Ruby Fever EPB, page 17
Runa happened to be in her siblings’ casita. She heard the siren, accessed the security feed, saw Arabella asleep and Buller strolling in, told her siblings to stay put until the fight was over, and ran out there to fight. Halle and Ragnar obeyed her precisely, meaning the moment she killed the nightbloom, they raced out of the house to help detoxify everyone.
Venenata mages detoxified by either poisoning their patient with something that would kill the pathogen or by drawing the poison into themselves and metabolizing it. Even though we had cans of nightbloom antidote, time was a factor. The Etterson kids exhausted themselves trying to save everyone. Poor Ragnar looked like he wasn’t sure where he was or what he was doing here.
To my right, Arabella watched Konstantin with silent hatred. I had brought her up to speed as soon as she woke up, and she zeroed in on Konstantin as the reason for Mom’s wound and everything that followed. That’s when Arabella was at her most dangerous, when she didn’t say anything and just seethed.
Konstantin and Alessandro had run to the north gate during the attack, missing Buller by moments. Alessandro torched the first nightbloom with his favorite tactical flamethrower. Konstantin changed shape into one of our guards and went after Krause, but she had fled as soon as she dropped those portals. Once the nightbloom was dead, Alessandro doubled back and ran into Buller and me.
Grandma Frida tapped her fingers on the table, watching Mom who sat across from her. Mom looked paler today, her bronze skin tinted with grey. Grandma Frida told me Mom wasn’t taking her pain medication. The attack had caught Grandma Frida in the motor pool, up to her elbow inside her latest mobile artillery project. The security protocol dictated that she and the three-person guard team protected the south gate, which was exactly what she did.
Leon sat by Grandma Frida. His arms, exposed by his T-shirt, sported hair-thin pale slashes that looked like old scars. Whatever attacked the FBI had gotten him after all. Dr. Patel told me he wasn’t sure they would go away or when. It was definitely making him sick, which was why he’d been asleep in his tower when the nightbloom seed landed on our patio. He’d tried shooting it and Buller, and none of it did any good, not even the minigun. Now he brooded, heartbroken because he felt useless.
The door swung open, and Cornelius entered, his expression grave. Matilda was next, her long dark hair gathered into a ponytail. She was carrying a fluffy Himalayan cat, whose full name was Go Mi Nam and who usually answered to “Kitty.” Patricia Taft was the last to enter, carrying a trash can. Some people had a stronger reaction to nightbloom than others.
Matilda walked over to Ragnar and deposited the cat on his lap. Ragnar blinked at her, startled.
“Comfort,” Matilda explained.
Go Mi Nam dutifully purred like a runaway bulldozer.
“Do I not get comfort?” Leon asked sadly.
Matilda walked around the table, hugged him gently, and patted his hair as if he was a dog. “It will be okay. You can shoot people next time.”
Everyone was finally here.
First things first.
“Family, Prince Berezin.” I nodded at Konstantin.
“Konstantin, please,” Konstantin said with a charming smile.
The family glowered back.
“Konstantin represents the Russian Imperium. He will be helping us with this matter,” I said.
Arabella took the metal spoon out of Runa’s drink and bent it.
I explained the prince, the contract, Smirnov, and everything surrounding it.
Nobody said anything.
“Do you know who attacked Linus?” Arabella demanded.
“Yes,” I told her.
“Did you do anything about it?”
“No.”
The outrage on my sister’s face was so stark, I almost asked Alessandro to summon a shield for me.
“Catalina!” Arabella snarled.
“It’s Kaylee Cabera, and I don’t know how she fits into this yet.”
“I do,” Konstantin volunteered.
I pivoted to him.
“Kaylee was a dud,” Konstantin said. “Luciana was facing a lot of pressure from the family to select an official successor and it couldn’t be Kaylee. Of course, you are already aware of the connection between Arkan and Luciana.”
Alessandro waved him on.
“Luciana contacted Arkan to fix the problem and so he did. Kaylee survived and became one of his mutant Primes. Unfortunately, someone alerted Duncan to the matter, and he went after her. Luciana realized the Warden was making circles around her daughter and getting closer with every pass, so she appealed to Arkan to kill him. He refused.”
“Why?” Leon asked.
“The Warden of Texas is a risky target,” Alessandro answered. “He probably wasn’t sure he could handle the fallout.”
“Luciana took her monster child and did it anyway,” Konstantin said. “And to top it off, she failed to seal the deal. Arkan went into a rage, threw some things, and once he calmed down, decided that he needed to do damage control. He ordered Xavier to kill her and to make it public.”
“And he had her killed at Linus’ restaurant,” I thought out loud. “As a kind of peace offering. ‘Look, she tried to murder you, and I punished her in retaliation.’”
“Exactly.” Konstantin nodded.
In Arkan’s mind, this probably made Linus and him square somehow. And the Russian prince had seen an opening to bring Arkan down. This matter put the Wardens and Arkan on a collision course, so he gave us both a little push. I had put most of this together already, but it was nice to have a confirmation.
“I want her dead,” Arabella stated, her voice flat.
“Not as much as me,” I told her. “I’d like to rip her throat out.” I made the squeezing motion with my hand. “Then she couldn’t hurt us anymore. It would be reassuring.”
Everyone looked at me. Apparently, I must’ve said something surprising.
“Unfortunately, there is the small matter of the oath of office,” I said. “I’m the Acting Warden. I have . . . obligations.”
“Screw obligations.” Arabella punched the table. It quaked a little.
“We will arrest her,” Alessandro told her. “If she resists, we will neutralize her one way or another.”
Arabella pinched her lips together, her mouth a hard flat line.
“We are on full lockdown going forward,” I said. “Arkan is coming. Do we need to get the kids out?”
“No,” Ragnar said.
Halle raised her head off the table. “Absolutely not. We’re not leaving. This is our home.”
I looked at Cornelius.
“I will remain here,” Matilda announced.
“It seems like the most prudent course of action,” Cornelius said.
Patricia grabbed her trash can, stepped out into the hallway, and shut the door.
We all silently looked at each other until the retching sounds stopped and she came back in.
“Sending the children out creates an opportunity for hostages,” Patricia said.
“Then the kids will stay,” I said. “What about Regina?”
“My wife is still with her cousin in Lyon,” Patricia said. “She isn’t due back for another week. I’ve let them know about the situation and asked her to not cut her trip short.”
I could imagine how that had gone. Knowing Regina, she would’ve wanted to be on the next plane to Houston.
“Where are we with our phones?” Mom asked.
Everyone looked at Bernard. He reached under the table and produced a large box filled with neatly stacked phones, each labeled with a name. Leon took his phone out and passed the box around the table.
“This won’t happen again,” Bernard said.
“Is there a plan for this Arkan situation?” Arabella asked.
“Konstantin provided us with a breakdown of Arkan’s finances. He has squirreled away a big chunk of money stateside. We take it away from him,” I said. I knew an FBI agent who would be overjoyed to help.
Alessandro spoke, his voice tinted with detachment, as if he were discussing a chore. “He has a mole in the Harris County DA’s office.”
Leon whistled.
I’d cursed when I found out.
“There are other informants as well, but that one is the most important,” Alessandro said.
“Are you going to expose him?” Arabella asked.
“No. I’m going to take care of him personally,” the Artisan said.
There was an awful finality in his voice. I had forgotten how angry he was.
Arabella smiled. “I like that part.”
I turned to Leon. “What exactly happened with the FBI?”
Leon shrugged. “Nothing much.”
I waited.
He sighed. “I followed them to the Caberas.”
“I didn’t see you.”
“You weren’t supposed to see me. You said ‘shadow.’ You didn’t say ‘make yourself seen.’”
He had a point.
“Arkan’s people hit us on the Justice Park Drive,” Leon continued. “Literally forty-five seconds from the FBI field office. An enerkinetic and some other weird shithead. The enerkinetic lit up their vehicle with projectiles. It blew up a little bit . . .”
“Define a little bit,” Mom said.
“Driver’s side door blew off and the engine flew out and landed on their SUV’s roof. It crushed the top of the car but didn’t fall all the way through.” Leon raised his hand and tilted it side to side. “Halfway in, halfway out type of thing. Of course, the windows shattered because the roof came down.”
“Cheap-assed armored glass,” Grandma Frida opined. “That’s government contract work for you.”
I killed a groan.
“I dropped the enerkinetic, but the other asshole snuck up from the opposite side. He shot bursts of this glowing crap, looked like seaweed, stung like a jellyfish, and things got serious when it wrapped around the car and the metal started smoking.”
“Where were the FBI agents at this point?” Mom growled.
“Inside the car.”
Oh no.
“It took me a second to find him,” Leon said. “The car was smoking, and the fumes made it difficult to see and breathe, and then the seaweed kind of contracted, and there was a crunchy noise, so it was hard to hear.”
Arabella put her head on the table, face down.
“Then he tried to shoot that shit at me, and I saw the direction it was coming from, and the rest is history.” Leon grinned.
“What happened to the FBI agents breathing in toxic fumes while trapped in a car that was being crushed?” Alessandro asked.
“I pulled them out. Agent Garcia was mostly okay. Wahl wasn’t breathing, so I did CPR until the FBI guys ran out of the building and helped.”
“That’s my boy!” Grandma Frida said.
I stared at him.
“What?” He raised his arms. “He was breathing fine when I left. They put one of those masks on his face and he kept taking it off to curse. All is well that ended well. And now I’ve got cool scars. Chicks dig scars.”
“Such a fascinating family,” Konstantin said.
He didn’t know the half of it.
“Okay,” I said. “We all know what we’re doing. Arabella, you are guarding, I’m going to deal with Arkan’s accounts, Alessandro and Konstantin will go after the mole.”
“What about us?” Ragnar asked.
“You recuperate. We don’t know when we will get attacked again.”
“Before we adjourn,” Cornelius said. “Has anyone seen the spider?”
“There is a spider?” Konstantin asked.
Arabella opened her eyes wide. “Yes, very large, very venomous.”
Bern tapped his laptop. The security feed from the office hallway ignited on the screen on the wall. On it, Jadwiga leisurely made her way across the carpet and scurried into Arabella’s office. The timestamp said 03:41 a.m.
“Well, she’s still alive,” Cornelius said.
“She’s in there.” Matilda pointed at the side wall. “I will try to coax her out when it’s quiet.”
“I want to stress that an attack can come at any time,” I said. “He will throw everything he can at us. Nevada and Connor are dealing with Matthew Berry and his PAC mercenaries. The government is pretending that this problem doesn’t exist. The National Assembly is trying to manage the death of its Speaker. We are on our own.”
Everyone nodded. Nobody seemed alarmed or surprised. They just accepted it. Somewhere along the line in the last three or four years, House Baylor had become a combat House. If Arkan thought his blitz would break us, he was in for a lot of disappointment.
“You should make some of those little sandwiches with Hawaiian rolls and leftover pork tenderloin,” Grandma Frida told me. “So your mother won’t starve in her crow’s nest.”
The conference room emptied.
Leon paused by Alessandro on his way out. “How did you know about Buller being vulnerable to knives?”
“Watched a recording of him fighting a praelia once,” Alessandro said.
Mages with the praelia talent summoned weapons and amplified them with their magic. They were usually called warrior mages and they were hell in a fight at close range.
“The praelia had a glowing katana,” Alessandro said. “It did nothing. Toward the end of the fight, he ran out of juice and his sword disappeared. Buller grabbed him by the throat, and the mage pulled out a knife and tried to force it through the armor. He was pushing it in and it looked like it hit home, because Buller went berserk and stomped the guy to death.”
“Nice find,” Leon said and left.
It was just Arabella, Alessandro, and me.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
“How much time did I have left when you revived me?” she asked.
“Twelve minutes,” I told her. “You were the first one Halle detoxified.”
Arabella gave me a brooding look.
“I’m sorry,” I told her.
“I’m tired of bad shit happening.”
“Me too.”
She sighed and pushed to her feet. “I’m going to go . . . do things.”
She left the room and shut the door behind her. Alessandro and I looked at each other.
“Explain the Cousin Sasha thing to me, please. How are you involved with the Imperium?”
He sighed. “How much do you remember about the change of the Russian dynasty?”
“Not that much. In 1916, the power balance in the First World War shifted in favor of Russia. The German Empire suffered heavy casualties and decided to assassinate Czar Nicholas II. I think they bombed his family’s motorcade during Easter. Only Anastasia and Alexei survived because they were not in the two front cars.”
“That’s right.” Alessandro nodded. “The murder created a vacuum. Alexei was too young and too sick to take the throne. The Imperium was in the middle of a war and required a strong hand. They offered the crown to a half-dozen people, but everyone refused.”
I had no idea the Russians had to play musical chairs with the throne of the largest empire on the European Continent. The history textbooks I’d read glossed over that part. Of course, in Texas the history of Texas took up more space in the textbook than the entirety of the rest of Western Civilization combined.
“What happened then?” I asked.
“Russia scrambled to find someone who was both suitable and willing to accept the crown. They chose Michael Berezin, who’d spearheaded the Russian offensive against the German Empire. Michael Berezin became Michael I, and his entire family rallied around him to make sure he survived. The country depended on it. They faced a war from the outside and civil unrest from the inside. Communists were still agitating the workers in large cities. They were mostly failing because by killing Nicholas II, Germany made him into a martyr. The Russians wanted a new monarch and they wanted payback.”
“That explains volumes about how Konstantin thinks. Family against the world.”
“Exactly. Michael I had a younger brother, Boris. He was an antistasi mage, like his mother, and a Communist sympathizer. He thought that Russia would be better off without the monarchy, so he conspired with his Communist cell to assassinate his brother. The Okhrana, the Imperial secret police, had planted an operative in the cell to keep an eye on him. The plot was exposed.”
“Plots often are.”
“Michael I couldn’t bear to kill his baby brother, so Boris was stripped of his titles and holdings and exiled instead. He ended up in the UK, where he bought a false identity, and married into a merchant family, the Winstons, who were willing to look past wobbly birth certificates and passports to add an upper-range Significant to their gene pool.”
“Your mother’s family.”
He nodded. “My great-grandfather was a very bitter man. He spent his life trying to regain his titles and status.”
“I thought you said he was a Communist.”
“That was before he became poor.” Alessandro laughed softly. “My grandfather was obsessed with titles as well, which is why my mother ended up in an arranged marriage to my father.”
His mother was a lower-level Significant antistasi. He’d told me before that she had the magic, but not the power or the training to use it.
“My maternal grandfather arranged that marriage for the title, my mother went along with it because she liked my father and wanted to escape her family, my father thought she was beautiful and they would make powerful children, and my paternal grandfather got a dowry out of it. Everyone benefited.”
His eyes were dark. Eleven years after his parents walked down the aisle, Arkan murdered Marcello Sagredo, and Alessandro’s life would never be the same.
I stood up and wrapped my arms around him. He sighed, quietly exhaling tension.
“Does the Imperium want you back?” I asked.
“It’s not me I worry about. Konstantin is dangerous.”
“I know. I will be careful.”
His phone chimed. He took it out of his pocket and looked at it. “Arkan pulled Sanders out of Alaska.”
