Stand Your Ground Hero

by Paul Duffau

  Kenzie wore tattered shorts, a baggy T-shirt, and embarrassment. “What are you doing here?” Kenzie asked, deliberately blunt. She drew herself up taller and still only reached to his shoulder. She pointed her chin at an upward angle and gave him her best glare.

  Hunter shifted his eyes to Jackson, who sat at the kitchen counter, eyeing both of them with a practiced noncommittal expression. Hunter moved his hand, and the alertness in Jackson’s eyes faded. “Leave us.”

  Jackson lifted himself from his stool and glanced around confusedly.

  “Outside.”

  Kenzie held her tongue until Jackson shut the door behind him. With the click of the closing latch, she whirled to face Hunter. “That was rude as hell.”

  “Word reached us of the weekend’s . . . events.”

  Kenzie stepped in and stuck a finger in front of the boy’s nose. “What right do you have to come into my home and act like a jerk? Jackson is—”

  “He is Meat, nothing more,” Hunter responded, black lava filling his eyes. “Your manners are atrocious.” He stepped past her to the kitchen. His head went left to right. “Where are the water glasses?”

  Spluttering, Kenzie followed him. Not trusting herself to speak, she pointed to the cabinet over the dishwasher.

  Hunter opened the door, removed a glass, and filled it from the refrigerator dispenser. He sipped it, staring at her over the rim. “Our Families have different customs. We will have to adjust to each other.” His tone made it perfectly clear who was going to do the adjusting.

  “Get out!”

  Ignoring her, he repeated, “As I said, my Family heard of the incident. My father has been in contact with your mother, and she invited me to visit.” He offered a grim smile. “She didn’t tell you?”

  “What do you think?”

  “That maybe we should start over.”

  Kenzie jerked a hand to point out the window at Jackson, standing stolidly in the backyard. “A little late for that. You think you have the right to come here and act all high and mighty, bossing everyone around, and tell me I have bad manners. That’s crap.” Her whole body vibrated with angry energy.

  Malicious anger crossed Hunter’s face. His hand twitched.

  “Don’t even.” Kenzie drew into a back stance, and set her hands into defensive position, both physically and magically.

  Hunter looked down at her. “Do not threaten me.”

  To Kenzie’s eyes, he seemed to grow taller and darker as he drew on power, eyes flashing like scimitars slashing under a desert sun. The image unsettled her. With a shiver, she stepped away, mindful of the amount of energy swirling between them, beautiful and destructive.

  Meanwhile, with a visible effort, Hunter regained his composure. In a voice cultivated by generations of superiority, he said, “We are betrothed. How happy the marriage will be is up to you. I know my responsibilities to the Family. I also know my privileges. You will not treat me with such disrespect again.”

  Red closed around Kenzie’s world, hot, boiling. Control, don’t give in to it, she thought. Or to him. Ever. The volume of magical power between them spiked in an exponential jump, riding on her fury, and looking for release.

  “Get out.” It was a savage whisper.

  Pinched and white under his dark complexion, Hunter glared with contempt but also with a touch of fear, as though he sensed the danger. He turned abruptly. The slamming door signaled his exit.

  Kenzie flexed her trembling fingers, and then remembered poor Jackson. She walked with weak knees to the door, opened it, and hailed the man in a tremulous voice.

  “Jackson, could you come in, please?”

  After rescuing Jackson from Hunter’s magic, Kenzie retreated to the upper floor, knowing that Jackson would not follow. Her room, with the delicate frills, felt confining. Jumpy with leftover emotional energy, she couldn’t stand in one place, much less sit, so she paced to the window and back.

  Her rage at Hunter’s insolent attitude dissipated, leaving a cold, calculating anger in its place that scrubbed away pretensions of schoolgirl fantasies. Within this bubble of newfound clarity, she assessed the dismal future. If that obnoxious jerk was a representative member of the Spaniards, they weren’t just old-fashioned, they were Neanderthals with gigantic egos. Intuitively, Kenzie saw that there might be a difference between the way Hunter handled Jackson and the way that he responded to her, but it was of degree. He’d thought nothing of chastising her like she was a . . . .a . . . a cleaning woman, in her own home. Her teeth hurt and the muscles on the side of her jaw ached at the indignity. Unbelievable that anyone could act like that in the twenty-first century, toward anybody. Intolerable. She absolutely was not marrying a jerk like that.

  The thought brought her up short. Such thinking was a repudiation of the Family’s dictates and Sasha’s demands. Somehow she’d find a way out of the chains her mother was determined to shackle her with. She blinked rapidly, sorting out her options. None of them were any good, not yet.

  Face facts, you can’t bail until you’re eighteen.

  She heaved a deep sigh. It might as well be forever, at the rate things were going. Until then, she needed to plan. To plan, she needed information; real facts, not the fluff that the Family had been blowing her way since she was a child. Harold knew stuff. Her father did. She was positive Sasha did, too.

  Why had no one told her? With a grimace, she answered her own question. Because the Family—Sasha—ruthlessly used secrecy like currency, doling out dribbles of information to control everyone else. The matriarch held the keys to the closets that held the skeletons. There was no advantage for Sasha to tell her the truth about her real mother. About Elowyn. With a sick feeling, she knew that until she could engineer an escape, she’d have to play along. Which, she thought with distaste, meant apologizing to Rubiera.

  That was going to suck.

  Impulsively, she went to her door and cracked it open. The house was silent and Kenzie briefly wondered what Jackson did when she was up here. She dismissed the worry and slipped into the hallway. Barefooted, she padded to her parents’ bedroom door, eased it open, and stole her way inside.

  She knew where she could start with getting answers. Her father’s safe.

  Kenzie examined her notes, written in haste on a scrap of printer paper. Names and dates were all she’d had time to extract from her father’s files. Matthias, Harold, Belinda, Elowyn. It was on the last that she bent her focus. A date of birth, a date of death. Her real mother had died within a year of giving life to Kenzie. No cause of death was listed.

  Her mother’s file was the only one that she read in its entirety. It spoke only of the investigation into Elowyn’s death. Each avenue the police investigators pursued ended in blind alleys. It did not take much imagination to see Raymond Graham’s young hand guiding the detectives away from the truth. In itself, that was a pair of clues. First, that it was Family business. Second, the Family already knew the cause.

  Harold’s folder contained details of his trial for blasphemy and crimes against the Family, though the latter weren’t specified. She had boggled at the idea of Harold doing anything contrary to their interests, but she recalled his pitiful face. “It’s a pretty prison, is it not?” The pages in her hand fluttered in memory.

  Matthias, the enigma. A powerful wizard, banished for blasphemy, plus heresy and treason for good measure. Unlike Harold’s, his file petered out immediately upon his sentencing. The remaining notes referred to failed searches.

  Belinda. Her file showed blanks where there should be data, and Kenzie could picture the frustration on her father’s brow. To him, each piece of the missing puzzle would prick at his suspicious nature. She was an even bigger mystery than Matthias.

  The files for Harold and Matthias tied back to her, to her birth year, as did the file documenting Elowyn’s death. That was the sole connector that the files shared, one that set an unearthly chill to her skin.

  She was born a year after the Splintering.
r />   What had happened?

  Chapter 15

  Arriving before dawn, Mitch situated himself with a minimum of noise, arranging the paraphernalia of his disguise—a water bottle, a snack, and a notebook—within easy reach. The plan was simple. Wait for Kenzie’s parents to leave and then walk up to the front door. His location allowed him a relatively unobstructed view of the back and side of the Tudor home. The peacefulness of the idyllic scene gave room for his mind to stew on Jackson.

  His chest rose and fell, cycling through the useless thoughts and emotions that followed getting canned. Anger was a good chunk of it, he knew, because he considered the ever-competent Jackson a friend. He was used to being angry, though he hadn’t realized how much until he met Kenzie and learned how not to be angry. He let the heat grow into usefulness.

  Confusion he knew, too, and it was an enemy. It led to fuzzy thinking and mistakes that he couldn’t afford.

  New to him was this kind of hurt, a kind of gut punch. It tasted too close to bitter failure. Mitch twisted his lips with the perceived sensation. No more, he thought, and dismissed it, vowing not to let it happen again.

  The seat of Mitch’s jeans was soaked through with moisture from the fragrant ground where he sat squinting through the spear-tip-shaped leaves of the ubiquitous rhododendrons into the rosy sunrise. Below him at the base of the hill was Kenzie’s house. A bug alighted on his forearm, tickling the fine hairs. With a gentle flick of his pointer finger, he removed the insect.

  The kitchen lights had turned on before the sun broke over the horizon. The drawn blinds hid the early riser. It didn’t matter, though. He could see the garage. What order the Grahams left in was irrelevant, just so long as they left.

  He shifted, the overnight cold pressing up into his buttocks. The notebook he’d brought with him fell off his lap in a flutter of pages. He picked it up and, with a mechanical pencil, made some bogus notes about the sounds around him. If anybody spotted him, he was doing an entomological study. Peeping Toms got the police called on them. People that studied bugs were shuffled into the weirdo category but otherwise were left alone.

  Traffic picked up on the road behind him. His car, stashed two blocks away on a residential cul-de-sac, stood out in this neighborhood where BMWs and Lexus SUVs proliferated. Mitch rolled his head clockwise, and then flipped the direction, getting a crack on the reversal. He checked the time on his watch, bored. His cubicle was more exciting. Warnicke would have a fit when he got the message that Mitch was out sick.

  The garage door rose up thirty minutes later and disgorged a black Volvo. Kenzie’s mom, thought Mitch. Her dad drove a Mercedes. He jotted a note onto paper, disguising the information by Latinizing it. Good enough to pass general scrutiny. Jackson might not want him around anymore, but Mitch knew he had learned well.

  The car turned left out of the driveway and went north, and then turned left again, heading right toward him. Belatedly, he realized the fast route to the freeway was a stone’s throw to his left. He heard the surge of the engine as the sedan attacked the hill. He hunched down. A flash of gleaming metal hurtled past. Maybe a cop’s wife doesn’t need to worry about speeding tickets, Mitch thought as he brought his eyes back up to check the home. One down. . . .

  Mitch went back to waiting, stifling yawns as the warmth of the day drove off the night chill. His attention flagged. He shook out his shoulders at regular intervals, checking his watch. In daylight, he couldn’t tell if anything was happening inside. What if Graham worked from home today? He had just assumed that both parents would leave for work. Indecision gnawed at him, and he argued with himself over how much longer to wait when, below, a silver Audi A8 turned in the driveway and parked at an angle to the rear door.

  Mitch already knew the driver before the door ever opened, and he muttered a cuss word.

  Jackson.

  He, Mitch, was an idiot, the dumbest dolt on the planet, and he cussed his stupidity some more, with extra vigor, because he deserved it. Of course Jackson canned him. He fricking had to. Mitch was a walking, talking conflict of interest. And since Jackson had been the bodyguard for Kenzie the last time, it was perfectly logical that he would be this time. It also explained the raft of paper that got included in the box. Jackson hadn’t so much fired him as moved him underground, where he could take a secondary role in keeping Kenzie safe. Grim pleasure radiated through him in a warm tide.

  I can do that. . . .

  The glow of being useful after all died in a deadly cold realization implied in the box of paperwork.

  Jackson knew he was still seeing Kenzie.

  Who else knew?

  Mercury, of course. He banged his head against the heel of his hand.

  Think, dumbass.

  When something happened to Kenzie, Raymond Graham made a beeline for me once she was safe. Did he know? Mitch dismissed it. Graham had all but promised to eliminate him if he stayed around Kenzie, warned him off. And yet . . . he came to the garden when Mercury summoned him.

  Graham talked like an officious jerk in cop mode and like an angry dad, but he had not acted on any of his threats.

  . . . not when he warned Mitch to stay away from Kenzie.

  . . . not at any of their clandestine meetings.

  . . . not when Kenzie got attacked.

  Why not? The Families were ruthless, yet he was still walking on the sunny side of the ground instead of planted deep. Why hadn’t the Rubieras acted? Hunter said he put in a good word for him; that he could be a reliable tool.

  Bull.

  The garage opened again, spitting out a Mercedes. Police work might not be lucrative, but Mitch intuited that Raymond Graham fulfilled a hidden role outside of breadwinner, that of protector, wormed into the Seattle Police Department both to act as a conduit of information that might affect the Family and as a force for actively hiding them from scrutiny.

  Even from the hillside, Mitch could see that Graham’s head was on a swivel, evaluating his environment. Mitch settled further into the vegetation until he was sure he was completely obscured from sight. If Graham followed his wife up the hill, he didn’t want those busy eyes getting distracted.

  As he hid, he considered his next move. Walking up the sidewalk to the front door seemed a really poor idea now. Ditto for leaving a note at their message drop. She’d never get it.

  Well, she couldn’t stay in the house for the next month. He moved a branch out of his way. The rustling leaves sounded loud in the early-morning air.

  When she came out, he’d follow her. Until she did, he’d make sketches and hope it wouldn’t take too long. He was already hungry.

  Chapter 16

  An eerie prickling at the edge of Kenzie’s consciousness made her a little twitchy as she seat-belted herself into the passenger seat. Jackson waited and flicked his attention from his mirrors to a scan around the Audi. She adjusted herself in the bucket seat as the man fired up the engine. Pretty strains of cello and piano music quietly filled the interior. Jackson put the transmission into drive and eased up on the brake. The car glided into motion.

  “Classical?”

  Jackson sighed. “Yes,” he said, “it helps me concentrate.”

  Kenzie tabbed the selector until she found better music. “I don’t want to think that much.” She reached for the volume control.

  “It’s loud enough.”

  Kenzie dropped her hand. “Do you know how to get there?” she asked.

  “The GPS does.”

  “You know people can track you on that.”

  The eyebrow nearest Kenzie climbed up Jackson’s forehead. With a compressed smile, he asked, “When did you get to be so concerned about prying eyes?”

  His comment rankled. Since Mitch figured out how Lassiter tracked us, Kenzie wanted to say, but kept her lips buttoned. Her right hand touched the broken fitting on the amulet necklace as though her fingers could derive the answer of its magic like reading braille. The pads of her fingertips tingled when they touched the tines, and
her scalp crawled with a thousand ants, all eager anticipation. She jerked her hand away.

  “You okay?” Jackson asked without looking at her.

  “Yeah,” she fibbed, rubbing her fingertips with the thumb. The sensation of being watched was so powerful that she checked the passenger mirror in a furtive glance.

  Why she’d decided to wear the necklace mystified her. It just seemed right when she had gotten ready, like putting on makeup she hardly ever wore. Today her hands, drawn by themselves, had applied a delicate shading to her eyes, and a gloss to her lips. Self-consciously, she pursed them together. With a mental shrug, she dismissed the self-inspection by telling herself that she wanted to appear competent at the library.

  Their destination was the University of Washington library and their archive of newspaper articles. Frustratingly, she couldn’t find any details online about her mother’s life or the way that she died. In her notes, stolen from her father, she had the bare framework of her mother’s death by fire. The official reports were terse and the data sparse.

  Fires were news, though, and she had a date she could research. The university also maintained extensive genealogical records. She should be able to get information on her own birth and the details on her mother. Between the two, I can piece together a timeline for the life of Elowyn. If the newspaper had a marriage announcement, she might be able to locate her real father, too. She grimaced at the thought. For all the animosity between her and Sasha, her relationship with Raymond Graham seemed to be growing sturdier.

  Using the local library was out of the question. There was no way it would have the resources she needed and, worse, she’d attract attention asking for microfiche. Shoot, they might not even have it. Kenzie’s mind boggled a bit at the idea that all the old newspaper articles and documents were on miniature pictures on actual film.

  Beside her, Jackson checked the rearview mirror, staring at it longer than necessary. A small furrow crossed his brow, smoothed away almost as fast as it appeared, and was replaced by a fraction of a smile that disappeared just as quickly. She tensed, and she twisted in her seat to look out the back window.