and her pics were coy. A sparkly shoe, a designer bag, a half-smoked joint. No obvious clues to her identity. A search of the other social networks didn’t uncover any relevant Magdalins, so we went after her followers.

  Of those, Killer Bee was the most frequent contributor. She liked all of Magdalin’s posts even after most of her fans had abandoned ship, and their banter referenced particular restaurants and clubs. On one of her later posts, Magdalin seemed dejected. Killer Bee had replied, “You’re brilliant as fuck! Can’t wait to have our lunch tomorrow. BFF forever.”

  Which was redundant, because BFF already stood for Best Friends Forever.

  Magdalin and Killer Bee knew each other in real life. Leon found a Killer B Twitter account, and Bern confirmed that the vocabulary and sentence patterns matched Killer Bee on Herald.

  We sifted through her images until we found a picture of five women, all drunk, wearing party hats and screaming. The hashtags said #DoctorBitch and #BFFForever. Three other accounts were tagged. Of those two were dormant. We went through them to other networks until we found Lillie Padilla, an Herbamagos mage from a small House. Her Facebook account was set to private, but her education was left public. Lillie Padilla was a Ph.D. and she got it from Baylor.

  At this point, Runa rubbed her hands together and got on the phone to the Baylor Alumni Association. The rest of us worked Lillie Padilla until we determined that her Ph.D. was in ecology and she was not our Magdalin.

  Following a reverse image search uncovered two more women, one of whom, Shondra Contreras, turned out to be our Killer Bee. She had earned a master’s in entomology and had abandoned her quest for a Ph.D. in favor of charitable work in Africa. Last year she had been honored for her humanitarian work restoring bee populations and promoting the revival of bee farming.

  Runa’s phone calls gave us two more names, Noriko McCord and Cristal Ferrer. Noriko had died in House warfare three years ago. Cristal Ferrer was a prodigy. She graduated from high school at fifteen, earned her bachelor’s two years later, and three years later successfully defended a dissertation in molecular biology followed by a second in genetics. She would have been a scientific savant, if it wasn’t for her magic. She was a Magister Examplaria, like Bern, but her specialization wasn’t computers and code, it was the microbiology of the human body.

  I logged into the Warden Network. In five minutes, I had everything the government and the Assembly knew about Cristal, from her SSN and DL to the particulars of her magic and the family scandal of her grandmother running away with a Chinese businessman. House Ferrer was well connected, with half a dozen active alliances and an MCI badge by their name, which stood for Military Contractor Inactive.

  Cristal ticked all the boxes. She was a Prime from House Ferrer, which specialized in genetic research and treatment. She ran her own lab, Biocine Laboratories. She had a reason to resent her parents, who had likely pushed her out of her peer group and into college. And after Bern read three of her scientific papers, he declared that her written voice pattern matched Magdalin’s posts.

  I stared at her picture. She didn’t look like a monster. Twenty-six, average height, average build, pale, with dark blond hair and golden highlights. Pleasant features, a heart-shaped face, large blue eyes. She seemed brittle in her images, likely half upbringing and half deliberate effect. Cristal was clearly trying to fit into the fragile flower category of high society; lovely yet delicate and looking for someone to shield her from the harsh world.

  I could have been a version of her, if I’d wanted to. I’d had Arrosa and three years of education on how to look, what to say, what not to say, and how to say it. Cristal spent that time earning her degrees. The fragile flower pose allowed her to fit neatly into an established niche.

  She blended in, but she was still broken. Somehow Cristal never learned that it was wrong to rob people of their humanity.

  It took us half an hour to assemble Cristal’s dossier. It took me less than five minutes to tie her to Diatheke. Cristal was a member of the Houston Opera Admiration Society. Randall Baker, Diatheke’s figurehead founder, was also a member. A picture of last year’s gala had run in the newspaper, gushing about the money the society had raised for charity by selling invitation-only tickets at one hundred thousand dollars a pop. In it, Cristal sat at a round table. To her left, four seats down, Benedict De Lacy raised a champagne flute to his lips.

  This was as close to a smoking gun as we could get. It would never stand up in court, but it didn’t need to. I went into my office, shut the door, and emailed the dossier to Linus. I could see straight through the glass door into the conference room. The entire family was watching me, silent. Runa’s face turned white again.

  My phone rang. I picked it up.

  “What’s your assessment of access?” Linus asked.

  “Extremely limited. Her family is well connected and has a history of cooperation with military forces.”

  All of which I had put into our report. Getting an interview with her would be difficult, getting her House’s permission for me to magic her would be impossible, and if we used brute force and demanded she submit to interrogation and I was wrong, there would be hell to pay.

  “I can compel her testimony, but we will need verification,” Linus sai
d.

  “Cristal rarely leaves the House Ferrer compound,” I continued.

  “But she does enjoy the opera,” Linus said.

  “Yes, but the next HOAS gala is tonight, in less than three hours. The tickets for the Crystal Ball are invitation-only and have been sold out for months—”

  “I’ll pick you and Alessandro up at seven.”

  He hung up.

  No good job, no thumbs up. Just pick you up at seven.

  Arabella jumped up, ran across the hallway, and opened my door. “What did he say?”

  “He wants me to go with him and Alessandro to the gala. Tonight. At seven.”

  I stared at my phone. 5:37 p.m. There was no way. The hair alone . . .

  “Up!” Arabella snapped at me. “You have less than an hour and a half. You need a shower.”

  I texted Alessandro, Opera, 7:00 p.m., tuxedo, and ran upstairs, thanking Arrosa in my head for insisting that I buy a small but expensive wardrobe.

  I had three evening dresses: a white sheath, a red dress the color of blood, and a flowing blue gown that hugged my breasts and waist, spilling into a flowing skirt. The sheath was too tight to allow any sort of running, the red dress drew too much attention, so the blue gown was it.

  It had taken a miracle, but at 6:58 p.m. Arabella herded everyone into the kitchen, so I could go into Runa’s bedroom and change, because there was no way I could make it down the stairs in the gown.

  I stepped into a pair of small silver heels, slipped the dress on, and examined myself in the mirror. My dark hair fell on my shoulders in wide waves, combed back behind one ear in a deep side part. It framed my face, showing off the diamond earrings glittering in my ears. The diamonds were lab made. Arrosa had insisted on the real thing, but I’d refused. Nobody had died digging my earrings out of the ground, and that mattered more to me than what Houston’s elite would think.

  My makeup was light for the evening. I never looked good wearing bright lipstick, so I opted for a lighter pink and smoky eyes. Given another half an hour, I would have done a better job contouring my face, but it would have to do. I looked appropriate for the evening, and nobody would laugh in my face. Most of it was in your poise anyway. As long as you looked like you belonged at the venue, people assumed you were supposed to be there, and being escorted by Alessandro Sagredo and Linus Duncan meant most of the attention would be on them.