The Russian Cage

by Charlaine Harris

  Hubble yelled, “You, Rose! Out, now! And McMurtry, you with her.”

  “I’m staying at the Balboa Palace,” I told Eli. “I’m in touch with Felix and your family and Felicia.” There was more I wanted to say, but not in front of all these people. I had the little black velvet bag around my neck, hidden in the dress. I pulled it up a little for him to see. “Good-bye for now.”

  “For now,” Eli said. And all of a sudden, he smiled.

  Turning and walking away was even more painful than I had imagined.

  But I did it.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  We got back to Imperial Island much faster than we’d gotten to the jail, or so it felt to me. I had a lot to think about, and Captain McMurtry hadn’t had much to say on our way, not that I cared.

  Maybe I’d angered McMurtry by drawing his gun. Maybe he’d been scared of the other grigoris (I’d be interested to know what charges the other three faced). Maybe the captain had been as astounded by the stupidity of Hubble as I’d been. Had the San Diego PD chosen their most useless officer to oversee the grigoris, because it wouldn’t make any difference if she died? Or had Hubble been selected because two of the grigoris were women?

  “Hubble is a null,” McMurtry said, as if he’d been reading my thoughts. “They had to find a null to guard the grigoris.”

  I’d forgotten what that meant. But I wasn’t in an asking-questions kind of mood. “She’s the most incompetent guard I’ve ever seen,” I said.

  “Bottom of the barrel,” McMurtry agreed. And we fell back into silence.

  For my purposes, it was good she wasn’t better at her job. But for Eli’s protection and well-being, Hubble needed to be smarter and more alert.

  I’d gotten control of myself by the time I arrived back in the room where the “best” people were still gathered. Lucky I had, because I saw the tsarina hadn’t been waiting with bated breath for my report. Vasily, son of Grand Duke Alexander, was standing in front of her, and his mouth was moving. Caroline looked at him intently, but I was pretty sure she was hearing Blah blah blah, since she wasn’t reacting to his words at all.

  The man seemed to talk forever. Finally, Caroline was able to beckon Captain McMurtry forward when Vasily’s lips stopped flapping. McMurtry took my arm and propelled me over to the tsarina. I had to resist the impulse to yank my arm away from his grasp. Not used to people taking hold of me.

  Following McMurtry’s lead, I bowed to Caroline. I didn’t miss the sneer on Vasily’s face as I straightened. Caroline glanced at the man but didn’t seem to find a way to tell him to get lost.

  “Did you find Ilya?” Caroline asked.

  McMurtry squeezed my arm a little. So I was supposed to answer, not him.

  “Yes, Your Imperial Highness, Eli is in the jail. There’s a special group of cells for holding grigoris. There are three others in there.” I wasn’t surprised that a lot of people in the room had fallen silent and moved closer. Who wouldn’t want to know what the tsarina was worried about?

  My information appeared to be shocking to everyone in the room, though that couldn’t be the case.

  “Who are the imprisoned?” Caroline said. If this wasn’t news to her, she was doing a good acting job.

  Captain McMurtry took a turn answering. “Four, your highness. Eli, Jane Parvin, Svetlana Ustinova, and John Brightwood.”

  “This must be brought to my husband’s attention,” Caroline said, and the captain sort of loomed over her, obviously hoping to get the job. It worked. “Captain McMurtry, since you accompanied Miss Rose to the prison, please go inform my husband about what you saw.”

  McMurtry bowed and departed.

  I was envious of royalty’s ability to get results. All of a sudden, I was tired of being here, tired of wearing someone else’s clothes, and I was definitely in need of some thinking time.

  I wondered how to excuse myself. The white-haired woman was near me, and I sidled over to ask her how to leave. It would be bad to simply walk out. There had to be a procedure. I got in Xenia Alexandrovna’s line of sight and raised my eyebrows.

  “Miss Rose begs for your permission to depart, Caroline,” Xenia Alexandrovna said quietly. “She wants to tell Eli’s mother and sisters about what she’s discovered.”

  “Oh, of course!” Caroline really didn’t want me to leave without further talk, I could tell, but she realized that Eli’s family should come first. I was kind of amazed. Myself, I’d really wanted to leave so I could tell all this to Felix… and my sister, if he hadn’t taken her back to the school yet.

  I bowed again and eased my way back until I figured the crowd obscured me. Then I made haste to leave the palace, and this time I didn’t need anyone to lead me to the front door.

  I didn’t worry about who drove me to the civilian parking lot this time. I’d seen Eli. I figured that was what they hadn’t wanted me to do.

  I’d wondered what I’d do if Felix hadn’t followed us back. When I spotted his old car, I felt relieved. He was alone. I was relieved and sorry. I’d had some questions for my sister, but today had been a big old mountain, and I needed to climb down before I tackled Felicia.

  I’d no sooner set my bottom on the seat than Felix said, “Did you see him? How is he?”

  And at that moment, I understood everything.

  I stowed it away to think about later.

  “He seemed okay,” I said. “No signs of torture. The same grigoris are in with him that Peter named: Ustinova, Brightwood, Parvin. They’re in staggered cells, so they can’t look directly at each other.” I wasn’t surprised that Felix had a piece of paper to hand me, along with a pencil. I drew a sketch.

  “Where are the toilets and sinks?” Felix asked.

  “At the back right corner of each cell. The mattress is on a metal ledge, attached to the wall.” I’d never seen such a thing. I’d only been in one jail as a prisoner, and Eli’s cell had been real nice compared to that one.

  We went over the security, such as it was.

  Felix looked disgusted at my account of Hubble, and he said, “She has to be a blank, a null. That’s the only reason they’d send her down there, unless they wanted her to die.”

  “McMurtry said she was a null. What’s that mean?”

  “Blank cartridges have no explosive force, am I correct?”

  “More or less.”

  “There are humans who are like that. Blanks, nulls, voids, whatever you call them. They can’t be affected by magic, and magic can’t be worked in their presence.”

  I had never heard of such a thing. “It must be rare,” I said.

  “Very. Thank God.” There was a pause; we were both thinking.

  “Did you believe that Captain McMurtry knew about the first driver, the official one in the palace employ?”

  “The one Felicia told us not to ride with.”

  “Yes.”

  I tried to recall McMurtry’s reaction. “I didn’t think he was in on anything. He seemed… willing to go along with Felicia’s warning. He didn’t ask any questions. At the time, I was just relieved.”

  “So you think he is sincere. Not in on any plot.”

  “That’s a big thing to give an opinion on, based on a car ride together. I did think he was being straight with me, with us. I think he’s driven by ambition to rise higher in the imperial service, so he’s looking out for opportunities to do that.” I looked around me. “We need to get out of this parking lot. No one else is sitting in cars talking. They get in, they leave.”

  Felix kind of shook himself and turned on the engine. We drove back across the bay. “Do you want to go with me to the Savarovs’ house?”

  I did and I didn’t. I wanted to return the dress and retrieve my own clothes. I wanted to tell Veronika about Eli. But I also wanted to think about everything that had happened this long day, and I wanted to eat. Now that I’d seen Eli, alive, breathing, knowing me, I had felt something relax inside me.

  “They’ll be waiting to hear,” I said. Could
n’t decide.

  “Let’s go there.” Felix turned left and began to make his way to the house on Hickory.

  We fell into silence. I wanted to ask him about Felicia, what he thought about her age and her abilities. I had thought I was sending her to the Rasputin School so she would have a safe place to live and food to eat while she grew up and learned how to make some kind of living in a city with more opportunities than Ciudad Juárez or Segundo Mexia. Instead, I had sent her to the place where she could learn how to be a grigori herself. Did the teachers at the school know about Felicia’s talent and true age? Or had she fooled them like she’d fooled me?

  I didn’t think Felicia had set out to deceive me. After all, we’d had so little time together before she’d had to leave with Eli. She’d just let me believe… what seemed likely to me. And her letters to me had been monitored, at least in the beginning. I shook my head in admiration. I’d been gotten, good and proper. My sister was smart and unpredictable. She’d given me the turquoise to let me know what she was, and I hoped Eli could figure out what it did. Whatever the spell in the stone, it wouldn’t work around Hubble.

  As Felix had done before, he drove to the parking apron behind the Savarov house. I wasn’t surprised that their yard lights—if they had any—weren’t on, and only one light was visible in the back of the house. How could they be sure we were coming tonight? They’d probably figured we’d been arrested, too. And I still had to tell the three women everything that had happened. As I climbed out of Felix’s car, I was tangled in my thoughts and very tired. From the slump in Felix’s shoulders, he felt the same.

  And that was when we were attacked.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Fighting for your life clarifies your thoughts and gives you a boost of energy. Without that, you would die.

  My body reacted before my mind could tell me, She’s trying to kill you.

  I pulled up my dress, pulled out a knife, and flung it. If my body hadn’t done that (all on its own), I would have been a dead woman. Katharine Demisova died instead. As she fell, I recalled her name and put it to her face. She was the grigori who’d been waiting, along with Derek Smythe, outside the Balboa Palace when Felix had dropped me off the other night.

  I have to admit it was a lucky throw. She’d heard I was a shooter, so she’d squatted to let the shot go over her. So the knife had taken her in the throat rather than her ribs. I took a second to be surprised and grateful before I turned to help Felix. He hadn’t been as lucky. Derek Smythe was not at all surprised by Felix’s magic. Derek was primed to combat it.

  He was not primed for being tackled from behind. Which was what I did.

  The grigori didn’t have time to catch himself. He yelled as he went down, and his homburg flew off as his head hit the ground. I grabbed his greasy hair with my right hand and slammed his face into the pavement. Felix pointed a finger at Smythe’s head, whispering a few words.

  Then Smythe lay still forever.

  As Felix and I stood there panting in the dim backyard, lights began to come on in the house, and I could hear Lucy’s voice calling to her mother.

  The big light came on over the garage door.

  Veronika, Lucy, and Alice poured out of the back door in their dressing gowns, each armed with a knife. I was astonished, as much as I had energy to be. The women weren’t as helpless as I’d thought.

  When they recognized us, the three stopped in their tracks. They looked down at the bodies on the ground. They looked back at us. They did not faint. They did not vomit.

  “I saw Eli. He’s alive and well,” I said.

  And that was the most important thing.

  On the way back to the hotel, I thought how strange it was that no one else’s lights had come on. Had all the neighbors been pretending the backyard attack did not wake them?

  In fairness, the fight itself had been quick and quiet. But Lucy, Alice, and Veronika had come out of the house shouting. And when the big light over the garage door had come on, I’d felt like it could have been seen from the moon.

  Since the neighbors were ignoring any hoo-rah from the Savarov house, I hoped they’d also been blind to Felix and me loading the bodies into the trunk of his car.

  We couldn’t think of anything else to do with Demisova and Smythe. We couldn’t bury them in the backyard. Lucy suggested we pitch them over the fence, because their neighbors to the north had some vicious dogs, but she got voted down. “Maybe the dogs would eat them,” Lucy said. “Or maybe the dogs would get blamed for the killing of them.”

  I thought it wasn’t a bad plan, and at least it would be easy and quick. But no one else was in favor.

  “Too close to home,” Veronika said.

  “Mother, no one will marry us,” Alice said. “We might as well.”

  Veronika’s mouth set in a hard line. “Not here,” Veronika insisted.

  “No, Lizbeth and I will remove them,” Felix said firmly. “They were here to kill us, so we are responsible.”

  Maybe because I was tired, very tired—today I’d killed a dead man, saved the tsarina, gotten dressed up by Eli’s mother, gone to court, gotten a killer turquoise from my little sister who probably wasn’t so little, visited Eli, and killed a grigori—I thought this was a funny conversation. I had to bite my lips to keep from laughing.

  Felix shot me a grim look.

  He opened his car trunk and went to Demisova’s head, waited for me to pick up her legs, and in she went. Smythe followed. “Ladies, please turn away,” Felix said, and I knew he didn’t mean me. He had to close the trunk, and the bodies were going to suffer for it. I had to help him push down. Finally, we heard the trunk latch engage.

  “I’m sorry about the dress,” I told Veronika. “I’ll get it cleaned and return it.”

  “Please don’t bother,” she said courteously. “It’s yours now.”

  I wasn’t going to go down a list of items of hers I was wearing or carrying and ask her about each item. “Thank you,” I said.

  We agreed I’d return the next day and tell them everything. “Where’s that Natalya?” I asked. Seemed strange the maid wasn’t out here with us.

  “She doesn’t live here, thank God,” Lucy said. “She comes in the morning at seven, and she leaves in the evening at six.”

  I liked this girl more and more.

  “She’s a spy,” Alice said, like she was mentioning Natalya had gray in her hair.

  “I figured.”

  “But she does put in a good day’s work, and we could do worse,” Veronika said. “We’ll come out in the morning, early, and check the gravel for blood.”

  My first impression of Eli’s mom and sisters had been wrong. Not that they weren’t very different from me. They were. But in some ways, we did think alike. They went back in the house, and Felix and I set out on our last task of the night.

  We threw the bodies into the water, I don’t know where. This had never been a choice anywhere else I’d been, so I was real pleased with how simple it was.

  I was so glad to see the Balboa Palace I could have clapped. The night clerk stared at my dress in amazement as I passed him on the way to the elevator. The same glum woman took me to the third floor and stared at me, too. I was glad to hear the elevator doors slide shut behind me. I opened the door to my room, standing to one side, knife in my hand.

  There was no one waiting for me.

  I shucked off all my borrowed finery, washed my face and brushed my teeth, and crawled into the bed. I pulled the blanket up. I looked over to the door to check that I’d locked it, and I turned out the bedside lamp. But it took me a while to sink into sleep.

  I’d finally seen Eli. He’d smiled.

  It was full sun the next day when the knocking on the door woke me up. I crept over to listen. One person outside, as far as I could tell. I pulled on my blue jeans and a shirt and opened the door cautiously. Peter.

  “Where have you been?” I said. “I expected to see you yesterday. I saw your brother. Have you bee
n by your mom’s?” I stood back to let him in.

  “I did go by this morning,” Peter said. “Lucy was outside in her bathrobe hosing down the gravel in front of the garage, and she wouldn’t tell me why. Why?”

  That was a poser. If his sister didn’t want to tell Peter what had happened, maybe there was a reason. Peter was hotheaded, sure enough, but he was also devoted to his brother.

  “Have you had breakfast?” I said.

  “No, not yet.”

  “Then let me finish getting dressed, and we’ll get some.” I realized that I was very, very hungry. I hadn’t eaten much the day before, and I had done a lot of things. I went into the bathroom, got myself set for the day, and emerged feeling like Lizbeth instead of a lady going to court.

  We left the hotel and went to a pancake place across the street. It was full of people drinking coffee and eating to start up their working day. None of them wore uniforms or grigori vests. I checked.

  After we’d ordered and I’d had a sip of coffee, Peter said, “I thought I was going to be in on every plan.”

  “I thought you were, too. But Felix told me where to be and what to do, more or less, and that ended up with me getting to see Eli.”

  “Mother tells me you saved the tsarina’s life.” Yeah, he was pouting.

  I raised my hand and tilted it back and forth. “In a sense.”

  Peter waited for me to explain. He was not my favorite person to be with in the morning, I decided. There were things I didn’t want to say out loud where anyone could overhear, no matter how uninterested the other customers seemed to be in our conversation. And Peter should know that. Instead, he was doing everything but tapping his fingers on the table to let me know how impatient he was.

  “I’ll tell you later,” I said. Used the voice that would let Peter know I wanted to make something real clear.

  “You and Felicia are friends, right?” I asked instead, to change the subject.

  Peter looked startled. “Yes, we are,” he said, real cautiously, like I might be trying to trap him.