but when I asked him if he could nullify the metamorphosis mage, he said, ‘Not in her current form.’ Which means he could have nullified her prior to transformation. Metamorphosis is arcane, not mental. If you see him, do not engage him alone. He’ll kill you. I mean it, Leon. Don’t get into a pissing match with him alone. Take it as an order.”
He smiled at me.
“Leon!”
He raised his hands. “Okay, okay. So did you figure out what happened to the two million?”
He changed the subject way too fast. He would try to take on Alessandro the moment he saw him and then die trying to outshoot him. Leon was lethal, but Alessandro was versatile, more experienced, and stone cold.
They were waiting for an answer.
“They’re claiming Ms. Etterson withdrew the two million dollars in cash.”
“In cash?” Bern asked.
I sighed. “Yes. We need to look further into Diatheke. It’s not what it seems.”
I slipped out of the kitchen and headed to my office. The little dog trailed me. I really had to give her a name. I was just about to duck into my office when I heard my mother’s voice coming from the conference room through the half-open door.
“. . . a strike team,” my mother was saying. “She had to kill some of them, I’m almost sure of it. Then she fought a metamorphosis mage.”
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