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Nevada shifted forward slightly, reached for her phone, and messed with it.
My phone chimed.
Arthur stirred. The remote on the coffee table rose into the air. Nevada plucked it, put it back, and stroked my nephew’s hair, soothing him back into sleep.
“He still manipulates objects in his sleep?”
“Yes. He stopped throwing them, for which I’m grateful. Look at your phone.”
I checked the text. She’d sent me an image, a photograph of a young dark-haired soldier grinning, a strange firearm in his hands . . .
“Linus!”
Nevada nodded.
The resemblance was unmistakable. Dad looked like Linus 2.0, the blond edition. A little shorter, a little more delicate in the face, but the same eyes, the same nose, the same grin.
“I came across it two years ago,” Nevada said. “Linus and Connor are two of the main donors for a veterans’ charity. The charity had a project they wanted to discuss in person, so Connor and I went, and while there, they showed us a wall of pictures from donors who had been in the service. I was looking at it and here was Dad with dark hair. It was such a weird moment.”
I stared at the image on my phone. So it was true. Part of me had doubted it and low-key hoped that Nevada would tell me it was ridiculous.
“Why didn’t Linus tell us?”
“I don’t know. He must have his reasons. Dad’s birth was complicated.”
Victoria Tremaine couldn’t carry a child to term, but she desperately wanted one. She had to rely on artificial insemination and a surrogate. According to her, she paid a Prime to serve as the father, but was unable to find a Prime willing to serve as a surrogate, so she committed a monstrous crime. She had the embryo implanted into a comatose Belgian woman, the original Beast of Cologne who had lost her mind during her last metamorphosis.
Our father carried the biomarkers for four sets of magic: the truthseeker from his mother, the siren and hephaestus talents from his father, and the Beast of Cologne metamorphosis from the surrogate in whose womb he grew. Feto-maternal microchimerism was the reason for Arabella’s powers.
Complicated didn’t even begin to describe it.
“There is another aspect to all of this.” Nevada reached over behind the tablet and held an object in front of the screen. Part of it was a wooden contraption that looked familiar.
“Is that a yarn swift?”
“Yes. The core of it is.”
The yarn swift was a modified wooden umbrella that held the skeins of yarn so they could be wound into balls. But this one had coils of thread, and some weird wire bent into hooks, and more weird rainbow thread stretched in loops over the hooks.
“Arthur made it,” Nevada said.
“What?”
“We were busy discussing something, and he was in his swing right next to us. He stole his grandmother’s yarn swift and her craft box while we were talking, and then Connor noticed him building this thing in midair.”
Well, it was certainly colorful.
“He’s built things before. Small things that made no sense.”
She didn’t sound right.
“And this thing makes sense?”
“It functions,” my sister said.
“In what way?”
Nevada raised the mutilated yarn swift straight up and squeezed a part of it. The band of blue thread snapped into the air. The yarn swift turned, firing the thread loops at an alarming speed.
It wasn’t thread. Oh. Oh!
“Are you telling me Arthur built a rubber band machine gun out of the yarn swift and some thread?”
“And some pushpins.”
Linus had to physically assemble the weapons. Yes, his magic made components snap together but only in a very narrow range. If he was truly a hephaestus mage, Arthur would be able to levitate parts to him . . . Oh my God.
“Are you okay?” She didn’t look okay.
Nevada pondered the rubber band gun. “No. It’s the pushpins that did it. They are sharp. He isn’t supposed to have them. He bent them into little hooks, see?”
“At least he didn’t use them as ammo.” I probably shouldn’t have said that.
“My son can barely speak, but he built a working firearm with tensile release and moving parts. We’ve got the telekinetic part down. We know what milestones to look for. We know the danger signs. We don’t know anything about hephaestus magic. Linus needs to wake the hell up. Soon. For his sake and ours. And when he does, you can’t kill him, Catalina.”
She looked really frightening for a second. I pulled back from the screen on pure instinct. “Why would I want to kill him? Are you hiding things from me?”
“Are you hiding things from Arabella?”
Touché.
“Sometimes older sisters have to keep things to themselves for the greater good. Promise me that you won’t kill Linus. I need him to help my son.”
“I promise not to kill Linus when he wakes up.”
Nevada nodded, satisfied, and put the rubber band gun down.
We looked at each other.
