Ruby Fever EPB, page 7
“Augustine was buff,” Runa observed.
“He still is,” I said. “He slims himself down.”
Alessandro smiled at me, proud that I got there first.
“What?” Arabella asked.
“Pause it,” I asked.
Alessandro tapped the tablet and the image on the screen froze.
“Look at the proportion of his shoulders to his chest. The Augustine we know has narrower shoulders, a shallower chest, and longer waist. Even the line of the shoulders is wrong. You can lose the muscle mass, but you can’t alter the skeletal structure of your body. He slims himself down with his magic.”
“He also gives himself two inches of height,” Connor said. “Makes him look thinner.”
Alessandro touched the tablet.
Augustine exploded into movement. His right fist hammered into Connor’s jaw, lightning fast.
“Holy shit!” Leon said.
Connor shied back, his hands up, and Augustine delivered a vicious kick into Connor’s left knee. Connor must have sensed it, because his leg came up, but Augustine still connected. The impact staggered Connor back.
“He’s fast,” Bern said, professional appreciation in his voice.
Both of my cousins leaned forward, focused on the screen. So did Arabella. For a moment she’d forgotten Linus. Her eyes tracked the two combatants on the screen. There was something slightly predatory in the way she watched them, like a cat watching two other cats fight.
Connor leaped back and launched a low kick that grazed Augustine’s thigh. Augustine danced back. His eyes lit up. His lips stretched in a smile. “Ow.”
Connor attacked, his arm snapping out like a sledgehammer. Augustine parried, crossing his arms, drove a front kick into Connor’s left thigh, and took a vicious jab to the arm for his trouble. They danced across the gym floor, kicking, punching, and growling. It was both beautiful and terrifying to watch.
On-screen, Augustine leaped. His right leg shot out like a swinging baseball bat, aiming for Connor’s head. At the last moment, Connor sidestepped, grabbed Augustine’s leg, and jerked him down. They rolled on the mat.
“Nice,” Bern said.
Connor locked Augustine into a half nelson for half a second. Augustine twisted his face away and rolled, landing on top of Connor. Connor bridged, throwing Augustine off, and hammered a punch to Augustine’s ear. Augustine snarled and kneed Connor in the face.
The mood shifted. They were playing before, aiming kicks and punches where it wouldn’t cause lasting damage. The gloves just came off. This was no longer a sparring session. This was a fight.
The view moved, bobbing closer.
“All right,” the invisible De Silva called. “On your feet. You’re done.”
They ignored him, trying to outmuscle each other.
Something hissed and flame retardant foam shot over them.
The two combatants broke apart.
“What the fuck, Thushan?” Augustine snarled.
“You should thank him. You’re shit on the mat.” Connor wiped the blood from his nose and flung it in Augustine’s direction.
“Fuck you too.”
Augustine rolled to his feet. He was muscled like a gymnast. His face blurred, and he was back to a younger version of the Augustine we knew, elegant, lean, and glacial.
The video stopped.
Augustine had scammed us. When we had listed his attributes, the first thing on that list should’ve been “a trained killer.”
I looked at Bern. “If you had to . . .”
He shook his head. “He’d kill me.”
“Augustine Montgomery is a highly capable martial artist,” Alessandro said. “Most high caliber illusion mages are. They assume other people’s identities and enter dangerous situations, usually to gather information or to kill their target. Primes like Augustine can obscure their movements in a fight. He didn’t do that here, but if it was a real fight, and he had a knife . . .”
“Connor would still beat Augustine’s ass,” Leon said.
My younger cousin had become a shameless Mad Rogan fanboy in middle school, and he never outgrew it. As far as Leon was concerned, Connor walked on water and ate enemy tanks for breakfast.
“He blurs,” Connor said. “You think his hand is in one place, and then there is a knife pressed against your ribs, and you didn’t see it get there. I wouldn’t fight him hand to hand. I’d kill him from a distance. But Augustine will never do anything to hurt anyone in this room.”
“Did you know?” I asked Nevada.
She nodded. “They spar sometimes.”
“And you didn’t tell us, why?” Mom asked.
Nevada looked sheepish. It almost never happened. “It didn’t occur to me. Like Connor said, he isn’t a threat. Connor and he had a moment a few years ago. It realigned Augustine’s worldview.”
“Trust me,” Connor said. “All of his veiled threats and scary promises are bullshit. He is a friend.”
“Could have fooled me,” Mom said, her voice flat.
Connor grimaced. “He has issues.”
“Konstantin Berezin can do everything Augustine can do and probably more,” Alessandro said. “If you encounter him, treat him like a cobra. Try to stay out of striking range. He kills quickly and without hesitation.”
“Agreed,” Patricia said. “A cornered illusion mage can be a very challenging opponent.”
In my mind, once an illusion mage was discovered, they were somehow rendered powerless. Clearly, that would be a deadly mistake to make. Being told Konstantin was lethal was one thing. Watching Augustine, whom we had all dismissed as a noncombatant, turn into a murder machine wasn’t something I would forget.
“Obviously, Konstantin complicates matters,” I said. “But our main priority is still protecting Linus and solving the Speaker’s murder.”
“On that note,” Nevada said. “We have some lousy news.”
“PAC?” Bern asked.
Connor looked like he’d bitten into a rotten apple. “We’ll handle it.”
Principal Action Consulting, or the PAC as they called themselves, recently became a very sharp thorn in House Rogan’s side. Just like Connor, they offered a private army for hire and, just like Connor’s army, they were led by a powerful Prime, Matthew Berry, a tagger. Taggers marked a spot in a structure and then saturated it with arcane energy until it exploded. Matthew was a one-man artillery battery.
The PAC was started by Matthew’s father. Back then it had been called the Black Hurricane, and after Connor erupted onto the military scene, people kept asking them if Mad Rogan and their outfit were somehow involved. The father and son duo got tired of it and changed the name.
But the real trouble started last year. A group of archeologists was taken hostage in Pakistan, four of them American citizens. For complicated political reasons, the United States government wanted to rescue them quietly. They contacted the PAC. The father of one of the archeologists and Connor’s mother’s friend contacted Connor. While Berry and the government haggled, Connor went in with a small team and saved the hostages.
For no apparent reason, Berry viewed this as a flex. What should have been a business rivalry at best turned deeply personal and the younger Berry decided to wipe House Rogan off the planet’s surface. If Connor’s people took one side of a conflict, Berry made sure to get hired for the other. They’d clashed several times on foreign soil, and we all knew the final confrontation was coming and soon.
“Berry is massing his troops in Austin,” Connor said.
Berry was headquartered in Virginia. There was no reason for his people to be in Austin, only a few hours from us. He was preparing for an offensive against Connor. Everyone here knew it, and none of us would do anything about it. Whoever made the first move would have to bear the legal ramifications. It was smarter to get attacked than to land the first blow.
Berry was a significant threat, and the timing was very coincidental. I never counted on help from Connor and Nevada, although it was always available, simply because we needed to be self-sufficient. But now we knew for sure that we had to rely on ourselves. I needed to alter our plan a bit.
“Arabella?”
She looked at me. The fury in her eyes was still there.
“Whoever tried to kill Linus will likely want to finish the job,” I said.
“I hope they try. Nobody touches my family.”
I supposed we all saw Linus as family. Linus treated the three of us as his granddaughters and Bern and Leon as his grandsons, and he especially doted on Arabella. He let her steal his whiskey and cigars, and sometimes she would ask him for advice. Nevada got respect and guidance, I got education and lectures, but Arabella got beaming approval. If we lost Linus, she would be inconsolable. I would be inconsolable.
“You’re staying in,” I told her. “You don’t leave the Compound no matter what happens. You’re our final line of defense.”
“Fine by me.”
“We’re done,” I said. “Everyone knows what to do.”
Nevada waved and the laptop screen went dark.
I walked over to Bern and handed him the USB. “I need to know what’s on it.”
“Will do.”
He got up, and Runa and he left. Leon sauntered out the door. Mom nodded to Arabella. My sister jumped off her chair and the two of them went out of the room.
Cornelius also rose to his feet. He’d stayed so quiet throughout the meeting, it was easy to forget he was there.
“Just a moment.” I got up, went back to my office, took the Ziploc bag with Luciana’s brush out of my desk drawer, and brought it back to the conference room. “I’d like you to check something for me.”
“I’m all ears,” he told me.
Chapter 5
The sound of my phone pulled me away from the computer screen. I glanced at it. Linus.
Linus?!
“Yes?”
“I broke into Linus’ phone,” Bern said.
Damn it. “You almost gave me a heart attack.”
Bern made a deep rumble that was probably a chuckle.
“Did you find anything good?”
“The last call he took was at 6:43 p.m. Sunday night. All others went to voice mail. The first of these was at 10:51 p.m. That’s likely your window.”
“The first call that went to voice mail, who was it from?”
“Zahra Kabani.”
Zahra Kabani was the Warden of Michigan. Linus and she were working together on tracking a fugitive. He would’ve taken her call.
“Any progress on the security system?”
“Working on it. How’s Linus?”
“Still unconscious.”
“No change is better than a change for the worse.”
“True. What about my USB?”
“Working on it.”
He said goodbye and hung up.
I rubbed my face. Whatever happened to Linus likely happened between 6:43 p.m. and 10:51 p.m. on Sunday night. We would narrow it down even further once the coroner was done with Pete.
Pete’s face crisscrossed by the dark starburst of lines surfaced from my memory. I pushed the thought aside and stared back at the screen.
Alessandro and I decided to divide and conquer. He reached out to his international contacts trying to figure out why the Russian Imperium was suddenly interested in Texas or its Warden, and I decided to work on House Cabera.
My head hummed. I should probably eat something and soon. I rummaged in my desk drawers, found a packet of jerky, tore it open with my teeth, and surveyed the fruits of my labor. For a two-hour deep dive into all things Cabera, I hadn’t come up with much.
Luciana Cabera, halcyon Prime, Head of the House, fifty-six years old, widowed. For some reason I thought she was in her early sixties.
Husband, Fredrick Cabera, halcyon Prime, ten years her senior, died of cancer six years ago. Fredrick had joined House Cabera and taken his wife’s last name. From what I could gather, he had been born in South Africa and had wanted to immigrate to the US. At the time the US had prohibited immigration from SA due to an Ebola outbreak. Marrying Luciana allowed him to sidestep the ban.
Daughter, Kaylee Cabera, twenty-two years old. Full-time student at Rice University, right here in Houston. Her driver’s license and her IP address confirmed that she still lived at home. Kaylee either hadn’t wanted to leave the nest or wasn’t allowed to.
Luciana had two brothers, one uncle, three aunts, and her parents were still alive, although neither was in good health. Besides Luciana, House Cabera officially listed one other certified Prime, Luciana’s elderly mother. However, Luciana’s twelve-year-old niece and her seventeen-year-old nephew had both undergone preliminary trials and tested in the Prime range. Their official certification would wait until they turned eighteen. The rest of the family fell into the Significant range.
Unlike a lot of other Houses, the Caberas did not diversify their business interests. The Serenity Clinic was their primary source of income, aside from some privately held stocks. All of the adult Caberas worked for the clinic, all of them held relevant degrees or were in the process of obtaining them, and none of them had attempted to break away from the family business.
None of them had been involved in any scandals, nobody had a criminal record, and their credit reports were blissfully free of bankruptcies and large debts. They were respectably boring.
Luciana’s political career was equally as boring. I couldn’t find a single matter she had brought before the Assembly in the last three years that could’ve put her into Arkan’s crosshairs. I seriously doubted he cared about House inheritance minutiae or the exact procedure for the certification of Primes in the state of Texas. All of it was local and region specific.
I tapped my pen against my lips. There was one thing that bothered me. According to Herald gossip, Kaylee Cabera was a Prime like her parents. Most Primes couldn’t wait to undergo the trials. Four of Kaylee’s cousins had taken the preliminary test, and while it didn’t grant certification, it let the family ballpark their power range. Two of them had been designated as tentative Primes and the other two were likely Significants. House Cabera had plastered the results all over their website. I couldn’t find any record of Kaylee’s preliminary test or her submitting to the trials.
There were reasons for which a Prime might delay being officially recognized. Usually, they had to do with business or family considerations. For example, a House involved in a feud might postpone the trials to appear weaker than they were and surprise their opponents.
However, the Caberas didn’t feud, and Kaylee was a fixture among the young House scion scene. Her Instagram and Herald told me she was a privileged child. She wore expensive clothes, drove luxury cars, dined in trendy restaurants, and hung out with people who did the same. I pulled her transcripts from Rice through the Warden Network. She ran track and was pursuing a B.A. in psychology and her grades in public speaking classes told me that if she suffered from social anxiety, she had a good handle on it.
Sometimes people deliberately hid their talents. Olivia Charles, the woman who’d killed Cornelius’ wife, had been a manipulator, a mage who could impose her will on other people’s bodies. She had registered as a psionic. But that scenario still required one to show up for the trials.
Something just didn’t feel right. I couldn’t put my finger on it, and I would have to interview Kaylee to get more information.
My phone chimed. Agent Wahl. I braced myself.
“Hello?”
“That’s one hell of a favor!” Agent Wahl hissed into the phone in that way people do when they’re furious but have to look calm because they have an audience.
“We’re even now.”
“I don’t know what we are right now, Prime Baylor. This is a staged scene. What do you expect me to do with this?”
And how did he know that? Linus’ crew had successfully relocated three murders during my tenure alone, all with no one the wiser. They were flawless.
“I expect you to investigate. Very loudly. It would help if you refused to answer questions, then had a press conference where you gave the bare minimum of information, and then refused to answer questions again.”
“You want me to be a distraction.”
“I want to be free to conduct the investigation. Besides, you enjoy press conferences. You can wear that black suit again, the one you said makes you look inscrutable but official.”
“Does the Warden know about this?”
“As of now, I am the Acting Warden. The National Assembly appreciates your cooperation and understanding, Agent Wahl.”
There was silence.
“Is he alive?” he asked.
“In a manner of speaking.”
More silence.
“I want in,” Wahl said.
“You are in. I reached out to you because I trust you. Because he trusted you. I need you to investigate the case, bring me in as a consultant, and take the credit when it’s solved.”
“By solved, do you mean the truth or a cover story the National Assembly finds convenient?”
“It will be a version of the truth we can both live with.”
More silence.
“Fine,” Wahl said. “As long as you understand that I am a fucking FBI agent, and I will not allow myself or the agency to be used to delude the public.”
I could bring up the Warden Network and offer him a dozen examples of the FBI doing just that. But I needed him on my side, and I respected his ethics. They aligned with mine.
“I have every intention of solving this murder and bringing the culprit to justice. We’re not going to frame anyone or let anyone go unpunished. Can you live with that?”
“I’ll take it. I’m going to talk to the Cabera family.”
“Can I meet you there?”
“Yes. I want to get there by five. Don’t be late.” He hung up.
I walked over to Alessandro’s office. He leaned back in his chair, his feet on the table, a phone to his ear. I rapped my knuckles on the doorway. He winked at me.
“Love and kisses to Maya. Ciao!”
