“Hello, Mama,” I said. She looked away and would not make eye contact. Wasn’t that interesting? Maybe she wasn’t the center of this affair after all.
I gave each of the Boys a look. Like matching statues of didn’t-give-a-damn, they looked back at me, and made no other move.
James walked over and handed me the cup of water. “Here you are.” He strolled back to the sink and leaned against it, his arms crossed over his chest.
I was glad he hadn’t filled it all the way to the top, because my hand shook and my pinky was so swollen it made it hard to keep the cup steady. I did my best to cover all that, and took a sip. I was thirsty enough I could drain the river. Both of them. But I wanted to have something in my hand I could use to delay my responses—it was an old board-meeting trick I’d learned from my dad—so I resigned myself to the fact that I might need to make this cup of water last a very long time.
The lights flickered, a blink of darkness. The storm was coming.
“The situation is fairly simple, Ms. Beckstrom—may I call you Allie?” James asked.
“No.”
He smiled. “Good. As I was saying, Allie, there is only a small thing I need from you, something Zayvion has assured me you will have no quarrel with.”
“Really? I don’t recall hiring Zayvion to speak for me. Is this a legal matter? If so, we should both have lawyers present to protect our interests.” I tried putting some Influence behind my words, but was too shaken to do much good.
“Soon,” he said. “But first I thought you and I could talk. Come to an understanding. An agreement. Like family.”
Okay, that got me. I blinked and looked harder at him. He didn’t look much like any of the women my father had married, or at least none whom I could remember. And he was the polar opposite to my dad—shorter, darker, thinner. The person he most resembled was Mama.
“Family? How exactly does that work?”
His smile flashed into a grin. He looked like an animal about to strike, something hungry and quick.
“Snake man, Snake man, bake a cake man,” Cody whimpered.
Oh, hells no.
Snake man. The man who killed my father. The man who somehow made Cody forge my signature. The man who threw a spell strong enough to kill someone and had apparently not paid the price for it. Holy shit.
Cold sweat spread over my skin. I took a drink of water, hiding my reaction as best as I could. If he could kill my dad at a distance and still be alive, I figured he could kill me close-up. I glanced around the room, looking for an escape, a weapon. But gun-happy Bonnie was still behind me. I assumed Zay was too, since I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t see a knife, a fork, or a heavy pan within reach. For a working kitchen it was painfully clean of any dangerous implements.
“You and I are kindred spirits,” James continued. “You hated your father. I hated your father. You wanted him dead. I wanted him dead. You wanted his business to stop taking advantage of the poor and the innocent, like my poor little brother, and I wanted his business to recognize the original creator of the Beckstrom Storm Rods and pay back the money he has made off the technology he stole.”
I put two and two together and came up empty. “You wanted my father to pay Perry Hoskil for the storm rods? Perry Hoskil has been dead for ten years.”
“I know,” James said. “Perry Hoskil was my father.”
Which meant Mama had slept with Perry Hoskil. I glanced at her. “Mama?”
She looked up, pressed her lips together, and nodded.
It didn’t make sense. Why would Mama go along with James in this crazy scheme? But at least I was finally able to see all the holes in the puzzle. James was the bastard child of Perry Hoskil. There had been a fierce court battle years ago over who had proprietary ownership of the patents and production of the Storm Rods—the technology that had allowed magic to be harvested not only from the rare magic-charged storms, but also from the reserves of magic that pooled deep in the earth. The two men who claimed they had the rights to the rods were partners in the invention of the technology. Those men were Perry Hoskil and my father. But my father had gone behind Hoskil’s back and filed the patent in his name alone, claiming proprietary ownership of the technology.
Perry Hoskil had lost the case. Most say he was bribed out of pursuing further litigation. Most also said he took to drinking and drugs, and he was found years later, dead of an overdose in some garbage heap on the worst side of town. Maybe on this side of town. Maybe even right here where I was standing.
I didn’t think anyone knew he had a son. But then, I wouldn’t expect Mama to share that information with the world.
She had shared it with at least one person though—James.
“Okay,” I hedged. “You want to sue Beckstrom Enterprises for royalties due. I still think you need a lawyer for that.”
He was no longer smiling. “I’ve talked to dozens of lawyers. I’ve talked to judges. They won’t do shit for me.” He paced over to where Mama stood and back to the sink. “They say there is no winning back that money. No getting the money due me. No getting back the technology that is rightfully mine. Beckstrom has had the law tied around his filthy fingers for years, and there isn’t a lawyer he can’t buy off.” He paused and smiled at me. “Couldn’t buy off. Things are different now, aren’t they? Now that Daniel Beckstrom is dead.”
If he was waiting for a reaction out of me, he didn’t get it.
The lights flickered again, three quick times, and I only had to count to ten before I heard the answer of thunder. My arm was really starting to ache, and the ache was spreading. The closer the storm came, the more I felt like I was coming down with the flu.
“But now that you’re here,” James said, “you can see that a little justice is finally served.”
“I’ll do what I can,” I said, trying to sound reasonable. “But I’m under suspicion for killing him, and until my name is cleared, you may not want to do business with me.”
“It will be a very short business relationship,” he said. “You sign over your shares of Beckstrom Enterprise to Mama, and you can go your own way and live your life.”
The lights flickered again, throwing the kitchen into darkness long enough that the other Boys were looking a little worried.
I counted to eight. Thunder.
“You’ll still have to convince Violet’s lawyers that I didn’t sign my shares over under duress,” I said. I was stalling, looking for an out. Waiting for a good bolt of lightning to really knock the power out for more than a second. “People think I killed my father. They are not going to honor a contract I sign when I’m not in my right mind.”
“You’ll convince them that you’ve snapped out of your killing passion. That you regret your hasty, terrible actions. You’ll turn yourself in to the police and declare you want to pay back your father’s debt to the Hoskils. Then you’ll live a nice long, unpleasant life behind bars.”
“And if I talk?” I knew there had to be an “or else” in there somewhere. I didn’t really care what it was. But I needed time. The itch and ache in my arm were growing worse, like needles of fire stabbing through every pore. I didn’t know what kind of tricks James had up his sleeve, but I could hold magic within me. A lot of it now. And I was banking James didn’t expect me to be able to use it here.
He walked toward me, stopped just out of arm’s reach. “This isn’t a game,” he snarled. “There are a lot of lives on the line, a lot of people tired of Beckstrom’s stranglehold on magic. Tired of hard-and-holy Beckstrom saying who can use magic and how and why and when.
“No more. We will wage war, bring it to the streets if we have to. You are nothing but an inconvenience to these people, and to me. You will sign your rights over to Mama. Zayvion will turn you in to the police. And I will hold a gun at that young man’s head until I hear you are safely locked away. Your other option is to say no to me. Instead of killing you with magic, like I killed your father, I will kill you right here with my bare hands, for fun.”