the best of times. I didn’t for a moment believe I could find Konstantin during the day. And by nightfall, he’d be long gone, perhaps out of my reach.
The grimness on Anderson’s face told me he’d reached the same conclusion, but he wasn’t ready to admit it yet.
“Keep trying,” he urged me as he turned onto the street that would take us by the front gates of Alexis’s home. I would have thought one of the other Olympians would have appropriated it after Alexis’s “disappearance,” but perhaps Konstantin had wanted to keep it for himself.
I shook my head. “It’s too late.” I rubbed at my tired eyes, wishing there were some better way for me to control my power. Maybe it would help if I took up meditation. Maybe that would make it easier to relax in tense situations like this one.
“Don’t you dare give up on me now, Nikki,” Anderson warned in a low growl.
If he thought that was going to make it easier for me to relax into my powers, he was sorely mistaken. But I wasn’t in the mood to argue with him, so I closed my eyes. My fingers were tapping away again, trying to vent the nervous energy that still pulsed through my veins. My mind might have decided the search was fruitless, but my body hadn’t caught up, still buzzing on the adrenaline of the hunt.
I made only a halfhearted effort to relax myself, knowing there was no way we were going to have time to catch up to Konstantin. Mostly, I was just pretending to try so Anderson wouldn’t nag me. My mind was still going a thousand miles an hour, and my token effort to relax hadn’t had the slightest effect, when my eyes popped open for a third time, this time with no external prompting whatsoever.
A shiver of dread trailed down my spine as I looked out my window and saw we were passing directly in front of the gates to Alexis’s mansion. Once upon a time, I would have considered the fact that my eyes had opened at that very moment to be nothing more than a coincidence. Now, however, I felt sure it meant only one thing.
“Konstantin is still in the house.”
Anderson’s hands jerked on the steering wheel, and for a moment I feared he was going to take us right into a ditch. He handled the car expertly, smoothly turning into the skid until he regained control and came to an idling stop in the middle of the road.
“He can’t be,” he protested. “He’s arrogant, but not stupid. He had to have arranged for his pet Descendant to contact him when Cyrus was dead, and he had to know what it meant when the Descendant didn’t do it.”
“Maybe he didn’t expect Cyrus to sic us on him so quickly,” I said doubtfully. Of course, it didn’t matter exactly what Konstantin had been expecting. Whether he thought we’d be after him in an hour or a day, he wouldn’t be hanging out at his last known location to make it easy for us. “Or maybe Cyrus forced the Descendant to call Konstantin and tell him he succeeded.”
“Yes, and he failed to mention that to you when you talked to him. And Konstantin has nothing better to do after assassinating his son than to lounge around in Alexis’s house.”
Okay, that theory didn’t make a whole lot of sense, either. But I really hated the third theory that came into my mind.
There was no parking on the street in this neighborhood, and a snowplow had piled dirty brown snow and ice along the curbs, but that didn’t stop Anderson from pulling off the road. The car shimmied and groaned a protest as he forced it over the mounded, icy snow. I clutched the grab bar with one hand and braced against the center console with the other. There was an ominous bang from the undercarriage, and Anderson’s side of the car lurched upward while mine lurched downward. I barely kept my head from smacking against the window.
Anderson brought the car to a stop—or maybe the car took the decision out of his hands—and put it in park. We were still at a precarious angle, and I wondered if the tires on his side were even touching anything. Of course, if being hung up on the side of the road was the worst thing that was going to happen, I’d be ecstatic.
“The only reason I can think of for Konstantin to still