That was the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to me. He meant it and he would make every word of it come true.
I made my mouth move. “Okay. I’ll see you in the morning.”
I’d barely closed my bedroom door behind me when someone knocked.
“Come in.”
The door opened and Leon slipped through. My youngest cousin was still in the lanky-teenager stage. Skinny, dark-haired, olive skinned, he reminded me of Ghost Elves from the recent fantasy blockbuster Road to Eldremar. I could totally picture him jumping from some ancient tree with two curved knives and blue war paint on his face. For a while we thought he might turn out to be really tall and once he hit his height, he’d fill out, but he’d stopped two inches short of six feet and so far showed no signs of adding bulk to his slight frame.
“If this is about Mad Rogan . . .”
He lifted his laptop and held it open for me. A dark background ignited on the screen, simulating deep space, and in the middle of it a beautiful nebula blossomed, made of luminescent threads, each spider-silk thin and weakly glowing with bands of different colors. Ah. The Smirnoff rubber-band model. I remembered doing that in high school. Magical theory was a core class and it hurt.
“I can’t do it,” Leon said.
After the day I’d had, homework was the last thing I wanted to do right now. “Leon, you really need to do your own homework.”
“I know.” He dragged his hand through his dark hair. “I tried. I promise, I really, really tried.”
Leon had two settings: sarcastic and excited. This new sad Leon was puzzling.
I sighed and sat down in my recliner. The chair was a necessity. I ended up taking work into my bed way too much, and my last laptop had leaped to its death in protest when I fell asleep and it slipped off my bed. From that point on, bed was strictly for TV watching, reading, sleeping, and having frustrating thoughts about certain telekinetics. Work was done in a recliner chair. It was comfortable like a cloud but it still made me feel like an old lady.
I studied the nebula. “Tell me about it.”
“This is a computer model of the Smirnoff rubber band theory,” he droned out.
“Your enthusiasm is overwhelming. What does the theory say?”
“It says that a space-time continuum is acted upon by many different factors. The influence of these factors is too great for any small change to affect the state of a continuum. It says that our reality is like a tangle of rubber bands. If you pull one out, the state of the tangle isn’t significantly affected. So if you went back in time and shot Alexei I, for example, World War II would still happen. Instead of Imperial Russia invading Poland in the 1940s, somebody else would’ve invaded, like France or Germany. Concentration camps and anti-Jewish ethnic cleansing would still happen. The rubber band theory is the complete opposite of the chain-link theory, which says that events are directly precipitated by each other, so if you go back in time and kill a mosquito, we’d all evolve gills or something.”
Good enough. “And your assignment is?”
“Prove or disprove rubber band theory as it relates to the introduction of the Osiris serum.” Leon pantomimed throwing up and pointed at the model on the screen. “Okay, so I know it should change. There is no way it wouldn’t change. If there was a huge plague, the world wouldn’t stay the same, right? Magic is like a plague. It’s affecting everything, so the events wouldn’t be the same. It’s too big of a factor. But I can’t make it work. Okay, so let’s say everything that glows blue is magic, right? I tried to pull all of the threads of the same color out to make a nonmagic model and nothing. Look, I let it run for ten years. Look.”
Leon clicked some keys. The screen split in two. On the left side the original nebula glowed with a rainbow of colors. On the right a new nebula formed. All of the blue threads vanished from it, but the shape of the new nebula remained the same.
“You’re ninety percent there,” I told him. “It’s a space-time continuum, Leon.”
“I know that.”
“So what are you forgetting?”
“I have no idea. Nevada, just help me, please. Please.”
I typed in new parameters. “You’re forgetting to take your time.”
On the screen the time counter rolled forward, dashing through decades. The nebula on the left remained unchanged, but the one on the right stretched, turned, evolving into a new odd shape. The counter clicked. One hundred years. Two hundred years. Five hundred. It came to a stop at a thousand. Leon stared at a completely different constellation of threads.
“You didn’t run it long enough,” I told him. “It’s like two roads branching from each other. At first they are close and going almost in the same direction, but the farther you go, the more they split. In the beginning magic didn’t change much. But with each generation it transforms our world more and more. Think about it. Without the magic we wouldn’t have Houses or Primes. Some things would probably stay the same, because some strings remained relatively untouched for a short while, but others would be completely different. Inevitably all strings will be affected, and the further we go, the more different the world will be.”
He landed on the bed. “How long did it take you?”
“Three days. I was frustrated and tried different things one by one, until I realized how it works.”
“Two weeks,” he said. “I’ve been doing it two weeks. Do you know how long it took Bern?”
“I have no idea.”
“Four minutes. I checked the school log. He holds the record.”
I sighed. “Leon, Bernard is a Magister Examplaria. He recognizes patterns. Code and encryption talk to him the way tanks talk to Grandma Frida. He probably figured it out within the first thirty seconds and then spent the next three and half minutes trying to find alternative solutions for fun.”
“I can’t do it.” Leon slumped, deflated. “I tried to do what Bern does and I just can’t. I’m a dudomancer.”
Not this again. “You’re not a dud.”
“I have no magic.”
Magic was a funny thing. What Catalina did and what I did was somewhat in the same area, but Arabella’s magic didn’t just come out of left field, it came out of the grass on the other side of the fence of the left field. Everybody in our family had magic, except for my dad, but Leon wasn’t directly related to him. His mom was my mother’s sister. All indications said that Leon had magic as well. It just was taking its sweet time demonstrating itself.
“Your talent will show up,” I said.
“When, Nevada? At first it was all ‘when he turns seven or eight,’ then ‘when he passes puberty.’ Well, I’m past puberty. Where the hell is my magic?”
I sighed. “I can’t answer that, Leon.”
“Life sucks.” He took his laptop. “Thanks for the help.”
“You’re welcome.”
“About Mad Rogan . . .”
“Out!”
“But—”
“Out, Leon!”
He stomped out. Poor kid. Leon so desperately wanted to be special. He wasn’t strong and large like his brother. He didn’t have Bern’s magic talent. He didn’t excel academically like Bern did. Bern was a wrestling star in high school and a lot of people had come to his matches. Leon ran track. Nobody cared about track except for people who did it. Some people in his place would’ve hated their older brother, but Leon loved Bern with an almost puppylike devotion. When Bern succeeded at something, Leon nearly burst with pride.
When he was little, I used to read baby books to him. One of them was about a puppy lost in the forest, with a picture of a small golden puppy among tall dark trees. Both Leon and Arabella inevitably bawled when we came to that part. Behind all of that sarcasm, he was still that little sensitive kid with big eyes. I just wished his magic would show up already.
Chapter 7
I sat in near absolute darkness. Around me the cave stretched on, deep, deep into the black. Watching me. Breathing cold that seeped into my bo
nes. The jungle waited around the bend of the brown wall. Something stalked within it, something with long vicious teeth. I couldn’t see it or hear it, but I knew it was there, waiting. Other shapes rested next to me, swathes of deeper blackness. They knew it too.
The cave breathed. Something was biting my legs and I knew it was ticks and I should pick them off, but moving seemed too hard. I was too tired.
The sniffers were out there, waiting for the faintest splash of magic. Desperation had passed. Emotions too. We were numb animals now, trying to get from point A to point B. Animals who didn’t speak, who communicated with glances, and who moved as one.
A watery green light to the left announced someone had sacrificed a glowstick. The shapes around me shifted, drawn like moths to this pathetic ghost of a real fire, starved, filthy, stretching hands to each other looking for some human touch in the nightmare.
A smaller shape scuttled to the side and fell under someone’s knife. Another squeaked and died. Rats. At least we’d eat tonight . . .
I sat upright in my bed. The shreds of the nightmare floated around me, melting. I groped for the lamp on the night table and flicked it on with trembling fingers. The welcome electric glow flared into life. My phone next to it told me it was almost two in the morning.
I wasn’t in a horrible cave. I was in my bedroom.
I felt clammy all over. I’d had nightmares before, but this was different. Oppressive, chilling, and hopeless. My room didn’t seem real, but the cave was. It was very real and it waited for me just beyond these walls. I was trapped.
I shuddered.
Pulling the blanket to my chest and clenching it didn’t seem to fix my freak-out.
I peered around the bedroom with wide eyes. There was no way I could go back to sleep. There was no turning off the light either. My stomach growled. I’d gone to bed without dinner. I’d been too tired to eat.
Okay, sitting in bed and shivering really didn’t accomplish anything. What I needed was to get out and go downstairs to our clean modern kitchen, and drink a hot cup of chamomile tea and eat something that didn’t look like a rat. Possibly a cookie. Cookies were as un-ratlike as you could get.
I pulled the blanket back, put on a pair of yoga pants, and opened my door, half expecting to see the cave walls.
No cave. No secret enemy with terrifying teeth waiting in the darkness. Just the familiar warehouse.
I tiptoed down the ladder and went along the hallway toward the kitchen. The above-the-table lamp was on and warm electric light pooled at the doorway. Rogan sat at the table, a laptop open in front of him. He leaned forward, his chin resting on his chest. His eyes were closed. He dwarfed the chair. He was so well proportioned it was easy to forget how big he was. His shoulders were huge and broad, his chest powerful, his arms made to crush and rip his opponents.
His hair wasn’t really long enough to be tousled, but it looked unbrushed and messy. Dark stubble touched his jaw. He’d lost some of that killer efficiency that made him so terrifying. He was human and slightly rough. I could picture him looking just like that, stretched out on a bed, as I climbed in there next to him.
Mad Rogan in his off mode. All of his titles—Prime, war hero, billionaire, major, butcher, scourge—lay at his feet, discarded. Only Connor remained, and he was so unbearably sexy.
I could just turn around and go back the way I’d come, but I wanted him to open his eyes and talk to me. My mother taught me that former soldiers could fall sleep anywhere, in any position. And they didn’t react well to being surprised.
“Rogan,” I called from the door. “Rogan, wake up?”
He awoke instantly, going from deep sleep to complete awareness in a blink, as if someone had thrown a switch. Blue eyes regarded me. “Problems?”
“No.”
I walked into the kitchen. Electric kettle or single-use coffeemaker? Coffeemaker was faster. I took a cup out of the cabinet, dropped the tea bag into it, and watched as the coffeemaker poured hot water over it.
He checked his laptop. “What are you doing up? I thought we agreed that you would rest.”
“I had a nightmare.” I extracted the jar of cookies from the pantry and brought it and my tea to the table.
He straightened, squaring his shoulders, stretching slightly. The chair couldn’t have been comfortable.
“What are you doing?” I peeked at his laptop. A shot of the video with the Suburban passing our Range Rover, ice frosting the road behind it. He must’ve been going frame by frame through it, trying to see some clues he missed.
“Bug is really good at this sort of thing, you know,” I told him.
“I know.” He pushed the laptop away. Drowsiness still hid in the corners of his blue eyes.
A cup of coffee sat in front of him. I stole it.
“I wasn’t finished with that.”
“It’s cold. I’ll warm it up so you will have something to drink. You can’t eat cookies without a drink.” I stuck the mug into the microwave. “Why aren’t you asleep on your air mattress?”
“I was working. What happened in your nightmare?”
The microwave beeped and I took the cup out and placed it in front of him.
“I was trapped in a cave. It was cold and dark. Something scary was waiting outside and then someone killed a rat, and I knew we were going to eat it.”
I shuddered and sipped my tea. It was almost scalding, but I didn’t care.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s not your fault.” I opened the plastic cookie jar, extracted a fat chocolate chip cookie, and offered it to him. He snagged it and bit into it.
“Good cookies.”
“Mhm.” I broke my cookie in half and bit one piece. There are times in life when sugar turns into medicine. This was one of those times.
“Did you make these?”
“Ha. I wish. It was probably Catalina. I can’t cook.”
He frowned at me. “What do you mean, you can’t cook?”
“Well, I can make good panini, but that’s about it. The way I look at it, someone has to put the food on the table and someone has to cook it. I’m the put-it-on-the-table type.”
He was looking at me oddly.
“Can you cook, Mr. I-Am-Prime?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you have people for that?”
“I like to know what’s in my food.”
I propped my elbow on the table and leaned my chin on my hand. “Who taught you to cook?” He wouldn’t tell me, but any little glimpse into him was worth taking a chance.
“My mother. One summer when she was six, her family was celebrating her older sister’s birthday back in Spain. Her sister loved cream puffs so the caterer brought a tower of cream puffs drizzled with chocolate and strands of sugar. It was the best thing my mother had ever seen up to that point.”
His voice was quiet, almost intimate. I could just sit here and listen to him talk all night.
“As adults were putting candles on the tower, her five-year-old cousin stole a cream puff and ate it. My mother was outraged, because the cream puffs belonged to her sister, so she slapped him. His sister, Marguerite, took offense to the slap. They had a brawl right there on the lawn. Half of the children started fighting, the other half cried, and everyone was sent to their rooms without dessert. The tower was covered with plastic, because their mother was determined to still have the celebration once everyone calmed down. The cousin died half an hour later.”
My heart dropped. “Poisoned.”
Rogan nodded. “They were involved in a long feud with another House.”
“They targeted the children?”
“Children are the future of any House. When my mother was fourteen, she killed the person responsible. She collapsed their summer villa.”
Somehow that didn’t surprise me.
“My mother cooked all of my food herself from ingredients she grew or purchased. So I eventually learned to make my own. Who do you think made that enormous stack o
f pancakes Augustine had to eat for his initiation?”
“Did you put anything weird into those pancakes?”
“No. That wouldn’t be fair.” He grinned at me. It was a sharp, amused grin that made him appear wolfish. “The real question here is would you like me to cook something for you?”
“Like what?”
“What are you in the mood for?”
Sex.
Rogan leaned forward, muscles rolling under the sleeves of his T-shirt. His face took on a speculative expression. There was something slightly predatory about the way he focused on me; it wasn’t the fear of being in the presence of a man who posed real danger. It was the feeling of being in the presence of a man who was about to try to seduce me. Anticipation zinged through me. Had he actually plucked the impression of my lust out of my head? Maybe it was just a coincidence.
He reached over.
I tensed.
His fingers slid so close to mine, I thought for a moment we touched. He stole the remaining half of my cookie and looked at it.
“That’s mine,” I told him.
“Mhm.”
“There is a whole jar of cookies.”
A light sparked in his eyes. “I want this one.”
“You can’t have this one. Give it back.” I held out my hand.
He examined the cookie and slowly raised it to his mouth.
“Connor, don’t you dare.”
He bit the cookie and chewed it. “I took your cookie and ate it. Are you going to do something about it?”
I was playing with fire. Fine. He ate my cookies, I’d drink his drink. I reached for his coffee. It slid out of my reach and settled next to him.
“Not fair.”
“This isn’t about fair. This is about delicious cookies.”
“In that case, that will be your last.” I grabbed the jar and put it in front of me. It shot straight up and hung above us. My half-empty teacup took off like a rocket and landed on the far end of the island. Okay, enough is enough. This was my kitchen.
I jumped up and marched around the table.
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