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“What were you doing out on Wilcrest?” Mom asked.
“I wanted oyster nachos from Cajun Kitchen.”
Nevada’s eyes glazed over for a second. “Oh, that does sound good.”
“I’ll get you some next time,” Arabella said.
Leon dropped his fork on the table and shook his hands. “What happened with the accident?”
“Nothing happened. He got out of the car. I got out too. I was in a really good mood because I’d curled my hair and had a sundress on.”
And that was my younger sister in a nutshell. Curling her hair and putting on a sundress meant the world was hers.
“He came out, looked at his grille, and then he grabbed his hair and started screaming that it was an aftermarket grille. He accused me of driving my mom’s car, not knowing how to drive, called me the C-word. And his friends in the car laughed and pointed at me.”
“So he just screamed at you?” Nevada leaned forward, her expression focused.
“Pretty much.”
“And what did you do?” Nevada asked.
Arabella sighed. “You want to know what I did? Nothing. I stood there like a moron and let him scream at me. I don’t even know why I did that. I’m not a pushover.”
Three years ago, Arabella would have exploded. She would have changed shape right there in front of the Cajun Kitchen, stomped on that Tahoe, and rode it like a skateboard up and down the street. We had dodged a giant bullet.
“What did the driver look like?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I didn’t look at him that well. Blond, well-built, jock type, probably twenty-five, twenty-eight, between one hundred and sixty and one hundred and eighty pounds, about five foot ten, clean shaven, black T-shirt with a grey outline of Texas on it, khaki cargo shorts, carrot-red Nikes with white laces, a fake Rolex. And not a good fake Rolex either. He was driving a black Chevy Tahoe, maybe 2012 or so, with a small dent in the bumper on the driver’s side. There were three other people in the car.”
“Did you take a pic?” I asked.
“No,” Arabella squeezed out through clenched teeth. “Like I said, I stood there and let him yell at me. He didn’t even give me his insurance. Since he kept screaming about his grille, I told him he could sell the knock-off Rolex he was wearing to pay for a new one. He started cussing, and I said that we needed to get the cops involved. Then he just drove off. It was a random thing. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. We were talking about Nevada. When is Connor coming home?”
Really? That was a low blow.
A week ago, Connor got word that one of the soldiers he served with got himself entangled in a kidnapping in Russia. He was part of the rescue team, which hadn’t come back to base. Alan was one of the sixteen soldiers who made it out of the Belize jungle with Connor. My brother-in-law would do anything for them, but Nevada could be due any day, so he’d hesitated. And my pregnant sister practically pushed him into the plane to the Russian Imperium to go and rescue the rescue team. We hadn’t heard anything since.
“Arabella,” Mom said in her sergeant voice.
Arabella looked at her plate.
“You’ll know when I know,” Nevada said. “He’ll handle it and come home.”
“Heart called,” Mom said, keeping her voice casual.
Suddenly everybody decided that their food was fascinating, me included. The tacos were to die for.
Heart was Rogan’s second-in-command, in charge of the military operations conducted by Rogan’s mercenaries. Six months ago, Mom had called him for help. We couldn’t afford him, but Heart dropped everything and came to protect us anyway. We paid for his protection—he’d quoted us a ridiculously low rate—but after his employment ended, he’d stuck around, reviving Rogan’s old HQ across the street. He and his soldiers returned to it between jobs, which conveniently offered us additional security. Our own security chief, Patricia Taft, was now fully up to speed, leading a crew of new, handpicked guards, but having Heart near made everyone feel better.
Heart and Mom were meticulously polite with each other in public, but when Heart was in residence, there was always some reason for him to come over or for Mom to go over there. Something was happening between them, but it was fragile and tenuous and all of us did our best to ignore it, afraid that if we looked too hard at it, it would disappear.
“Oh?” I asked. “How is he doing?”
“He’s fine. He said to say hello.”
To the side, out of Mom’s peripheral vision, Arabella wagged her eyebrows.
I loaded another taco onto my plate. I was starving.
“So, how’s Linus?” Grandma Frida asked.
Subtlety was Grandma Frida’s middle name.
“Good.”
“Is that the family we are now?” Leon asked dramatically. “The family where nobody talks about their things? Where everything is just ‘good’ and ‘fine’?”
Bern reached over and tapped the back of Leon’s head. “She isn’t going to tell you about Linus. Stop already.”
“How’s the fire tank coming along?” I asked.
Grandma Frida grunted.
One of the local Houses had bought a custom firefighting tank from the Russian Imperium. Vodoley 03 was a marvel of Russian engineering. It carried about 25,000 liters of various liquids and could spray them in different patterns. It could also take a hit from a high-explosive 155 mm artillery shell and self-deploy two hundred and fifty km on a single tank of gas, but something had gone bonkers with its custom-built filtering system. Grandma Frida had been trying to coax it back to life for the last three days with no success.
“That good, huh?” Mom said.
Grandma Frida bristled. “Eat your food, Penelope.”
“We have a new case,” I said.
I told them about Felix’s murder, omitting anything that had to do with Wardens or the serum.
Mom bit her lower lip. “There is a lot of money involved. This makes me nervous.”
“That’s why we’ll stay on lockdown,” I said.
Arabella groaned. I ignored her.
“Let’s divide and conquer. I have four suspects. Everybody gets one.” I pointed at Arabella, Leon, and Bern in turn. “You get a Prime, you get a Prime, everybody gets a Prime, and we all run an in-depth background check. Is that agreeable to everyone?”
“Yes,” Bern told me.
Leon nodded.
Arabella rolled her eyes. “Work, work, work . . .”
I tapped my phone, sending out the mass email I had written on the drive home. “Pick whoever you want except Tatyana Pierce. Cornelius wants that one.”
Nevada frowned. “I bet he does.”
Arabella looked at her phone, jumped up, and ran out of the room.
Grandma Frida blinked. “Like what is even going on with that child?”
My sister sprinted back into the kitchen, carrying a tablet. Her eyes were the size of saucers. “Hua Ling!”
“What?” Mom asked.
“He’s the royal physician! The assassin! Hua Ling!”
No way.
Leon pivoted to her, his face concerned. “Is it drugs? You can tell me.”
“It’s not drugs,” I told him.
“It’s The Legend of Han Min,” Grandma Frida said.
Mom gave her an odd look.
“What?” Grandma Frida asked her. “I watched a few episodes with them. There is action and the actors are very pretty. You should see the costumes.”
“It’s a Chinese xianxia drama,” I explained. “It’s high fantasy, set in a mystical land, a lot of martial arts and Chinese mythology. Han Min is a martial arts heroine who ends up in the imperial palace and Hua Ling is a mystical alchemist who can cure any illness but is secretly an assassin trying to murder the emperor.”
“That explains everything,” Leon said.
Arabella marched over and stuck a tablet under his nose. “This is Hua Ling.”
On the tablet a startlingly beautiful man with a waterfall of dark hair sailed through the air swinging a sword.
She flicked her fingers across the tablet. “This is Stephen Jiang.”
A picture from Augustine’s files showed Stephen in a suit.
“See? Same person.”
It did kind of look like Stephen.
Leon flicked his finger back and forth, switching between the pictures, once, twice. Bern took the tablet away from him, set the portraits side by side, and handed it back.
Arabella tapped the tablet. “It’s him. It’s Cheng Feng.”
“I thought you said his name is Hua Ling,” Nevada said.
“The character’s name is Hua Ling. The actor’s name is Cheng Feng!” Arabella waved her arms in exasperation. “How are you not understanding this?”
“Do you understand this?” Nevada asked me.
“I do but I watch the show.”
“I’m telling you.” Arabella pounded her fist on the table for emphasis. “It’s the same guy!”
“Even if he is, how is it relevant?” Leon asked.
“Because of this.” Arabella tapped her tablet.
Hua Ling appeared on the screen, dressed in black and wearing a matching hooded cowl and a mask across the lower part of his face. He dashed across the double-eave hip roof through the rain, leaped impossibly high, and flung raindrops at the soldiers in ancient Chinese armor below. The raindrops turned into blades and sliced through the soldiers like razor-sharp needles.
