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Linus would just love this.
I pulled out my phone and dialed his number. One beep, two, three . . .
At the other end of the lawn Leon jogged across the road, Zeus in tow.
The phone kept ringing. Officially Linus Duncan was retired. In reality, he still served the state of Texas in a new, more frightening capacity, and I was his Deputy. He always answered my calls.
Beep. Another.
Linus’ voice came on the line. “Yes?”
“I was attacked by magic monsters in Eleanor Tinsley Park. They were controlled by a biomechanical device powered with magic.”
Leon ran up and halted next to me.
“Do you require assistance?” Linus asked.
“Not anymore.”
“Show me.”
I activated FaceTime, switched the camera, and panned the phone, capturing the device, the corpses, and the fleeing creatures. On the screen, Linus stared into the phone. In his sixties, still fit, with thick salt-and-pepper hair, he always had the Texas tan. His features were handsome and bold, a square jaw framed by a short beard, prominent nose, thick dark eyebrows, and dark eyes that looked either hazel or brown, depending on the light. He smiled easily, and when he paid attention to you, you felt special. If you asked ten people who just met him to describe him, they would all say one word—charming.
The man looking back at me from the phone was the real Linus Duncan, a Prime, former Speaker of the Texas Assembly, focused, sharp, his eyes merciless. He looked like an old tiger who spotted an intruder in his domain and was sharpening his claws for the kill. A dry staccato came through the phone, a rhythmic thud-thud-thud, followed by a mechanical whine. Linus’ turrets. He was under attack.
Who in the world would assault Linus Duncan in his home? He was a Hephaestus mage. He made lethal firearms out of discarded paperclips and duct tape and his house packed enough firepower to wipe out an elite battalion in minutes.
They attacked me and Linus simultaneously. The thought burned a trail through my mind like a comet. Was someone targeting the Office of the Warden?
“Disengage,” Linus said. “Go straight to MII and take over the Morton case, use the badge. Repeat.”
“Go straight to MII, show the badge, take over the Morton case.”
Usually Linus brought me in after jurisdiction had been established. In the last six months, I’d had to use my badge exactly once, to take over an FBI investigation. To say they had been unhappy about it would be a gross understatement.
“I’ll send the files.” Linus hung up.
“That was turret fire,” Leon said.
“It sure was.”
My cousin grinned, no doubt anticipating another fight. “What are we doing?”
“You’re driving me to MII.”
“I’ll follow.” Cornelius sprinted to the parking lot, Zeus on his heels, bounding like an overly enthusiastic kitten.
I grabbed the device. The metal rings were slick with mud and slime. I walked to Rhino, threw the device into the bin in the back, and jumped into the passenger seat.
In the distance, police sirens wailed, getting closer.
Leon peeled out onto the street. In the rearview mirror, Cornelius’ BMW glided out of the parking lot. We’d likely lose him before long. Cornelius’ top driving speed usually stayed four miles over the posted limit. MII was roughly thirty minutes away but knowing Leon we would get there much faster if the traffic let us.
“Call Bern.”
My cousin answered on the second ring, his voice coming from Rhino’s speakers as the phone synced with the car’s control panel.
“I was just attacked by some magical monsters. So was Linus.”
“Was he with you?”
“No. He was at his mansion. Lock us down, please.”
“Done. Do you need help?”
“No. Is everything okay there?”
“Everything is fine.”
“I’m fine too, Bern!” Leon yelled.
“That’s debatable,” his older brother said.
“I’ll call you in a bit,” I told him and hung up.
My phone chimed, announcing a new email. I clicked my inbox. A message from Linus with a video file attached. The file was huge. Linus didn’t optimize the video. I tapped it to download. This would take a while.
“Let me get this straight. Linus is attacked. You don’t ask him if he needs help. You just drop everything and go to MII to take over some case you never heard about before.” Leon shook his head.
“Yes. If Linus required my help, he would tell me.” The Morton case was likely connected to the attacks somehow.
“One day you’ll have to tell me what you do for Linus Duncan,” Leon said.
“But then I’d have to kill you, and, as you often point out, you’re my favorite cousin.”
Leon snorted.
Most of my family had no problem with secrecy. Grandma Frida and Mom both served in the military, Bern naturally kept things to himself, and Nevada was a truthseeker. She could fill her and Rogan’s mansion with other people’s secrets and kept them to herself. But Leon and Arabella thrived on gossip. They knew I was doing something confidential for Linus Duncan, but they had no idea what exactly, and it was driving them both up the wall.
I dialed Augustine’s direct number. Voice mail. Getting to see the head of MII on short notice could prove to be a problem. He was busy. But like Leon and Arabella, he loved to collect information—the more exclusive, the better. I had to bait my hook and dangle it in front of him just out of reach.
“This is Catalina Baylor. I have critical information regarding the Morton case. I must see you in person. I’ll be at your office in twenty minutes.”
I hung up.
“Who is Morton?” Leon asked, taking a corner too fast.
“Most likely Lander Morton. A Prime geokinetic, very old, very rich, one of the prominent developers in the state.”
“How do you know that?”
I knew that because I did my homework. Linus Duncan had had a long and eventful career and he made no effort to conceal the close relationship between our two Houses. I wasn’t sure if we would inherit his friends, but we would definitely inherit his enemies, which was why I had built a biographical database around Linus complete with charts profiling his relationships with various Houses.
“After Linus retired from the Army, he went into politics. Lander Morton used to be Linus’ political rival. The first bill Linus tried to bring to the floor of the Assembly involved zoning restrictions for various Houses. Lander Morton opposed it. A lot of people owed him favors, and he called them in to kill the bill. It got ugly. Morton gave an interview to Houston Chronicle and told them that he would trust Linus with governance as soon as he took ‘his mama’s titty out of his mouth.’”
Leon choked on air. “How old was Linus, exactly?”
“Forty-two.”
“And he let that slide?”
“He got Morton back three years later. They both tried to buy the same building, and Linus won. As soon as the ink dried on the closing papers, Linus bought earthquake insurance.”
And he got it dirt cheap too. The last time a natural earthquake occurred around Houston was in 1910, near Hempstead. It was so weak, the city didn’t even feel it.
“Two months after Linus moved his company in, a very small yet surprisingly powerful earthquake destroyed the building. Nobody died. The Assembly and the insurance company investigated, and Morton was slapped with a huge fine and barred from voting in the Assembly for three years. What he really lost was political power.”
Leon frowned. “Is this Linus settling an old score?”
“I doubt it.”
While it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility, it was highly unlikely. Linus dedicated himself to service, first military, then civil. Using his official position in a petty political squabble went against everything I knew about him.
The video file finally downloaded. I opened it.
Someone was flying a drone above a swamp. Bright algae islands, emerald green, electric blue, and neon orange floated on the surface. Here and there an abandoned husk of a building thrust through the bog, wrapped in vines and sheathed in moss. Lilies bloomed on the dark water, but rather than the usual white or pink, they were bloodred, so vivid, they almost glowed. Strange trees spread their branches over the mire, their limbs contorted and knotted.
Where was this? It looked like some alien world.
The drone ducked under a tree tinseled with long strands of bizarre moss and emerged into a clearing. Four rickety wooden bridges met at a small island supporting the remnants of what once must have been an office building. Someone had jury-rigged power lines and several long cables converged at a small power pole on top of the structure. One of them supported a body.
It hung above the water, its neck caught in a loop of the cable stretching from the nearby building. The drone turned, getting a better view of the corpse. A man in his late thirties, white, dark haired, wearing pants from a business suit, a torn blue dress shirt, and black dress shoes.
The drone’s camera dipped down, closed in, then panned up, capturing the body from bottom to the top.
No, he wasn’t wearing shoes. His feet had been burned to charred blackness. Ragged gaps marked his trousers over the knees, their edges stained with blood. A melon-sized chunk of his right side was missing, the wound red and jagged, dripping blood from where it had pooled in the body cavity. Prickly heat stabbed at my spine. He’d suffered before he died.
