Bern, Runa, and Ragnar sat at the table in the conference room with two laptops, a tablet, and notebooks with scribbled notes. In the corner Mom rested in her favorite chair, scrolling through her tablet. The four of them raised their heads and looked at me.
“Where is everybody?”
“Leon is passed out in his room, because he hasn’t slept for two days,” Bern said. “Grandma Frida is in the motor pool still working on the Guardians.”
“Where is Arabella?”
“She said she had an errand,” Mom said.
I pulled out my phone and texted Arabella. Where are you?
No answer.
I dialed her number. It went to voice mail. Would it kill her to charge her phone? Half of the time her phone was dead and the rest it was dying, because she was always on it. Argh.
“Something bad happened,” Runa guessed.
“Diatheke is an assassin firm. They ordered the hit on your mother.”
Mom sat up straight. “How sure are you?”
“Pretty damn sure. We’re putting them at risk of exposure.”
Ragnar tilted his head as if he was considering a thorny logical problem. When he finally recovered from the magic drain and his emotions returned, there would be hell to pay. “We should notify the authorities.”
Runa’s face went white again. “We can’t.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because they have your sister,” Bern said. “They’ll kill her.”
Runa clenched her hands together. “Not if I get them first.”
“You would never get to her in time,” Mom said.
“We don’t know where they’re holding her,” I told her. “Diatheke’s building downtown is a fortress. Everything requires a keycard. Once you’re in the lobby, they can drop the grate over the front door and shoot you remotely. You won’t get the chance to kill anyone or to ask any questions.”
“So we just sit here. Again.”
“No,” Mom said. “We prepare.”
“They’ll hit us, sooner rather than later,” Bern told her. “If we can, we need to take some of them alive, so we can bargain. If we get ahold of someone valuable enough, we can trade them to Diatheke for your sister.”
Runa stood up. “I need some air.” She walked out of the room.
“Stay close to the warehouse,” Mom called.
“I’ll keep an eye on her.” Bern got up and followed her out.
I looked at Mom. Bern had voluntarily left the warehouse. Again. Since graduating from college, Bern did his best to impersonate a mushroom: he parked himself in the Hut of Evil with his servers and basked in the glow of the monitors, escaping only to use the bathroom and consume food. Going outside wasn’t in his repertoire.
Mom shrugged.
Ragnar got up. “I’m going to the kitchen to get snacks. Please don’t worry. I won’t go outside, and I’ll try very hard to not kill anyone.”
He left. It was just me and Mom.
“It won’t work,” I told her. “They’ll never trade Halle. She’s a potential witness.”
“I know,” she said. “We have to bleed them. We have to make it so expensive that they’ll drop it. They’re a business.”
“We’re gambling with her life.” Anxiety churned inside me.
“It’s not about Halle now,” Mom said. “It’s about keeping that wild wrecking ball and her brother alive.”
My stomach dropped. “I’m going to try, Mom. Halle’s still alive. There is still a chance.”
“Then you go and try. Heart and his people will be here tonight. That should give you some freedom of movement.” Mom sighed. “I miss doing small, quiet jobs. Insurance fraud. Cheating spouses.”
“I miss them too,” I told her. “But we are who we are. There’s no going back.”
Alessandro had taken the top floor in the three-story brick building that used to be a fire station years ago. Rogan purchased it but never did anything with it, and eventually we bought it from him.
I had walked through this building before when we purchased it. The first floor, with an unusually high ceiling, served as the garage for the fire trucks. The second, accessible by an iron staircase, housed the offices, and the third contained the rec room, sleeping quarters, and a big kitchen once capable of serving food to an entire fire team.
I climbed the iron stairs, with my hip screaming at me the entire way. I had left Shadow in the warehouse. She seemed susceptible to his bribes, and I had no idea what sort of bizarre thing he would try to feed her this time.
The original plan was to turn the fire station into barracks, but the building proved to be too old. Fixing it up would be more expensive than building a brand-new structure. Rogan let it go for next to nothing. At some point, Leon, obsessed with the fire pole, had tried to convince Bern to move there with him and turn it into a “hip bro cave.” That plan died when they realized rewiring the place was out of their budget.
The stairs brought me to a wide-open door. I stepped through and ended up in the rec room, flooded with daylight from huge windows. Someone had swept the concrete floor. On the right a large pack of bottled water waited on the counter of a kitchen right out of the seventies, complete with wooden paneling. Straight ahead, in the corner, an inflatable mattress rested on the floor. Between me and the mattress stood two plastic fold-out tables filled with weapons and equipment. A high-tech-looking laptop, parts of a drone, six, no, nine guns, including a BFR, four knives, two daggers, a machete, a garrote, and a compound bow. The assassin’s tool kit.
The assassin himself was nowhere to be seen. I walked to the tables. Whatever his faults were, Alessandro had excellent taste in blades. Everything was functional, sharp, and sturdy. And generic. No custom-made pieces, no family heirlooms. Nothing irreplaceable or that could be traced.
I reached for the Ka-Bar and tested the balance. Seven-inch straight blade angled at the tip. Heavy.
I turned to get better light. Alessandro sat on the kitchen counter, one leg bent, the other hanging free. I almost threw the Ka-Bar.
“Adorable,” Alessandro said. “Do that little jump again.”
I put the Ka-Bar down before the temptation got the better of me. “I brought you the recording.” I held up the thumb drive.
He jumped off the counter and stalked toward me.
I circled the tables, looking at his collection and keeping the furniture between us. “You seem to know a lot about Benedict.”
“Mhm.”
“What is he?”
“You were with him. What do you think he is? What did you feel?”
“Revulsion and fear. His magic manifested as dark phantom serpents. He opened himself, and a nest of ghost snakes slithered out wanting to bite me.”
“That’s why he calls himself the Adder,” he said.
“The Adder? Really?”
“It goes with the territory. Nobody wants to hire a Mr. De Lacy or Madame Laurent. They want to hire the Adder or Mort Noire.”
“Please tell me there isn’t an assassin calling herself the Black Death?”
“More than one.”
It seemed so childish except people were dying. “So, what’s your nickname? Instagram Famous? Playboy Killer?”