“I did no such thing. I didn’t go to your house. Your captive—a citizen of my land, whom you kidnapped and kept prisoner—hired mercenaries to rescue him and they did. I’ll send you the contract, so your lawyers can explain it to you. Your security is lousy, Father. I would look into that if I were you.”
“I AM SHARRUM OF SHINAR. MY LINE GOES BACK A HUNDRED GENERATIONS. I WILL NOT BE DISRESPECTED!”
“Nor will I!” My magic raged. The Guild around me shook. “I’m a princess of Shinar, granddaughter of Semiramis, niece of the City Eater, daughter of the Builder of Towers. My line is longer than yours by one!”
Shock registered on his face for a moment before melting back into fury. That’s right. You made me, now deal with it.
“You will respect my boundaries, Father. You squatted on the edge of my land and you keep trying to provoke me. I haven’t broken my word. I’ve upheld our peace.”
“BY TAKING WHAT IS MINE LIKE A THIEF? YOU SHAME ME, DAUGHTER.”
The press of his magic was almost too much to bear, but I was too angry to back down.
“I wasn’t there. I was in Mishmar, talking to my grandmother. Ask her, if you don’t believe me.”
His magic punched me. “RETURN THE DEMIGOD TO ME!”
I pulled my magic to me and punched back. The floor under my feet bounced. “No.”
The magic was so tight around me, it responded every time I took a breath.
“YOU’RE A POOR EXCUSE FOR A DAUGHTER.”
His magic clashed with mine. It felt like the air around us was breaking apart.
“Kate!” Curran snapped.
I glanced around me. The mercs cowered by the walls, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t give a crap if the entire roof caved in and crushed them all. I would not back down. Not this time.
I raised my chin. “You’ve killed your own family, Father. Even now, you’re trying to reach through time with your hand and strangle its future. You are the reason no descendants of our blood survived. You reap what you sow. I’m exactly what you deserve.”
He stared at me, his gaze boring through me. His face stretched and Roland laughed. “YOU ARE, INDEED, MY DAUGHTER.”
The light contracted, sucked into its own center, and vanished.
I turned around. The Clerk stared at me, wild-eyed. His nose was bleeding. On my right, shell-shocked mercs blinked. The closest to me bled from the nose and ears. I glanced up. Saiman stood on the third-floor balcony, his face bloodless. Above him Christopher gripped the balance beam, staring at the spot where my father had been, his ruby wings opened wide, his face twisted by fury.
Juke wiped the blood from under her nose and looked at it.
I’d done it again. Damn it. I’d let the magic drag me away from who I was.
“What the hell was all that about?” Juke asked. “All I heard was a weird hissing language with some ‘fucks’ in it.”
The tension hung in the air. I had to say something to break it. “This is nothing. You should see the fit he threw when I told him I wasn’t coming to visit for Christmas.”
Barabas laughed.
The mercs looked at him, then back at me.
“Family,” Curran said, putting his arm around me. “Can’t live with them, can’t kill them. You ready to go home, baby?”
“Sure,” I said.
Outside I stopped. “I did it again.”
“I know,” he said.
“I’m trying.”
“I know.”
I had to try harder. “He really wants Saiman for some reason.”
“Did he mention the tiger?”
“He thinks we stole it. You still feeling okay?”
“Yes.”
I glanced at him. “Why did you eat the tiger?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. It was a compulsion. I saw him and I had to make him not be.”
“You worry me,” I told him.
He pointed back at the Guild with his thumb. “Pot, kettle.”
Some pair we made. There was nothing left to do but go home. I could use a quiet afternoon and a big early dinner before we figured out our next move.
• • •
“CAN I TALK to you?” Julie asked me as we pulled into the driveway in front of our home.
“Yes.” I knew that tone of voice. Something bad always followed that tone of voice. Something like “I crashed the car” or “I accidentally set the school on fire.” I couldn’t take more bad news today.
Curran and Derek went inside. I leaned on the trunk of the car. “What is it?”
She stepped close to me and whispered. “Adora is staying in George and Eduardo’s spare bedroom.”
“What?”
Julie went to the Jeep she or Derek usually took to Cutting Edge, pulled her backpack out, and ran back to me, digging in it.
“He sent some people after her a few hours after you left. I had to move her. The hospital wouldn’t let her stay. Here, they took pictures for insurance purposes and I got the extras.”
She thrust a stack of Polaroids at me. The first one showed a wall covered with blood. A big spurt of bright red blood, then the characteristic wave pattern as the victim stumbled along the wall. Arterial spray. Another Polaroid, more blood. I flipped through them. Blood on the floor, blood on the walls, headless body, another body crumpled up, a third corpse sagging in the corner, more blood, bloody sheets, and finally Adora, kneeling in the blood and sitting back on her heels, her sword in front of her, a big angelic smile on her face.
Why me?
“She said Roland’s people tried to bring her back and she told them she didn’t want to go.”
Well, at least she made a choice instead of blindly obeying. “So you took her to George’s house?”
“I didn’t know where else to put her. If I put her into one of the other houses, Curran would smell her. George has people working on her roof, so there are new smells all the time.”
“My old apartment?”
She opened her mouth. “Oh. I didn’t think of that.”
“Did you at least tell George who she was?”
“Yes. George was okay with it. She told Adora that if there was any trouble, she would sit on her.”
Coming from an enormous Kodiak, that was no small threat.
“She also wrote down all the sahanu information you wanted.” Julie dug in her bag. “It has some blood spatter on it but you can still read some of it . . . Kate?”
I hugged her. “We’ll deal with it tomorrow. Tonight we all need to rest. And we need to take time to remember Jezebel, because there might not be much time tomorrow.”
“Okay,” she said.
We went inside.
My aunt tore through me like a hurricane. “You left me behind.”
“Yes, I did.”
“You will not do that again.”
“Yes, I will, if I find it necessary. Bringing you to the Pack would’ve resulted in us being torn to pieces.”
Erra squinted at me. “What happened?”
“For two years a shapeshifter woman took care of Julie and acted as my bodyguard. I trusted her with my life and the life of my adopted child. Tonight he made her try to murder my best friend’s baby. She failed but she injured the Beast Lord’s mate.”
Erra peered at Julie. “You told me this one was dead.”
“I didn’t want you to kill her,” I said.
Erra peered at Julie. “You gave her our blood?”
“It’s a long story.”
“You like horses, child, don’t you?”
Julie looked at me.
“Go ahead and answer,” I told her.
“Yes.”
“And wolves. You have an affinity for wolves and wolflike dogs. They make sense to you.”
“Yes.”
/> “What color is my niece’s magic?”
“It’s difficult to describe.”
Erra glanced at me. “You have a child of the Koorgahn. And a throwback to a pure-blood, too. Look at that hair.”
Koorgahn? She probably meant kurgan. The only kurgans I knew about were the burial mounds peppering the old Russian steppes, Asia, and southern Siberia. The kurgans served as burial mounds for the ancient race of Scythians, and the earliest ones dated sometime around the ninth century BC . . . They were blond. The ancient Greeks described them as red-haired or fair-haired with blue or gray eyes, and the mummies the archaeologists pulled out of the ancient grave sites matched that phenotype.
“Who are you, child?” Erra asked.
“I’m her Herald,” Julie said.
“At least you have a Herald. You’ve done something right. I need to speak to my niece alone. We’ll talk more later.”
Julie looked at me. I nodded and she went deeper into the house.
“My father has been talking to her,” I said.
“Of course he has. He always wanted one, but they were a proud people. He couldn’t buy a child of royal blood and he couldn’t broker the marriage of one of his offspring to theirs. First, they knew his reputation, and second, they were afraid to lose the Sight. It was believed that a mixing of two powerful bloodlines could produce a child unable to see magic, and they wouldn’t expose one of their own to that risk. When it was clear that magic would vanish from the world, her people killed themselves by the hundreds because they were going magic-blind.”
My aunt, the downer.
“Binding a child of the Koorgahn. A dangerous game you’re playing, squirrel.”
“I was trying to save her. She was dying of loupism.”
“Yes, they are susceptible. Wolves, horses, and birds of prey, those are her things. That’s how they came to battle, riding their horses, guarded by their birds of prey and their wolves. Your great-grandfather fought a bloody war for thirty years just to keep the people of Koorgahn out of our valley as they were sweeping west. How ironic that you would find one in this age and in this place, yet have no idea how to use her.”
“I don’t want to use her. She is my kid.”
Erra sighed. “We’ll talk about this and what happened today later. Now I will go and see if your ‘kid’ knows the extent of her powers.”
“Good luck with that. I can’t even get her to clean her room.”
I turned and went upstairs. I locked the bedroom door and walked into the bathroom. Curran was already in the shower.
I stripped my clothes off and went in there with him.
He stared at my body. I looked like a gang of street thugs with steel-toed boots had worked me over. I stepped under the water and hugged him.
He hugged me back.
• • •
SOMETHING TOUCHED MY ear. I shrugged off sleep long enough to open my eyes and saw Curran holding the phone. For me. Ugh.
“Yes?” I said into the phone.
“What do you need?” Saiman asked.
Well, he didn’t last long. “Let me make you a list . . .”
“Do spare me the smartass comments. What do you need me to do?”
“A way to kill or contain my father. Failing that, I need a record of what he wrote on my skin.”
“Your office in two hours.”
He hung up. I opened my eyes and looked at Curran. “What time is it?”
“Six o’clock.”
“You let me sleep for four hours straight?” I’d stay up all night.
“Sixteen,” he said. “It’s six in the morning. You needed it.”
After the shower I’d crashed. The thing with my aunt had taken a lot out of me, and the thing with Andrea’s baby didn’t help either. Sooner or later, you had to pay the piper. I dimly recalled waking up at some point, because I had dreamed Dali died and Jim wouldn’t let me go to her funeral, but exhaustion had soon dragged me back under.
“Did you have dinner last night?”
“Yes. The kids and I went to George and Eduardo’s,” he said. “Mahon’s bear guards arrived with honey muffins and roasted deer and we all ate ourselves into a coma.”
“That’s nice.” I hugged my pillow. “Will you wake me up in an hour?”
He picked me up and stood me upright on my feet. I punched him in the neck. Not very hard and not very fast. I missed.
“The medmage is here.”
“I don’t need a medmage.” I yawned.
He picked me up, carried me into the bathroom, and set me in front of the mirror. I had acquired a lovely reddish-purple color. Both of my shoulders had turned raspberry red. The edges of my wounds were puffy. Irene must’ve had something nasty on her blades, or maybe Mishmar wasn’t the most sterile environment to get cut in. My left hip, my knees—and probably my back, judging by the lake of pain that pulled in my trapezius muscles—were a deep blue, too.
“My impersonation of a peacock is proceeding as planned.”
“Not funny.” Curran’s expression could’ve stopped a raging bear in his tracks.
I had tried to seduce him after the shower but he wasn’t having any of it. He packed me into the bed, and I was making some sort of smartass quip about his new powers post-saber-tooth-devouring, and then there was nothing. Here’s hoping I didn’t fall asleep in mid-sentence.
Yep, I probably did.
In fact, I could totally sleep more. I could lie down on this nice cold floor and nap. I yawned again.
“Curran, where are you going?”
“To make breakfast.”
Sleep evaporated. My eyes snapped open. If I didn’t get downstairs in the next ten minutes, he’d smoke out the kitchen again with bacon.
I made it down in time to save the bacon from a terrible fate. Curran had brought in Nellie Kerning, one of the medmages the Guild frequently hired. She had set up camp at our dining room table. She was short, plump, and in her early fifties. She also took no prisoners, which was why Curran must’ve called her in the first place.
“Strip.”
I pulled off most of my clothes, leaving on my sports bra and underwear. A woman had to have limits. Nellie examined me.
I caught Curran giving me an interested look. Was he actually . . . Yep, he was checking me out. Yeah, where were you last night, buddy? I would’ve stayed awake . . . Well, no. Probably not.
“Did you play tag with a rock troll?” Nellie asked.
“No.” My aunt played tennis with me against the walls. But explaining that would cramp my style.
Where was my aunt?
Nellie sighed. “Why does everyone have to be a hard case? Is it in your job description?”
“Yes. Also I know a were–honey badger you would really like.”
“Mm-hm. Let’s see if we can salvage this mess.”
She was fifteen minutes into the chant when Andrea and Raphael walked through the door, followed by Robert.
“Would it kill you to knock?” I asked.
“Would it kill you to lock your door?” Andrea marched over to me and handed Baby B over. “Here, hold my kid.”
Oh boy. I took Baby B. She looked at me and yawned.
Raphael very carefully avoided looking at undressed me and went into the kitchen.
“First, Dali survived, so you can stop freaking out,” Andrea said. “And don’t get any ideas about things being awkward between us because of what happened. Things are not awkward.”
“Things are awkward,” Robert said. “Your father ordered a hit on the heir of Clan Bouda, and his assassin injured the Consort.”
“Done,” Nellie said. “I’ll bill you.”
I waited until she left, gave the baby back to Andrea, and pulled on my T-shirt and my shorts.
“Is she recovering okay?” I asked.
“I’m forbidden to answer any questions,” Robert said.
“What do you mean, forbidden?” Curran asked. The tone of his voice wasn’t friendly.
Robert stood a little straighter.
“He means Jim flipped the fuck out.” Raphael stole a piece of bacon off the plate. “You and everyone who separated with you are on the Do Not Talk To list. He can’t forbid you to visit the Keep because it’s against the law, but your access will be severely restricted. And he gagged anyone employed in an official capacity, like Robert here. But unlike Robert, I don’t hold an administrative position outside my clan, so I don’t care what the fuck he thinks.”
Andrea grinned at him. Somebody had earned a whole bunch of awesome husband points.
“He’s thinking with his gut instead of his brain,” Raphael said. “Nobody realized Jezebel was a double agent, so in his mind, if she was one, anybody could be one. His gut reaction is to shut down the flow of information, fortify, and . . .”
“Retaliate,” Curran said, his face grim.
“He can’t retaliate,” I said.
“I can’t answer questions,” Robert said. “But I can listen to advice. He didn’t forbid me to listen.”
“Is there proof that Jezebel acted on Roland’s orders?” Curran asked.
Robert didn’t answer.
“Probably not,” Andrea said. “If there is, that information hasn’t been shared with us.”
“In the absence of proof,” Curran said, “to outsiders this looks like one member of the Pack attacked another. It’s a Pack matter.”
“If Jim retaliated in force against my father, it would mean a declaration of war,” I said. “He and the Pack are within the land I protect. Roland wants war, but he doesn’t want to break the treaty. He will seize any opportunity. Jim’s actions will be viewed as an unprovoked attack.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Curran said, watching Robert. “He’s made up his mind.”
“What would you do if your mate was stabbed in the heart with a silver blade?” Robert asked.
“I would wait until I was absolutely sure that I could destroy my enemy,” Curran said. “I wouldn’t throw my people away. He can’t kill Roland, Robert. He doesn’t have the resources. All he can do is kill some of Roland’s people and a lot of his own. Roland’s forces are disposable. Our people, the Pack, are not.”