by Jenna Black
“Steph and I can take care of anything that needs doing until you get back,” I continued, crossing my fingers that he’d find my argument sound.
Mr. Glass sighed heavily. “We’re not going to be in any mood for sightseeing or even relaxing after this. We might as well come home.”
I had to agree that I wouldn’t feel much like being on vacation, either. However, that didn’t mean I had to concede the point. “I know you’re not in the mood, but it might be nice to have something to take your mind off your troubles for a while. As far as I know, there’s nothing you have to do that can’t wait until you get back.” Not that I knew much of anything about what needed to be done. There would be insurance company wrangling for sure, and heaven only knew what would be involved in getting the ruins cleaned up and a new house built. Surely Steph and I could take care of some of that on their behalf.
“At least take a little time to think about it,” I urged. “If you decide to stay on the cruise, you can always change your mind and come home, but vice versa doesn’t work. Steph and I will find you a nice rental so you don’t have to stay in a hotel or anything. And we’ll start the ball rolling on insurance and stuff. There’s no need to make a bad situation worse by losing out on the rest of your cruise.”
He let out another heavy sigh. “When did you get so smart?”
I smiled at the affection in his tone. “Guess someone just raised me right.”
“All right. Your mother and I will talk it over before we make any hasty decisions. But you call us if there are any updates, or if there’s anything we need to do.”
“I promise.”
“We’ll call you tomorrow to let you know what we’ve decided.”
“Okay.”
I suspected from the tone of his voice that he was still leaning toward coming home immediately, and I couldn’t blame him. Probably I’d have done the same in his shoes. But at least I’d bought a little bit of time.
Of course, if I hadn’t been able to figure out how to explain my current circumstances over the course of the last few weeks, a couple of extra days probably weren’t going to help all that much.
For those of you who might be tempted, I wouldn’t recommend downing a tub of chocolate ice cream at four in the morning, even if you have just learned your childhood home burned to the ground. Steph and I had had help—she’d called Blake while I was on the phone with the Glasses, and he’d met me at the bottom of the stairs when I went to let Steph in. I felt like the third wheel all of a sudden, but that didn’t stop me from shoveling down the ice cream until my stomach felt queasy. The sugar high buoyed me for a while, but when the crash came, I decided it was safest to leave Steph and Blake to their own devices. I felt sick enough from overeating without getting myself all worked up about their relationship.
I excused myself and went back to my suite to brood in quiet solitude. I was trying to hold on to hope that the fire had been the result of faulty wiring or some other legitimate accidental cause. I’d brought enough hardship down on my adoptive family since the fateful day my car had slammed into Emmitt Cartwright and killed him, making me a Liberi. The last thing I wanted to do was be the cause of more pain and heartache.
I might have lived on in blissful ignorance for at least another few hours if I hadn’t decided to check my email.
I wasn’t getting a whole lot of email lately, not since I’d temporarily closed up my business as a private investigator. There was never anything important in my in-box, so mostly when I checked email, it was to delete the spam that had gotten through the filter. I was happily deleting away when my cursor hit a message that chilled my blood.
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING, screamed the subject line, and the name in the From column said Konstantin.
Dreading what I would see, I opened the email and held my breath.
Dear Nikki,
I hope this letter finds you well.
Actually, no, I don’t. I hope it finds you miserable and guilt stricken.
I’ve put a lot of time and thought into my current situation. I have been forced to step down as king of the Olympians, a position I’ve held for several centuries and to which I had become accustomed. I have been exiled from my people, forced to live in hiding for fear that the more predatory amongst them might want to ensure my permanent removal. I have been forced to abandon a magnificent home and watch as my worthless son attempts to destroy from within everything I’ve built over my long, long life.
All of these indignities I’ve been forced to face, I can trace back to one person: you.
If you had joined the Olympians when I invited you, none of this would have happened. You and I could have lived harmoniously together, and we could have hunted down Justin Kerner without all the fuss and fireworks. Maybe if I hadn’t had to ask for Anderson’s help to stop Kerner, we could have captured and neutralized him before he killed Phoebe. Certainly we could have taken care of him quietly, in such a way that no one untrustworthy had to know about my lapse in judgment.
But you didn’t join us. Instead, you set yourself up in opposition, and you went out of your way to reveal every detail of what had happened. You cost me everything I hold dear, and I plan to pay you back in kind.
This morning’s little surprise was nothing more than a warning shot across the bow. I have much, much more in store for you. I know you’ll be hunting for me, and maybe you think you’ll catch me before I can fully realize my revenge. But I didn’t manage to become king of the Olympians and lead them for centuries without having an impressive bag of tricks at hand. I’m betting I can break you before you get to me. And if you think you can invoke your silly little treaty and get Cyrus to control me, you are gravely mistaken. I will do nothing to harm you or your family. Nothing that will officially break the treaty. Hurting you without breaking the treaty will be quite the enjoyable test to my creativity. And believe me, I am highly creative.
Be afraid, Nikki Glass. I am coming for you.
Yours, Konstantin
I read the email twice, hardly believing what I was reading. Konstantin blamed me for all his troubles? That was nuts.
I’ll admit, I’d certainly had a hand in his downfall. It was I who’d unraveled the mystery and found out why Justin Kerner was hunting the D.C. area. I’d discovered that his death magic combined with the taint of supernatural madness made him capable of killing Liberi, and that he wanted to kill them all—starting with Konstantin—for having forced him to take the tainted seed in the first place. I’d uncovered the fact that all of the Olympians could have been killed because Konstantin made a mistake, and that was what caused him to lose power. But that didn’t mean it was my fault.
I rubbed my eyes, which ached with a combination of weariness and lingering grief over my family’s pain. Why did every Liberi blame me when things went wrong in their lives? Jamaal had originally blamed me for killing Emmitt. Emma blamed me for the dissolution of her marriage, which I believed she was 100 percent responsible for herself. And now Konstantin was blaming me for his own screwup.
I had only met Konstantin once, and though he’d chilled me to the bone with his coldness and malice, I had never once suspected he was insane. But a vendetta of this magnitude did not speak of a man of sound mind. Maybe losing his place at the top of the totem pole had cost him his sanity as well as his power.
Whatever the reason, he was one hell of a dangerous enemy. And if he was coming after me, my life was going to get a lot more difficult very soon.
FOUR
It was still oh-God o’clock, and the sun hadn’t even begun to peek up over the horizon yet, but I was so wired on stress and chocolate ice cream that I didn’t put much consideration into other people’s comfort and routine.
I forwarded the threatening email to Leo, our resident computer expert. He was a descendant of Hermes, and had a Midas touch where money was concerned. He’d first started learning about computers so he could keep in constant touch with the stock market, but he’d taken to them
like a duck to water, and his hacking skills were sometimes downright scary.
Leo’s rooms were down the hall from mine, and after I hit send, I scurried to his door and knocked. I figured the email I just forwarded needed an explanation, and it wasn’t until I’d knocked a second time without an answer that I realized what time it was, and that I was probably the only person in the house awake at this hour, other than Blake and Steph, if they were still up. I was badly rattled and wanted to get a start on finding Konstantin now, but as urgent as it felt to me, I knew it wasn’t reasonable to be waking anybody up before six. Whatever Konstantin had planned for me, it would take days, weeks, maybe even months to develop, and letting Leo get another couple hours of sleep wouldn’t endanger anyone.
I was just turning to go back to my room when the door behind me opened.
When I first caught sight of Leo, I was sure I’d rousted him out of bed. He was wearing a fluffy white bathrobe over blue and white striped pajamas. A second glance showed me that his mousy brown hair was slightly damp and his cheeks were freshly shaven. He smelled of drugstore aftershave and Listerine, and I came to the inevitable conclusion that I hadn’t woken him up after all. His eyes widened when he saw me.
“Nikki?” he said. “What are you doing here?” He reached into the pocket of his robe and pulled out a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, shoving them onto his face in a gesture that looked almost nervous. I realized I’d never seen him without the glasses before.
I think Leo has a good heart, or he wouldn’t be working for Anderson, but he’s about as socially awkward an individual as I’ve ever met. He has an obvious aversion to eye contact, and he always seems a bit nervous and distracted, like only a fraction of his attention is actually focused on whoever he’s talking to. I suspect when he heard the knock on his door, he assumed it was Anderson, and finding me there threw him for a bit of a loop. His shoulders hunched as if he were expecting a blow, and his gaze dropped to the floor.
He was nervous with everyone, but more so with me, the newcomer to the house. I wondered if I should have explained what was going on via email instead of coming to his suite, but it was too late now.
“Hi, Leo. I’m sorry to bother you so early in the morning. I hope I didn’t wake you.” I knew I hadn’t, but it seemed like the polite thing to say, and I found Leo’s nerves and awkwardness contagious.
“I was awake,” he told my left shoulder. “The European markets start opening at four.”
Geez, and I’d thought I was an early riser. I’d never known anyone else in the house was up at this hour, which I guessed meant Leo didn’t venture out of his rooms in the morning. Actually, Leo didn’t venture out of his rooms much at all. Sometimes he had to be reminded to step away from his computers and eat. It didn’t seem like much of a life to me, but what do I know?
With anyone else, I probably would have tried a little small talk before launching into my request, but I figured Leo wouldn’t blame me—hell, he probably wouldn’t even notice—if I skipped the social niceties.
“I forwarded you an email,” I told him. “It’s supposedly from Konstantin. I wonder if you’d be able to trace it or something.” I honestly didn’t think Konstantin was stupid enough to send me a trail of bread crumbs that would lead right to him, but I figured it would be foolish not to at least check it out. Not to mention that Konstantin was centuries old and might not be as computer literate as a modern man.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Leo didn’t beckon me to follow as he retreated into his room, but he didn’t close the door, either. I assumed that was an invitation to come in, so I stepped inside.
All of the suites Anderson’s Liberi inhabited consisted of two rooms. For most of us, one of those rooms was the bedroom, and one was some version of a sitting room. I supposed with his fanatical attachment to the stock market and his lack of socialization, a sitting room would have been useless for Leo. Instead, the first room of his two-room suite was what I imagined the inside of a NASA control room might look like, only less tidy.
A huge L-shaped desk took up about half the room, and practically every inch of that desk was covered with computer equipment, bristling with tangled cords and surge protectors. I saw laptops and desktops, Macs and PCs, shiny new machines and old clunkers that looked like they were held together by duct tape. There were monitors sprinkled here and there on the desk, but there was also a bank of them mounted on the wall. Disassembled units spewing spare parts were tucked under the desk and pushed up against the other walls, and a freestanding air conditioner blasted cold air into the room even though it was January.
Leo must have noticed me staring at the air conditioner.
“The computers generate a lot of heat,” he explained. “If I didn’t keep the air conditioner going, my equipment would overheat.”
He plopped down into a rolling chair and used the edge of the desk to pull himself over in front of one of the computers. His fingers moved lightning fast over the keyboard. Whatever he was using as an email reader wasn’t anything I’d seen before, and I wondered if it was something Leo had created himself. There were no pretty icons or neatly labeled buttons, and instead of tooling around with a mouse or track pad, Leo was typing into a command window. He paused practically midkeystroke and glanced over at one of the other monitors. He frowned and wheeled himself over, hit a couple of keys, then returned to the email.
“You’re really into multitasking, aren’t you?” I murmured.
“Have to be,” he answered without turning his attention away from the computers. “Sometimes all the markets are open at the same time. Don’t want to miss anything.”
I was tempted to ask him what he did for fun, but I already knew the answer. Maybe he wasn’t just socially awkward. Maybe he actually bordered on autistic, though he was obviously high functioning. I wondered if he’d always been like that, or if becoming Liberi had changed him. Then I wondered how someone as mild mannered and aloof as Leo could have become Liberi in the first place. Unless he was one of the original Liberi—the son of a god, rather than just a descendant of one—he had to have killed someone to become immortal. I had a hard time imagining him doing that.
“I like numbers more than I like people,” he said without looking up, as if he could guess the direction of my thoughts. His fingers kept zipping across the keyboard. There was an edge of defensiveness in his voice. “Whenever someone new comes along, they feel sorry for me and try to draw me out, but I’m not like the rest of you. I’m happy like this.”
Maybe that was why he was so nervous around me—he was waiting for me to try to “save” him. If he were an ordinary human being, I might have thought him desperately in need of human contact. I might have thought he couldn’t possibly be living a good life shut up in his room with his computers all the time. But he wasn’t an ordinary human being—he was a Liberi. Immortality, and the powers that were awakened in a Liberi when he or she became immortal, changed people, made them something other than human. When Leo said he was happy with his life as it was, I believed him.
“I don’t feel sorry for you,” I said, though maybe that wasn’t strictly true. It seemed sad to me that Leo would spend so much of his time so completely alone, but I knew I was imposing my own likes and dislikes on him. “I wouldn’t want to live like this, but if it works for you, that’s all that matters.”
He paused for a moment in his typing, looking over his shoulder at me, though he still didn’t meet my eyes. “Thank you.”
“No problem.”
He turned back to his computer and tapped a few more keys. Then he nodded sagely and spoke without turning around.
“The email was sent from a computer at the FedEx Print and Ship on K Street at 4:02 A.M. The email account was created at 3:46 A.M. and deleted at 4:03. Sending that email is the only activity associated with the account, and the user registered as John Smith.”
“Creative,” I muttered under my breath. I’d have to swing by and see if anyo
ne there remembered seeing Konstantin, though even if they did, I didn’t think it would be much help. I needed to know where he was now, not where he’d been at 4 A.M.
Leo shrugged apologetically. “Sorry that’s all I could get.”
I almost laughed. “You got everything there was, and in about five minutes. I couldn’t have asked for more.”
He didn’t respond, instead zipping his chair over to another computer and typing at high speed. But even so, I didn’t miss the pleased little smile on his lips.
I’m not particularly fond of admitting I’m wrong—who is?—but it seemed like the logical conclusion, given the evidence. Trying to catch Konstantin all by myself would be flat-out stupid, and it wasn’t like I could do anything to him if I caught him. Which meant I had to swallow my pride and tell Anderson I’d changed my mind about the hunt.
I was in a foul mood when I stepped into his study after a late breakfast I’d forced myself to eat in an attempt to counteract the ice-cream binge. I desperately wanted to catch Konstantin before his next attack, whatever that would be, but I wasn’t overly optimistic about my chances. I didn’t have much to go on, and since Konstantin knew he’d have a descendant of Artemis on his tail, he was no doubt going to be extra paranoid and careful about keeping himself hidden.
The icing on my grumpy-pants cake was the sympathy the rest of Anderson’s Liberi had thrown my way. Blake had apparently spread the word after Steph’s visit, and my friends/coworkers had paraded through my suite to offer their condolences. I had to endure a long, motherly hug from Maggie, who was so sweet my misfortune brought a sheen of tears to her eyes; an awkward visit from Logan, who was too much of a manly man to know how to express his sympathies comfortably; and an even more awkward visit from Jack, who, with his trickster heritage, had trouble being serious for more than two minutes in a row.
