Sapphire Flames

I snuck forward on my toes and leaned to look through the glass wall. Mom sat at the conference table, an open laptop in front of her.

“Is she okay?” a familiar male voice asked.

She was Skyping with Sergeant Heart.

“She’s alive. She won’t tell me anything. I watched my daughter chop off a monster’s head with a sword.”

Mom paused. Her tone had an odd note in it. If I didn’t know better, I would say it stopped just short of being fear, except my mother would never show fear to anyone outside the family.

“We need protection,” she said. “I can’t tell you for how long, but I promise you that however long it is, we will pay you . . .”

“Penelope.”

He said it with warmth in his voice, and I almost did a double take. Sergeant Heart didn’t do warm. He did efficient and scary.

It must have startled my mother too, because she stopped talking mid-word.

“All you ever have to say is that you need my help,” Sergeant Heart said. “Do you need me, Penelope?”

There was a long pause.

“Yes, Benjiro, I need you.”

“Ah, you know my name. I’ll be there tomorrow at 20:00 hours. Can you hold until then?”

“Yes,” Mom said.

I quietly backed away and into my office. The little black dog scampered in and went straight to the loveseat in the corner.

There was no way she could jump that high on her short little legs.

The dog leaped onto the loveseat and started making circles on the folded blanket Arabella used when she hid in my office to nap.

Well. I stood corrected.

I gently shut the door, sat at my desk, and put my headphones on in case Mom noticed me when she left the conference room. What, you had a tender, almost intimate conversation with deadly and almost superhuman Sergeant Heart? No, I didn’t hear a thing. I had my headphones on the whole time.

Sergeant Heart liked my mother. I wasn’t sure how she felt about that. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that either.

I opened the Etterson file on my computer and stared at it. Making a list of everything I knew usually helped me, so I started a new file and wrote out my list.

Sigourney Etterson was a poison Prime who amassed a fortune of almost ten million dollars in twelve years by unknown means.

She knew her life was in danger.

Someone killed her and possibly kidnapped her second daughter.

Before she died, Sigourney visited Diatheke, Ltd., to withdraw two million dollars, in cash.

Diatheke had no problem filling a bag with two million dollars in cash on the spot. Celia, who worked at Diatheke, didn’t find this odd.

Celia described Sigourney as a “pro.” She also implied Sigourney had a secret account, and acted like getting killed was a known occupational hazard for pros.

Benedict De Lacy, who is a screwed-up mental Prime, didn’t ask any of the usual questions most people ask when learning about the death of an acquaintance or a client. He didn’t show surprise or express condolences.

Diatheke routinely employs a trained strike team of killers.

Celia was a metamorphosis mage, probably at least a Significant, and she tried to murder me. I was her primary target.

There was only one reasonable conclusion to all of this. Sigourney Etterson worked for Diatheke as an assassin. They either knew she was about to die, or they killed her. Other convoluted ways to interpret that list existed, but this was the simplest and most straightforward.

Did Benedict have her murdered over the two million dollars? I had no doubt that Diatheke gave Sigourney her money. If they hadn’t, Celia would have told me. By the time Sigourney cashed out the account, she had already moved her will to her desktop, which meant the threat existed before she went to Diatheke. If they intended to kill her, why cash her out?

I still had no idea what Diatheke actually did. Private security teams, like the one that almost killed me today, usually served prominent, wealthy Houses. On paper, Diatheke wasn’t associated with any House, but it sure was run like one, with a Prime at the top.

A metamorphosis mage of Celia’s caliber required careful management. Arabella was a metamorphosis mage. There was no comparison between the two, because my sister was one of a kind, but similarities existed. For one, deploying Celia would’ve been a gamble every time. Very few metamorphosis mages retained the ability to reason while transformed. They were the magic equivalent of a directional antipersonnel mine. Point the right side toward the enemy and hope for the best. Diatheke would have to maintain a suppression team to neutralize her if she went off the rails.

What kind of nasty shit was Diatheke involved in that they needed Celia on their team? There was a simple answer to that, and I didn’t like it.

Bern had already done a search on Diatheke and came up with nothing out of the ordinary. That left Benedict De Lacy. Mental Primes with that sort of power didn’t just pop out of nowhere.

Most of his furniture and artifacts dated between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, during the rise and peak of the Ottoman Empire, and came from that specific region, with the exception of some medieval European swords and French furniture. To acquire that collection took not only ridiculous wealth, but education. He had to have gone to college, probably an Ivy League university somewhere. I pictured his office in my mind. No, he didn’t have any diplomas framed on his wall.

I logged into Herald and searched for Benedict De Lacy. Nothing.

House De Lacy?

Herald spat out two search results, one for some aquakinetics in Canada and the other for some harmonizers in New York. The aquakinetics imported bottled spring water, and the harmonizers, whose specialty was creating living spaces that evoked a particular feeling, owned an interior design firm. I checked both out of due diligence. Neither listed any Benedicts and none of the family members looked anything like Benedict.

He was something though. I had spent enough time with Arrosa to recognize old wealth and breeding. Perhaps he was using an assumed name. If he was a bastard child of some high-ranking Prime, he would be nearly impossible to identify. Family resemblance would be my best bet.

I accessed the Herald’s Prime visual database and went to advanced search. I typed in male, white, fifty to eighty, Prime, mental branch of magic. It resulted in two thousand hits.

Great. Here’s hoping Benedict had a living father who looked like him.

I was on page seven when I smelled blood. The salty metallic stench cut across my senses like a razor. It came from my sword.

It made no sense. I’d wiped the gladius with an oiled rag before putting it back in its bracket on the wall. It hung there, five feet away from me, the blade shining slightly, reflecting the light of my lamp. I knew it was clean.

I had killed three people with it. I’d cut their throats. They’d died while my hands were on them. I could still feel the warmth of the second man’s face as I clamped my fingers over his mouth. I remembered the heat of his breath when he exhaled as I drove my sword into his flesh.

My hands shook. The scent of blood was everywhere now, saturating the air and settling on my skin in a sticky patina. I inhaled it with every breath.

I gagged and tasted acid in my mouth. Tears wet my eyes, blurring my vision. I wished I could open a window, but the office had none.

I swiped at my eyes and heard myself sob. The office blurred. I got up, locked the door, and lowered the shades on the glass wall facing the hallway. Then I collapsed in the chair, put my hands over my face, and cried.

I wished I could take it back. I wished I could rewind today or wake up and realize I’d had a nightmare. It felt like a sharp shard was inside me trying to cut its way out. It hurt so much.

The little black dog stood on her hind legs, put her front paws on my knee, and wagged her tail. I petted her shaggy head. The tears kept coming. I just couldn’t stop.

My phone rang. Bug. I answered and hit the speaker icon.

“Hey,” he said. “Your grandma and your sister made it to Keystone okay, got the Guardians, and are heading back. Arabella made a slight detour, so I thought I’d tell you so you don’t freak out.”

“That’s great,” I choked out. My voice sounded strained and sharp.

“I detect some hostility,” Bug said. “Is everything okay?”

“It’s great.”

“Catalina, where are you? What’s wrong?”

“I killed three people.” I was trying to keep it together, but saying it out loud proved too much. The sobs broke through.

“What people? Where?”

“At Keystone Mall. Actually, I killed ten people, three myself and seven through people I beguiled. Ten people, Bug. They can never go home. They had families . . .”

“It’s okay.” Bug’s voice turned soothing. “It’s okay. Why were you at the mall?”

“Things didn’t go well after Diatheke. I picked up a tail, took them to the mall, and killed them.”

“The crew from the Guardians?” Bug guessed.

“Yes.”

“Catalina, they followed you to the mall. You didn’t chase them down. They could’ve walked away at any point. Those fuckers made a deliberate choice to hunt you down instead. It was you or them. Listen to me. You didn’t do anything wrong. You killed ten bad people.”

The rational part of me knew he was right, but it didn’t make me feel any better. I took ten lives.