by Devon Monk
She studied my face and hands, a frown making only the barest of creases across her smooth forehead. This close, I could see that her youth was legitimate, and not bought off the operating table or maintained by spells.
“What are those marks?” she asked.
“Oh, I got into a fight with a tattoo artist.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Okay, let’s take care of this right now. I loved your father. I know the age difference between us is a hard thing to deal with, and if my own father had married someone my age, I’d probably be angry too. However, since I am not going to judge you for how you treated him, I expect you to do me the decency of not judging me for how I treated him either.”
Zay was right. She was a blunt little thing.
“Terrific,” I said. “Then how about you tell me how much of the corporation you get now that he’s dead.”
She blinked once and held her breath before letting it out. “About one quarter of it. You have just over half, and the rest of his ex-wives, combined, hold the remaining quarter.”
Not enough of a stake in it for her to kill my father. Unless she and my father’s other ex-girls were banding together on this.
“I could try to be tactful,” I began.
“Don’t bother.”
Kevin handed me a glass of red wine, and gave Violet a glass of white.
“Did you kill him?” I asked.
She shook her head, took a drink of wine. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“No,” I said. “I’ve been angry with him for a long time, but not enough to kill him.”
“Teresa said you were furious when you left his office.”
“Teresa?”
“His receptionist.”
“Oh. I was furious. He’d just lied to me about a hit on a little kid I’d Hounded back to him. I told him I was advising the people involved to sue his ass off.”
Violet smiled. “He said you were strong-willed. Said you took after Angela.”
Wow. I hadn’t been compared to my mother in years. And certainly not by someone who spoke her name like maybe they’d met, or maybe they were friends. And what the hells kind of friendship would that be? Violet was old enough to be my sister, not my mother’s crony. I took a gulp of wine.
Okay. I had to admit there was one thing money could buy—really good wine.
“How did . . .” I wasn’t sure quite how to bring it up. “Who found him?”
“Teresa. She was hysterical and called me first. I placed the call to the police.” She took another drink of wine. “It was horrible.” Her voice was much softer, and I could see the lines at the edge of her eyes and the circles beneath them. I got to thinking that even though she looked like a natural redhead, and I expected her to have a very fair complexion, she looked a little gray, as if maybe she really was grieving his death.
That would so not fit with my vision of one of Dad’s wives. Most of the women he’d married wanted the money and the limelight that came from being on Daniel Beckstrom’s arm. But then, why should things turn out how I thought they would? I’d been wrong about lots of things. Zay had said he thought they loved each other. I tried to picture this girl, someone who could maybe have been my friend if she wasn’t my stepmom, next to my polished, powerful, stern father, and just couldn’t make the image work in my head. Another image came unbidden into my mind—the idea of the two of them in bed together.
There were some things that should never be imagined. That was one of them. I took another swig of wine.
“Tell me what you know about his death,” Violet said, “and I’ll fill you in on what you don’t know.”
Zayvion, who had been standing over by the bar with Kevin, walked over and sat on the couch opposite me, settling against the leather cushions with a beer in his hand. Sweatshirt, blue jeans, and a beer. They all looked good on him.
“I hope you don’t mind.” He held up his beer toward Violet. “It’s been a rough couple of days.”
“No, that’s fine. I want to hear what you know too, Zayvion.”
Zay took a drink of beer and gave me a subtle, encouraging nod.
You better be right about her, I thought. He must have gotten the gist of my sentiment because he raised his eyebrows like I was a recalcitrant child.
“Okay,” I said. “I found out he died when I picked up a paper at a newsstand down on Third Street. I was on my way to get coffee. The last time I saw Dad was the previous afternoon when I accused him of illegally Offloading into the St. John’s side of town.”
“St. John’s?” She sounded surprised. “How interesting. I’ve seen the records, and the company hasn’t ever used in-city Proxy, and especially not out by St. John’s. That’s over the railroad divide. In the dead zone.”
“I was there. I Hounded the hit. It was his signature.”
“Really.” She glanced at Zayvion. What I couldn’t figure out was why she was all of a sudden so interested in St. John’s. “Who did you Hound for?”
“I won’t give names. Client confidentiality.”
“I think we both need to break a few rules here if we’re going to share information.”
“Okay, I’m all for that. You start.”
She tipped her head. “Did you know that Zayvion was hired by your father to keep an eye on you?”
“Yeah, I figured that out pretty quick.”
“And that he worked for me before that?”
“Yes. Tell me something you shouldn’t, and I’ll spill the rest of what I know.”
It was like a game of chicken. A game I was good at, mostly because I had nothing to lose. Violet didn’t seem to be a slouch at it either.
“Kevin, will you see that we are not bothered?”
Kevin walked over to the doorway and pressed a button. Even without using magic to enhance my senses, I felt him draw on the deep, rich core of magic over which the condo had been built and he deftly set a Deflection spell. There was nothing in this world I was aware of that could break a Deflection spell of that magnitude and expertise. Respect for Kevin’s worth just jumped about a million points in my book. A plain-looking, unassuming, deadly guy who cast magic like the highest-level user was a hard position to fill, but it looked like my dad, and Violet, had hit the jackpot when they found Kevin.
Violet untucked her leg from beneath her and rested both of her elbows on her knees, the glass of wine held in both hands.
“Your father and I met when he became interested in a line of study I was following at a very private institution. At first we argued. He was an intelligent man and had strong ideas about how magic should be made available to the public. I had other ideas. I thought a system with more freedom would alleviate some of the criminal elements of magic use. If we are all equally able to use magic, perhaps we would be less likely to hurt one another with it or for it.”
She took a swig of wine, draining her glass. “He agreed to invest some money so I could pursue the application of certain technologies to magic. We were not romantically involved then. That didn’t happen for several months, and it was a mutual decision, though I had to talk sense into him when he wanted to end the relationship. You may not believe this, but he was a kind man, if you could get through the business tycoon exterior.”
Okay, that just creeped me out. I looked over at Zayvion, but he was looking at Violet.
“In any case, we developed some astounding devices. Disks about the size of your palm that carry enough magic to cast a single spell.”
“Portable magic. Even off the grid,” I said. “Even in a dead zone.”
“Yes. And since the magic is in the disk, and can be more easily accessed by the user, there is very little price to pay.”
“So there is no Offload, and no need for Proxies?”
“That’s right.”
Holy shit.
“Do you realize how much this will change how magic is used?”
“Yes. And apparently, so do other people.” She glanced over at the bar whe
re Kevin stood, and I heard the clink of glass on glass, then the sound of wine pouring.
“How do you charge the disk with magic in the first place?” I asked.
She shook her head. “That I won’t tell you. Patents are pending. The entire process will change how magic can be accessed and distributed. We both thought, with enough regulation, the disks would do more good than harm. But we were not going to release them for public use until we had laws in place. We had just begun working on the legal side of matters when he was killed.”
“Him dying didn’t do you much good at all, did it?”
She laughed, one hard, broken sob. “No. Not at all.”
I glanced over at Zayvion, who looked his thoughtful, Zen self.
“Do you know a woman named Bonnie Sherman who Hounds for a living?” I asked Violet.
She shook her head. “I don’t think I know anyone named Bonnie.”
“How about a man named Cody Hand?”
She frowned, thinking. Kevin came over with two full wineglasses and another beer for Zayvion.
“Wasn’t there something in the news a long time ago about a man named Cody the Hand who was sent to jail for corporate forgeries?”
“It might be him,” I said.
“I know of him. Why?”
“I think he forged my signature on the hit on Dad. I also think he knows who really killed him.”
Violet became very still. But it was the sort of distracted nonmotion that looked like she had left her body on neutral while her brain burned through an amazing amount of calculations.
Finally, “Where is he?”
“We think Bonnie has him.”
She curled back up in the chair, looked over at Zayvion.
“We were off the grid,” Zayvion said. “Out in the country. We had Cody with us. He’s been damaged mentally, whether at birth or later in life”—he shrugged—“but he can comprehend simple concepts, and he is aware of magic.”
“He was in a field ahead of us,” I said, “and a bolt of lightning . . .” I paused. Actually, it hadn’t looked like a bolt of lightning striking from sky to ground. Now that I thought back on it, I realized it looked like a shot of copper lightning had come up out of the ground. “Uh, a bolt of some sort of energy shot up out of the ground. It was a copper-colored flash. Then Bonnie was suddenly standing there in the middle of the field in front of him. We were a world away from nowhere, and so far off the grid, electric lights could pass for magic.”
If Violet had looked ashen before, she looked like she was going to faint now.
“What happened?” she whispered.
“She put her arms around Cody, intoned a spell, and held one hand up. Then they disappeared.”
“Impossible,” she said. But her eyes were too wide, and she had a white-knuckle grip on her wineglass. She looked at Zayvion.
“Impossible,” he agreed. “But it happened. There was residue left behind in a perfect circle on the ground. Black ash.”
“Feathers,” I cut in. Halfway through my second glass I was starting to feel the wine. I wanted to stretch out and lie back on the love seat. If someone had offered me a nice lap quilt and a pillow, I’d probably stay right where I was. But I wanted to leave this condo as quickly as was practical. There were too many memories ghosting me here.
I placed the glass on the table next to me so I wouldn’t be tempted to swig down the rest of it. I noticed Zayvion had not started on his second beer yet, either. Good. Maybe I’d be able to talk him into driving me home, or loaning me his car for the night.
“It felt more like feathers than ash,” I said. “And it melted at the slightest touch.”
“You touched it?” Violet asked.
“She tried to taste it,” Zay muttered.
“Oh, God, what were you thinking? Don’t ever do something like that! That is an untested, and possibly deadly, matter.”
“Hey,” I said with a smile, “get off my case. You’re not my mom.”
“Technically?” At that moment, I realized she and I could maybe be friends one day.
She took a deep breath. “Okay. At least we now know that the disks have been stolen, not destroyed.”
“What?” I said. “You knew there might be some of these disks out there?”
Violet nodded. “We had a fire a few months ago at one of the production labs. We thought everything had been destroyed, but there was some doubt. And other . . . things that hinted of a break-in. But the . . . investigation we implemented left us with very little to go on.”
“What did you have to go on?”
“A very slight indication that the person, or persons, who broke into the lab may have gone toward North Portland.”
“Shit,” I said. I didn’t like where this was heading. North Portland had more than its share of shady people. You could close your eyes and point anywhere along any of its streets and find a felon.
“Do you have any idea who would do this? There can’t be that many people who knew about the project or where the lab was.”
“We have ideas, but ideas are not proof,” she said, in a reasonable impersonation of my dad.
“So do you have some good reason why we shouldn’t go to the police with this?” I asked.
“I already have,” Violet said. “They hadn’t had much luck tracking the stolen items. It was one of the reasons we were hoping the disks had been destroyed in the fire.”
I rubbed at my eyes. I was tired and my head was starting to hurt. There had to be an easy way to figure out who had access to the technology. And to draw some sort of connection between that person or persons, Cody, Bonnie, and Snake man, if Snake man was real and not just some kind of imaginary friend—or worse, a pet—of Cody’s, and of course me, and maybe even the hit on Boy that pointed back to my dad and his death. What were we missing?
Nothing besides a suspect, a motive, and some hard proof.
Hells.
I needed to find Bonnie and wring her thick neck. No, I needed to get the information out of her about who she was working for and how she pulled her smoke and mirrors act. Then wring her thick neck. Which meant I needed to Hound her. But not tonight. Tonight I wanted sleep. Tomorrow I’d take on the world.
I also did not want Violet to set a bodyguard on me, or try to force me into staying safely trapped here until things sorted out. It would be easy to Influence her, to break my promise not to use people like my father had. I had used it on his secretary, so I’d already fallen off the wagon. Just one more time wouldn’t kill me.
“So it’s agreed,” I said, pouring Influence behind my words. “I’ll Hound around the city for Cody tomorrow.”
“Uh, no, it is not agreed,” Violet said. “First of all, I cannot be Influenced, so you can stop wasting your time. Second of all, we weren’t even talking about finding Cody. And even if we were, I am sure I have far more resources at my disposal than you do. The police are looking for you, Allie. If you draw on magic to so much as light a candle, they’ll know where you are and will haul you in for questioning.”
Well, hells. There was an angle I hadn’t thought of. This secret technology was probably still a secret from the law around these parts. I had not only become a new friend to Violet, I’d also become a new liability if I were caught and indiscreetly questioned.
Still, she could send her men and women off to find the kid, all she wanted. And if they found him and either brought him back here or turned him in to the police, I figured he’d be in pretty good hands until I got done wringing the truth out of Bonnie.
“Sorry,” I said. “You’re right.”
Zayvion turned and looked at me, probably surprised at my apology. I gave him an innocent glance. He wasn’t buying it, but covered his scowl by taking a swig of beer.
“Good,” Violet said. “Why don’t you stay here tonight? There is still a bed in your old room. Or the guest suite is available if you’d rather.”
Oh, hells, no.
I said good riddance to this plac
e years ago. I had never come running home when things had gotten tough in the last seven years. I was not going to come running home now.
“Thanks, but I have somewhere else to be.”
“Where?” She took a drink of wine. She didn’t look like she believed me.
“I don’t think I’ll say. That way if you’re asked you won’t have to lie when you say you don’t know.”
“I don’t like you going off alone, Allie. You do understand you’re being hunted, don’t you?”
“Oh, yeah. I have the bruises to show for it.” I stood. “Thanks for worrying, but I’m a big girl. I’ll be fine.”
Zayvion stood too.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Thought I’d see you to the door.” He put his beer on the table. “Good night, Mrs. Beckstrom.”
“Take care, Zayvion. Be careful, Allie. And if you change your mind, the door is always open.”
“Thanks,” I said. And I meant it.
Kevin walked to the doorway and released the spell with a flick of his fingers, the sort of subtle motion that looked like he was adjusting the ring on his middle finger with his thumb. Oh, this guy was good. Very good.
Kevin allowed us through the door, then followed us to the elevator. He used the remote to open the doors, and I felt my shoulders crawl up to my ears at the small, mirrored space.
“Take it easy, Zay,” he said.
“You too,” Zayvion said. “And next time the drinks are on me.”
They shook hands, and I stood there and broke into a cold sweat. How had the elevator gotten smaller? I’d just been in there. With two men. There had to be enough room for me to step in. But try as I might, and I mighted my best, I could not force my foot to lift and take me one step closer to that mirrored coffin.
Kevin turned and walked back down the wide, spacious, marble hall, toward the spacious great room.
“Allie?” Zay said.
“What?”
He didn’t answer, so I looked over at him. He put one hand on the unmarked, left side of my sweaty face and kissed me. Hard.
Oh. The prickly spikes of panic in my chest melted and a whole bunch of other pleasant feelings took their place. Oh. Yes.
I kissed him back just as hard.