Ruby Fever

Chapter 2

The Respite occupied a handsome two-story building on the corner of Milam and Anita, in Midtown. There were places in Houston that glittered. This area wasn’t one of them. It was a place of generic apartment complexes, karaoke bars, bistros and take-out joints. Chipotle and Starbucks lived here and enjoyed heavy foot traffic from young professionals stopping in on their way in or out of the steel and glass towers of Northeast Midtown.

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.”

“In our conference room?”

“Yes.”

“How big is this spider?”

“About a four-inch leg span.”

Alessandro glanced up at the heavens. The heavens were hidden by the car roof, but I was sure the higher power had seen the silent plea for mercy in his eyes.

“I forgot to ask, how did it go with Gunderson?”

Alessandro shrugged. “We talked. I dropped him off at the Justice Center trussed up like a hog. Lenora can take it from there.”

Lenora Jordan, the Harris County DA, would definitely take it from there. As Connor once put it, law and order were her gods, and she served as their devoted paladin.

We turned around the bend. Linus’ gates came into view, Leon’s blue Shelby GT350 parked by the keypad. Alessandro pulled in behind him.

I got out of the car and walked up to the keypad. Leon had the family version of the code, but mine was the Deputy Warden sequence. I entered it.

Leon rolled down his window. “I waited as instructed.”

The gates slid open with a clang. The lights on the keypad blinked but remained a steady lemon-yellow.

I was right. Linus’ house thought it was under attack. The moment an intruder crossed the property line, Linus’ defense turrets would sprout out of the innocuous-looking lawn like some lethal mushrooms and pulverize the offender into a pile of smoking meat. Linus was a hephaestus mage. He built devastating weapons out of random trash and duct tape. His defense systems were second to none.

Alessandro got out of the car.

The wrought iron gates stood wide open, like the mandibles of some beast ready to grind us between its teeth. Theoretically, the system would recognize me and Alessandro. Theoretically, it wouldn’t kill us. Unfortunately, we’d never tested that theory under battle conditions.

“Do we go in?” Leon asked.

“I go in,” Alessandro said. “The two of you stay here.”

“I don’t think so,” I told him.

“There is no reason for both of us to go.”

“You’re right. I should go by myself. It’s my responsibility as the Deputy.”

“It’s my responsibility to protect the Deputy.” Alessandro’s tone said the discussion was over.

“That’s why we’ll go together.”

Leon sighed. “I guess I’ll just stay here. Watching you get inside or get turned into human hamburger meat.”

I could have done without that visual.

The longer we waited, the worse things would be.

Deep breath.

I took a step toward the gates. Alessandro strode next to me and took my hand. “Slow and steady. It’s a walk in the park.”

We walked past the gates and down the circular driveway, keeping our pace measured. The grounds looked perfectly ordinary. No signs of battle. Nothing out of place.

No sudden movements. No holding your breath. The system had our biometrics, but biometric scanners were notoriously unreliable.

Two months ago, I’d watched Linus test one of his turrets. He’d fired at an armored car with a ballistic dummy in it. The stream of bullets cut through the armor, nearly slicing the vehicle in half. When he was done, the ballistic dummy was no more. There was just mush. Thick gelatinous mush.

Alessandro’s strong warm fingers held mine. “Almost there.”

Slow and steady, around the fountain in a pretty flower bed, up the stairs, to the front door. Just another day in the life of a Deputy Warden.

We stepped onto the porch. I raised my head, looking straight into the hidden camera. If Linus was inside, he would let me in.

Nothing.

If this was a test, I would turn around, go straight home, and refuse to speak with Linus until he apologized. It wouldn’t matter if the sky started raining the Osiris serum. I would get a genuine, heartfelt apology.

I punched the code into the sophisticated lock and pressed my thumb against the fingerprint pad.

A distant motor whirred, followed by a metal clang.

The lock clicked.

Alessandro put his hand on the door handle.

Breathe, breathe, nice and calm.

The door swung open, and we slipped inside.

The cavernous grand foyer stretched in front of us, full of shadows. Motorized blinds blocked the windows, and the only illumination came through a stained-glass dome high above. White venetian plaster on the walls, a double staircase wrapping around another fountain directly under the dome, three empty doorways, one to the left, leading to guest bedrooms and the garage, one straight ahead, into the dining room, and the last, to the right, opening into the hallway that terminated in Linus’ study.

Alessandro stepped in front of me. We stood quietly, listening, waiting. The house was as silent as a tomb except for the quiet splashing of the fountain.

Alessandro pointed to the left and slightly back, his gaze sweeping the house in front of us. I moved in that direction, into the murky corner between two columns, and pressed the hidden sensor. A section of the wall slid aside, revealing a control panel with all its lights off. I’d have to speak while facing it. My back would be presenting a great target to anyone hiding inside. Adrenaline spurred my heart rate.

I held my arm out and pushed with my magic, forcing it through the bone and muscle of my forearm. An orange glow shone through my skin, forming a circle of a braided vine with a five-point star in its center. A spot between my shoulder blades itched, expecting a bullet.

“Catalina Baylor, Deputy Warden.”

The panel lit up with green, the small display flaring into life. Access granted. I exhaled and typed in my code. A prompt popped up, warning me that siege protocols were in effect. I had two choices, CANCEL, which would take me back to the previous menu, or DEACTIVATE. I chose DEACTIVATE.

The panel flashed with red. I had expected some noise, something to announce it, but the house stayed quiet. No metal clanging, no machinery moving, no sirens, only a word on the display: DISARMED.

I took my phone out and texted Leon.

Clear.

Moments ticked by.

The front door opened, and Leon strode through, carrying a SIG Sauer.

The air around Alessandro’s right hand sparked with orange for a fraction of a second. An identical gun materialized in his fingers.

Leon stalked left, while Alessandro started right, toward the study. I followed Alessandro. We passed through the doorway, through the short hallway, and Alessandro walked into the study. He stopped, blocking my view, moved to the left, and motioned me in. I entered.

On the right, Pete, Linus’ bodyguard, sprawled on the antique Persian rug. He’d fallen on his side in a crumpled heap with his face turned toward us. His lips were black. His eyes were open wide, milky and dead. A dark pattern of jagged lines marked his face, spreading from his eyes across his skin to his hairline.

Shock splashed me in an icy wave.

I’d known Pete for almost a year. He picked me up when Linus wanted to see me, he drove me around to my assignments when I needed it, and he would have put himself between me and any threat without hesitation. I just saw him last week. I’d brought him and Linus a cranberry tart I made. They’d shared it, and Pete told me I had to stop wasting my life on trivial things like being a Warden Deputy and dedicate myself to my true calling, which was making delicious desserts. And now he was dead.

I crouched by him. It felt like someone else was moving my body for me. Slowly, I pushed his right shoulder. Full rigor. He’d been dead longer than a few hours, but less than a day.

The network of lines on his face bulged from his skin. It looked like blood, old blood, somehow forced into a pattern and darkened to near black.

Alessandro moved next to me. His hand rested on my shoulder, the warm strength of his fingers reassuring.

Funny, protective Pete was dead. There was nothing I could do. But Linus was still missing. Until we found his body, there was still hope.

I got up.

Alessandro met my gaze. We talked without saying a word.

Okay?

Yes.

We moved across the study to the corner. I pushed my hand against the wooden panel decorating the wall and waited for the sensor to pick up my presence. A motor purred inside the walls and the wooden panel slid aside, revealing a stone shaft twelve feet across. Stone stairs wound down along the wall, wrapping around a fireman’s pole that stretched to the bottom floor. A dark red smear stained the metal of the pole.

Alessandro descended the stairs, quiet as a ghost. I followed.

We went down and around, three floors deep. The stairs terminated in a wide hallway. On the left, a wire cage guarded access to the freight elevator. On the right, a massive steel door barred the way to the workshop and weapon vault. A trail of blood drops led to it. Red smudges marred the control panel on the wall to the left.

My heart was beating out of my chest. If I never saw another damn control panel again, it would be too soon.

I wiped the blood off the keys with my sleeve, punched in the code, and pressed my thumb against the fingerprint scanner.

Seconds ticked by. One, two . . .

Come on.

Three, four, five . . .

Something thudded beyond the door.

Come on!

The vault door slid aside with a heavy groan, revealing the workshop hidden behind it. The stench of old urine hit me. In front, on the floor littered with first aid supplies, Linus slumped against his workbench. A trail of dark blood stretched from his nose, staining his lips and his shirt. His eyes were shut. He looked dead.