by Jenna Black
Steph and I drove around the area a little while longer, just to be thorough, but the rain had settled in to stay, and the moon wouldn’t be giving me any more help tonight. Our meanderings had taken us deep into the heart of D.C., and the most convenient way to get back to Arlington was to take Independence Avenue to the Arlington Memorial Bridge. I was staring out the rain-speckled side window, brooding about what a total failure this expedition had turned out to be. It wasn’t until we passed the Sackler Gallery that I snapped out of my funk and directed my mind toward another of the many problems on my plate.
To be fair, I shouldn’t have been thinking of Jamaal as one of my problems. I wasn’t his girlfriend, was barely even his friend anymore. And he was a grown man, responsible for his own issues. But I couldn’t help wondering if his almost obsessive practice with Sita—and his decreasing ability to keep her controlled and contained—was a sign that his self-imposed isolation wasn’t good for him.
The new Indian art exhibit would be opening on Saturday, but I’d already determined that Jamaal would blow me off if I asked him to go see it with me. I needed a stronger temptation, something Jamaal couldn’t get on his own. I glanced sidelong at Steph, who was quietly concentrating on driving. Through her extensive charity work, Steph knew practically everybody who was anybody in the D.C. area. Her virtual Rolodex contained a veritable cornucopia of the rich, famous, and powerful.
I didn’t know how to bring up the subject gracefully, so I just blurted it out.
“Do you happen to know anyone who’s a big muckety-muck at the Sackler Gallery?” I asked.
We conveniently came to a red light, so Steph could turn in her seat and give me a long, puzzled look. “The Sackler? Why? Have you developed a sudden interest in Asian art?”
There was something too knowing in her eyes as she stared at me. My sister’s no dummy, and not only was she aware I had the hots for Jamaal—despite my repeated attempts to deny it—but she was also aware that he was the descendant of an Indian goddess. Even if I could have thought of a more innocuous-sounding reason for my interest, I didn’t think Steph would buy it, not when the look in her eye said she’d already put two and two together.
The light turned green, and Steph returned her attention to the road. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. Steph disapproved of Jamaal almost as much as I disapproved of Blake, so asking for her help might not have been the smartest idea I’d ever had. However, I’d already committed to the course of action.
“There’s a new Indian art exhibit opening up next weekend,” I said. “I’d like to see if I can draw Jamaal out to go see it, but I know if I ask him, he’ll say no. I was thinking maybe you had a contact who could get us in for a private tour, maybe before the exhibit is open to the public. I think he’d have a much harder time saying no to that.”
Steph was silent for the next couple of blocks, and I forced myself to be quiet and let her think. If I tried too hard to persuade her, she might come to the conclusion that I was letting myself get too involved. Actually, she probably already thought that, but there was no reason to make it worse.
“Do you really think that’s a good idea?” she finally asked me.
I shrugged, trying to look casual. “It wouldn’t be that big a deal. Just a trip to a museum. But I think Jamaal needs to get out of his own head for a while.
“That’s your professional opinion, eh?”
I bristled, but managed to refrain from making an angry retort. “It’s my opinion as a fellow human being.” I didn’t think telling Steph about Sita’s walkabout was going to incline her to see things my way, though it was that more than anything that convinced me Jamaal needed more human contact. “We’re not meant to be solitary creatures. Or didn’t they teach you that in psych class?” Steph had been a psych major in college, although she’d chosen not to pursue a career.
She raised an eyebrow at me. “No reason to get testy.”
“I’m not!” I protested, though I knew I was.
Steph ignored me. “If I have to listen to you telling me Blake isn’t good for me, then you have to listen to me telling you that Jamaal is bad news for any woman.”
I slumped in my seat. I thought I’d been getting better, refraining from editorializing about Blake, but maybe I hadn’t. “You don’t listen to me about Blake,” I pointed out.
“That doesn’t stop you from sharing your opinion.”
“When was the last time I said anything to you about him?” I honestly couldn’t remember. I’d bitten my tongue more times than I could count.
“You don’t have to say anything to make your opinion clear. All I have to do is take one look at your face when I’m talking about him.”
I glanced out the side window to orient myself, hoping we were almost at the mansion so I could escape this conversation. No such luck.
“I’m doing my best to keep my opinions to myself,” I said. “That doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions, and I can’t just turn them off like a light. Sorry.”
Steph’s hands had tightened on the wheel, and I hated the tension that radiated from her. She was a genuinely nice, good person, and she deserved to be happy. Ever since I’d become Liberi, I’d been dragging her down, and I wished I could make things better. But I knew Blake was bad for her. Eventually, they would both get tired of a relationship that didn’t include sex, and then one of two things would happen: either Blake would sleep with her, thereby tying her to him for the rest of her life, or he’d dump her, breaking her heart. Neither of these alternatives was acceptable.
“I just want you to stop treating me like a child who’s not capable of making her own decisions. I’m twenty-seven years old, and I don’t need your guidance.”
“What do you want me to do, Steph? Stop caring about you? Stop worrying about you? That isn’t reasonable.”
“Oh, but it’s reasonable for you to ask me not to care that you’re falling for Jamaal?”
“I’m not falling for him!” I snapped, which probably cemented her opinion that I was. I took a deep breath to calm my temper. Steph had seen me make a lot of bad relationship decisions over the years, and I couldn’t blame her for trying to warn me away from what she saw as just one more. I took a second deep breath just for insurance, then continued in what I hoped was a calmer, more reasonable tone.
“Jamaal is a different story. I live in the same house with him, and unless the Olympians turn over a new leaf and decide to live and let live, I’ll be stuck with him for the rest of my life. And in case you’ve forgotten, I’m immortal.” Despite already having come back from the dead once, those words sounded almost laughably absurd. I supposed I’d get used to it someday, but that day sure hadn’t come yet. “It’s in my own best interests to try to help him, because I have to live with him either way, and he’s not good to live with right now.”
Everything I said was true, but it wasn’t really the reason I wanted to help Jamaal, and we both knew it. Steph tapped her fingernails against the steering wheel, but the gesture seemed more restless than angry. Maybe we were making progress.
“Why does it have to be you who tries to help him?” she asked, and I decided we weren’t making progress after all. “Why don’t you let Anderson handle it? He’s supposed to be in charge, right?”
It was a perfectly reasonable question. Anderson had certainly known Jamaal longer than I had, and Jamaal respected him a hell of a lot more. But I didn’t think Anderson or any of his Liberi could connect to Jamaal the way I did. Our lives and backgrounds were completely different, and yet there were unmistakable similarities between our emotional landscapes. I knew what it was like to feel isolated, to hold everyone at arm’s length and be completely self-sufficient. Anderson could see Jamaal’s outward behavior, but he couldn’t understand it like I could.
Of course, if I told Steph any of that, she’d read a whole lot more into it, and things felt rocky between us already.
“Anderson is too much of a guy to be much hel
p,” I said, and it was the truth, even if it wasn’t the whole truth. “But he does have money up the wazoo, so maybe he’ll have some contacts that can get me into the Sackler. I’ll ask him about it tomorrow, and we can pretend we never had this conversation.”
There was a long silence, and then Steph shook her head and sighed. “Don’t bother. I know one of the trustees, and I can probably arrange something.” I started to thank her, but she cut me off. “You can thank me by laying off me and Blake. What we do or don’t do is our business, not yours. You’ve more than done your sisterly duty in trying to warn me, and you need to back the hell off.”
I swallowed a protest. I had backed the hell off. Hadn’t I? But maybe I needed to try harder.
“Okay, fine. It’s a deal,” I said.
Steph didn’t respond.
The rest of the ride passed in silence.
NINE
It was still raining when I woke up on Monday, and a glance at the weather forecast showed me the rain was settling in for a lengthy visit. This did not increase my chances of hunting down Konstantin before he struck again, and I was tempted to drop-kick my computer for giving me the bad news.
I made another pot of coffee instead. Then I stretched out on the sofa in my sitting room with my laptop on my lap to make a show of keeping up to date with the news. I was brooding a little too much to read more than a couple of paragraphs here and there, and those only for the most interesting of stories.
My heart took a nosedive into my stomach when I saw the headline that read ARSON SUSPECTED IN CONDO FIRE THAT LEFT THREE DEAD.
There was no reason to think it had anything to do with me, but the words arson and condo jumped out at me like monsters at a horror movie.
My throat was tight, my every muscle taut, as I reluctantly clicked on the link to the full story. My breath whooshed out of my lungs when I saw the picture of a burned-out husk of a building. The roof had collapsed, and the brick facade was black as charcoal, but the shape of the building was familiar, as were the rows of granite planters that adorned the circular drive.
Without a doubt, it was my building.
Konstantin had struck again, and this time it wasn’t an empty building he’d burned.
My eyes were clouded with tears as I took in the horrifying details the article revealed. The fire had occurred around ten last night, while Steph and I had been riding around the Beltway in our fruitless quest. The three dead were a ninety-two-year-old woman who was apparently overcome by the smoke before she’d even gotten out of bed, a twenty-five-year-old single mother whose broken leg had hampered her attempt to escape, and the three-month-old baby she’d been trying to carry to safety.
All dead because of me.
I shook my head violently. No, it was because of Konstantin. I had to remember that, had to keep it front and center in my mind, or I would go crazy. I’d done nothing wrong, nothing I’d had any reason to believe would endanger innocent civilians. Konstantin had always made it clear that he valued humans about as much as he valued insects. It was his contempt and malice that was behind the deaths, not me.
All sound, logical reasons why I shouldn’t feel guilty about what had happened. And not one of them did a thing to lessen the guilt that sat heavily on my shoulders.
I read the article about four or five times, under the guise of getting all the details down, but I think I was mostly just flogging myself with them. Maybe if I’d done a better job on one of my aborted hunts, I would have been able to stop Konstantin before he killed innocents. Maybe instead of giving Jamaal a hard time about his obsessive practicing with Sita, I should be practicing my own powers just as obsessively. I’d practiced throwing and shooting because I understood exactly how that worked, but I hadn’t done a whole lot with the hunting because it was hard to figure out how to train for something I didn’t understand. Maybe if I’d put some serious time and effort into it . . .
Frightening how easy it was for me to find reasons to blame myself, even when I knew that was exactly what Konstantin wanted and that I was playing into his hands.
For a while, I was too busy wallowing to notice the incongruity in last night’s fire. But when my mind kept circling back to my failed hunts, something jumped out at me.
The article said the fire had started around ten last night. That was when I’d been dreaming about hedge mazes and directing Steph toward what was presumably Konstantin’s location. My powers had cut out the moment the rain set in, but we’d been way across the city from my condo when that had happened.
I unfolded my D.C. metro area map. Steph said we’d been in Maryland when I’d directed her to get off the Beltway, and while I’d had her make quite a few turns as I homed in on the “signal,” we’d been traveling in a northwesterly direction at the time my supernatural radar went silent. My condo was northeast of that location, and quite a distance away.
It didn’t necessarily mean anything. I couldn’t be certain my powers were actually leading me to Konstantin, and even if they were, he probably hired a third party to set the fire for him. He wasn’t the type to do his own dirty work if he didn’t have to. But that line of thought reminded me of my doubts about Konstantin being the culprit. He had always struck me as coldly calculating, cruel, and dangerous, but not crazy.
No, an attack that left three innocent civilians dead pointed more to a mind like Emma’s, dangerously unhinged. Maybe Cyrus and I were both wrong about her. Maybe having Erin killed hadn’t been the end all, be all of her revenge.
I’d been having a hard enough time tracking down Konstantin when I’d been sure he was behind the fires. Now I had another viable suspect, one who was just as much under the Olympians’ protection. And yet, whoever the firebug was, I was going to have to catch them, and catch them soon. Before more innocents died.
I gave myself a few hours to get over the initial shock and horror of what had happened, locking myself in my suite and turning off my phone. If I didn’t pull myself together before I talked to anyone, I was going to say something I would later regret. Either that, or I’d burst into tears, which was almost as bad. I didn’t know what whoever it was had planned for the next attack, but I was sure the other shoe would drop soon, and it would be worse even than the condo fire. If I was going to stop it from happening, I had to keep my emotions as under control as humanly possible.
Hours of sitting alone in my room and brooding didn’t do much to improve how I felt, and I eventually decided no Zen-like state of calm was going to descend on me out of the ether. I didn’t have time to sit around anymore anyway.
I didn’t like my chances of hunting down Konstantin in the next handful of days, especially not with the rain cutting off the moonlight. That meant my best chance of preventing another attack was through diplomacy. Whether the person behind the attack was Emma or Konstantin, they were both Olympians, and that meant they answered to Cyrus, at least in theory. I’d already seen evidence that Cyrus was not the nice guy he pretended to be, but I believed he genuinely wanted to avoid a war between the Olympians and Anderson’s Liberi. Maybe he could be persuaded to put a leash on whoever was behind the fires.
It was a long shot, particularly if it really was Konstantin who was behind them. No matter what terms he and Cyrus had come to in order to effect their peaceful regime change, I didn’t think there was a chance in hell Konstantin would take orders from his son. Maybe I would just have to hope that Emma was the guilty party and that she would be forced to obey Cyrus.
Of course, I was getting way ahead of myself. First, I had to find a way to convince Cyrus to call off the dogs.
My first inclination was to pick up the phone and call him, but even in my depleted mental state, I knew that wasn’t a good idea. I didn’t have enough clout to enter into a negotiation with Cyrus myself, and Anderson would not appreciate me going behind his back. I’d done it once before, and had the feeling I’d just barely escaped a date with his Hand of Doom.
I printed out the article about the fire
, sticking it in a manila folder so I didn’t have to see the headline and the photo anymore. Then I ducked into the bathroom to wash my face and put on some makeup, trying to make myself look more normal than I felt. The concealer lightened the dark circles under my eyes, but it didn’t make them go away completely, and there wasn’t any makeup in the world that could conceal the stark expression in my eyes. I wanted to look calm, strong, and completely reasonable when I pleaded my case to Anderson, but the reflection in the mirror told me I was falling short.
There was nothing to be done about it, so I grabbed the manila folder and marched down to the second floor, hoping Anderson would be in his study. The door was open, but when I stepped inside, Anderson wasn’t at his desk. He didn’t go out much, so chances were he was in the house, most likely somewhere else in his own private territory in the east wing. The rest of us weren’t allowed to venture into the east wing except in case of emergency, and I wasn’t sure this would qualify in his book, no matter how urgent it felt to me.
I stepped out into the hallway. “Anderson?” I called, hoping he was within earshot.
A door down the hall opened, and Anderson stuck his head out. His hair was slicked back from his face with water, and I caught a glimpse of bare shoulder, though he used the door to shield his body from view. If I weren’t such an emotional wreck, I might have tried some wisecrack about our mutual propensity for interrupting showers, but I couldn’t muster even a hint of humor.
I must have looked even worse than I thought, because Anderson didn’t wait for me to speak.
“Just let me throw some clothes on,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
I nodded, my throat tightening up on me as my mind insisted on flashing me an image of the poor, injured mother trying desperately to get her baby to safety while the building burned around her and smoke stole her breath. I had always been a bit of a bleeding heart, and I had the unfortunate tendency to let other people’s misery become my own. I would never have made it as a health-care worker of any kind, being completely unable to hold myself at the distance necessary to maintain sanity. I told myself not to think about the doomed woman, or to imagine what she must have felt in the final minutes of her life, how terrified and utterly devastated she must have been when she’d realized she wasn’t getting her baby out.
