SIX
My appetite had fled after all the excitement, but I sat down and ate the bowl of noodles Logan had dished out for me anyway. Logan didn’t return to the kitchen, and I wondered if he and Jamaal had bumped into each other on the stairway. Logan had seemed pretty determined to give Jamaal a talking to, and Jamaal had been equally determined to avoid it. I hadn’t heard any sounds of battle, so I assumed either it was something else that distracted Logan, or he and Jamaal were talking things out like civilized adults.
I put the rest of the noodles in the fridge, then picked up the soggy shirt Jamaal had considerately left in a heap on the floor. I draped it over the back of one of the chairs to dry, then retrieved my purse and my planned itinerary for the night from my room. I thought long and hard about whether to bring my .38 Special with me. I would be within the D.C. city limits for some of the drive, and it would be illegal to carry a loaded gun when I was. I could have locked the gun in the trunk, unloaded, but that would defeat the purpose of having it with me.
In the end, as I had so many times in recent weeks, I decided to risk carrying it. I was probably in no danger just driving by Olympian properties, but I had too many enemies to feel comfortable going anywhere near them unarmed. I would have to be doubly careful to obey all traffic laws while I was out.
I got into my Mini and started the long and tedious journey. There were scattered clouds in the sky, and the moon was only a crescent when it was visible. I didn’t know how much moonlight my powers needed to be juiced up to the max—hell, I wasn’t even certain moonlight had any effect. If the moon was covered by clouds when I neared one of the properties of interest, I tried to find a way to hang around inconspicuously until it broke through. I spent a lot of time by the side of the road with my map unfurled as camouflage, but whether the moon was peeking through or not, I didn’t feel any special interest in anyplace I passed.
I didn’t have a huge amount of time until the moon set at a little before ten, but I was determined to use every glimmer of moonlight I could, methodically going through my itinerary. I was using the Beltway to carry me between locations, and the traffic was for once cooperating without any snarls or major slowdowns. The steady movement, and the sound of my tires on the asphalt, lulled me, and I went into autopilot—that state of mind where you arrive at point B and realize you have no memory of the turns and exits you took on your way from point A.
I came back to myself as I was hanging a right off the exit ramp, and I honestly had no idea what exit I had taken. I glanced at the dashboard clock and knew for sure that wherever I was, it wasn’t the exit I’d been aiming for, or I would have been there ten minutes ago. A bolt of adrenaline shot through me, banishing the cobwebs in my brain and making me feel awake and alert again. If I’d just been driving on normal autopilot, I would have gotten off at a familiar exit, but I had to consult my map to figure out where I was, which likely meant that my supernatural hunting sense had taken over.
There were no known Olympian properties anywhere close, and now that I was alert again, I felt no particular pull to go one way or the other. I tried to send myself into autopilot again, but that’s hard to do when you’re driving unfamiliar streets. I also tried pulling over and closing my eyes, attempting to tuck my conscious mind away so my subconscious could feed me some clues, but it’s almost impossible to get your mind to drift on command.
Frustration beat at me. I knew I’d been going in the right direction to get to Konstantin when I’d pulled off the Beltway, but now I had nothing. I slapped the steering wheel and uttered a few choice words as I reluctantly turned back toward the Beltway. Whatever had led me here was now refusing to cooperate, and the moon had set for the night.
Playing a long shot, I stopped by the FedEx store Konstantin had used when sending his nasty email. I luckily found an employee who’d been at work at the time Konstantin had been there. When I described Konstantin to her, she shrugged and said she didn’t remember seeing anyone meeting that description. However, she also said she could barely remember her own name when she worked the graveyard shift, so I had no way of being sure whether Konstantin had been there or not.
Disappointed but unsurprised by the dead end, I headed back to the mansion.
I slept in on Sunday morning, though I was still up earlier than anyone else in the house—with the exception of Leo. I had developed a morning ritual very similar to the one I had had when I’d been living blissfully alone in my condo. I still missed the place, and I tried to stop by on a regular basis to have some time to myself and to remind myself that I had a home to go back to if and when I could ever extricate myself from these messes with Konstantin and Emma. But every time I left the condo, I found myself taking something else back to the mansion with me, moving in little by little, growing ever deeper roots.
In my condo, my morning ritual was to make a pot of coffee and a couple slices of toast, then sit on the couch in my bathrobe with my laptop on my lap and read, or at least skim, my favorite news sites. Having brought over my toaster and coffeemaker, I was now able to re-create the ritual in my suite, though I’d gotten away from it when I’d been trying so hard to avoid Anderson.
I was enjoying the leisure of my “new normal” when my cell phone rang. My gut clenched in anxiety because I feared it was the Glasses calling to tell me they had decided to come home. But when I picked up the phone, the caller ID said Cyrus Galanos. I knew Cyrus and Konstantin by first name only—very kingly of them—but I suppose it would have been legally inconvenient to go by only one name.
I stared at the phone for a good long time, wondering what he could possibly want and if it would be better to let him go straight to voice mail. But until I got around to getting a disposable phone, he could probably find me and waylay me somewhere if I played hard to get. With a sigh, I answered the phone.
“Hello?” I said, sounding tentative. Showing weakness of any kind probably wasn’t the wisest idea, but I doubted he was calling for anything good.
“Hello, Nikki,” Cyrus said, his voice warm and friendly as always. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“No, I was up.”
“I thought maybe you were sleeping in after your late night.”
Oh. That was what this was about. My drive-bys last night must not have been as subtle as I’d hoped. Taking the Mini had been a mistake. I should have rented a nondescript sedan that no one would notice.
“What, no clever comebacks?” Cyrus mocked, sounding considerably less friendly. “No elegant denials?”
I shook my head. “What do you want, Cyrus?”
“I think I made that quite clear the other day: leave my father alone.”
“I’d have been happy to do that, if he’d left me alone.”
“Huh?”
I did a mental double take, because he sounded genuinely puzzled. I supposed Daddy Dearest hadn’t run his little vendetta idea by Cyrus before acting on it.
“He burned down my parents’ house, Cyrus,” I said, letting my own anger rise to the surface and color my voice. “Then he sent me an email telling me how creative he was going to be in making my life miserable without formally breaking the treaty. If you think I’m just going to sit here and take it—”
“He didn’t do it.”
There was no hint of doubt or uncertainty in Cyrus’s voice, but I had to wonder how well Cyrus really knew his father. He seemed like such a decent guy himself, it was hard to believe he could condone the kinds of things Konstantin did. Maybe his mind just didn’t work the same way and he couldn’t fully grasp his father’s evil.
“He claimed responsibility for it,” I argued, despite my own doubts.
“Really. Via email. Anyone can write an email. Ask yourself who has the most to gain from threatening you. It sure as hell isn’t Konstantin.”
“Oh, come on—Anderson wouldn’t do that,” I said, because there was no doubt in my mind who Cyrus meant. I sounded 100 percent certain, but that was only because I was pretty good at acting. I had mostly convinced myself that Anderson wasn’t behind it, but there remained a touch of doubt.
“You’ve known Anderson, what, a couple of months? I’m telling you he’s not the saint he pretends to be. He’s a world-class manipulator, and like all old Liberi, he’s deeply selfish at heart. It’s impossible not to be when you’ve lived for centuries.”
I snorted. “And how old are you?”
Cyrus laughed. “I’m selfish, too, and I’m not afraid to admit it. Just ask Blake. But my point is that Anderson might seem like he’s too good and moral to do something like that, but he isn’t. He’ll do whatever it takes to get what he wants, and what he wants is you hunting Konstantin.”
I’d have been able to put up a better protest if I hadn’t had the same thoughts myself. Instead of defending Anderson and perhaps letting Cyrus see the seed of doubt, I changed tactics.
“As far as I’m concerned, the top suspects are Konstantin . . . and Emma. She hates both of us, so she’d be happy to hurt me while pushing me into hunting Konstantin.”
There was a moment of silence as Cyrus thought that over, but he soon rejected it. “It’s not Emma. It’s true that she hates you and my father, but the person she wants to hurt most right now is Anderson. I don’t know exactly what happened between the two of them, but it was obviously a very nasty breakup.”
It certainly had been. However . . . “Emma blames me for it, though I still don’t understand why. She may complain about Anderson, but it’s me she wants to hurt.”
“I hate to contradict you, but I can guarantee you it’s Anderson she’s after. And she’s already taken her revenge.”
“Huh?” Even not knowing what he was talking about, I felt a chill.
Cyrus sighed. “I believe she’s planning to visit to explain later today.”
“Explain what? Cyrus, what are you talking about?”
“You’ll find out soon enough. Having seen her in action, I know I don’t want to get on Emma’s bad side, and she wouldn’t want me spoiling the surprise.”
“Bastard.”
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up in the first place. Suffice it to say that she’s made it clear to me that you’re not her target. And what I said about Konstantin still stands. If you or any of your people harm him, it’ll be a declaration of war.”
I was too sick with dread to keep talking. “I understand,” I said, and hung up the phone.
It was hard to go back to my morning routine when I got off the phone with Cyrus, but I gave it my best shot. I drank my coffee and scrolled listlessly through the news, not really reading anything, just sort of skimming and making a show of it. As if by going through the motions of acting normal, I could actually be normal. But it was damn hard not to obsess, both about who was responsible for the fire, and about what hell Emma was going to release on Anderson in the near future.
When something finally did capture my full attention, it was an ad, of all things. There was a new exhibition opening at the Sackler Gallery next weekend. I’m not a huge fan of museums—thanks to umpteen million school trips in this museum-filled metropolis, and aided by the necessity of taking every visiting relative and friend of the family on museum tours—and normally, I wouldn’t even notice an ad like that, or care what exhibitions were in town. But since I’d set my sights on mending my fences with Jamaal . . .
You wouldn’t think to look at him that Jamaal was into museums, not with the testosterone that fairly oozed from his pores. Ask your average manly man if he’d like to go to a museum, and he’ll look at you like you suggested he wear a tutu in public. But there was nothing average about Jamaal, and the one and only time I’d been in his suite I’d noticed an impressive collection of museum catalogs displayed on his bookshelves. Not to mention the crowning glory of his sitting room, which was a tiny Indian painting of the goddess Kali, from whom he was descended. It was a bona fide work of fine art, dating from the seventeenth century.
The new exhibition opening at the museum was of Indian art, and I’d bet anything Jamaal would want to go. Maybe I should tell him I was planning a visit and invite him to come along.
Yeah, like Jamaal would make it that easy.
I had about a half hour to make and reject a number of plans to coax Jamaal out of his shell before Emma and her malice drove every other thought out of my head.