But it was tempting—so very, very tempting. Then again, it was supposed to be tempting, so tempting that I wouldn’t realize what I’d agreed to until it was too late—for me.
That’s how the Families worked. They lured you in with shiny dreams and pie-in-the-sky promises that all too often burned to ash and crumbled into dust right before your eyes.
“And what if I say no?”
Claudia shrugged. “Then I’ll find someone else. You will be free to leave . . .”
“But?”
“But I’m sure there are some folks who will be very interested in a girl killing two men so close to the Midway, especially the Draconis, since they consider that square to be on the edge of their territory,” Claudia said. “I’m sure there would also be some people who would like to speak to you about why you aren’t in the foster care system and where you’ve been living. There’s also the small matter of you enrolling in high school with the help of fake documents. The mortal police will no doubt be curious about that as well.”
Mo had forged the documents for me, along with everything else I’d needed. He had even signed school forms when necessary. All those documents and Mo’s occasional help were what had kept me off the grid, which was exactly how I had wanted it.
But now Claudia was threatening to shove me into the spotlight in the worst way possible. The cops would be extremely interested in me, given all the tourist rubes who were missing their wallets, cameras, and phones because of yours truly. At the very least, all of this would mean a quick trip to foster care—if not a stint in juvie. And the mortals could always decide to try me as an adult, which could mean more serious jail time.
But Claudia alerting the Draconis was the real threat. Just like she said, that square was close to their territory, so they’d be extremely interested in the attack and my part in it. And it wouldn’t surprise me if the mystery man and his goons had been working for Victor Draconi, and now Victor would want payback on whoever had messed up his plan to kill Devon. Either way, I had no desire to get anywhere near any of the Draconis, especially Victor.
A cold, thin smile curved Claudia’s lips. She had her hand wrapped around my throat, squeezing tight, and we both knew it. I might be the better fighter, but she was by far the better tactician. I didn’t know whether I admired or hated her for it. Still, I wasn’t giving in without putting up as much of a fight as I could.
“How long?” I asked. “How long would I have to be Devon’s guard?”
“Five years or until your twenty-first birthday, whichever comes first.”
Well, she was being exceptionally optimistic about my life expectancy. I’d be surprised if I made it through the end of the summer. Because the funny thing about assassination plots was that they never stopped until someone was dead.
“One month.”
She blinked, as if she hadn’t expected me to make a counter offer, but her eyes narrowed. “Five years.”
“One month.”
We went back and forth like that for a few minutes before we both started to give some ground.
“Four years.”
“Three months.”
“Three years.”
“Six months.”
“Two years.”
“Nine months.”
“One year,” Claudia said. “Final offer.”
“Done.”
“Done.”
I held out my hand and we shook on it. I started to pull back, but Claudia gripped my hand even tighter and stepped forward. Her fingers felt ice-cold against mine, almost as if she were using magic, and I remembered the rumors I’d heard about her Talent—the ability to freeze a person’s skin with just a touch of her hand.
“Make no mistake, Miss Merriweather,” she said in a voice so chilly I was surprised that icicles didn’t start forming on the walls. “I am not foolish enough to just trust you with my son. If you do not live up to your end of our bargain, if you decide not to fight for him, or harm him in any way, sell him out, or take my money and run, then I will use all of my considerable resources to find you, drag you back here, and execute you in front of your friend Mo—before I do the same to him. Do you understand me?”
I only knew Claudia Sinclair by reputation. The other Families had nicknamed her the Ice Queen, and with good reason. My soulsight let me see that she meant every harsh, brutal word. If it had been only me, I would have already been planning to take her money and skip town. But I would never abandon Mo, and she somehow knew that was her trump card, the thing that would get me to do her bidding above all else.
“I understand,” I said, having no choice but to give into her demands. “I will protect your son the best I can.”
No matter how much I hate you both, I snarled silently in my head.
Satisfied, Claudia dropped my hand.
“I’m glad we were able to come to an arrangement, Miss Merriweather. Reginald will show you to your room, and Grant, Felix, and Devon will explain your new duties to you in the morning. Until then.”
Claudia brushed past me and headed toward the doors. She threw them open, revealing Mo lurking outside in the hallway, along with Grant, Felix, Devon, and Reginald, all of them trying to act as though they hadn’t had their ears pressed to the doors the whole time. Eavesdroppers.
All I could do was stand there in the middle of the mats and wonder exactly how I’d wound up here. It didn’t take me long to realize what had happened.
The guards chasing me across the rooftops. The attack at the pawnshop. And now this.
Yeah, bad things really did come in threes.
CHAPTER NINE
Claudia and the others disappeared, probably so she could tell them all about the newest conscripted member of the Family, and only Reginald and Mo stepped back into the training room. Mo was grinning ear to ear, while Reginald looked far less excited. And he still hadn’t brought me a sandwich. My stomach grumbled in disappointment. Yeah, it was that kind of day.
“If you will follow me, miss,” Reginald said. “I will show you to your room.”
I laid the sword on a nearby bench, where I’d also put my backpack when we first entered. I shouldered my bag, then followed him and Mo out of the training room.
Reginald marched in front, his back stiff and straight, with me behind him and Mo bringing up the rear. Reginald led us through several hallways and up three flights of stairs before stopping in a long corridor with one door set into the wall.
“This will be your room.”
Reginald twisted the knob and stepped to one side. Mo gave me a not-so-small shove in the back that sent me stumbling into the room.
It was much larger than I expected, at least five times the size of my small corner of the library basement, and the furnishings were as opulent as those in the rest of the mansion. So opulent that I felt very shabby and out of place in my T-shirt, cargo pants, and sneakers. I put my backpack on the floor, not wanting it to dirty up any of the chairs, and walked from one side of the room to the other.
The front of the room was a sort of den, with a black leather couch and matching recliners arranged around a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. Behind that area, a four-poster bed covered with a black-and-white-striped comforter and mounds of matching pillows took up a good chunk of the back wall. A white vanity table sat next to the bed, and there was a walk-in closet in one corner.
But best of all, a door to the left opened onto a private bathroom—one with a sunken tub in the middle of the white marble floor. My own private bathtub with hot, running water. Heaven—absolute heaven.
I started grinning almost as big and wide as Mo was right now. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. Except for the whole putting-my-life-on-the-line-for-a-complete-stranger thing. But my mom had done it countless times. I could manage it, too.
“I assume that you are pleased with the room?” Reginald asked in a bland tone.
“It’s all right,” I said in a nonchalant voice. “I suppose that it will do.”
“That�
��s my girl,” Mo whispered.
Reginald rolled his eyes, the most emotion I’d seen him show so far.
I strolled over to the far right side of the room, where a series of French doors opened onto a large balcony. Through the glass, I could see the whole of Cloudburst Falls spread out below. I would have gone outside and gaped at the view, but I was all too aware of Reginald and Mo watching me, so I forced myself to turn away.
My gaze caught on a long table next to the doors. A structure made of ebony wood that resembled an oversized doll’s house covered much of the table. Actually, it looked more like some ramshackle, rundown trailer in one of the neighborhoods on the poor side of town. Several windows were broken, the wood was splintered in places, and a couple of shingles had been ripped off the roof, even though they were no bigger than curls of sawdust. The trailer also featured a wraparound porch with several missing boards. The porch was sagging onto the stubby lawn that spread out around it. I squinted. Were those tiny honeybeer cans littering the fingernail-high grass?
“Is that a pixie house?” I asked.
“Yes, you’ll have your own personal pixie,” Reginald said. “Miss Claudia thought that it would be helpful to have someone around to see to your needs, day or night. His name is Oscar.”
I huffed. No doubt the pixie had orders to spy on me and report my every move back to Claudia. That’s what I would have done if I’d taken in a strange girl.
I bent down, trying to peer inside the windows, but all of the miniature black shades had been drawn. Either Oscar wasn’t home, or he didn’t want to talk to anyone.
“You don’t want to do that,” Reginald said, a warning note in his clipped voice. “Oscar doesn’t like people trying to peek in through his windows. He’s been known to stick his sword into anyone who tries.”
I drew back. Pixie swords were hardly bigger than needles, but the weapons were often dipped in poison, like copper crusher venom, since that was the only hope pixies had of defeating larger mortals, magicks, and monsters. Either way, I had no desire to get stabbed in the eye.
So I examined the rest of the table. Besides the trailer and yard, small wildflowers dotted another patch of grass that was cordoned off by an ebony fence that led over to a barn, as if it was part of a western dude ranch. Inside the corral, a small, green tortoise snoozed in a patch of sunlight streaming in through the windows. Many pixies kept small pets, like tortoises and spiders, the same way that mortals and magicks kept dogs and cats. A hand-painted sign on the front of the corral gate read TINY, which I assumed was the tortoise’s name. I’d have to remember to find some treats for Tiny. Oscar, too.
Once I’d seen everything in the bedroom itself, I walked over and opened the closet door, expecting it to be empty.
But it wasn’t.
Jeans, shirts, sweaters, and shoes crowded into the space, and a faint, floral perfume drifted over to me. A belt curled up on a table in the middle of the closet read ASHLEY in bright, shiny, bedazzled letters.
And just like that, I saw the room as the prison it truly was.
I blinked, and Reginald was there, expertly shouldering me out of the way and shutting the closet door.
“Sorry about that, miss. I had been told that Oscar had already boxed up all of Ashley’s things and put them into storage until they can be sent to one of the local charities. She didn’t have any relatives, you see. I will have to speak to him about this severe dereliction of duty.”
He shot a dark, angry glare at the pixie house. Looked like Reggie and Oscar weren’t the best of friends.
I considered making a snide comment about Claudia not wasting any time in replacing Ashley, but the tension and sorrow in Reginald’s face made me bite back my snarky words. Well, at least when I died, they wouldn’t have as much stuff to get rid of.
The idea was more chilling than I’d thought it would be.
Reginald cleared his throat. “If there’s nothing else . . .”
I shook my head.
“Breakfast is at nine in the dining hall,” Reginald said. “After that, you will accompany Mister Devon as he goes about his Family duties for the day. Grant will most likely go with you, along with Felix.”
“What sort of duties?” I asked.
His thin chest puffed up with pride. “Mister Devon is the Family bruiser. Mister Lawrence appointed him to the position late last year when Devon turned nineteen. Mister Devon oversees all of the guards and all of the protection services that the Family provides. He is second in command to Miss Claudia.”
No wonder someone wanted Devon dead. Taking out a Family bruiser would be a great way to make a name for yourself.
“After Mister Devon finishes with his duties for the day, you will return to the mansion,” Reginald said. “After that, you’ll have a few free hours to yourself until bedtime.”
“It doesn’t sound like I’ll be doing much actual bodyguarding.”
He shrugged. “Devon is safe in the mansion. It’s when he leaves that there are . . . problems.”
I wondered if those problems included his trip to the Razzle Dazzle, but I didn’t ask. There was no point. Not with Claudia’s threats hanging over my head. For better or worse, I was stuck here, and I’d be protecting her son until either my year of service was up or one or both of us was dead.
Me? I was betting on the dead part.
“Until tomorrow.” Reginald bowed his head to me, ignored Mo completely, then walked out of the room, shutting the door behind him.
Mo grinned. “See, kid? I told you that this would work out for the best.”
“The best? The best? Yeah, if you think the best is me being a walking target as Devon Sinclair’s bodyguard.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “I don’t know what you were thinking, Mo. How did you even arrange this? I had no idea that you had these kinds of Family connections, especially ones to this Family.”
Over the years, Mo and I had developed our own sort of code, so he knew exactly what I was talking about. He waved his hand, causing the diamond in his signet ring to wink. “I have connections everywhere, kid. You should know that by now.”
True. Somebody was always searching for something on the sly in Cloudburst Falls, and Mo was the person who could get you whatever you wanted—in a hurry.
“What happened after the fight at the Razzle Dazzle?” I asked, wanting to know how my life had so drastically changed in the space of a few days.
“Devon called his mom, and Claudia came to the store, along with Grant, Reginald, and some Sinclair guards,” Mo said. “They showed up about fifteen minutes after you left. Apparently, some of the tourist rubes out in the square had called nine-one-one, talking about a girl with blood all over her. I told them what had happened and how you had saved Devon and Felix.”
“But why shove me out the door? Why not just let me stay and explain things?”
Mo sighed. “Because I didn’t want them to think that you had anything to do with the attack.”
“Why would they think that?”
“Because, according to what Grant told me, that day was the first time Devon had been out of the mansion in a week. And he just happens to get attacked then? Can you spell suspicious? So I wanted a chance to smooth things over with Claudia.”
“But I still don’t understand why—why put the idea into her head to make me Devon’s bodyguard? I thought we had a good thing going, Mo, with me working for you. Just like my mom did.”
Mo sighed, sat down on the black leather couch in front of the TV, and patted the cushion beside him. I grumbled, but I moved over and sat down. He drew in a breath and let it out, as if he wasn’t sure what to say. That would be a first. Finally, he looked at me, his black eyes somber, his face serious.
“We did have a good thing going, kid. A great thing, actually. But I promised your mom I’d look out for you, if anything ever happened to her, and we both know that I haven’t exactly done a bang-up job of that.”
“But—”
Mo held up hi
s hand, cutting me off. “No, let me finish. After she died, I thought that you’d be okay in foster care, but we both know how that worked out.”
Not well.
“After that was a bust, you struck out on your own, and you seemed happy enough. So I let it slide, even though you were only thirteen. I let a lot of things slide that I shouldn’t have. But what do I know about teenage girls? A big fat lot of nothing. That’s what.”
“I was happy enough,” I muttered.
He shook his head. “But happy enough isn’t good enough for you, Lila. It’s not what your mom would have wanted for you, and it’s not what I want for you, either. Face it, kid. Your skills are wasted on my penny-ante jobs. You can do every single one of them in your sleep. There’s no lock you can’t pick, no building you can’t sneak into, nothing you can’t figure out some way to steal. But your mom trained you to do better, to be better, to be more than just some thief who skulks in the shadows and barely gets by. She wanted more than that for you—so much more. So when you saved Devon, I knew that this was my chance to finally do right by you.”
“By offering me up as Devon’s latest disposable guard?”
Mo ignored my snide comment. “This is your chance, kid.” He gestured out at the room. “Look around. You’ve gone from squatting in a basement to scoring a primo room in the mansion of one of the most powerful Families in town. Not only that, but you’re going to be treated the same as Devon, Felix, and all the other Family kids. Go to their classes, go to their parties, mix and mingle with the most powerful folks in Cloudburst Falls. And the best part is that you’re getting paid to do it. I already worked it out with Claudia. You’ll get a generous allowance every week as part of your service.”
“Yeah,” I muttered. “And all I have to do is make it through a whole year without getting killed.”
“You’ve made it through four years living on the streets,” Mo countered. “So just think of what you can do here, with all the magic, money, power, and resources of the Sinclair Family at your disposal—”
A blast of twangy country music drowned him out. It took me a few seconds to realize that the song was coming from Oscar’s trailer. Seemed like the pixie would rather burst his eardrums than listen to our conversation.
Cold Burn of Magic Page 9