by TR Cameron
She sat quickly, even though she hadn’t made the conscious decision to do so. The reality that her parents had fought and probably killed criminals outside the law could no longer be ignored. She’d chatted to Tanyith about his girlfriend’s belief that they were vigilantes. Perhaps, by definition, that’s what her parents had been. But so were she, Tanyith, and the others who fought for what they believed was right. She wouldn’t think less of them because of it.
Cali pushed herself to her feet, suddenly filled with directionless anger. “No, it’s more than that. They should be thanked—or celebrated—for doing what others couldn’t. Maybe there were mistakes and maybe there weren’t. But if good people do nothing, evil flourishes. And, like them, I have only four words to say to that. Not. On. My. Watch.”
She grabbed a backpack and emptied it, then dumped the smaller weapons, including the pistols, into it. She hefted it over her shoulder and took one last look around her. It wasn’t all she’d hoped for unless important secrets lay inside the crates but it was enough.
Now, it’s time to see if Tanyith wants new daggers. With a smile, she headed to the exit.
Chapter Nine
A night’s sleep had tempered the enthusiasm she’d felt at the discovery of her parents’ weapon stash. A vague sense of exhaustion pressed at her—not a physical tiredness but a mental one. Her life had too many open loops at the moment, and the way her subconscious constantly poked and prodded at them was like picking scabs only to discover the wound beneath hadn’t closed.
“But, on the good side, I’m smart enough to know that going to the bunker alone was stupid and I won’t make that mistake again.” Fyre wore the same disapproving expression he’d had since she’d told him he couldn’t join her. He sat stiffly in the corner of the apartment’s living room and watched as she prepared a bowl of cereal for breakfast in the small attached kitchen.
She took an apple out of the basket on the counter and threw it at him. He snapped it out of the air and chomped noisily three times, then swallowed with a gulp. It didn’t make him appear any less annoyed at her.
Cali sighed. “Look, I’m sorry. Can we let it go, please? I promise, we’re together from now on.” His expression remained unchanged but the emotions that radiated from him softened. “If I give you another apple, will you quit it?”
“I can get my own apples,” he muttered.
With a laugh, she threw a second one at him and he caught it with a loud crunch. “Yeah, I know you can but at heart, you like to play as much as the rest of us.” She pulled the refrigerator open, checked the date on the milk, and put the bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios on the shelf beside it. “I think the milk is old enough that it may have achieved consciousness. Let’s have breakfast in New Atlantis instead.”
After the anticipated meal—which consisted of Emalia’s always amazing sourdough French toast—Cali and Fyre cleared the Oriceran bunker and moved everything into one of the spare rooms in the mansion. She portaled to the tavern in time to pick up Scoppic and Invel and brought them to work with Emalia.
Well, Scoppic is here to research, anyway. The way the Drow and her great-aunt lit up when they saw each other was a clear indication that Invel had interests beyond the collection of books and papers scattered around the formal dining room table.
She left them to their tasks with a wave and a parting, “Find out everything you can. I need every last piece of information you can get out of there. None of you will leave that room until every word is translated.” The responses varied but all were notably disrespectful. She looked at Fyre and shook her head. “Honestly. I’m the matriarch of a noble house and people still treat me like a slacker.”
The Draksa grinned at her. “Well, you did withdraw from your classes so you are kind of slacking.”
“Ya gotta rub salt in the wound, don’t ya, buddy? You are not a nice draggylizard.” She’d discovered the name she’d made up annoyed him and since then, had done her best to include it in conversation whenever possible. “Besides, I do have a few things on my plate at the moment. My career as an investigator will have to wait a while.”
Maybe forever, at this rate. My future is certainly turning out different than I’d expected.
Cali took the winding path to the chamber where her parents’ memories were stored. Fyre entered with her, looked around the room as if impressed, and slipped under the large wingback chair. With both of them in the space, even with most of him hidden under her, claustrophobia crept in at the edges of her mind. She banished those feelings with an act of will and did the same with the many concerns that banged around in her head. None of them was relevant in that moment as she was there to ask a difficult question. The answer wouldn’t change how she felt about her parents but it nonetheless carried a palpable weight.
Now focused, she selected the last of the rods in the sequence, which she and Emalia had agreed was likely the final one recorded. She slotted it into the basin and an illusion of her mother, frozen in time, flowed into existence above it. In silence, she absorbed the finer details of the image, the kind face, and the long dark hair. Finally, her heart full of longing for what could have been, she managed to croak, “Hi, Mom.”
The magical representation suddenly came to life and her mother’s face softened in a wide smile. “Cali, my love. It’s good to see you.”
“And you, Mom. I don’t know if I’ve ever said thank you for leaving these memories for me. So, thank you.”
Her mother nodded. “It was the least we could do when we discovered we would be forced to leave all the safety nets we’d constructed for you and your brother behind.”
A lump of emotion caught in her chest and she coughed to banish it. “So…uh, I have a question for you. Well, a couple. The first is, when did you record this? It’s the last one in the cabinet so I’ve assumed it’s the final message.”
“I created this on the day before we intended to leave New Atlantis. Well, in the early, early morning of the day we intended to depart. If it’s the last one, I can only presume we made it out as we hoped.”
“Why didn’t you make any more in New Orleans?” She hadn’t planned to ask that question but the words leapt out of her mouth before she knew they were coming.
Her mother gave her a soft smile. “I can’t say what happened after this moment, but I can tell you we wanted to. It might be that we couldn’t find the magical materials needed as they are unique to New Atlantis as far as we knew. Or…it could be anything, really. We had hoped to continue to leave these for you both until you were grown.” Her expression stretched into a grin. “At least that’s what I said to your father. Personally, I wanted to keep doing it forever.”
Cali laughed. “It was a good plan. But if you did it, I haven’t been able to find it. Although that’s not why I came. There’s something else I need to know.”
Her mother’s face turned somber. “I will share whatever I can, of course.”
“A friend who visited a secret place you left on the surface thinks that you and Dad were vigilantes who hunted and killed criminals outside the law. She doesn’t argue that the people you apparently targeted mostly deserved what they got.” Even talking to a magical version of her parent, she felt the need to soften the accusation. “But her opinion is that it was wrong. I don’t agree with her but what I want to know is if you had planned something like that. Or, if you didn’t, if you think it might be something you’d do.”
The other woman’s lips curled and she frowned as she considered the question in silence. It stretched long enough that Cali started to fear she’d somehow broken whatever made the conversations with the past versions of her parents possible.
Finally, her mother sighed. “We were angry when I recorded this. Very angry. At the general indifference of most of the Nine and the betrayals by the others. But I can’t imagine a situation where we would do such a thing of our own volition.”
Her heart started to beat with its normal rhythm again as the woman continued to
speak. “We intended to go to the surface and live anonymously until you were old enough to choose whether to join us or not in an effort to reclaim our lives and standing in New Atlantis. During that time, we had only three goals—survival, raising you, and finding a way to save your brother. Whatever we did should have been driven by one of those.
“Anything is possible, of course.” Her mother shrugged. “But I don’t think it’s likely that we would have picked a fight with anyone or that we would have engaged in one we could have avoided. I can’t say what might have changed after we left the city for the dirt above, but I cannot conceive of us suddenly becoming crusaders without a very, very powerful reason.”
She sighed as relief surged through her. “Good. That’s good.” The emotions from Fyre, which had supported her through the whole conversation, were in agreement. “Thank you. I knew it had to be something other than what Barton thought.”
The magical image nodded. “Keep an open mind, my daughter. There’s no telling what might have happened. But I’m glad you’ve found comfort in my answer.”
Cali stood and held the rod for a moment. “Thanks, Mom. I miss you.” She pulled the slim wand free and stored it in its receptacle, then knuckled the tears away from the corners of her eyes. With a sniff, she gave a hoarse command, “Let’s go, scale-face. We have important things to do.”
When they arrived in the dining room, Emalia, Invel, and Scoppic were all bent over the table. The gnome had to stand on a chair to manage it. One of the boxes she’d retrieved from the Oriceran bunker stood open on its surface and papers were spread out. Her great-aunt looked up as she entered. “Cali, good. Come here.”
She obeyed and peered at the object of their interest. It was a plain sheet of legal pad paper with writing on it in her mother’s hand. “What does it say?”
“It gives the location of another piece of the sword,” Invel replied. “One of the other families apparently shared it to taunt your parents, or at least that’s what Elisinia wrote.”
Cali frowned. “How does providing them the location accomplish that?”
Emalia shook her head. “Because it’s virtually unreachable.”
“How so?”
Scoppic adjusted his glasses as he straightened on the chair to meet her eyes. “You see, it was given as a gift to a very bad person to celebrate his ascension to a new role. The blade fragment is hidden inside a golden statue of a tiger.”
They all stared expectantly at her, which made her feel like she was missing something important from the conversation. “Okay, so, let me ask a different way. What the hell are you talking about?”
The older woman chuckled. “According to your mother, the statue was given to Peng Jian, the leader of a criminal organization in Shenyang, China. She writes that the group’s leadership and much of its membership is made up of former elite soldiers. Since his personal icon is the tiger, there is no way he’ll surrender a gift of such significance willingly.”
Her brain whipped through the information again and immediately began to spit out possibilities. Each was more ludicrous than the last. After a few moments of that, she shrugged. “Well, then. If that’s where it is, that’s where I’ll go.” Fyre growled, and she uttered a chagrined laugh. “Correction, that’s where we’ll go.”
She sighed and shook her head as the only reasonable path forward swam into clarity. “I’ll owe so many people too many favors after this.”
Chapter Ten
Tanyith portaled to the docks of New Atlantis and within minutes, was already annoyed at being in the domed city. It wasn’t the location itself, of course. The architecture was pleasant and most of the people were gregarious and welcoming. No, the reason he was there was what soured his mood. Finding a note on his door to summon him to a meeting with the bastards who threatened those he cared for would always put him in a belligerent frame of mind.
He hired one of the runners who constantly hung around the docks and sent the girl with a message for Cali—simply to tell her he was in town and going to visit “old friends.” She’d know what it meant and if he ran into trouble and didn’t report in after a reasonable amount of time, he imagined she’d come looking for him. At least, he hoped so.
The walk to the Privateer Pub was shorter than it had been from the Leblanc mansion and decidedly more pleasant to do on his own rather than in the company of the goon who had escorted him on the previous occasion. The weather under the dome was warm and comfortable, the same as it always was. He thought with a small laugh that if New Orleans could find a way to accomplish the same thing, it would become the prime tourist destination in the country.
The afternoon crowd inside the venue was stunningly normal, merely folks having lunch and drinks in the same way as they might anywhere. It was easy to forget, amongst the battles and the politics and the people trying to manipulate him, that New Atlantis was mostly full of ordinary citizens. Admittedly, they were of a higher economic class than him but that didn’t make them any more special.
Rather than turn toward the back room where those who had rudely demanded his presence would doubtless be waiting, he veered left and headed to the bar. The bartender was different than the one who had been on the job the last time. He was a strong-looking middle-aged man who had let some of his former muscle go to fat but was still demonstrably imposing enough to keep his clientele in line. A large black mustache drew attention away from the rest of his face very effectively. “What’ll ya have?”
“A pint of whatever you’ve got in the cask.” He grinned and gestured toward the small barrel.
“Good choice. It’s strong, though. You’ll want to take it slow.” The liquid that filled the glass as he twisted the valve was deep-red and ended with a crimson-tinted white foam. Tanyith accepted the drink, took a sip, and nodded in appreciation.
“Nice. Thanks.” He threw some local currency on the bar, double what his beverage cost. “Can I ask you a question?”
The man scooped the offering up and replied, “Sure. I won’t promise to answer, though.”
“I’m meeting with the folks in the back room but I don’t know them very well. They’re from the Malniet family but outside the main line, I think. Is there anything else you can tell me?”
With a guarded look at the back door, the bartender leaned closer. “I can tell you three things. First, you’re right, although they’re fairly close to the main line, regardless of blood. They’re often the voice of the patriarch in this part of town. Second, they have their hands in all kinds of things around here.” The way he said it strongly suggested that he referred to criminal activities. “And, finally, you don’t want to cross ʼem. People who do tend to wind up disappearing—probably as shark food.” He straightened and moved to the other end of the bar without waiting for a reply.
Great. Well, it’s not any worse than I expected but certainly not as good as I might have hoped. He drank half the glass at a relaxed pace, perfectly fine with making them wait a little longer before he strolled to the back. The door yielded to his push and he passed through to find the scene essentially as he’d anticipated.
The two sat in the same positions they’d occupied the last time—the pocked-face man on the left and the freckled blonde on the right. He took the chair across from them and spun it so he could sit reversed and lean his arms on the top. “It’s so great to see you again. Thanks so much for the invitation.”
The man laughed. “Hardly an invitation, but if it makes you feel better to call it that, you do what you need to do.”
He answered the taunt with a smile. “Oh, I very much doubt you’d enjoy it if I did what I need to do.”
The woman shook her head. “Let’s not lose focus, gentlemen. Tanyith, don’t forget that your lady friends are one word away from taking their last breath. And if you have any doubt about our resolve in that area, feel free to test us. We can give up one without any particular damage to our plans. Which would you like to see die first? The old girlfriend or the new?�
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He suppressed a growl at her words but allowed the anger to show on his face. Barton had eyes watching Sienna and was naturally wary in her own right, but magic tilted the balance. It was always possible that the Malniets could make good on the threat against one or the other. “Fine. You’ve made your point. What do you want?”
The man rested his elbows on the table and steepled his fingers. “Oh, several things. You won’t want to do them but in the end, I’m sure you’ll realize that you need to.”
Yeah, that would probably be true if your compulsion was still working. Since you’re not freaking out right now, I guess Nylotte managed to hide the evidence of her efforts. “Anything’s possible. Can we quit dancing and get to the point? I have places to be.”
The woman grinned and snarked, “Are you going to visit Leblanc? Maybe add her to your little harem? I think the Jehenel idiot might have gotten there first.”
Tanyith stared at her for a moment, his face expressionless but his eyes smoldering, and turned his attention to her compatriot. “You should put a muzzle on her. She brings your collective IQ way down and it’s fairly low to begin with.”
The man tilted his head mockingly. “And yet you’re the one on our hook rather than the other way around. What does that say about you, lover boy?” He leaned forward and lowered his hands. “Okay, enough fun. You’ll do three things for us. First, you’ll put the torch to that wench Usha’s place. It doesn’t matter if anyone’s in it or not but if it’s still standing in a week, we’ll move on to the endgame of our little relationship.”
His eyes widened. “You’re picking up some powerful enemies, aren’t you? One would have thought that House Malniet had enough on its plate right now.”
