FOUR
It was still oh-God o’clock, and the sun hadn’t even begun to peek up over the horizon yet, but I was so wired on stress and chocolate ice cream that I didn’t put much consideration into other people’s comfort and routine.
I forwarded the threatening email to Leo, our resident computer expert. He was a descendant of Hermes, and had a Midas touch where money was concerned. He’d first started learning about computers so he could keep in constant touch with the stock market, but he’d taken to them like a duck to water, and his hacking skills were sometimes downright scary.
Leo’s rooms were down the hall from mine, and after I hit send, I scurried to his door and knocked. I figured the email I just forwarded needed an explanation, and it wasn’t until I’d knocked a second time without an answer that I realized what time it was, and that I was probably the only person in the house awake at this hour, other than Blake and Steph, if they were still up. I was badly rattled and wanted to get a start on finding Konstantin now, but as urgent as it felt to me, I knew it wasn’t reasonable to be waking anybody up before six. Whatever Konstantin had planned for me, it would take days, weeks, maybe even months to develop, and letting Leo get another couple hours of sleep wouldn’t endanger anyone.
I was just turning to go back to my room when the door behind me opened.
When I first caught sight of Leo, I was sure I’d rousted him out of bed. He was wearing a fluffy white bathrobe over blue and white striped pajamas. A second glance showed me that his mousy brown hair was slightly damp and his cheeks were freshly shaven. He smelled of drugstore aftershave and Listerine, and I came to the inevitable conclusion that I hadn’t woken him up after all. His eyes widened when he saw me.
“Nikki?” he said. “What are you doing here?” He reached into the pocket of his robe and pulled out a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, shoving them onto his face in a gesture that looked almost nervous. I realized I’d never seen him without the glasses before.
I think Leo has a good heart, or he wouldn’t be working for Anderson, but he’s about as socially awkward an individual as I’ve ever met. He has an obvious aversion to eye contact, and he always seems a bit nervous and distracted, like only a fraction of his attention is actually focused on whoever he’s talking to. I suspect when he heard the knock on his door, he assumed it was Anderson, and finding me there threw him for a bit of a loop. His shoulders hunched as if he were expecting a blow, and his gaze dropped to the floor.
He was nervous with everyone, but more so with me, the newcomer to the house. I wondered if I should have explained what was going on via email instead of coming to his suite, but it was too late now.
“Hi, Leo. I’m sorry to bother you so early in the morning. I hope I didn’t wake you.” I knew I hadn’t, but it seemed like the polite thing to say, and I found Leo’s nerves and awkwardness contagious.
“I was awake,” he told my left shoulder. “The European markets start opening at four.”
Geez, and I’d thought I was an early riser. I’d never known anyone else in the house was up at this hour, which I guessed meant Leo didn’t venture out of his rooms in the morning. Actually, Leo didn’t venture out of his rooms much at all. Sometimes he had to be reminded to step away from his computers and eat. It didn’t seem like much of a life to me, but what do I know?
With anyone else, I probably would have tried a little small talk before launching into my request, but I figured Leo wouldn’t blame me—hell, he probably wouldn’t even notice—if I skipped the social niceties.
“I forwarded you an email,” I told him. “It’s supposedly from Konstantin. I wonder if you’d be able to trace it or something.” I honestly didn’t think Konstantin was stupid enough to send me a trail of bread crumbs that would lead right to him, but I figured it would be foolish not to at least check it out. Not to mention that Konstantin was centuries old and might not be as computer literate as a modern man.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Leo didn’t beckon me to follow as he retreated into his room, but he didn’t close the door, either. I assumed that was an invitation to come in, so I stepped inside.
All of the suites Anderson’s Liberi inhabited consisted of two rooms. For most of us, one of those rooms was the bedroom, and one was some version of a sitting room. I supposed with his fanatical attachment to the stock market and his lack of socialization, a sitting room would have been useless for Leo. Instead, the first room of his two-room suite was what I imagined the inside of a NASA control room might look like, only less tidy.
A huge L-shaped desk took up about half the room, and practically every inch of that desk was covered with computer equipment, bristling with tangled cords and surge protectors. I saw laptops and desktops, Macs and PCs, shiny new machines and old clunkers that looked like they were held together by duct tape. There were monitors sprinkled here and there on the desk, but there was also a bank of them mounted on the wall. Disassembled units spewing spare parts were tucked under the desk and pushed up against the other walls, and a freestanding air conditioner blasted cold air into the room even though it was January.
Leo must have noticed me staring at the air conditioner.
“The computers generate a lot of heat,” he explained. “If I didn’t keep the air conditioner going, my equipment would overheat.”
He plopped down into a rolling chair and used the edge of the desk to pull himself over in front of one of the computers. His fingers moved lightning fast over the keyboard. Whatever he was using as an email reader wasn’t anything I’d seen before, and I wondered if it was something Leo had created himself. There were no pretty icons or neatly labeled buttons, and instead of tooling around with a mouse or track pad, Leo was typing into a command window. He paused practically midkeystroke and glanced over at one of the other monitors. He frowned and wheeled himself over, hit a couple of keys, then returned to the email.
“You’re really into multitasking, aren’t you?” I murmured.
“Have to be,” he answered without turning his attention away from the computers. “Sometimes all the markets are open at the same time. Don’t want to miss anything.”
I was tempted to ask him what he did for fun, but I already knew the answer. Maybe he wasn’t just socially awkward. Maybe he actually bordered on autistic, though he was obviously high functioning. I wondered if he’d always been like that, or if becoming Liberi had changed him. Then I wondered how someone as mild mannered and aloof as Leo could have become Liberi in the first place. Unless he was one of the original Liberi—the son of a god, rather than just a descendant of one—he had to have killed someone to become immortal. I had a hard time imagining him doing that.
“I like numbers more than I like people,” he said without looking up, as if he could guess the direction of my thoughts. His fingers kept zipping across the keyboard. There was an edge of defensiveness in his voice. “Whenever someone new comes along, they feel sorry for me and try to draw me out, but I’m not like the rest of you. I’m happy like this.”
Maybe that was why he was so nervous around me—he was waiting for me to try to “save” him. If he were an ordinary human being, I might have thought him desperately in need of human contact. I might have thought he couldn’t possibly be living a good life shut up in his room with his computers all the time. But he wasn’t an ordinary human being—he was a Liberi. Immortality, and the powers that were awakened in a Liberi when he or she became immortal, changed people, made them something other than human. When Leo said he was happy with his life as it was, I believed him.
“I don’t feel sorry for you,” I said, though maybe that wasn’t strictly true. It seemed sad to me that Leo would spend so much of his time so completely alone, but I knew I was imposing my own likes and dislikes on him. “I wouldn’t want to live like this, but if it works for you, that’s all that matters.”
He paused for a moment in his typing, looking over his shoulder at me, though he still didn’t meet my eyes. “Thank you.”
“No problem.”
He turned back to his computer and tapped a few more keys. Then he nodded sagely and spoke without turning around.
“The email was sent from a computer at the FedEx Print and Ship on K Street at 4:02 A.M. The email account was created at 3:46 A.M. and deleted at 4:03. Sending that email is the only activity associated with the account, and the user registered as John Smith.”
“Creative,” I muttered under my breath. I’d have to swing by and see if anyone there remembered seeing Konstantin, though even if they did, I didn’t think it would be much help. I needed to know where he was now, not where he’d been at 4 A.M.
Leo shrugged apologetically. “Sorry that’s all I could get.”
I almost laughed. “You got everything there was, and in about five minutes. I couldn’t have asked for more.”
He didn’t respond, instead zipping his chair over to another computer and typing at high speed. But even so, I didn’t miss the pleased little smile on his lips.
I’m not particularly fond of admitting I’m wrong—who is?—but it seemed like the logical conclusion, given the evidence. Trying to catch Konstantin all by myself would be flat-out stupid, and it wasn’t like I could do anything to him if I caught him. Which meant I had to swallow my pride and tell Anderson I’d changed my mind about the hunt.
I was in a foul mood when I stepped into his study after a late breakfast I’d forced myself to eat in an attempt to counteract the ice-cream binge. I desperately wanted to catch Konstantin before his next attack, whatever that would be, but I wasn’t overly optimistic about my chances. I didn’t have much to go on, and since Konstantin knew he’d have a descendant of Artemis on his tail, he was no doubt going to be extra paranoid and careful about keeping himself hidden.
The icing on my grumpy-pants cake was the sympathy the rest of Anderson’s Liberi had thrown my way. Blake had apparently spread the word after Steph’s visit, and my friends/coworkers had paraded through my suite to offer their condolences. I had to endure a long, motherly hug from Maggie, who was so sweet my misfortune brought a sheen of tears to her eyes; an awkward visit from Logan, who was too much of a manly man to know how to express his sympathies comfortably; and an even more awkward visit from Jack, who, with his trickster heritage, had trouble being serious for more than two minutes in a row.
Only Jamaal failed to put in an appearance, and that hurt me though it probably shouldn’t have. He was even less comfortable with expressing feelings than Logan. But I couldn’t help taking it as even more evidence that whatever friendship we had started to build together had been destroyed, either by my willingness to leave, or by our tentative foray into romance. I wished I knew which.
Anderson was sitting at his desk when I ventured through the open door of his study. I had the immediate impression he’d been waiting for me, though perhaps that was egocentric of me. He spent a lot of time in his study, and it was always the first place to check when I wanted to look for him.
I didn’t know what Anderson generally did all day while he was sitting around in his study, but this morning, he was reading the newspaper. I hadn’t read a real, printed newspaper since I was a kid clamoring for the Sunday comics, but Anderson was a bit of a traditionalist. Not surprising for a god who’d been around since the dawn of time, I suppose.
He folded the paper when I came in and laid it down on his desk. His fingertips were stained gray from handling newsprint. He was badly in need of a haircut, and I wished he’d either learn how to iron or start buying no-iron shirts. But looking like an unprepossessing slob is part of his disguise, part of how he hides the enormous power that lies just beneath his surface.
“I’m sorry to hear about your house,” he said, beckoning me to one of the chairs in front of his desk. There was no hint of “I told you so” in his voice, and he looked genuinely sorry.
If one more person told me how sorry they were, I was going to scream. Unless that person is Jamaal, I mentally amended.
The sympathy—I refused to think of it as pity—sat heavily on my shoulders, and I practically collapsed into the chair. I wanted to maintain some semblance of dignity, but the weight of it all was getting to me, and my throat tightened like I was going to cry.
It was just a house, dammit. A thing, an object. Something that could be rebuilt. It had been empty when it burned down, and no one was hurt. That was all that mattered. I swallowed hard, trying to push the irrational grief back down inside. The Glasses and Steph had a right to grieve over the loss of their home, but it had never really been mine to begin with. So why did I suddenly feel like someone had just died?
Anderson rolled one of his desk drawers open and pulled out a little pop-up box of tissues, setting them on the edge of the desk within easy reach. “Just in case,” he said with a small, sad smile.
I was not going to cry about this. I was not going to make it that easy for Konstantin to hurt me.
“I’m fine,” I said, more to convince myself than to convince Anderson. “And you win: I will hunt Konstantin to the ends of the earth if that’s what I have to do to keep him from hurting my family anymore.”
I had the brief, unworthy thought that it was convenient for Anderson that the very week when he’d pinned me down and forced me to listen to—and refuse—his request, my adoptive parents’ house should burn down and Konstantin should taunt me with that email.
“I knew he’d lash out eventually,” Anderson said. “But it never occurred to me that he’d come after you. I’m his true enemy here, not you.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “but you’re a lot harder to hurt. Plus, he’s scared of you, though I don’t suppose he’d admit it.”
To tell you the truth, despite Anderson’s dire predictions, I was actually kind of surprised that Konstantin had decided to go on the warpath. If he’d kept his head down and hadn’t bothered anyone, I wouldn’t have been motivated to hunt him down for Anderson to kill. Though perhaps he didn’t know that. Perhaps he was incapable of understanding my reluctance to commit murder for revenge. Even Anderson hadn’t understood, and he had a much firmer grasp of the concept of morality than Konstantin did.
“Good point,” Anderson said. “Though I expect he will eventually scrape up his courage. I already want him dead, and he knows that. It’s not like provoking me would change anything.”
No, but provoking me had had a definite effect, spurring me into the hunt. Maybe Konstantin hadn’t realized I wasn’t planning to hunt him—or maybe someone who really, really wanted Konstantin dead had thought it a good idea to provide me a little motivation.
I stared at Anderson across the desk, wondering if he was ruthless enough to do something like that. He’d wanted his revenge badly enough that he’d neglected to tell anyone that Konstantin was still under the Olympians’ protection. But still, burning down my parents’ home . . . As ruthless and manipulative as I suspected Anderson could be, I couldn’t see him doing something like that to innocent bystanders. However, I didn’t have much trouble coming up with another suspect.
“What if someone knew I wasn’t going to hunt him for you?” I asked, watching Anderson’s face carefully. I suspected I was about to piss him off. “And what if that someone wanted him dead and would get a real kick out of hurting me in the process?”
Anderson froze in his seat, his face going so still he looked like a statue. He didn’t breathe or blink, and I had the feeling something dangerous was brewing inside him. I half expected him to leap over the desk and seize me by the throat, and I mentally mapped out my escape route. Then he blinked, and the life returned to his face.
“You mean Emma,” he said, as if there could be any doubt who I was talking about. His voice was even and his expression bland, but he had never taken well to accusations about Emma, and I didn’t expect that to change now.
“Yeah. She’d love to be able to hurt me without breaking the treaty. And she knows my family is my weak spot. And the only person she hates more than me is Konstantin.”
“I understand why you suspect her,” Anderson said carefully, then paused.
“But . . . ?”
“She was . . . damaged by what Konstantin and Alexis did to her. I know that for a long time I tried to ignore that damage, and that makes my judgment where she’s concerned questionable in your mind. But no matter how damaged she is, she’s still the same woman I married, beneath it all. She’s joined the Olympians to spite me, but just because she’s joined them doesn’t mean she is one at heart.”
I clenched my jaws to hold back my protest. His judgment was more than just questionable where Emma was concerned, and I had absolutely no doubt she was capable of burning down my parents’ house if she thought that would get her what she wanted. What I did doubt was that any force on earth could make Anderson believe that without some pretty overwhelming evidence to support the theory.
Anderson shook his head, having thoroughly talked himself into discounting my suggestion. “Emma didn’t do it,” he said firmly. “I told you Konstantin would strike out, and he has. Let’s not go looking for complex explanations when a very obvious and simple one exists.”
That clanking sound I heard was the doors of his mind slamming shut. I would have argued with him more if I thought there was a chance I could convince him, and if I thought for sure Emma really was the culprit. I was certainly willing to entertain the possibility, but I had to admit that for the moment, Konstantin had to take center stage as the prime suspect.
“I don’t have any clue how I’ll find him,” I said, cursing my annoyingly mercurial power. My ability to find people is based on supernaturally fueled hunches, but it’s hard to tell the difference between an honest-to-goodness hunch, wishful thinking, and random stray thoughts. “But I’ll get right on it. I still have that list of Olympian properties from when I was searching for Emma. I doubt he’ll be on one, but I’ll start cruising by them one-by-one tonight.”
For the most part, I didn’t truly understand how my powers worked. It would probably take years of trial and error before I had any real confidence in them. But it did seem they worked better in the moonlight, which made sense because Artemis was a moon goddess as well as a huntress.
“The question then becomes, what do we do if I find him?” I gave Anderson a hard look. “I ran into Cyrus the other day, and he informed me that his father is still an Olympian and under their protection. He said he’d talked to you about it and you’d agreed to leave Konstantin alone.”
Anderson didn’t bother trying to act like he felt guilty about his tacit deception. “I gave him that impression, it’s true. And if there’s any way we can eliminate Konstantin without Cyrus having to know we’re responsible, that’s how we’ll do it.”
I shook my head. “If you kill him and he disappears off the face of the earth, everyone’s going to know you were behind it.”
“Not true. Only you know what I can do. As far as anyone else is concerned, I can’t kill Konstantin unless I have a Descendant around to do my dirty work, and I don’t. As long as we leave no evidence that can be traced back to us, Cyrus will have to assume that one of Konstantin’s other enemies got to him. An Olympian enemy, because, believe me, those exist.”
I did believe him about Konstantin having enemies within the Olympians. There were probably plenty of them who’d chafed under his rule over the years. But I didn’t buy the idea that Anderson wouldn’t be suspect number one.
“Look,” Anderson said, leaning forward and clasping his hands on the desk, “Cyrus isn’t going to start a war unless he’s certain I’ve broken our treaty. Unlike Konstantin, he actually values people and would care if someone close to him got killed. It’s not something he’s going to risk unless he has to.”
I reluctantly had to admit that Anderson had a point. I knew Cyrus wasn’t as nice a guy as he pretended to be, but he wasn’t evil. After all, he was protecting his father out of loyalty—misguided though it might be—and that proved he cared about something other than himself. I didn’t know who else among the Olympians Cyrus cared about, but I did know he cared about Blake. And Blake could very easily get killed if we went to war.
“So what you’re saying is if I find Konstantin, I should keep my mouth shut to everyone else and only tell you. Right?”
Anderson nodded. “Exactly. I don’t mind everyone knowing you’re hunting him, because no one would believe you weren’t, after what happened. But if you find him, that has to be our secret. And I’ll take care of what needs to be done.”
I still didn’t like it, not one bit. But I’d gotten as much concession out of Anderson as I was going to, and I had to be satisfied with it.