House Molpe. The only known siren House in existence, now extinct.
Linus was a Molpe.
He was a siren.
Linus was . . .
“Go ahead.” Linus lifted his glass. “Pace for a bit. Let the implications percolate. It means exactly what you think it does.”
Linus was my grandfather.
Oh my God.
My brain shoved all sorts of facts at me all at once. I circled the desk to the right, reversed, circled it to the left, and finally settled on marching back and forth in front of it, trying to chew through an avalanche of memories.
Back after the battle in the Pit, when I had sung so hard and spent so much magic trying to kill a godlike construct that I couldn’t even think, Linus had found me, and he’d coaxed me back to reality. I’d asked him about it later and he told me he’d done some research, and it indicated that when sirens overextended, some of them lost their minds. They could no longer speak, only sing songs of insanity and beguiling magic. If I hadn’t spoken, he had a mental Prime on standby to surge into my mind and try to guide me back.
He had “done some research.” He probably called whatever close relative he knew on that side.
Wow. Wooow.
Why would a Prime of Linus’ standing take such an in-depth interest in a new emerging House, especially one as odd as ours? Even before I became his Deputy, Linus was a constant presence in our lives. He found a way in through Nevada, and soon we were invited to his barbecues and fishing trips. He smoothed the way for Bernard to enter grad school. Leon practically lived in his workshop when Linus was working on new firearms. Problems we encountered sometimes vanished, as if swept away by some unseen force, a helpful watchful presence acting on our behalf behind the scenes.
He was there when we registered as a House. He was one of the two witnesses, with Connor being the other.
A memory came to me, Alessandro and I in Linus’ summer mansion, Linus grilling meat for his patented fajitas, Alessandro looking at me, looking at Linus, and then murmuring to himself in Italian, “I’m such an idiot.”
He knew! Siren magic leaked, and Alessandro’s antistasi powers would’ve tagged it as a threat.
“Sonovabitch!”
I wasn’t even sure which one of them I was cursing at.
I braked hard in front of the desk and leaned onto it, face-to-face with the recorded Linus.
“Fuck you.” It felt good to say it out loud.
“You’re probably cursing and it’s fair. But if you’re watching this, the situation is urgent, so let’s put that part aside and move forward. I have many vital things to tell you.”
I landed back into the chair. Yes. I couldn’t wait to hear this. I knew all about House Duncan. It was an old Scottish House with a persistent line of hephaestus Primes. Duncans made weapons of all types and sizes. One time when Linus and I were chased and had to abandon our vehicle and everything inside it, he made a detour to a recycling center and built a gun out of scrap metal and magic. It fired the little tabs you broke off aluminum cans—there was a container of them there—and he’d killed three people with it.
Linus was an orphan. Both his father and his mother had died in a tragic car accident when he was a toddler. That was the official record.
“Angus Duncan, my grandfather, was a stubborn man, set in his ways and convinced he was always right.”
You don’t say. Shocking.
“He and my mother butted heads. When she was nineteen, they had a row and she left for a holiday in Greece. She met my father, who was twenty-six, handsome, and charming. They had a summer romance, and she became pregnant with me. His family pushed for marriage. My grandfather told her to come home. They had another one of their fights, over the phone this time, and the next week my mother married my father. House Duncan didn’t attend the wedding.”
Marrying someone because you were pissed off at your parent sounded like a recipe for disaster.
“The bloom was off that rose quickly. My parents were very different people. My mother had goals. She wanted to be someone, to challenge herself, and my father was content to float within the bubble his family had built to safeguard him. Still, two years after I was born, my mother was pregnant again, with a girl. My father’s relatives demanded she abort the child.”
What?
Linus’ expression turned harsh. “During the First World War the region was invaded by the Russian Imperium. Katina Molpe, my father’s oldest aunt, rowed her boat to one of those tiny rocky islands the Aegean is famous for, little more than a boulder sticking out of the water, and then she sang to the invading army. An entire battalion drowned trying to reach her, until enough of them managed to swim across the stormy water. You can guess what happened next.”