I stared at the image on my phone. So it was true. Part of me had doubted it and low-key hoped that Nevada would tell me it was ridiculous.
“Why didn’t Linus tell us?”
“I don’t know. He must have his reasons. Dad’s birth was complicated.”
Victoria Tremaine couldn’t carry a child to term, but she desperately wanted one. She had to rely on artificial insemination and a surrogate. According to her, she paid a Prime to serve as the father, but was unable to find a Prime willing to serve as a surrogate, so she committed a monstrous crime. She had the embryo implanted into a comatose Belgian woman, the original Beast of Cologne who had lost her mind during her last metamorphosis.
Our father carried the biomarkers for four sets of magic: the truthseeker from his mother, the siren and hephaestus talents from his father, and the Beast of Cologne metamorphosis from the surrogate in whose womb he grew. Feto-maternal microchimerism was the reason for Arabella’s powers.
Complicated didn’t even begin to describe it.
“There is another aspect to all of this.” Nevada reached over behind the tablet and held an object in front of the screen. Part of it was a wooden contraption that looked familiar.
“Is that a yarn swift?”
“Yes. The core of it is.”
The yarn swift was a modified wooden umbrella that held the skeins of yarn so they could be wound into balls. But this one had coils of thread, and some weird wire bent into hooks, and more weird rainbow thread stretched in loops over the hooks.
“Arthur made it,” Nevada said.
“What?”
“We were busy discussing something, and he was in his swing right next to us. He stole his grandmother’s yarn swift and her craft box while we were talking, and then Connor noticed him building this thing in midair.”
Well, it was certainly colorful.
“He’s built things before. Small things that made no sense.”
She didn’t sound right.
“And this thing makes sense?”
“It functions,” my sister said.
“In what way?”
Nevada raised the mutilated yarn swift straight up and squeezed a part of it. The band of blue thread snapped into the air. The yarn swift turned, firing the thread loops at an alarming speed.
It wasn’t thread. Oh. Oh!
“Are you telling me Arthur built a rubber band machine gun out of the yarn swift and some thread?”
“And some pushpins.”
Linus had to physically assemble the weapons. Yes, his magic made components snap together but only in a very narrow range. If he was truly a hephaestus mage, Arthur would be able to levitate parts to him . . . Oh my God.
“Are you okay?” She didn’t look okay.
Nevada pondered the rubber band gun. “No. It’s the pushpins that did it. They are sharp. He isn’t supposed to have them. He bent them into little hooks, see?”
“At least he didn’t use them as ammo.” I probably shouldn’t have said that.
“My son can barely speak, but he built a working firearm with tensile release and moving parts. We’ve got the telekinetic part down. We know what milestones to look for. We know the danger signs. We don’t know anything about hephaestus magic. Linus needs to wake the hell up. Soon. For his sake and ours. And when he does, you can’t kill him, Catalina.”
She looked really frightening for a second. I pulled back from the screen on pure instinct. “Why would I want to kill him? Are you hiding things from me?”
“Are you hiding things from Arabella?”
Touché.
“Sometimes older sisters have to keep things to themselves for the greater good. Promise me that you won’t kill Linus. I need him to help my son.”
“I promise not to kill Linus when he wakes up.”
Nevada nodded, satisfied, and put the rubber band gun down.
We looked at each other.
“But jokes aside, should I tell Arabella about the grandfather thing?”
My older sister sighed. “Why?”
“I feel like she should know.”
“What’s worse, losing a family friend or losing a grandfather you never knew and living with a lifetime of regret and unanswered questions?”
I thought about it.
“You’re right,” I said. “It just feels like lying.”
“Arabella is still trying to deal with Mom getting hurt and the nightbloom. It’s a lot.”
“How do you know about the nightbloom?”
Nevada leaned closer, her eyes intense and wide, and whispered, “I know everything.”
The screen went black.
I jumped out of my chair and headed straight out the office door and toward the main house. I needed to cook something in the worst way.
I popped the tray of chicken thighs into the oven. I had marinated them in a mixture of soy sauce, the juice of two limes, my homemade sweet chili sauce, and some spices for an hour. Most people thought that a proper marinade only happened overnight. In reality, for most meats, an hour was plenty.
Around me the kitchen of the main house was quiet. Kitchens were my sanctuary. And I really needed a sanctuary right now.
I washed the heirloom tomatoes, put a cutting board on the island, and took out my favorite cleaver.
My phone rang. Agent Wahl. Finally.
I took the call.
“The Bureau took this case as a favor,” Agent Wahl said.
Straight to the point.
“So far, I’ve had to process a dummy crime scene and then give a dummy press conference about it. In the past forty-eight hours, I’ve been glamoured, blown up, poisoned with toxic air, and cussed at by my partner.”
“You also stopped breathing for a bit.”
“Tell me something good, Prime Baylor, because my patience is wearing thin.”
“Would you like to get even?” I pulled up the draft of the email I had written this morning and sent it.
“I don’t get even, Prime Baylor. This is not a schoolyard fight. I’m an agent of the law. I detect illicit activity and stop it.”
“Have you checked your inbox?”
There was a long pause. I put the phone on speaker and started chopping my tomatoes.
“Is this legitimate?”
“Yes.” I had just handed him half a billion dollars’ worth of illicit activity. Arkan’s US accounts complete with evidence of money laundering, tax evasion, and payments to and from people on international watchlists. Konstantin delivered and then some.
“Do I want to know how you got hold of it?”
“Let’s say it was an anonymous tip. If you scroll down, there are notes at the end of the file. Point three is of particular interest.”
If you followed the trail of financial bread crumbs outlined in point three, you would find a record of payments from Arkan to Luciana Cabera.
There was another pause.
“Explain this to me.”
“How secure is this line?”
“As secure as it can get.”
That was debatable but I had to cooperate with him to get what I needed. “Five years ago, a group of Primes financed Arkan’s theft of an Osiris serum sample.”
“Go on.”
The tone of his voice told me that he understood the gravity of the situation. Anything regarding this theft had to be handled with kid gloves. The National Assembly and the US government had never acknowledged that the theft had taken place because the international ramifications would be disastrous. This was a massive show of trust on my part, and he understood and appreciated it.
“Luciana Cabera was part of that group.”
“Okay, I see where she sent him several payments years ago.”
She had done it very carefully, but Arabella and Bern were very good at untangling complex financial threads.
“I also see the trail of payments to her from the same account. What are those?”