Ruby Fever EPB, page 21
I marched through the central hallway of the Spa like I owned it. People saw my face and got out of the way. In all honesty, it probably wasn’t me. It was Alessandro looming next to me, looking like he would run over anyone who got in our way.
I’d called back to the Spa and had a conversation with a somber deputy warden which had taken twice as long as it should have because she was choosing her words like she was picking out the best apples at the market. My grandmother was attacked and injured. She was taken to the infirmary. She was also a little upset by the incident, so the Spa would be happy to waive the normal visiting procedures for my arrival. Translation: Victoria Tremaine is furious, so please, please, please hurry up and soothe her before everyone’s brains start leaking out of their ears, thank you.
I had hung up and announced I had to go to the Spa. Alessandro decided to come with me. We dropped our fight, grabbed the Bus, two Humvees, eight soldiers, plus Leon, and came here. Leon was currently staying with the convoy just outside the prison gates both because it needed guarding and because the Spa gave him “the creeps.”
Konstantin also wanted to come, but I nipped that in the bud. I wouldn’t put it past my grandmother to lobotomize him. I could just imagine the conversation with the Russian Embassy. Here is your prince. He can’t speak in complete sentences anymore, so dreadfully sorry . . .
We made a turn and walked into the infirmary. A prison guard stepped in our way.
“Prime Baylor to see Prime Tremaine,” I snapped.
“Second room on the right.”
We turned right, and Alessandro swung the second door open. My evil grandmother sat in a hospital bed. A bandage wrapped her head. Her makeup was flawless, her white kaftan blouse and white trousers pristine, and as she glared at me, her eyes were sharp and hard like two pale blue diamonds. Trevor, a human guard dog in an expensive black suit, stood by the bed, his face impassive. If you needed a faceless government agent with a short haircut, shades, and an unreadable expression, you needn’t have looked further.
“Do I not warrant knocking?” my grandmother demanded.
Alessandro turned and knocked on the inside of the open door.
“Yes, very clever,” Victoria Tremaine said.
Her eyes were clear, but her voice had lost some of its crispness. The attack shook her.
This was my fault. I had become so used to thinking of her as this terrifying, unassailable bastion of power that securing her safety had slipped right under my radar. That was what I had forgotten and so desperately tried to remember back in Bern’s Lair. My grandmother was a magical powerhouse. Looking at her now, I didn’t see that. I saw a woman past seventy who had been hiding her fragility for way too long.
Guilt gnawed at me. I had pulled my horrible aunt who didn’t give a damn about us off the street all the way in Mexico, but I had forgotten about my grandmother who was an hour away and actually cared if we lived or died.
I pivoted to Trevor. “What happened?”
“She was attacked in the garden,” he said. “A female guard hit her with a baton on the back of the head.”
“And her body is now cooling in the morgue,” Victoria said. “Problem solved. There was no need for them to contact you or for you to rush over here.”
I had thought Christina showing up was Arkan’s retaliation for us apprehending Matt. I was wrong. This was it. He’d targeted Victoria. He must’ve had it preplanned. It would’ve taken a single phone call and if the guard had been just a little bit quicker or hit a little harder, my grandmother would be dead right now.
I knew my grandmother. She had squeezed every drop of information out of her attacker before she crushed her mind. She wasn’t asking me questions, which meant the guard didn’t know much. She might not have even known who hired her. Right now, Victoria was likely trying to figure out which of her many sins had caught up with her.
I had to take her home.
“Grandmother, it isn’t safe here.”
Victoria scoffed. “Don’t be absurd.”
My phone chimed. A text message from Sabrian, our lawyer.
It’s done.
“We are taking you out of here,” I said.
“You forget yourself,” Victoria snapped. “Nobody takes me anywhere. I make the decisions, and I’ve chosen to stay here.”
She was betting that whoever hired the guard would try again. She wanted a second attack so she could figure out who was behind them.
“Signora Tremaine.”
Alessandro had slid into the Italian form of address, his voice considerate, firm, and reasonable. He must have decided that she would respond better to a formal approach and was using all the powers at his disposal.
“We are being targeted by Ignat Orlov,” he said. “This is not about you. This is about House Baylor. You are a vulnerability.”
Victoria pinned me with her stare. Her magic clamped me in a vise. “And why exactly is a former Russian assassin targeting your House?”
“That’s a private conversation, one I will be happy to have with you when we are safe in the Compound. Our lawyer has made arrangements for an emergency medical release.”
It took a lot of pulling, but she only had six months left on her sentence, and I had anticipated something like this. All the paperwork had been prepped, so plugging in the specific details took almost no time. The Spa was only too happy to get her off their premises.
“We have an armored vehicle,” Alessandro said. “We will transport you with minimal discomfort. As long as you remain here, you will be in danger and House Baylor can’t afford to lose you. We will not survive without your wisdom and guidance.”
The vise around my mind tightened. My grandmother’s eyes bored into mine. Holding her gaze was like trying to stare into the sun. It would burn your mind right through your eyes if you weren’t careful.
“You did not answer my question,” she said.
“Grandmother . . .” I started.
She leaned forward, looking like an ancient predatory raptor. “What are you hiding?”
She’d left me no choice.
“Trevor, Grandmother is in danger.”
Magic shot out of Trevor like an invisible fist and walloped Victoria. Her eyes rolled back into her skull, and she slumped onto the bed. Trevor scooped her up. The tendril of magic that connected us pulsed as I fed him a little more reassurance.
“Follow me please.”
We walked out of the infirmary, Trevor with my grandmother in his arms following two steps behind. The guard stood aside, averting his eyes, as if we were carrying a plague victim.
“You cooked Trevor?” Alessandro muttered in Italian.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“I did it little by little each time she sent him to talk to me.”
“There will be hell to pay when she wakes up.”
“I’m ready for it.”
I walked into my office, shut the door, sat behind my desk, and took a deep breath. We had settled Grandmother Victoria in a bedroom upstairs. She was still out. I was ready to resume our discussion about baggage and secret fiancées, but Patricia came and got Alessandro because there was some urgent security issue that required his attention.
That was fine. I could use some time to cool off.
I stared at my screen. So much had happened this morning and I’d had no time to process any of it.
My gaze snagged on the scented candle on my desk. Serenity and Calm. Yes, I would like some of that. I rummaged in my top drawer for the candle lighter until I found it, lit the candle, and stared at it. Normally the calm candles smelled of lavender, but this one was vanilla with a hint of cinnamon, a soothing warm aroma that made me think of baking and Nevada.
Nevada . . .
I tapped the keyboard and initiated a video call. I could’ve just used the phone, but despite replacing it, I was still wary. Not that calling through the computer was any safer, it was the same . . .
Nevada appeared on the screen. Her hair was in a loose braid. She sat on the large couch in the situation room on the second floor of their house. The computer screen offered me a nice view of her and a small slice of the coffee table. She must’ve taken the call on her tablet.
Somewhere out of view Bug was likely perched in front of a cluster of monitors. Arthur had fallen asleep next to Nevada, and his dark head was on her lap. Someone had put a soft crocheted blanket over him. Connor’s mother made them for her grandson. He had one in every color.
“Hey,” my sister said.
“Is now a bad time?”
“Not at all. Bug is the only one here, and he has headphones on.” She raised a mug to her lips and sipped from it.
“What are you drinking?”
“Milky oolong. It’s soothing. You would like it. I’ll bring some over once this thing is done.”
“Thank you for your help with Matt.”
“You’re welcome, but you don’t have to thank me. I like to make sure the DA office owes me. Keeps them out of trouble.”
“Did you get anything good?”
Nevada smiled her scary truthseeker smile. “The man was a treasure trove.”
I had run out of neutral things to talk about. It was time to get to the point.
“Linus is still unconscious.”
Nevada sighed. “He is a tough man. As long as he’s still breathing, there is hope.”
“He left a USB. One of those ‘If you are watching this, I am dead’ recordings.” Which was currently cooling its heels in Bern’s dehydrator, because I was stupid enough to drown it.
“Mhm,” Nevada said.
“He says he’s our grandfather.”
Nevada sipped her tea.
“You don’t seem surprised,” I pointed out.
“I thought he might be.”
“Because he paid a lot of attention to us without any logical reason?”
She shook her head. “How well do you remember Dad?”
I was twelve years old when our father died. “What do you mean?”
“Do you remember his face?”
I tried to recall it. I remembered his presence, I remembered what it felt like when he was in the room, his blond hair, but his face was . . . smudged. Guilt bit at me. I had forgotten my dad’s face.
“On the server, there should be a folder under Photos that says Mom and Dad’s Wedding,” Nevada said.
I split the screen in half, searched for the folder, found it, and opened a slideshow. Mom, smiling, in a white dress, so young looking. She looked like a kid, like she was one of us. For some reason that was slightly disturbing. And Dad next to her, blond, almost pretty rather than handsome, grinning. The memories came flooding back from my childhood. I remembered his face now.
Nevada shifted forward slightly, reached for her phone, and messed with it.
My phone chimed.
Arthur stirred. The remote on the coffee table rose into the air. Nevada plucked it, put it back, and stroked my nephew’s hair, soothing him back into sleep.
“He still manipulates objects in his sleep?”
“Yes. He stopped throwing them, for which I’m grateful. Look at your phone.”
I checked the text. She’d sent me an image, a photograph of a young dark-haired soldier grinning, a strange firearm in his hands . . .
“Linus!”
Nevada nodded.
The resemblance was unmistakable. Dad looked like Linus 2.0, the blond edition. A little shorter, a little more delicate in the face, but the same eyes, the same nose, the same grin.
“I came across it two years ago,” Nevada said. “Linus and Connor are two of the main donors for a veterans’ charity. The charity had a project they wanted to discuss in person, so Connor and I went, and while there, they showed us a wall of pictures from donors who had been in the service. I was looking at it and here was Dad with dark hair. It was such a weird moment.”
I stared at the image on my phone. So it was true. Part of me had doubted it and low-key hoped that Nevada would tell me it was ridiculous.
“Why didn’t Linus tell us?”
“I don’t know. He must have his reasons. Dad’s birth was complicated.”
Victoria Tremaine couldn’t carry a child to term, but she desperately wanted one. She had to rely on artificial insemination and a surrogate. According to her, she paid a Prime to serve as the father, but was unable to find a Prime willing to serve as a surrogate, so she committed a monstrous crime. She had the embryo implanted into a comatose Belgian woman, the original Beast of Cologne who had lost her mind during her last metamorphosis.
Our father carried the biomarkers for four sets of magic: the truthseeker from his mother, the siren and hephaestus talents from his father, and the Beast of Cologne metamorphosis from the surrogate in whose womb he grew. Feto-maternal microchimerism was the reason for Arabella’s powers.
Complicated didn’t even begin to describe it.
“There is another aspect to all of this.” Nevada reached over behind the tablet and held an object in front of the screen. Part of it was a wooden contraption that looked familiar.
“Is that a yarn swift?”
“Yes. The core of it is.”
The yarn swift was a modified wooden umbrella that held the skeins of yarn so they could be wound into balls. But this one had coils of thread, and some weird wire bent into hooks, and more weird rainbow thread stretched in loops over the hooks.
“Arthur made it,” Nevada said.
“What?”
“We were busy discussing something, and he was in his swing right next to us. He stole his grandmother’s yarn swift and her craft box while we were talking, and then Connor noticed him building this thing in midair.”
Well, it was certainly colorful.
“He’s built things before. Small things that made no sense.”
She didn’t sound right.
“And this thing makes sense?”
“It functions,” my sister said.
“In what way?”
Nevada raised the mutilated yarn swift straight up and squeezed a part of it. The band of blue thread snapped into the air. The yarn swift turned, firing the thread loops at an alarming speed.
It wasn’t thread. Oh. Oh!
“Are you telling me Arthur built a rubber band machine gun out of the yarn swift and some thread?”
“And some pushpins.”
Linus had to physically assemble the weapons. Yes, his magic made components snap together but only in a very narrow range. If he was truly a hephaestus mage, Arthur would be able to levitate parts to him . . . Oh my God.
“Are you okay?” She didn’t look okay.
Nevada pondered the rubber band gun. “No. It’s the pushpins that did it. They are sharp. He isn’t supposed to have them. He bent them into little hooks, see?”
“At least he didn’t use them as ammo.” I probably shouldn’t have said that.
“My son can barely speak, but he built a working firearm with tensile release and moving parts. We’ve got the telekinetic part down. We know what milestones to look for. We know the danger signs. We don’t know anything about hephaestus magic. Linus needs to wake the hell up. Soon. For his sake and ours. And when he does, you can’t kill him, Catalina.”
She looked really frightening for a second. I pulled back from the screen on pure instinct. “Why would I want to kill him? Are you hiding things from me?”
“Are you hiding things from Arabella?”
Touché.
“Sometimes older sisters have to keep things to themselves for the greater good. Promise me that you won’t kill Linus. I need him to help my son.”
“I promise not to kill Linus when he wakes up.”
Nevada nodded, satisfied, and put the rubber band gun down.
We looked at each other.
“But jokes aside, should I tell Arabella about the grandfather thing?”
My older sister sighed. “Why?”
“I feel like she should know.”
“What’s worse, losing a family friend or losing a grandfather you never knew and living with a lifetime of regret and unanswered questions?”
I thought about it.
“You’re right,” I said. “It just feels like lying.”
“Arabella is still trying to deal with Mom getting hurt and the nightbloom. It’s a lot.”
“How do you know about the nightbloom?”
Nevada leaned closer, her eyes intense and wide, and whispered, “I know everything.”
The screen went black.
I jumped out of my chair and headed straight out the office door and toward the main house. I needed to cook something in the worst way.
I popped the tray of chicken thighs into the oven. I had marinated them in a mixture of soy sauce, the juice of two limes, my homemade sweet chili sauce, and some spices for an hour. Most people thought that a proper marinade only happened overnight. In reality, for most meats, an hour was plenty.
Around me the kitchen of the main house was quiet. Kitchens were my sanctuary. And I really needed a sanctuary right now.
I washed the heirloom tomatoes, put a cutting board on the island, and took out my favorite cleaver.
My phone rang. Agent Wahl. Finally.
I took the call.
“The Bureau took this case as a favor,” Agent Wahl said.
Straight to the point.
“So far, I’ve had to process a dummy crime scene and then give a dummy press conference about it. In the past forty-eight hours, I’ve been glamoured, blown up, poisoned with toxic air, and cussed at by my partner.”
“You also stopped breathing for a bit.”
“Tell me something good, Prime Baylor, because my patience is wearing thin.”
“Would you like to get even?” I pulled up the draft of the email I had written this morning and sent it.
“I don’t get even, Prime Baylor. This is not a schoolyard fight. I’m an agent of the law. I detect illicit activity and stop it.”
“Have you checked your inbox?”
There was a long pause. I put the phone on speaker and started chopping my tomatoes.
“Is this legitimate?”
“Yes.” I had just handed him half a billion dollars’ worth of illicit activity. Arkan’s US accounts complete with evidence of money laundering, tax evasion, and payments to and from people on international watchlists. Konstantin delivered and then some.
