The Respite masqueraded as an average midlevel restaurant. Built with red brick, it boasted large arched windows on the first level, and if you were to walk through its front door, you’d find a satisfying menu of Texas staples with a hint of French flair. Special clients didn’t enter through the front door. They took the side entrance and were led up a narrow staircase to the second floor. There they had a choice of a spacious dining room with tables set far apart to ensure privacy or the patio, an open-air dining space enclosed on two sides by a wall of plants and on the third, by a stone feature wall, offering art with Old West themes, framed antique maps, and black-and-white frontier photos in case the visitors somehow forgot they were in Texas.

  Luciana Cabera hung off that wall, between a group shot of some cowboys and a dreamy Dawson Dawson-Watson original of a field awash with bluebonnets.

  A two-foot metal spike pinned her to the stone through her chest. A second spike protruded from her open mouth. In life, she had been a slender woman with short curly hair she styled in a modern haircut, a sly nod at male politician hairstyles. She’d smiled easily, talked with her hands, and her eyes sparkled with life.

  The thing that hung on the wall was her pale, lifeless imitation. Blood drenched her beige suit. Her trademark glasses with dark green frames lay on the ground. Her dark pumps had fallen off, and her bare feet, suspended six inches above the floor, dangled limp. There was something so disturbing and vulnerable about her feet with pale green nail polish on her toes. I had never seen her without shoes. It felt wrong. I couldn’t explain it, but it made my throat squeeze itself into a hard clump.

  In the first few months of working for Linus, I kept telling myself that eventually I’d become desensitized to the sheer brutality of magic combat, but it’d been almost two years. I knew better now. The urge to run away, the disturbing sensation of a sinking stomach, and throat gripped in an invisible fist when I saw another body savaged by someone’s power would stay with me. Always. But I had gotten better at sidestepping it so I could do my job. The gloves helped. When I put on gloves before entering a scene, some part of me took it as a signal that it was time to put away personal anxiety and fear.

  Alessandro stared at the corpse. His face was dark.

  When the citizens of Texas found out that the Speaker of the Assembly had been murdered, the shit would hit the fan with a terrifying intensity. The fallout from this would be catastrophic. It was our job to contain it.

  The first priority was to shift this scene away from the Respite. Luciana’s body would have to be discovered—she was too prominent to simply disappear—but if it was discovered here, the Respite and its staff would become the focus of a media blitz. It would cripple our ability to investigate and shining a giant searchlight straight at Linus had to be avoided at all costs.

  Alessandro dialed a number. “I need a cleanup crew, highest priority. Document, remove, recreate.” He gave them the Respite’s address and hung up.

  Sometimes our thoughts were so in sync, it was almost frightening.

  I forced myself to scrutinize the body. The angle of both spikes suggested a downward trajectory. The first spike had sunk so deep into the wall that only four inches protruded. The second was barely in, nearly twenty inches of it still visible. Both spikes ended in a metal ring with a hole wide enough to feed a heavy rope through.

  I didn’t like this. Not at all.

  Alessandro stared at the spikes, then tilted his head and looked at the concrete and glass tower a couple of blocks away to the southeast.

  “Mr. Gregoire, please walk me through it,” I said.

  Stéphane Gregoire nodded. Of average height, he was in his midforties, a white clean-shaven man with a Texas tan and dark wavy hair sprinkled with grey. He wore glasses, his suit was impeccably tailored, and he seemed unperturbed despite the human decoration on the wall of his restaurant. The server next to him, a young blond woman in a black and white uniform, wasn’t nearly so composed. She clenched her hands into a single fist and looked at the ground directly in front of her. I understood the urge. I would’ve liked to look at the ground as well.

  “Madam Cabera arrived alone at two minutes past eleven. She informed me that she expected a guest,” Mr. Gregoire said.

  “Did she say who?”

  “No. She sat at her usual table.” He indicated a table eight feet away, where one of the chairs was knocked over. “Simone brought her her customary wine. She preferred to have a glass of La Scolca Gavi before the meal.”

  “Did she order anything?”

  “Not right away. It was her custom to linger. She enjoyed sipping her wine and catching up on her work. She would usually signal the staff when she was ready to order.”

  I had dined here before with Linus. The Respite subscribed to the European school of hospitality. Unlike American servers, who were encouraged to approach customers repeatedly, the Respite’s staff left the patrons to their own devices. They didn’t ignore the customers, and a slight gesture or a glance would summon the server nearly instantly, but they didn’t intrude. To interrupt a meal by offering refills or bringing the check unasked would have been the height of rudeness.

  “Madam Cabera sat for about six minutes. The first missile tore into her chest, lifted her out of the chair and pinned her to the wall. The second missile hit her face. Death was instant. She didn’t even have the chance to scream.”

  We were looking at a Prime or an upper-level Significant telekinetic. A spike fired from a weapon would have hit Luciana at a downward angle and continued in that direction, piercing the chair and likely knocking it over. We would’ve found her on the floor. But telekinetics almost never threw objects in a straight line across a significant distance. They threw them in a catenary curve. The object swooped down and shot back up, drawing a shallow U.

  Connor had explained it to me one time when he was training us to respond to telekinetic threats. He got really technical about it, but mainly it boiled down to three reasons. One, a person who saw a missile coming toward them would naturally jump to their feet or back up. The curve ensured that the missile would still get them on the upswing, which was why Luciana now hung off the wall. Two, an object thrown by a powerful telekinetic packed a lot of kinetic force. Even if it didn’t kill the target, that upswing would knock them into the air, throwing them away from where they stood and resulting in additional damage. And three, the curve felt more natural than a straight line. Telekinetics using it hit with greater accuracy. It was a hard habit to break, and a surprised telekinetic would almost always throw in a curve. If you happened to see it coming, the only way to avoid it was to drop under it as flat as you could. Luciana never saw it.

  “Who else was on the patio?” Alessandro asked.

  “Prime Curtis and her daughter.”

  House Curtis specialized in horticulture, specifically cotton, sunflowers, and corn. They would have wanted none of this. They would have calmly gotten up and left and talking to them would be useless.

  “Do you have video footage?” Alessandro asked.

  “The Respite does not record their guests.”

  That was glaringly unlike Linus. Hm. “Can you tell me exactly what Prime Cabera said to you?”

  Mr. Gregoire opened his mouth and said in Luciana Cabera’s voice,“Stéphane, we meet again.”

  He switched back to his own voice. “Always a pleasure, madam. Your usual table?”

  “Yes, please. I’m expecting a guest.” Again, a flawless female voice.

  “Very well, madam.”

  Alessandro laughed softly.

  An auditory mnemonic. Linus didn’t need a CCTV. Mr. Gregoire was a perfect recording device all by his lonesome.

  My phone chimed. The cleanup crew was here.

  “Mr. Gregoire, our people are downstairs, please let them in.”

  He nodded and departed with the server in tow. Simone practically tripped over her own feet to escape.

  Alessandro nodded at the tower. “What’s that building?”

  I glanced at my phone and pulled up a map. “HCC. Houston Community College. Do you think the roof?”

  “Yes. That’s where I would have set up.”

  I pulled up an image of a two-foot spike with a ring on the blunt end on my phone and showed it to him. It looked identical to the two sticking out of Luciana.

  “A marlin spike,” Alessandro said. “Used by sailors for ropework.”

  “Most telekinetics throw crossbow bolts or giant nail-shaped skewers. I know of only one family that throws marlin spikes.”

  Alessandro raised his eyebrows. “House Rogan?”

  I nodded. “The telekinetic who attacked us in the Pit also used marlin spikes.”

  “You think it’s Xavier.” A dangerous light flared in Alessandro’s eyes.

  “I seriously doubt that Connor climbed the HCC building and hammered two giant spikes into the Speaker of the Texas Assembly. If he wanted to kill her, he would have done it quietly.”

  My brother-in-law’s control was off the charts. If he’d wanted to kill Luciana, and I couldn’t imagine that he would, he could have slit her throat with a razor blade from hundreds of yards away, or choked her with her own necklace or clothes, or sent a tiny needle through her eye, scrambling her brain. This was loud and aggressive. It had to be Xavier. I had no proof, but I knew it was him. It felt like him.

  Alessandro’s phone rang. He stared at it like it was a snake.

  “Please excuse me. I have to take this.” He walked away, speaking in Italian, too low for me to hear.

  Something was going on with him, and that something wasn’t good.

  I looked back to the spike.

  Until Arkan got to him, Xavier’s magic talents were modest. When Arkan had stolen a sample of the Osiris serum years ago, putting himself on Linus Duncan’s permanent hit list, he kept some of it. Once someone took the serum, its effects persisted through generations, and if any of that person’s descendants tried to take it again, it would kill them. Arkan was obsessed with finding a way around that certain death, and he used Xavier as a guinea pig. Most of Arkan’s test subjects died in agony, but Xavier had won the life-or-death lottery, becoming an incredibly powerful insta-Prime.

  Xavier had grown up in my brother-in-law’s shadow. To him, Connor, his distant cousin, was the example of everything Xavier wanted to achieve. Connor was freakishly powerful, wealthy, and respected, a war hero who was looked up to by the whole family. To someone like Xavier, with his modest telekinetic talent and craving for the finer things in life, Connor was at the apex of everything he ever hoped to achieve. Now, thanks to Arkan, he thought he had reached that height, and he flaunted his power. The spikes were a special fuck you to Connor.

  You didn’t think I was strong enough to use these. Look at me now.

  Alessandro came striding up, his phone put away. He and Xavier had a score to settle. Alessandro had tried to kill Arkan for murdering his father. Xavier had hit him with a semitruck and nearly ended his life.

  I looked into Alessandro’s eyes and saw calculated, cold rage. Fear punched me right in the stomach. I’d spent the last six months doing everything I could to avoid the confrontation between him and Arkan, but it was coming like a runaway train, unstoppable and inevitable.

  “This was sanctioned,” Alessandro said.

  I nodded. It had to be. For all of his craziness, Xavier worshipped the ground Arkan walked on. He wouldn’t have murdered the Speaker of the Texas Assembly on his own. Arkan was behind him, holding on to his pet’s leash. He pointed at a target, and Xavier bit it.

  “This is so . . .” I waved my hand at the body.

  “Loud,” Alessandro finished with a grim look on his face.

  It was unlike Arkan. He preferred to operate from the shadows. Was he sending a message? To whom? Why? Was it to someone close to Luciana?

  Luciana Cabera had been a halcyon Prime. She specialized in soothing magic. Psionics incited crowds, and halcyons calmed them. Two decades ago, a riot raged inside the Ellis Unit, the most dangerous prison in Texas. The authorities sought a nonviolent solution, so they turned to the best halcyon mage in the state. Luciana walked into the prison unarmed and alone, and when the sheriffs followed her fifteen minutes later, they found the inmates sitting in rows along the hallway walls, quietly smiling. That day started her political career.

  In her political life, Luciana had been aboveboard. She approached the Assembly with the attitude of a veteran middle school teacher, which meant she was stern enough to follow the procedure but flexible enough to make compromises where special treatment was required. In her day-to-day life, Luciana had run a clinic that treated people suffering from anxiety. She held a PhD in psychology from Harvard.

  None of these things should have put her into Arkan’s crosshairs. I needed more information. Where the hell was Linus?

  My phone launched into the Fistful of Dollars theme. Leon. Not texting, calling.

  I took the call. Leon’s face appeared on-screen.

  “I’m at Linus’. The gate is shut. I entered the code, it didn’t work. I called. No answer on the phone or intercom. Also, there is this.”

  He switched to the other camera. The keypad by the gate glowed with yellow. It should have turned green when he put the code in.

  Linus had activated the siege protocol. Shit.

  “Do you want me to jump the gate?”

  “No! Do not go inside. Leon, everything is armed. The moment you step foot in there, the turrets will shred you.”

  “Fine. No need to be dramatic.”

  “Please wait there for me.”

  “Inside the gates?” He opened his eyes real wide.

  “Leon!”

  “Don’t worry. I got it.”

  A stray thought zinged across my mind. It was vague and formless, but very disturbing. “Can you show me the gates without touching them?”

  The phone view swung and presented me with the wrought iron gates. The yard was pristine.

  Alessandro looked at me. “What is it?”

  “There are no bodies.”

  For Linus to activate a lockdown meant he either expected an attack or one had already occurred. He had answered my phone call during an attack before.

  “Leon, wait for us. Please.”

  “I will.”

  He hung up.

  Mr. Gregoire reappeared, leading a team of five people onto the patio, each carrying a large duffel bag. They set the bags down, pulled out hazmat suits, and put them on. An older black woman approached me. We had worked together before. I didn’t know her name, but I knew Linus trusted her. She referred to herself as Team 1 Leader, and that’s how I addressed her as well.

  “How long and where?” I asked her.

  “Ninety minutes. A warehouse on Cedar Crest Street.”

  She gave me the address and zipped herself into the hazmat suit. The crew converged on the body, spreading plastic sheets.

  “I need a Ziploc bag and her purse,” I said.

  One of the techs brought the purse and the bag to me. I unzipped it and looked inside. Pack of Kleenex, a glass case, a pink brush . . . That would do. I fished the brush out, slipped it into the Ziploc bag, and waved the tech on.

  I sealed the Ziploc bag. I was probably wrong, but just in case.

  I turned away from the team and looked at Mr. Gregoire. “Speaker Cabera was not here today.”

  “Understood.”

  “Will Simone be a problem?” Alessandro asked.

  “Not at all. I chose my people very carefully.”

  That left the Curtises, who would not talk for fear of being implicated, Xavier, who should be long gone by now, and whoever Cabera was meeting. That was our best lead. Over an hour had passed since this supposed lunch meeting, and her guest never showed.

  Metal clanged as one of the crew members pulled a spike out of the wall with metal forceps.

  I nodded to Mr. Gregoire, and Alessandro and I hurried downstairs. We exited the restaurant and marched to Alessandro’s Alfa. I would have preferred sprinting, but you never knew who was watching.

  We got in. Alessandro started the engine and it roared to life.

  “Linus?” he asked.

  “Yes.” Please be okay. Please, please be okay.

  He put the car in gear. The Alfa streaked out of the parking lot and hurtled down the street at a breakneck speed.

  Linus Duncan lived in River Oaks, the most exclusive neighborhood in Houston, full of mansions, tree-lined streets, and infuriating speed bumps. Alessandro was a speed demon, and he’d bought us an extra ten minutes on the highway. But River Oaks made it impossible to maintain any kind of speed.

  Bump.

  Bump.

  “Merda!”

  Shit was a good way to describe it. I tried the phone again. No answer.

  “You think something happened to him. Something serious,” Alessandro said.

  “He activated the siege protocol.”

  “It doesn’t mean he’s dead. It could be a test.”

  I looked at him.

  He shrugged. “Linus could be sitting inside that house with a timer, waiting to see how long it will take us to catch on.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  It would be just like Linus to pull something like that. But a feeling deep down in my stomach told me that something was horribly wrong. When Nevada first trained me in investigative work, she taught me to trust my instincts. If it didn’t look right, it probably wasn’t. If the hair on the back of your neck stood up, you needed to get the hell out of there. She taught Arabella the same thing. My younger sister called it listening to the lizard brain. I trusted my lizard brain. It kept me breathing.

  My phone chimed. A text message from Ragnar.

  We can’t find Jadwiga. Matilda says they’re nocturnal, so we’ll come back tonight. We’ve locked the conference room and put the key on your desk.

  “What is it?” Alessandro asked.

  “Jadwiga.”

  He glanced at me.

  “There is an expensive and possibly endangered spider loose in the conference room. It was smuggled into the country, stolen, recovered, and during the handoff to the current owner it escaped.”

 

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