The Power of Mercy

by Fiona Zedde

  “Can you drop by the station on Monday?” A familiar voice asked the question in lieu of a hello.

  “Yes.”

  “Six in the evening?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  Stepping out into the warm embrace of the September evening, she put away the phone, heels like silenced gunshots against the still sun-heated concrete of the parking deck. Her car beeped when she disarmed the alarm, and the relief of being away from so many eyes and in a private space made her sigh with quiet pleasure. She dropped her bag in the passenger seat.

  “You’d have much more fun if you worked at your mother’s company.”

  It was only an intense act of will that prevented her from lashing out to protect herself. Mai tightened her fist around the car key. She felt more than heard the minute sigh of her leather stilettos as her toes flexed and spread wide, her body readying itself to spring into action. Her fighting instinct had never learned to relax around family.

  “What do you want, Ethan?”

  Her cousin sat in her back seat, smug in his Tom Ford three-piece suit and shark’s grin. “You, as always.”

  He sat in her car, looking for all the world like he belonged there. A muscle throbbed in Mai’s jaw as she waited for him to get to the point of his visit.

  “Nice car,” he said, grinding down her patience even more. He shifted obscenely behind her, hands caressing the leather seat on either side of his sprawled thighs.

  Just because her mother gave him the power to do whatever he wanted in pursuit of her orders, he felt free to be an asshole, which included flirting with Mai when he knew damn well she didn’t date men. He made no secret that he thought he would one day be the permanent exception to Mai’s “no men allowed” rule. But despite how things stood between Mai and her powerful mother, Mandaia Redstone would never approve a marriage between Mai and Ethan.

  So she waited him out while he felt up the napa leather of her well-loved Mercedes. Mai started the car and cued up Nicki Minaj on the Bluetooth connection to her phone. When “Anaconda” began to play, her cousin started talking, but Mai didn’t turn down the music. Neither of them needed silence to hear each other.

  “Your mother wants me to remind you about the Conclave of Families tomorrow afternoon.”

  Mai rolled her eyes. As if she could forget. On every single day last week, her mother had made a point of texting her various details of the Conclave—what time it started, where she would sit when the official announcements were made, what to wear.

  Ever since Mai had neglected to go to the last Conclave, which was nothing more than a glorified birthday party for a child too spoiled to appreciate the small island her cash-rich but power-poor family had bought for her, Mandaia’s messages to her daughter had been rife with even more disappointment than usual. Mai liked to pretend that it didn’t matter.

  “Okay,” Mai said with a dismissive glance at her cousin. “You’ve reminded me. Now go.”

  His face flashed spite in her rearview mirror, his shark teeth on full display. “Formal dress,” he hissed at her. “Something showing off that hot body of yours.”

  Ethan gave the nut-brown leather another suggestive caress as he stared past the driver’s seat at her body. It was as if he were seeing through to her naked skin. Mai wouldn’t put it past him to do just that.

  Annoyed, she put the car in gear and drove off. Caught off guard, her cousin abruptly melted through the leather upholstery, his body going completely transparent before slipping through the leather, then out of her car. She didn’t need to look back to see him standing on the moonlit parking deck, hands in the pockets of his gray suit, his figure solid once more.

  “See that you’re there. You don’t want to disappoint her.” A pocket of sound burst near her ear, the last remnant of his unwanted visit.

  She turned up the stereo and rolled down all the windows. But the reminder of his presence still lingered like a bad stench.

  Chapter 3

  Mai never felt like she belonged in her family. Well, maybe not quite never, but close enough. The last time she’d felt as if she belonged, she was a naïve twelve-year-old. Twenty years of betrayal and pain separated that child from who she was now.

  She drew in a deep and steadying breath and slowly released it.

  With her tiny purse tucked under her arm, she stood at the top of the main staircase of her mother’s Alpharetta mansion, watching the annual Conclave from a distance. A meeting of all the Families in North America to discuss pertinent Meta business, the Conclave was nearly over. Mai had planned it that way.

  This was the last place she wanted to be. Her stomach twisted with discomfort, and she could barely get her legs to move forward. Other than to attend official gatherings, she hadn’t been in her family home since she moved out nearly seventeen years before for boarding school. It was seventeen years of peace she’d desperately claimed for herself after the horror of living in a house where she couldn’t be safe.

  Okay. Enough. Mai shook herself and took a deliberate step forward. She couldn’t stand there stewing in her resentment all afternoon. Shit or get off the pot. But she couldn’t push herself to go any further.

  A hand curled around the dark wooden railing, while the other tightened into a fist in her pocket. She drew in another deep breath, this one too deep, and almost choked on the sickly sweet scent of tropical flowers that hung thick and cloudlike throughout the entire mansion. Her spine stiffened.

  In defiance of what her mother expected, Mai wore slacks. Slim-fitting tuxedo pants the color of old blood, a white blouse sheer enough to show off the shape of her braless breasts underneath, and the unapologetic opacity of her nipples that wilted in the warm room. She wore the brief outfit like armor, a visual reminder to everyone that she knew she didn’t fit in among them and would never try.

  Below the landing where she stood, two sweeping parallel staircases led down to the main ballroom where over five dozen people gathered, members of the sixteen Meta Families living in the North American territory. Above them, the ceiling soared two stories high, terminating in a wide and round stained glass feature that poured brilliant sunlight down on everyone gathered for the biannual event.

  Their combined voices rose and fell through the massive room, weaving with the music from the string quartet tucked away on the smaller of two stages in the ballroom.

  Everyone looked beautiful. Powerful. Even the members of the Families with little Meta power exuded influence because of the financial sway they held in the human world. Energy in the room rolled, warm and electric, over Mai’s skin like an unwanted caress, stirring up her self-protective instincts.

  She didn’t belong among these Metas. But she didn’t fully belong in the human world either. The only time she felt truly like herself was when she dressed in the skin of her own choosing and blended into the night on rooftops and alleys all over the city. That felt right.

  With her family, she just felt like prey.

  Below her, the high afternoon Conclave continued on, despite her lack of direct involvement, and Mai was glad for it. She knew, though, that she couldn’t stay above it for long. Just then, a gong sounded, deep and overly dramatic, a signal for everyone to stop what they were doing and move toward the raised dais in front of the massive ballroom.

  “So you actually decided to grace us with your presence today.”

  Mai turned to look over her shoulder, keeping her hand on the balustrade for balance. A very distant cousin, Caressa, came up slowly behind her. Even Caressa’s approach, friend though she was, was a cautious one, as if approaching some rabid and untamed animal. Everyone knew that although Mai was nearly powerless, she was vicious when cornered and wore her body like a naked blade. This reputation was her only defense among other Metas, and she was proud of it.

  “Mother just about threatened me, so I couldn’t say no th
is time.” Caressa knew Mandaia well enough to know Mai wasn’t joking.

  Caressa, being only a low-level empath, had as little power as Mai. But Caressa had taken the path recommended by her own mother and gone into politics, easily charming every human she met and parlaying that into a seat in the Senate. One of the youngest senators in the country at the age of forty, she was well on her way to more and better. It was a strategic position to be in if the future clash between humans and Metas that her brother and his radical friends were always talking about ever became a reality.

  “Threats must look good on you, then.” Caressa leveled a flirtatious look at Mai, who was used to this sort of behavior from her. She seemed to think Mai wanted this sort of thing.

  That was absolutely not what Mai was projecting. Here of all places, she held her emotions tightly locked in a cage. But Caressa was ridiculously beautiful and thought everyone wanted to fuck her.

  She teased Mai again with a dip of her emerald eyes, scanning her from Mai’s high crown of hair to the black stilettos that were like daggers on her feet. “Come down with me and stop lurking up here like a ghoul.” She slipped her arm through Mai’s without waiting for agreement and tugged her down the steps.

  The ballroom was large, just one of the many showplaces in the massive house. Even among their powerful and mostly rich race of Meta humans, Mandaia Redstone was extremely wealthy. Instead of going into politics like most Metas, she’d opted to go into media and business. She had an extremely successful talk show for nearly thirty years before she gave it all up to become a business mogul and focus full-time on amassing even more money and working behind the scenes to pull the strings of America’s conscience and its political institutions. Mandaia Redstone was very good at pulling strings.

  This house of hers was one few humans knew about. According to paperwork available to any enterprising hacker or diligent googler, Mandaia lived on a twenty-acre ranch somewhere in California and owned over a dozen homes in other parts of the world. But this mansion was her primary home where she, as matriarch of the Redstone Family, lived, hosted Conclaves, and showed fledgling Metas what to aspire to. Her benevolent mask was a beautiful and believable one. Mai sometimes wished she’d never seen what was behind it.

  The gong sounded again, a thirty-second warning.

  “You really waited until the last minute to get here, didn’t you?” Caressa tilted her head down at Mai, who was a full three inches shorter.

  They flowed down the stairs and into the crowd with the rest of the stragglers.

  “You say it often enough yourself,” Mai said. “Why waste valuable time on the things you don’t want to do?”

  She wasn’t telling Caressa anything new. Just about everyone knew how much Mai hated these events, the pomposity of it all. The unnecessary expense of the parties. The hypocrisy at the idea of family, when any of them were willing to sacrifice their young for…anything.

  As she approached the gathered crowd, Mai felt her mother’s gaze on her and turned to meet it—amber eyes the same shade as hers, loosened curls tumbling around her silk-clad shoulders, and a face so beautiful it seemed unreal. It was unreal. Mai blinked and looked away.

  On the dais behind her mother like a royal retinue sat members of Mai’s immediate family: her younger sister, Abi, who could influence living and dying things; their father, Quinn, whose power was invulnerability to everything except old age and his wife’s machinations; and Mai’s younger brother, Cayman, who could break anything on earth with his mind alone.

  From behind their mother’s back, her sister fluttered long fingers at Mai in greeting, risking a small smile. Mai wondered if their mother had noticed. Mai’s own smile died before it could be born when she noticed Ethan had taken her place on the dais. He was a mid-level teleporter, avid sycophant, and local mobster with growing influence on the East Coast. Beside him was his father—and Mai’s uncle—Stephen, a level-ten telekinetic. She quickly skimmed her gaze over her uncle, not wanting to have him in her sight any longer than necessary.

  Looking at them reminded Mai again how much of an anomaly she was among her Power-rich family. She was only a chameleon, able to change surface parts of herself to alter her appearance. Her hearing, sight, and speed were superhuman. But that was ordinary among Metas.

  When she was a child, her mother had thought she could be more and tried to force that perceived potential into becoming a reality. That force had yielded nothing but Mai’s fear and Mandaia’s disappointment. Mai remained as she was.

  It was that powerlessness which had left Mai vulnerable as a child.

  Even with her Redstone Family weakness, Mai was still more powerful than many members of the other Families who’d bred out their Meta power over the centuries by having children with humans. Only in the last twenty years had Metas begun to pay attention to what Mandaia Redstone had been saying all along, that the Families needed to create fertile marriages between Metas and secure power in the blood. It helped that the Redstones were unique, in that all their members had some sort of power.

  Which was why Mandaia Redstone was the matriarch and current head of all Families in North America.

  Her mother began speaking from the stage. “Greetings and continued prosperity for doing me the honor of attending this most humble event.”

  Caressa tried to tug her toward the stage, but Mai dug in her heels. She was close enough. Very gently, she unwound her arm from her cousin’s and put a few inches of distance between them, ignoring Caressa’s slightly hurt look. Her skin was tingling with the need to morph into something that would protect her from the danger she sensed on the stage. But there was no mask she could put on, no new chin, no hunched back, no artificially heightened frame that would protect her from what she knew her mother was capable of.

  Still, Mai straightened her spine and widened her stance, hands in her pockets, where she felt the small, rectangular, card-sized case where she carried her ID, a few folded bills, and the single key to her car. Her apartment was electronically locked with her fingerprint and a scrambled code, so she didn’t need to carry those keys.

  “Today, we have come together to announce and celebrate the engagement of Audrina Page and Rafael Hernandez,” her mother continued.

  As she spoke, two people approached her from opposite sides of the stage—a pretty teenager and a man who looked about Mai’s age. Despite her makeup, it was obvious the girl was young, maybe sixteen years old, and that was being generous. She looked Instagram-ready in her floor-length gilded gown that brought out the gold in her own skin. Her hair was a tall and impressive wave of brown silk studded with diamond pins.

  Mai wouldn’t have been surprised to see a photo of the girl on social media later, pouting toward the audience with her skillfully applied makeup and diamond nose ring. She looked proud to have the Hernandez Family claim on her. But her too-wide eyes and flickering smile betrayed that she wasn’t quite sure what she was doing. She was so damn young.

  Mai couldn’t imagine the amount of money the Hernandez Family had pledged for Mandaia to agree to this.

  “Audrina.” Mandaia held out her hand, and the girl stepped forward, the skirts of her gold gown brushing the floor and swirling around her long legs. Audrina put her right hand in Mandaia’s, and a flare of electricity burned through the room. For the first time, the girl looked frightened. But she kept her hand in Mandaia’s even though the contact with her mother’s tremendous power must have hurt. “Rafael.” Her mother called over the fiancé-to-be.

  Rafael Hernandez stepped forward, looking more confident and capable, as befitting a man at least ten years older than Audrina. He put his hand in Mandaia’s left palm, and electricity licked through the room again. On the dais, Rafael flinched but kept his hand where it needed to be, probably not wanting to be outdone by his child-fiancée.

  “Unless any Family has some reason why this arrangement should not com
e to pass…” And Mandaia paused in the traditional manner, something obviously taken from human ceremonies, waiting to see if there were any objections. When all that came was silence, she continued. “Audrina Page and Rafael Hernandez are hereby pledged to each other. The wedding will occur in three years’ time, when Audrina comes of age.”

  Mandaia brought up her open palms, burdened with the hands of the two people who had pledged to join their lives together. The room sparked with the smell of ozone and a flash of blue light as the rings on the pinky fingers of the couple caught both the light and the power in the room.

  “Long life and power to you.” The entire ballroom rumbled with the combined voices of the hundreds of Metas gathered as they said the traditional words.

  Electric heat raced through the air, heating Mai’s skin and everyone else’s, a source of comfort and a connection to a distant power her mother always speculated was tied into the origin of all Metas. Mai’s skin tingled and flushed. As the closest female relative to her mother and the one who in theory would inherit her position should Mandaia see fit to leave the earth to less deserving mortals, she felt an echo of the power surge that her mother experienced during the pledge.

  The rising tide of applause pulled her attention from her mother and to the rest of the gathered crowd. Beside her, Caressa was clapping along with the rest of them to ceremonially serenade the couple’s walk down the stairs and into the crowd. Mai’s hands stayed at her sides.

  Despite the distance between them, she caught her mother’s eyes. The darkly golden gaze held Mai’s with a ferocity she’d grown used to over the years but had never learned to properly protect herself from. Mandaia was pissed Mai had waited so long to arrive at the ceremony.

  Tough shit.

  She broke eye contact with her mother and turned from the dais, stepping away from Caressa at the same time with the excuse of reaching for a glass of champagne from a nearby waiter. She didn’t want the alcohol, but the glass felt cool in her palm. Grounding. She sipped the champagne, her nose twitching from the bubbles.