Emerald Blaze

Chapter 5

I walked to the window of the security booth and pressed my hand against the glass in the designated circle where small round holes had been drilled in the bulletproof glass. The tinted windows hid the two guards inside, and I felt slightly vulnerable.

“Password?” a clipped male voice demanded through the speaker.

“Manhunters from Venus.” Leon was in charge of the daily passphrases and he’d been working his way through the masters of sword and planet science fiction.

“Welcome home, Ms. Baylor.”

“Thank you, Samir.”

Metal clanged and a section of the barrier slid down. I walked through the gap and up the street, to the three-story brick building that served as our temporary base.

When my father was dying of cancer, Mom sold our house to pay for his medical bills. Grandma Frida did the same, and we moved into a warehouse together, which we had split into an office, living space, and a motor pool for Grandma Frida’s armored car and mobile artillery business.

The warehouse was no more. Six months ago, an assassin attacked us and I caught him in an arcane circle. The spell failed to contain our combined magic, and the overflow exploded our home. If I craned my neck, I could see the empty lot where it had stood, and the guilt bit at me every time.

We had to stay somewhere, so Connor, who had bought up roughly two miles of real estate around the warehouse to keep Nevada and us safe when they were investigating the Sturm-Charles conspiracy, sold us one of the larger buildings and the three structures around it for the princely sum of one dollar. We tried to reason with him, but he refused to name a reasonable price, and we needed a place to stay, so I said thank you and took it. It allowed us to concentrate on hiring a new security force and banking money for a new house.

It also established a strong public link between our Houses. When I had become the official Head of the House after turning twenty-one, I’d fought tooth and nail to keep our two Houses separate in public view. I didn’t want us to be seen as a vassal House to House Rogan. Now my priorities had changed. Once Victoria Tremaine took an interest in your life, nothing was the same.

Leon’s Shelby was in his parking space. The other three family cars occupied their spots as well, and a big silver Range Rover took up the visitor’s spot. June, a compact white woman, leaned against the wall by the door. My older sister was in residence.

June nodded at me. She was short, with broad shoulders and muscular arms that showed definition even when she relaxed. Her caramel hair was pulled back from her face into a short braid. She was Nevada’s personal aegis, a shield mage. If someone shot at my sister, June’s magic would block the projectiles. Asking her to come inside was pointless. She would guard the door no matter what anybody said. I nodded back at her, punched the code into the lock, and stepped inside.

In its past life, this building served as an office, which worked for us on a business level, but wasn’t great for our living arrangements. I walked past the receptionist counter, made a left, and headed down a long hallway to what was once the cafeteria and now was our kitchen. Ahead, bright electric lights and loud voices told me the family was up. Kind of late for dinner . . .

A little black shadow padded out of the kitchen and streaked to me, her tail wagging so hard, she nearly went airborne.

I scooped my dog up. Shadow licked my face, her whole body wiggling. My chest tightened. Suddenly heat warmed the backs of my eyes.

Noises drifted from the kitchen, excited chatter, the sound of forks and knives on plates, the clatter of glasses being picked up and set back down. The air smelled of spicy meat and baked taco shells.

I hugged Shadow to me and stuck my face into her fur, trying to get myself under control. I couldn’t walk in there crying.

Leon said something I didn’t catch. Grandma Frida laughed.

It was fine. It had been a long day with many sharp turns, that was all. I was just tired.

Shadow twisted around in my arms. Hot tongue brushed my cheek. The tight knot in my chest dissolved. I squeezed her to me and set her down on the floor. She wagged her tail. I didn’t have to do anything to make my little black dog happy. I just had to come home.

The urge to cry passed, and my brain woke up. I had things to do and the first on that list was to verify what Alessandro had told me. He didn’t lie to me. That kind of emotional storm would be impossible to fake. But I wanted to see things for myself.

His father died at a wedding less than twenty years ago. Any wedding attended by a Prime would be special enough to be filmed.

I pulled out my phone and stepped into one of the front rooms that served as our office. Shadow bounded in after me. I shut the door and texted Bug.

Are you busy?

Bug worked as Connor and Nevada’s surveillance specialist. A swarmer implanted with arcane magic, he processed visual information at superhuman speed.

The phone chimed. Not particularly.

I need a quick search and I don’t want anyone to know.

Shoot.

I paused, trying to organize my thoughts. Shadow made circles around my feet, sniffing at my borrowed shoes.

I need to know about a wedding. It took place fifteen years ago, probably in Italy. The best man was Marcello Sagredo. I need to confirm he was murdered during this wedding. There might be a recording.

My phone rang. I answered.

“Is he right there next to you?” Bug roared into the phone. “Is that spoiled moneyfucker in the room with you now, Catalina?”

“No, because he died fifteen years ago.”

“That’s not who I mean, and you know it. He came back, didn’t he? Let me guess, he’s in trouble and he needs you to save him.”

“No. He isn’t in trouble, but I’m forced to work with him.”

“Shit on a stick!”

“Bug, I don’t have a choice. Can you do this for me or not?”

“Of course I’ll do it. Here is my price. Next time you see him, I want you to tell him, ‘Hey dickfucker, Bug is watching you.’ Because I am.”

He hung up.

Well, that went well.

Shadow stood up on her hind legs and leaned on my leg, looking up at me with big brown eyes. I petted her. “Let’s go.”

I walked into the kitchen. The whole family had gathered around the oversized dining room table. Bern, my oldest cousin, big, broad-shouldered, with tousled hair that couldn’t decide if it was light brown or dark blond. Leon next to him, a sharp grin on his face. Arabella, looking surly, her long blond hair curled into ringlets.

On the other side of Bern, at the head of the table, Grandma Frida loaded her taco. Thin, bird-boned, with a halo of platinum curls and a hint of machine grease at her hairline, she saw me and winked. On her left, Mom scooped mango salsa onto her plate. Dark haired and bronze skinned, the only person in the family with darker skin than me, Mom used to be athletic and hard. During her last tour in the Balkans, she’d ended up as a POW. The experience robbed her of the full use of one of her legs. Even after two surgeries, her knee still hurt.

Nevada sat next to Mom. She wore a pristine white dress with a boat neckline, three-quarter sleeves, and a knee-length paneled skirt that draped gracefully over her bump. Her hair framed her face in a sophisticated updo and her makeup was perfectly done. She must’ve come from a business meeting.

Nevada picked up a pickle, dipped it into honey, and stuck half of it into her mouth.

“Eww,” Arabella said. “Someone take that away from her.”

Nevada squinted at her. Most of the pregnancy books I read warned to expect mood swings in the last trimester. Nevada was forty weeks pregnant and cool as a cucumber. She claimed she’d put on forty pounds, which didn’t slow her down any, and if she had mood swings, we sure as hell hadn’t seen them. She was her calm, sometimes scary, self, and the look she gave Arabella would have given the five Primes I’d met today serious pause.

“Touch my pickles and die.”

I took the chair next to Nevada. She reached over and patted my back. Leon must have brought everyone up to speed on our monster adventure and race to MII.

Arabella squinted back. “You’re almost nine months pregnant. Shouldn’t you be soft, and happy, and glowing? When are we gonna see some glow?”

Arabella clearly had a death wish.

Nevada finished her pickle spear and licked honey off of her fingertips. “My back hurts, the kid inside me keeps kicking me in the kidneys, I have to pee every five minutes, my legs cramp, and I can’t get out of bed by myself. I have to roll to the side, which is harder right now since my husband is somewhere in the Russian Imperium and he isn’t there to steady me. And how was your day of being young, beautiful, skinny, and carefree? Why aren’t you glowing?”

Arabella stuck her tongue out and turned back to her plate. Something was wrong.

“What happened?” I asked her.

“Nothing happened.”

“Something did.”

Arabella rolled her eyes. “I can’t get any privacy in this family.”

No, you can’t. “What happened?”

“Some guy rear-ended me with his Tahoe on Wilcrest Drive.”

The collective chewing stopped.

“Are you okay?” Nevada asked.

“I’m okay, Baby is okay; he just bounced off my bumper.”

“Damn right he did,” Grandma Frida said between bites. “That’s 7.5 mm ballistic steel.”

Arabella loved her red Mercedes. We bought it for her used, and she had been in three accidents since getting her license. This made four. After our warehouse was attacked by an elite mercenary team, Grandma Frida tried to convince her to switch to something more “sensible,” but my sister refused, since Grandma Frida’s idea of sensible was a tank. Grandma settled for upgrading the Mercedes to VPAM 7 armor. She souped up the engine to compensate for the added weight and now the Mercedes sounded like a pack of hungry lions.

“What were you doing out on Wilcrest?” Mom asked.

“I wanted oyster nachos from Cajun Kitchen.”

Nevada’s eyes glazed over for a second. “Oh, that does sound good.”

“I’ll get you some next time,” Arabella said.

Leon dropped his fork on the table and shook his hands. “What happened with the accident?”

“Nothing happened. He got out of the car. I got out too. I was in a really good mood because I’d curled my hair and had a sundress on.”

And that was my younger sister in a nutshell. Curling her hair and putting on a sundress meant the world was hers.

“He came out, looked at his grille, and then he grabbed his hair and started screaming that it was an aftermarket grille. He accused me of driving my mom’s car, not knowing how to drive, called me the C-word. And his friends in the car laughed and pointed at me.”

“So he just screamed at you?” Nevada leaned forward, her expression focused.

“Pretty much.”

“And what did you do?” Nevada asked.

Arabella sighed. “You want to know what I did? Nothing. I stood there like a moron and let him scream at me. I don’t even know why I did that. I’m not a pushover.”

Three years ago, Arabella would have exploded. She would have changed shape right there in front of the Cajun Kitchen, stomped on that Tahoe, and rode it like a skateboard up and down the street. We had dodged a giant bullet.

“What did the driver look like?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t look at him that well. Blond, well-built, jock type, probably twenty-five, twenty-eight, between one hundred and sixty and one hundred and eighty pounds, about five foot ten, clean shaven, black T-shirt with a grey outline of Texas on it, khaki cargo shorts, carrot-red Nikes with white laces, a fake Rolex. And not a good fake Rolex either. He was driving a black Chevy Tahoe, maybe 2012 or so, with a small dent in the bumper on the driver’s side. There were three other people in the car.”

“Did you take a pic?” I asked.

“No,” Arabella squeezed out through clenched teeth. “Like I said, I stood there and let him yell at me. He didn’t even give me his insurance. Since he kept screaming about his grille, I told him he could sell the knock-off Rolex he was wearing to pay for a new one. He started cussing, and I said that we needed to get the cops involved. Then he just drove off. It was a random thing. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. We were talking about Nevada. When is Connor coming home?”

Really? That was a low blow.

A week ago, Connor got word that one of the soldiers he served with got himself entangled in a kidnapping in Russia. He was part of the rescue team, which hadn’t come back to base. Alan was one of the sixteen soldiers who made it out of the Belize jungle with Connor. My brother-in-law would do anything for them, but Nevada could be due any day, so he’d hesitated. And my pregnant sister practically pushed him into the plane to the Russian Imperium to go and rescue the rescue team. We hadn’t heard anything since.

“Arabella,” Mom said in her sergeant voice.

Arabella looked at her plate.

“You’ll know when I know,” Nevada said. “He’ll handle it and come home.”

“Heart called,” Mom said, keeping her voice casual.

Suddenly everybody decided that their food was fascinating, me included. The tacos were to die for.

Heart was Rogan’s second-in-command, in charge of the military operations conducted by Rogan’s mercenaries. Six months ago, Mom had called him for help. We couldn’t afford him, but Heart dropped everything and came to protect us anyway. We paid for his protection—he’d quoted us a ridiculously low rate—but after his employment ended, he’d stuck around, reviving Rogan’s old HQ across the street. He and his soldiers returned to it between jobs, which conveniently offered us additional security. Our own security chief, Patricia Taft, was now fully up to speed, leading a crew of new, handpicked guards, but having Heart near made everyone feel better.

Heart and Mom were meticulously polite with each other in public, but when Heart was in residence, there was always some reason for him to come over or for Mom to go over there. Something was happening between them, but it was fragile and tenuous and all of us did our best to ignore it, afraid that if we looked too hard at it, it would disappear.

“Oh?” I asked. “How is he doing?”

“He’s fine. He said to say hello.”

To the side, out of Mom’s peripheral vision, Arabella wagged her eyebrows.

I loaded another taco onto my plate. I was starving.

“So, how’s Linus?” Grandma Frida asked.

Subtlety was Grandma Frida’s middle name.

“Good.”

“Is that the family we are now?” Leon asked dramatically. “The family where nobody talks about their things? Where everything is just ‘good’ and ‘fine’?”

Bern reached over and tapped the back of Leon’s head. “She isn’t going to tell you about Linus. Stop already.”

“How’s the fire tank coming along?” I asked.

Grandma Frida grunted.

One of the local Houses had bought a custom firefighting tank from the Russian Imperium. Vodoley 03 was a marvel of Russian engineering. It carried about 25,000 liters of various liquids and could spray them in different patterns. It could also take a hit from a high-explosive 155 mm artillery shell and self-deploy two hundred and fifty km on a single tank of gas, but something had gone bonkers with its custom-built filtering system. Grandma Frida had been trying to coax it back to life for the last three days with no success.

“That good, huh?” Mom said.

Grandma Frida bristled. “Eat your food, Penelope.”

“We have a new case,” I said.

I told them about Felix’s murder, omitting anything that had to do with Wardens or the serum.

Mom bit her lower lip. “There is a lot of money involved. This makes me nervous.”

“That’s why we’ll stay on lockdown,” I said.

Arabella groaned. I ignored her.

“Let’s divide and conquer. I have four suspects. Everybody gets one.” I pointed at Arabella, Leon, and Bern in turn. “You get a Prime, you get a Prime, everybody gets a Prime, and we all run an in-depth background check. Is that agreeable to everyone?”

“Yes,” Bern told me.

Leon nodded.

Arabella rolled her eyes. “Work, work, work . . .”

I tapped my phone, sending out the mass email I had written on the drive home. “Pick whoever you want except Tatyana Pierce. Cornelius wants that one.”

Nevada frowned. “I bet he does.”

Arabella looked at her phone, jumped up, and ran out of the room.

Grandma Frida blinked. “Like what is even going on with that child?”

My sister sprinted back into the kitchen, carrying a tablet. Her eyes were the size of saucers. “Hua Ling!”

“What?” Mom asked.

“He’s the royal physician! The assassin! Hua Ling!”

No way.

Leon pivoted to her, his face concerned. “Is it drugs? You can tell me.”

“It’s not drugs,” I told him.

“It’s The Legend of Han Min,” Grandma Frida said.

Mom gave her an odd look.

“What?” Grandma Frida asked her. “I watched a few episodes with them. There is action and the actors are very pretty. You should see the costumes.”

“It’s a Chinese xianxia drama,” I explained. “It’s high fantasy, set in a mystical land, a lot of martial arts and Chinese mythology. Han Min is a martial arts heroine who ends up in the imperial palace and Hua Ling is a mystical alchemist who can cure any illness but is secretly an assassin trying to murder the emperor.”

“That explains everything,” Leon said.

Arabella marched over and stuck a tablet under his nose. “This is Hua Ling.”

On the tablet a startlingly beautiful man with a waterfall of dark hair sailed through the air swinging a sword.

She flicked her fingers across the tablet. “This is Stephen Jiang.”

A picture from Augustine’s files showed Stephen in a suit.

“See? Same person.”

It did kind of look like Stephen.

Leon flicked his finger back and forth, switching between the pictures, once, twice. Bern took the tablet away from him, set the portraits side by side, and handed it back.

Arabella tapped the tablet. “It’s him. It’s Cheng Feng.”

“I thought you said his name is Hua Ling,” Nevada said.

“The character’s name is Hua Ling. The actor’s name is Cheng Feng!” Arabella waved her arms in exasperation. “How are you not understanding this?”

“Do you understand this?” Nevada asked me.

“I do but I watch the show.”

“I’m telling you.” Arabella pounded her fist on the table for emphasis. “It’s the same guy!”

“Even if he is, how is it relevant?” Leon asked.

“Because of this.” Arabella tapped her tablet.

Hua Ling appeared on the screen, dressed in black and wearing a matching hooded cowl and a mask across the lower part of his face. He dashed across the double-eave hip roof through the rain, leaped impossibly high, and flung raindrops at the soldiers in ancient Chinese armor below. The raindrops turned into blades and sliced through the soldiers like razor-sharp needles.

“That’s special effects,” Leon said.

“What if it isn’t?” Arabella asked. “What if Catalina goes to see him and he turns her face into a pincushion?”

“You don’t even know it’s him. His face is covered. What you have here is some sort of Chinese ninja on a wire and lots of CGI . . .”

Arabella grabbed a spoon and threw it at Leon. He caught it.

“No violence,” Bern rumbled.

I glanced at Nevada. “Could an aquakinetic do this?”

“In theory,” she said. “I never came across one who did.”

That’s what I thought too. Most of the aquakinetics killed by drowning. It was faster and more efficient.

“I’m taking Stephen Jiang,” Arabella announced.

“Marat Kazarian,” Leon said.

“Cheryl Castellano.” Bern raised his finger.

“Okay,” I said. “My first interview is tomorrow at ten with Kazarian.”

“Do you need backup?” Leon crunched his knuckles.

“I already have it.”

“Who?” Leon asked.

Do it quick, like ripping off a Band-Aid. “Alessandro Sagredo.”

The room exploded.

I dragged myself from my small bathroom to my bed, crawled into it, and sprawled on my back. Shadow jumped up, turned three times, and settled on the blankets by my feet.

Once I mentioned Alessandro, the family had ganged up on me. Arabella screamed like a pterodactyl and demanded to know where Alessandro was staying, while punching her palm with her fist. Bern swore, which had happened exactly six times since he came to live with us. Grandma Frida promised to hit Alessandro with a wrench when he came over. Leon produced a gun, and then Mom asked him what the rule was about guns at the dinner table, and then he said that this was a special case and he had a bullet with Alessandro’s name on it. Then she told him that writing names on bullets was no way to go through life. And Nevada just sat there, in the middle of the chaos, and listened to me lie through my teeth about how Alessandro was no longer an emotional factor for me.

It was over now. Everyone had calmed down.

I was so tired. Reaching over to turn off the lamp on the night table seemed way too hard. I could probably fall asleep with it on, but it would bug me.

A quiet knock echoed through the room. Now what . . .

“Yes?”

The door swung open. Nevada walked in and shut the door behind her. “Hey, you.”

“Hey.”

My sister crossed the room and perched on the side of my bed. She’d switched to a flowing maxi dress in pale blue and green and abandoned her shoes somewhere. Her feet were swollen again. I’d bought her maternity support stockings that went up to her waist, but it was too hot to wear them.

“How are you holding up?” she asked.

Living with a truthseeker older sister had its advantages, but sometimes I wished I could lie to her. I sat up. “I’ve been better.”

Nevada glanced at the wall above me. “Is it me, or are there more of them since I last was here?”

Originally our building consisted of a long hallway with ten-foot-by-fifteen-foot offices on both sides. Bern had analyzed the structure and we knocked down some walls, which was why my bedroom was only ten feet wide but thirty feet long. The left side of it, with two large windows, looked out onto the glorious vista of an old parking lot. The other side, a solid wall of brick, offered two hundred and seventy square feet of opportunity. I put my bed against it, in the center. The rest of the space I’d filled with blades. Rapiers, sabers, tactical swords, katanas, daos, machetes, and kukris rested against the brick, each in its proper place. The blades glinted softly in the lamplight.

“The saber on the left is new. And the short sword in the lower right corner,” I told her.

A shadow crossed her face. “I should’ve found another way . . .” she murmured.

“What do you mean?” I knew exactly what she meant, but neither of us was ready for that conversation today. I didn’t know if I would ever be ready.

She shook her head. “Nothing. Do you feel unsafe?”

Oh no. She thought I needed a sword for protection, and she blamed herself. Nevada was the kind of older sister one dreamed of having. When things were at their worst and I was scared to tell Mom, I ran to Nevada and she fixed it. For a good chunk of my life, she protected and provided for us, and she still tried to do it even after she married Connor.

I needed to fix this. She didn’t need to feel any guilt because of me. She’d made the only possible decision when her life was tumbling into hell. In her place, I would’ve done the same.

“I don’t collect swords because I feel unsafe. I collect them because I like them. And because I haven’t found the one sword yet. I think we should discuss the real problem instead of this.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Nevada, your addiction to scented wax cubes is tearing this family apart . . .”

She laughed softly, but the guilt was still there, buried in her eyes. I needed to steer this conversation away from myself and my addiction to sharp chunks of metal.

“When was the last time you heard from Connor?” I asked.

“The day before yesterday. He said he found Shevchenko’s trail.”

“So good news?”

“Good news. What’s really going on with you and Alessandro?”

I sighed. “Nothing.”

She leaned forward and gently said, “Lie.”

Argh.

“Linus wants me to work with him.”

“And you always do what Linus says?”

“You’re breaking our agreement,” I told her.

“What agreement?”

“You don’t ask me about Linus, and I don’t ask you about midnight calls from the Pentagon to your cell and stories of harrowing hostage rescues by unidentified elite forces on the morning news.”

In Connor’s absence, Nevada ruled his private military empire. The aftermath of exposing the Sturm-Charles conspiracy scarred my sister and those wounds still hurt. She concentrated a lot of her efforts on making friends in high places and, by all accounts, succeeded. When House Rogan was mentioned in the Texas Assembly, the name was spoken with apprehension and respect.

“Fine,” Nevada said. “I’ll just say it. I am worried about you. When Alessandro abandoned you, you weren’t yourself for weeks.”

There was a lot more going on in my life at that time besides Alessandro leaving, but no, him taking off didn’t help.

“You barely slept, you didn’t eat, your wings . . . He hurt you.”

There was no point in lying. “Yes. He did. But . . .”

“There is no but.”

“But I bear some responsibility for it. He didn’t promise me anything except that he would see the investigation to the end. He didn’t say he loved me. I fell head over heels, and the worst thing is, I didn’t even know him that well. I fell in love with a man that was half fantasy and I paid for it.”

“What does he want from you?” Nevada fixed me with her stare.

“I don’t know. He says he is here to protect me.”

“From whom?”

“From a man called Arkan. He killed Alessandro’s father and now he is targeting me because of the current case.”

“Never heard of him.”

She would know everything there was to publicly know about Arkan by morning.

“I think he’s sincere.”

“Why?”

I sighed again. “He’s different.”

“How?”

“It’s hard to explain. The old Alessandro spent a lot of time tailoring how people saw him. He was arrogant. Everyone respected Linus, so Alessandro would challenge him out of principle. He thought he knew best, and he didn’t have to waste time on silly things like explanations. If he told me something, I should just accept it and do what he said. He thought he was exempt from a lot of limitations that normal mortals had.”

“Mortals?” Nevada raised her eyebrows.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he thought he was immortal. He is death in a fight, Nevada. I don’t think he’s ever met an opponent he couldn’t take.”

“So what changed?”

“All the flash is gone. He’s hyper focused. It’s this grim, cold determination, and it’s frightening. He didn’t challenge Linus. He told me he was sorry. He had a long list of what he was sorry for. Above all, he wants to protect me. He told me he would answer anything I asked, no matter how personal, and he did. He’s driven.”

My sister nodded. “I understand. Connor is driven. Right now, my husband is in the Russian Imperium, because when you live with a driven person, there are times you have to step back and let them do what they must do. I could have kept him here. It would’ve only taken one word, and he would have stayed, but I understand that he would carry a lifetime of guilt if he couldn’t try to save his friend. The important thing is, I’m still first. Connor cares about me most of all. Are you more important to Alessandro than his revenge?”

“I don’t know. Probably not. I’m not trying to restart this relationship, Nevada. I’m only trying to do my job. He is a part of it, and so I’ll grit my teeth and work with him, and at the end of it we’ll go our separate ways. It’s just . . . there are leftover feelings and they make everything complicated. It still hurts.”

She reached over and hugged me. I hugged her back. A soft thump hit my stomach. My nephew was doing summersaults inside his mom.

She had so many things to worry about besides me. Connor, their people, her baby, her baby’s magic . . . Connor and Nevada weren’t compatible from the magic point of view. He was a telekinetic, she was a truthseeker, and there was no telling what sort of magic their son would have, if any. There was an ugly word for members of magical families born without a power—a dud. For a while Leon had thought he was a dud and it was so hard on him. He’d thought he was the only one who wasn’t special. If my nephew was born without magic, Connor and Nevada would love him just as much, but I crossed my fingers and toes that he would have a talent.

She carried all that on her shoulders, but she still found time to worry about me.

“It will be fine,” I told her. “I can handle it.”

She let me go. “If you need help, any help at all, you ask me. Promise me.”

“I promise. Since you offered . . .”

“Yes?”

“What’s the deal with Cornelius and House Pierce?”

She grimaced. “How much did Cornelius tell you?”

“He told me that he and Adam Pierce were joined at the hip through their childhood, not by choice, and that he detested the whole family.”

Nevada nodded. “Right now House Pierce is run by Peter Pierce. Tatyana is his younger sister. Adam is the youngest. Pierce Senior died a few years back, but their mother is still alive. She spoiled Adam rotten. Cornelius’ mother went to school with her, and they never lost touch. It was decided that Adam needed ‘a boyhood companion to help him make good choices.’”

“Boyhood companion? Are we in the 19^th century?”

Nevada shrugged. “My guess is, Mama Pierce realized that her precious boy had one hell of an antisocial personality disorder, and since she couldn’t be there one hundred percent of the time, she decided to chain him to someone who followed the rules. Long story short, Cornelius couldn’t keep Adam from doing messed-up crap and he was frequently punished in Adam’s stead.”

“That’s horrible.”

“It is. Some of the things he told me made me want to punch her in the face. I don’t think he will do anything to jeopardize your investigation.”

“I never thought he would.”

She studied my face. “Catalina, I’ll tell you this one last thing, and then I’ll go. Connor treats Alessandro like a ticking bomb. His father once told him that a Sagredo Prime is the most dangerous opponent he could ever face.”

“Why? Alessandro can summon weapons, but Connor can cut a building in half.”

“He doesn’t know. He was young and didn’t ask for explanation at the time. But from what he says, it has to do with a Sagredo House spell.”

“Sagredos have no House-level spells. There is no record of them ever using arcane circles, even.”

Nevada’s face turned dark. “Exactly. I don’t know what secrets Alessandro is hiding, and I want you to be careful. Be very careful. I love you and I don’t want you to get hurt.”