NINE
It was still raining when I woke up on Monday, and a glance at the weather forecast showed me the rain was settling in for a lengthy visit. This did not increase my chances of hunting down Konstantin before he struck again, and I was tempted to drop-kick my computer for giving me the bad news.
I made another pot of coffee instead. Then I stretched out on the sofa in my sitting room with my laptop on my lap to make a show of keeping up to date with the news. I was brooding a little too much to read more than a couple of paragraphs here and there, and those only for the most interesting of stories.
My heart took a nosedive into my stomach when I saw the headline that read ARSON SUSPECTED IN CONDO FIRE THAT LEFT THREE DEAD.
There was no reason to think it had anything to do with me, but the words arson and condo jumped out at me like monsters at a horror movie.
My throat was tight, my every muscle taut, as I reluctantly clicked on the link to the full story. My breath whooshed out of my lungs when I saw the picture of a burned-out husk of a building. The roof had collapsed, and the brick facade was black as charcoal, but the shape of the building was familiar, as were the rows of granite planters that adorned the circular drive.
Without a doubt, it was my building.
Konstantin had struck again, and this time it wasn’t an empty building he’d burned.
My eyes were clouded with tears as I took in the horrifying details the article revealed. The fire had occurred around ten last night, while Steph and I had been riding around the Beltway in our fruitless quest. The three dead were a ninety-two-year-old woman who was apparently overcome by the smoke before she’d even gotten out of bed, a twenty-five-year-old single mother whose broken leg had hampered her attempt to escape, and the three-month-old baby she’d been trying to carry to safety.
All dead because of me.
I shook my head violently. No, it was because of Konstantin. I had to remember that, had to keep it front and center in my mind, or I would go crazy. I’d done nothing wrong, nothing I’d had any reason to believe would endanger innocent civilians. Konstantin had always made it clear that he valued humans about as much as he valued insects. It was his contempt and malice that was behind the deaths, not me.
All sound, logical reasons why I shouldn’t feel guilty about what had happened. And not one of them did a thing to lessen the guilt that sat heavily on my shoulders.
I read the article about four or five times, under the guise of getting all the details down, but I think I was mostly just flogging myself with them. Maybe if I’d done a better job on one of my aborted hunts, I would have been able to stop Konstantin before he killed innocents. Maybe instead of giving Jamaal a hard time about his obsessive practicing with Sita, I should be practicing my own powers just as obsessively. I’d practiced throwing and shooting because I understood exactly how that worked, but I hadn’t done a whole lot with the hunting because it was hard to figure out how to train for something I didn’t understand. Maybe if I’d put some serious time and effort into it . . .
Frightening how easy it was for me to find reasons to blame myself, even when I knew that was exactly what Konstantin wanted and that I was playing into his hands.
For a while, I was too busy wallowing to notice the incongruity in last night’s fire. But when my mind kept circling back to my failed hunts, something jumped out at me.
The article said the fire had started around ten last night. That was when I’d been dreaming about hedge mazes and directing Steph toward what was presumably Konstantin’s location. My powers had cut out the moment the rain set in, but we’d been way across the city from my condo when that had happened.
I unfolded my D.C. metro area map. Steph said we’d been in Maryland when I’d directed her to get off the Beltway, and while I’d had her make quite a few turns as I homed in on the “signal,” we’d been traveling in a northwesterly direction at the time my supernatural radar went silent. My condo was northeast of that location, and quite a distance away.
It didn’t necessarily mean anything. I couldn’t be certain my powers were actually leading me to Konstantin, and even if they were, he probably hired a third party to set the fire for him. He wasn’t the type to do his own dirty work if he didn’t have to. But that line of thought reminded me of my doubts about Konstantin being the culprit. He had always struck me as coldly calculating, cruel, and dangerous, but not crazy.
No, an attack that left three innocent civilians dead pointed more to a mind like Emma’s, dangerously unhinged. Maybe Cyrus and I were both wrong about her. Maybe having Erin killed hadn’t been the end all, be all of her revenge.
I’d been having a hard enough time tracking down Konstantin when I’d been sure he was behind the fires. Now I had another viable suspect, one who was just as much under the Olympians’ protection. And yet, whoever the firebug was, I was going to have to catch them, and catch them soon. Before more innocents died.
I gave myself a few hours to get over the initial shock and horror of what had happened, locking myself in my suite and turning off my phone. If I didn’t pull myself together before I talked to anyone, I was going to say something I would later regret. Either that, or I’d burst into tears, which was almost as bad. I didn’t know what whoever it was had planned for the next attack, but I was sure the other shoe would drop soon, and it would be worse even than the condo fire. If I was going to stop it from happening, I had to keep my emotions as under control as humanly possible.
Hours of sitting alone in my room and brooding didn’t do much to improve how I felt, and I eventually decided no Zen-like state of calm was going to descend on me out of the ether. I didn’t have time to sit around anymore anyway.
I didn’t like my chances of hunting down Konstantin in the next handful of days, especially not with the rain cutting off the moonlight. That meant my best chance of preventing another attack was through diplomacy. Whether the person behind the attack was Emma or Konstantin, they were both Olympians, and that meant they answered to Cyrus, at least in theory. I’d already seen evidence that Cyrus was not the nice guy he pretended to be, but I believed he genuinely wanted to avoid a war between the Olympians and Anderson’s Liberi. Maybe he could be persuaded to put a leash on whoever was behind the fires.
It was a long shot, particularly if it really was Konstantin who was behind them. No matter what terms he and Cyrus had come to in order to effect their peaceful regime change, I didn’t think there was a chance in hell Konstantin would take orders from his son. Maybe I would just have to hope that Emma was the guilty party and that she would be forced to obey Cyrus.
Of course, I was getting way ahead of myself. First, I had to find a way to convince Cyrus to call off the dogs.
My first inclination was to pick up the phone and call him, but even in my depleted mental state, I knew that wasn’t a good idea. I didn’t have enough clout to enter into a negotiation with Cyrus myself, and Anderson would not appreciate me going behind his back. I’d done it once before, and had the feeling I’d just barely escaped a date with his Hand of Doom.
I printed out the article about the fire, sticking it in a manila folder so I didn’t have to see the headline and the photo anymore. Then I ducked into the bathroom to wash my face and put on some makeup, trying to make myself look more normal than I felt. The concealer lightened the dark circles under my eyes, but it didn’t make them go away completely, and there wasn’t any makeup in the world that could conceal the stark expression in my eyes. I wanted to look calm, strong, and completely reasonable when I pleaded my case to Anderson, but the reflection in the mirror told me I was falling short.
There was nothing to be done about it, so I grabbed the manila folder and marched down to the second floor, hoping Anderson would be in his study. The door was open, but when I stepped inside, Anderson wasn’t at his desk. He didn’t go out much, so chances were he was in the house, most likely somewhere else in his own private territory in the east wing. The rest of us weren’t allowed to venture into the east wing except in case of emergency, and I wasn’t sure this would qualify in his book, no matter how urgent it felt to me.
I stepped out into the hallway. “Anderson?” I called, hoping he was within earshot.
A door down the hall opened, and Anderson stuck his head out. His hair was slicked back from his face with water, and I caught a glimpse of bare shoulder, though he used the door to shield his body from view. If I weren’t such an emotional wreck, I might have tried some wisecrack about our mutual propensity for interrupting showers, but I couldn’t muster even a hint of humor.
I must have looked even worse than I thought, because Anderson didn’t wait for me to speak.
“Just let me throw some clothes on,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
I nodded, my throat tightening up on me as my mind insisted on flashing me an image of the poor, injured mother trying desperately to get her baby to safety while the building burned around her and smoke stole her breath. I had always been a bit of a bleeding heart, and I had the unfortunate tendency to let other people’s misery become my own. I would never have made it as a health-care worker of any kind, being completely unable to hold myself at the distance necessary to maintain sanity. I told myself not to think about the doomed woman, or to imagine what she must have felt in the final minutes of her life, how terrified and utterly devastated she must have been when she’d realized she wasn’t getting her baby out.
I made a fist and banged it hard on my thigh, trying to force myself back from the brink. The last thing I wanted to do was start this conversation with tears already running down my cheeks, and my eyes were burning in that familiar, ominous way. At least I could hand the article to Anderson instead of having to tell him what had happened.
Taking as deep a breath as my tight throat would allow, I stepped into Anderson’s office and took a seat in front of his desk. I swallowed convulsively, hoping that would loosen my throat—and hoping that Anderson would take his time getting dressed so I could regain my composure.
I was going to be asking Anderson to have a civilized conversation and even negotiate with the man who’d ordered Erin’s death, and I was going to have to bring up the possibility that Emma was the one responsible for the fires. No matter how cold Anderson might have acted when Emma had come by to drop her bombshell, I knew he wasn’t going to want to accept the possibility that the woman he’d loved and married had set a condo full of people on fire. I had to be in control of my emotions, because Anderson might well lose control of his, and that would be bad.
I no longer felt on the verge of tears when Anderson stepped into his office, but I still wasn’t as put together as I’d have liked. Anderson had donned one of his endless collection of wrinkled shirts, and if he’d combed his wet hair at all, it had to have been with his fingers. He dropped into his desk chair looking even more safe and ordinary than usual, and though I knew it was an illusion, I grasped hold of it to help steady myself.
Wordlessly, I tossed the manila folder across the desk, still not trusting myself to talk. Anderson raised an eyebrow at me, but opened the folder and read the article while I averted my eyes to avoid the pictures. I heard the pages flipping as he read, but I didn’t look up. An unfortunate, whiny voice in my head kept asking why everyone was so eager to blame me for everything that went wrong in their lives. I tried not to listen to it, because feeling sorry for myself wasn’t going to help the situation one bit.
I heard the sound of the papers being tucked back into the folder, then the soft groan of Anderson’s chair as he leaned back in it. Safe from the worry of catching another glimpse of the pictures, I raised my head and tried to interpret the look on his face.
The best word I can come up with to describe his expression was neutral, and I realized he was making a concerted effort to hide his feelings. He was doing a much better job of it than I was. I hadn’t a clue what he was thinking or feeling behind that mask.
“In case you were wondering,” I said, though I was sure he’d figured it out already, “that was my condo.”
“So I gathered. Have you made any progress in your hunt?” he asked, his voice as neutral as his face.
“Depends how you define progress,” I said. “I thought I was on his tail last night when the rain came in, but I have no way to be sure.” I braced myself for trouble as I took a tentative step into dangerous territory. “I was on his tail right about the time the fire seems to have started, and he was nowhere near my condo.”
Anderson kept his neutral mask firmly in place, though I was sure he knew what I was implying. “A man like Konstantin never does his own dirty work. He has people for that kind of thing.”
I was certain that was the truth, but I still couldn’t shake the uncomfortable suspicion that Emma was the true culprit. She had a much more obvious motive, at least in her own twisted version of reality, but Anderson wasn’t going to believe that unless I came up with actual proof, and I didn’t have it. At least not yet.
“It doesn’t really matter who’s behind it,” I said, although it did matter, quite a lot. “Whoever it is, it’s an Olympian, and Cyrus should be able to put a stop to it.”
Anderson shook his head. “I don’t care that Cyrus has supposedly taken Konstantin’s place at the top. He doesn’t have the kind of power that Konstantin does, and there’s no way in hell he can control Konstantin’s actions. Even if he wanted to.”
I mentally cursed Anderson’s stubbornness. If he’d only acknowledge the possibility that Emma was behind the fires, he’d probably have set up a meeting with Cyrus already. Cyrus might not be able to stop Konstantin from coming after me, but I’d bet good money he could stop Emma.
“So what you’re telling me,” I said through gritted teeth, “is that you’re content to sit back and do nothing while whoever it is kills babies and old ladies.” Anderson’s narrowed eyes said he didn’t appreciate my tone, but I was pissed enough not to care. “You’re not even going to try to negotiate with Cyrus.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t try.” Despite the narrowed eyes, he sounded calm enough. “I was merely pointing out that it’s not likely to work. We have no leverage.”
No, we didn’t have leverage. Not unless Anderson was willing to go to war with the Olympians for my sake, which he wasn’t. And to tell you the truth, I was just as happy about that. The Olympians had too much of an advantage in numbers, and they would wipe us all out. Cyrus might not be eager to start that war, but not eager wasn’t the same as not willing. Konstantin had laid off Anderson and his Liberi because he knew that Anderson was capable of killing him, and that was a risk he wasn’t willing to take. Taking that thought to its logical conclusion . . .
“We’d have leverage if you’d let Cyrus know what you are, and what you can do.”
I’d tried to broach this subject any number of times since I’d learned Anderson’s secret, and he had always shut me down fast and hard. He’d even threatened to kill me—and whoever I told—if I revealed what I knew. I didn’t think he was bluffing, but I couldn’t for the life of me understand why he wasn’t willing to reveal the deadly weapon that could act as a powerful deterrent and give us a leg up on the Olympians. It felt kind of like we had a nuclear bomb but didn’t want anyone, not even our own people, to know it.
“I think I’ve made it perfectly clear that that is not an option,” Anderson said in a low and menacing voice. “You’d be wise never to bring it up again.”
I felt like grabbing him and shaking him. I couldn’t think of a single reason why we shouldn’t use his special power to our advantage. He obviously wasn’t shy about using it, at least not when nobody but me could see. I’d already seen him kill three Liberi.
“I know you want me to shut up about it,” I continued. “But letting Cyrus know you have the power to kill him might be the only way to motivate him to—”
“Enough!” Anderson pushed back his chair and practically jumped to his feet. His expression was dangerous enough that I stood, too, and took a couple of hasty steps back.
Anderson stepped around his desk, but instead of coming toward me, he stalked toward the study door and banged it shut, turning a dead-bolt lock I’d never noticed before. He swiveled toward me, and I made sure there was a chair between us. It wouldn’t slow him down much, but it was better than nothing.
“What’s it going to take to keep you quiet, Nikki?” He took a step toward me, and I took a corresponding step back as he raised his right hand. The Hand of Doom.
My heart was slamming in my chest, my every nerve on red alert, but frankly, I was getting sick to death of being bullied. I wanted to shout out my rage, but I shoved a muzzle and leash on my temper. If I wasn’t careful, I could end up dead, or wishing I were dead, in no time flat.
“You could try explaining why you’re so dead set against anyone knowing,” I said.
Anderson blinked like he was startled. I guess he’d expected me to back down in the face of his threat. And why shouldn’t he expect that? It’s what I’d always done before.
“Innocent people’s lives are at stake,” I reminded him. “People are getting hurt, getting killed, losing everything they own, all because one of Cyrus’s people has some psychotic vendetta against me. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do everything in my power and explore every possible way to make it stop. Even if it means pissing you off yet again. I don’t get why—”
“If I tell you why it’s imperative that the truth doesn’t get out, will you promise to stop asking questions?”
It was my turn to be startled. I don’t know where I was expecting the conversation to go, except that it wasn’t here. Anderson was actually backing down? It seemed impossible, and I was immediately wary.
“So after all the huffing and puffing, you’re just going to give up and tell me?”
“I’ll tell you what could happen if the truth got out. The answer won’t satisfy your curiosity, and you’ll want to ask me ten million questions in search of more details. You must swear to me that you won’t ask even one, no matter how curious you are. Not now, not ever.”
Scant seconds ago, I’d been in fight-or-flight mode, sure this conversation was going to end with something ugly. Now I felt like I was going to explode with curiosity. Nothing like telling me I’m not allowed to ask questions to make me desperate to ask questions.
“Or you could try taking my word for it,” Anderson said. “Giving me the benefit of the doubt, believing that I’m not a shallow, selfish person acting on a whim.”
Anderson wasn’t human, and he never had been. At times, I was painfully aware that his thought processes weren’t always the same as ours. How could a man who’d never been mortal, had never had to face the possibility of his own death, think like everyone else, or understand the specter we all have to live with? Even the Liberi could die, no matter how hard it was to kill them, but Anderson couldn’t, and there was an inherent otherness that came with his true immortality. But despite that otherness, he did have feelings, and I realized for the first time that my insistence on knowing his reasoning had hurt them.
When you read mythology, you see examples aplenty of gods acting shallow and selfish. I mean for Pete’s sake, the Trojan War started when a couple of goddesses got offended that a mortal said another goddess was prettier than they were. But I’d seen no sign that Anderson was like that, and I had yet to see him act on a whim. So the question became: did I believe Anderson had a good reason for keeping his secret?
I hadn’t known Anderson all that long, admittedly, but I knew him well enough to feel certain the answer was yes. I was dying of curiosity, having been unable to form even a reasonable guess as to why keeping the secret was so important, but did I really want to draw this line in the sand over curiosity? Anderson was willing to tell me why he wouldn’t reveal his identity, but I realized that if I pressed for it, it would change something between us. He would always feel that when it came right down to it, I didn’t trust him. Once upon a time, that had been nothing but the truth. It still was, if you threw Emma into the mix. But this particular secret had nothing to do with her.
I swallowed hard, forcing my curiosity back down. I believed Anderson had a good reason, and it wasn’t going to kill me not to know what it was.
Maybe Anderson was manipulating me. It was something he was very good at, though I liked to think I was aware whenever he tried to do it. Maybe his feelings weren’t really hurt by my lack of faith, and he was just laying the guilt trip on me because he knew it was an effective tactic. But considering the things that had happened with Emma over the last few weeks, I figured Anderson was in enough pain already. No reason for me to add to it.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll trust you, even though I’m not very good at it. You’ve earned that.”
He smiled at me, the tension easing out of his shoulders. “I appreciate it. More than you know.”
If I didn’t know better, I could swear he was a little choked up under that smile. I thought about giving him a hug, but decided it would feel awkward, for both of us.
“I’ll call Cyrus and see if I can set up a meeting,” he said. “I don’t have high hopes we can reach a resolution, but we should at least try.”
“Thank you.” Going in there with such a defeatist attitude wasn’t going to help our cause, and I worried that Anderson’s refusal to suspect Emma would hamper any negotiations that occurred. But I’d gotten as much out of him as I was going to get.
Anderson stepped aside so I had a clear path to the door, the gesture something between a release and a dismissal.
“Um, sorry I got so pissy,” I said, because I couldn’t walk out without another word.
“Me, too,” he replied, and the twinkle in his eye told me he’d deliberately left it up to interpretation as to whether he was apologizing to me or teasing me.
I shook my head as I reluctantly smiled back. I stepped up to the door and opened the dead bolt.
“If word of my existence reaches the wrong ears,” Anderson said softly, “it could mean the death of every man, woman, and child on this earth.”
I turned back to him, and I’m sure my expression was one of naked shock.
“When I say I have a good reason, I mean it.”
What could I possibly say to that? My cheeks felt cold and bloodless, and my mouth gaped open. My mind could barely encompass what he’d just told me, and I desperately wanted to dismiss it as some kind of hyperbole. A shudder ran through me. When the first shock wore off, I was going to have a million questions—none of which Anderson would answer—but right now I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. I opened my mouth a couple of times in hopes that I would magically say something, even if it wasn’t something intelligent or meaningful, but nothing came out. So instead, I opened the door and hurried out of the room.