Ruby fever epb, p.10
Ruby Fever EPB, page 10
Linus appeared on the screen sitting in the same chair I now sat.
“Hello, Catalina. This is the proverbial Things Have Gone Terribly Wrong video. I’ve left Bernard a nice trail of bread crumbs so I’m sure it didn’t take him long to break the encryption.”
My eyes watered, and I paused it. He wasn’t dead yet. He was a stubborn, mean old bastard, who wouldn’t kick it just because he injected himself with some stupid shit.
Damn it, Linus.
I wiped my eyes and restarted the video. On-screen, Linus raised a heavy cut-crystal glass with two fingers of whiskey in it. He sipped it and smiled. “Liquid courage. Let us get on with it.”
Yes, that would be good, because otherwise I would just sit here and cry.
“My name is Linus Stuart Duncan of House Duncan. My mother’s name was Fiona Duncan of House Duncan. My father’s name was Vassilis Makris. His father’s name was Christos Makris. His birth name was Christos Molpe of House Molpe.”
The name fell like a brick and knocked me right out of my chair and to my feet. The headphone cord came out with them and I yanked the headphones off my head and dropped them to the floor.
House Molpe. The only known siren House in existence, now extinct.
Linus was a Molpe.
He was a siren.
Linus was . . .
“Go ahead.” Linus lifted his glass. “Pace for a bit. Let the implications percolate. It means exactly what you think it does.”
Linus was my grandfather.
Oh my God.
My brain shoved all sorts of facts at me all at once. I circled the desk to the right, reversed, circled it to the left, and finally settled on marching back and forth in front of it, trying to chew through an avalanche of memories.
Back after the battle in the Pit, when I had sung so hard and spent so much magic trying to kill a godlike construct that I couldn’t even think, Linus had found me, and he’d coaxed me back to reality. I’d asked him about it later and he told me he’d done some research, and it indicated that when sirens overextended, some of them lost their minds. They could no longer speak, only sing songs of insanity and beguiling magic. If I hadn’t spoken, he had a mental Prime on standby to surge into my mind and try to guide me back.
He had “done some research.” He probably called whatever close relative he knew on that side.
Wow. Wooow.
Why would a Prime of Linus’ standing take such an in-depth interest in a new emerging House, especially one as odd as ours? Even before I became his Deputy, Linus was a constant presence in our lives. He found a way in through Nevada, and soon we were invited to his barbecues and fishing trips. He smoothed the way for Bernard to enter grad school. Leon practically lived in his workshop when Linus was working on new firearms. Problems we encountered sometimes vanished, as if swept away by some unseen force, a helpful watchful presence acting on our behalf behind the scenes.
He was there when we registered as a House. He was one of the two witnesses, with Connor being the other.
A memory came to me, Alessandro and I in Linus’ summer mansion, Linus grilling meat for his patented fajitas, Alessandro looking at me, looking at Linus, and then murmuring to himself in Italian, “I’m such an idiot.”
He knew! Siren magic leaked, and Alessandro’s antistasi powers would’ve tagged it as a threat.
“Sonovabitch!”
I wasn’t even sure which one of them I was cursing at.
I braked hard in front of the desk and leaned onto it, face-to-face with the recorded Linus.
“Fuck you.” It felt good to say it out loud.
“You’re probably cursing and it’s fair. But if you’re watching this, the situation is urgent, so let’s put that part aside and move forward. I have many vital things to tell you.”
I landed back into the chair. Yes. I couldn’t wait to hear this. I knew all about House Duncan. It was an old Scottish House with a persistent line of hephaestus Primes. Duncans made weapons of all types and sizes. One time when Linus and I were chased and had to abandon our vehicle and everything inside it, he made a detour to a recycling center and built a gun out of scrap metal and magic. It fired the little tabs you broke off aluminum cans—there was a container of them there—and he’d killed three people with it.
Linus was an orphan. Both his father and his mother had died in a tragic car accident when he was a toddler. That was the official record.
“Angus Duncan, my grandfather, was a stubborn man, set in his ways and convinced he was always right.”
You don’t say. Shocking.
“He and my mother butted heads. When she was nineteen, they had a row and she left for a holiday in Greece. She met my father, who was twenty-six, handsome, and charming. They had a summer romance, and she became pregnant with me. His family pushed for marriage. My grandfather told her to come home. They had another one of their fights, over the phone this time, and the next week my mother married my father. House Duncan didn’t attend the wedding.”
Marrying someone because you were pissed off at your parent sounded like a recipe for disaster.
“The bloom was off that rose quickly. My parents were very different people. My mother had goals. She wanted to be someone, to challenge herself, and my father was content to float within the bubble his family had built to safeguard him. Still, two years after I was born, my mother was pregnant again, with a girl. My father’s relatives demanded she abort the child.”
What?
Linus’ expression turned harsh. “During the First World War the region was invaded by the Russian Imperium. Katina Molpe, my father’s oldest aunt, rowed her boat to one of those tiny rocky islands the Aegean is famous for, little more than a boulder sticking out of the water, and then she sang to the invading army. An entire battalion drowned trying to reach her, until enough of them managed to swim across the stormy water. You can guess what happened next.”
They tore her to pieces.
The love sirens inspired wasn’t truly love. It wasn’t gentle or selfless. It was a burning obsession and if allowed to linger, it grew into an all-consuming need to possess. If they couldn’t have the entire person, they would settle for a piece. A clump of hair. A nail. A finger. Anything would do. Katina died a horrible death to save her town. Nevada had told me this story just before our trials. A cautionary tale about the perils of siren magic.
“All Molpe carry the talent, but only women are Primes,” Linus continued. “I’m probably the strongest male siren alive but I’m barely an Average, and I suspect that is only due to the magic reserve I inherited from the Duncan side. I cannot compel people the way you do. The most I can do is to predispose people to like me and to sense when mental mages try to manipulate me.”
He must’ve felt Kaylee building up her power when she and her mother entered his study. The siren magic, however weak, gave him a warning. It was the only reason he was still breathing.
“After the war the Molpe family was hounded by every neighboring government and political faction wanting access to siren powers. A lot of Molpes died. The family had to go into hiding to save themselves. They relocated, changed their name, and made sure no more Primes were born.”
Selective breeding, Molpe style. Only male children were allowed to live.
“My mother refused to give up my unborn sister. She was a hephaestus Prime, and nobody would be taking her future baby away from her. She barricaded herself in a house and called my grandfather to come and get her. He and my uncles got there one day late. My father somehow got my mother to let him in and shot her in the head.”
If you want us to survive, kill your wife and your unborn daughter. Do it to save the family. It was no longer shocking to me. I had seen worse. Fear made people do terrible things. But it bothered me so much. This was my family. I came from this.
“There was a massacre,” Linus said. “The Duncans retrieved me and my mother’s body and returned to Scotland. They had a funeral for my mother. The official report said she died during an automobile accident while on a holiday in Greece and her husband’s body was lost at sea. It was a dark time. I don’t remember any of it or my parents. My first memory is getting to ride a pony by the castle walls.”
I knew that his grandfather had raised him, but I had no idea how deep the wound was.
On-screen Linus leaned forward, his expression grave. “The Makris family is not to be trusted. If they ever approach you, kill as many as you must to break yourself free. They fear you because they think your existence will drag their sordid history to light. Do not look for them to find answers to your magic, do not approach them, do not correspond with them. They will stop at nothing to murder you if you come into contact with them. Do not open that door.”
Wow.
“I know you have questions about your magic. I will tell you everything I know. Very shortly you’ll be facing a crisis, if you aren’t already. You’ve concentrated on only one aspect of your powers, but your magic is more complex than you realize. The black wings are the first manifestation of the problem, and it will become worse in times of emotional distress . . .”
A man screamed outside, his voice dropping into a tortured gurgle.
I yanked the USB stick out of the computer, shoved it into my pocket, and ran to the window.
The outline of a twenty-foot-wide arcane circle smoked on the ground. Two corpses slumped inside it, their skin turning green, the trademark sign of Runa’s work. In the center of the circle, a pile of reddish flesh steamed. Bones stuck out of it. Human bones. A teleportation mage could teleport themselves, but teleporting another person required complex arcane circles and a lot of preparation, and a slight miscalculation or variation in weight could make it backfire.
I dashed across the house to the front door. In the doorway, Runa and Bern were looking at the three corpses. A horrible stench rolled from the circle, like rotten fish being steamed. I had smelled a failed teleportation once before. It wasn’t an odor you would ever forget.
“. . . question them,” Bern said.
“Bernard,” Runa said.
She used his full name. He was in trouble.
“If you teleport me into the house of your enemy and give me one second, I’ll kill everyone I see. Even if you shot me as soon as you saw me, you would die immediately after. I love you too much to gamble with your life and I’m responsible for the safety of everyone under this roof. I stand by my decision.”
“I agree,” I told them.
“See? She agrees.”
“I also concur,” Cornelius said, approaching from the other hallway, Gus trailing him. He must’ve come inside at some point. “When there is an intruder in your house with a gun, you don’t shoot at their feet. You shoot to kill.”
Bern sighed.
I leaned past his broad back to look at the circle. The closest green corpse had long dark hair wound around her head in a kind of crown. I knew that hair. Melanie Poirier, one of Arkan’s combat mages. If Runa hadn’t nuked her immediately, we would have had a hard time neutralizing her.
Arkan risked a teleportation in broad daylight. Why? His hits were usually well planned and carefully executed. This seemed rushed, almost like a knee-jerk reaction to something. What could have upset him enough . . .
It hit me like lightning. I spun around and sprinted back to the study.
“What?” Runa yelled.
I didn’t answer.
I got to the study, yanked the keyboard to me, clicked the Warden Network, and typed in my login. Runa, Bern, Cornelius, and Gus ran into the room, followed by one of the Warden guards.
“What’s going on?” Runa demanded.
I didn’t have time to answer. The network accepted the login. The Warden interface unfolded in front of me. I accessed the databanks.
“Catalina? What happened?” Runa asked.
Ignat Orlov, alias Arkan, known associates. I scrolled through the list.
No . . .
No . . .
Trofim Smirnov.
I clicked the name. The dossier opened. The familiar face stared at me from the screen. A slender, stooped white man in his forties who looked like he was expecting a surprise punch.
Fuck.
I grabbed my phone from my pocket and called Patricia. No answer.
Bern grabbed me by the shoulders and held me still. “Explain.”
It took me a second to slow my brain enough to speak. “An hour ago, Prince Berezin showed up at the Compound asking to see me. I told Patricia to let him in. He was wearing this man’s face.”
Runa glanced at the screen. “Who is he?”
“Trofim Smirnov. He is Arkan’s Bernard.”
I had studied Arkan’s inner circle and I knew most of them by sight. But I had concentrated on combat operatives, people who were a threat if you spotted them in the crowd. Smirnov was a pattern cybermage. He was at his most dangerous behind a keyboard. He had been low priority. I had no idea how many lives my mistake would cost us.
They stared at me. Bern whipped his phone out and began making calls.
“Right now, Arkan thinks that his oldest friend betrayed him and defected to the Wardens, and we have him in our house. Smirnov knows too much. Arkan can’t let him live. He will retaliate.”
Konstantin had set us up. Arkan would stop at nothing to get his hands on Smirnov.
“Our phones are compromised,” Bern announced.
“How?” Runa asked.
He shook his head. He looked ready to rip someone apart with his bare hands.
“If Arkan can capture any of us and trade us for Smirnov, it would solve all his problems,” I said. “Everyone outside the Compound is a potential hostage or casualty.”
“Shit,” Runa said. “We can’t stay here.”
Runa was dangerous as hell, but all of the automated defenses were down, and none of the guards were above Average on the magic scale. If Arkan sent several heavy hitters and they attacked from different sides, there would be casualties.
We had to go. Now.
Bern turned to the Warden guard. “Get your people packed. Five minutes.”
I dialed Alessandro.
The guard looked at me. They answered only to the Office of the Warden.
“Do as he says,” I told him.
The guard double-timed it out of the room.
“Your call has been forwarded . . .”
Bern gently pushed me out of the way and bent over the desktop. His fingers flew over the keyboard. “Baby, I need the two laptops from the vault.”
Runa turned around and ran down the stairs.
I tried Alessandro again. Straight to voice mail. Text was my only option.
Konstantin put on Smirnov’s face and walked into our house.
Nothing else needed to be said. He would understand. I texted Leon, trying to explain the same thing as fast as I could.
Cornelius shook his head. “My phone is affected as well.”
The computer screen blinked, and Bug appeared on-screen. Connor’s surveillance specialist, lean, wiry, pale, and looking like he was taking care of ten things at once. “What do you want, weirdo?”
“Arkan hacked us,” Bern said. “Phones are down, network is down, we need to warn the Compound an attack is coming.”
The distracted expression evaporated from Bug’s face. “On it.”
Bern shut down the call, opened a new window, and started typing code.
Runa emerged from the vault carrying two laptops, Linus’ black one and Bern’s silver. Bern waved her on and she took off out the door.
I finished the text to Leon. I had no idea if it would even make it through. “Can you get the security system online?”
“I can trigger an emergency override, which is what I’m doing.” Bern’s gaze was fixed on the screen.
“What does that mean?”
“It means the vault will lock and the siege protocol will be reinstated without exceptions. We’ll have three minutes to get out. If you need anything, grab it now, because nobody is getting back in. If Linus dies, we’ll have to fight our way inside.”
He was right. It was our best option.
A phone rang somewhere in the room. Bern and I froze for a desperate second, trying to pinpoint it.
Another muffled ring.
Inside the desk.
Bern jerked open the middle drawer. Locked. Bern grit his teeth and yanked it. Wood snapped, the drawer came free, and I grabbed the cell phone. Unlocked. I answered the call.
“Catalina!” Arabella yelled into my ear.
“How are you calling me? Whose phone is it?”
“I’m calling from a burner Connor’s people brought. That phone is my emergency phone.”
“Why do you have an emergency phone at Linus’ house?”
“He bought it for me to use when I come over because my phone is always dead.”
Of course he had.
“Anyway, not important. Mom is out.”
“What?”
“She left to identify Pete’s body. She took a security detail with her, three guards. We can’t reach them.”
“Why did she go in person?”
“Pete’s son is there. Someone had to go and explain why Pete died.”
Crap. Pete had been taken to a private morgue at the Woman’s Hospital of Texas. Twenty-five minutes from us.
“I’ll get her.”
An electric crackle split the air on the other end.
“Got to go,” my sister said and hung up.
I shoved the phone into my pocket.
Bern yanked the cords out of the back of the tower and picked it up.
The three of us took off for the front door. The security team was piling into an armored personnel carrier. Jean, the tall olive-skinned woman in charge, looked at me from the front passenger seat, her window down, waiting for instructions.
The use of Warden guards was strictly limited. Guarding the family of Wardens wasn’t covered by their duties, so telling them to escort Bern and Runa was right out. Technically they would guard me if I ordered them to as long as I was performing an official investigation but going to get my mother wasn’t a Warden matter, it was a Baylor matter.
“Go back to base and fortify,” I told her.
