“It took me a second to find him,” Leon said. “The car was smoking, and the fumes made it difficult to see and breathe, and then the seaweed kind of contracted, and there was a crunchy noise, so it was hard to hear.”
Arabella put her head on the table, face down.
“Then he tried to shoot that shit at me, and I saw the direction it was coming from, and the rest is history.” Leon grinned.
“What happened to the FBI agents breathing in toxic fumes while trapped in a car that was being crushed?” Alessandro asked.
“I pulled them out. Agent Garcia was mostly okay. Wahl wasn’t breathing, so I did CPR until the FBI guys ran out of the building and helped.”
“That’s my boy!” Grandma Frida said.
I stared at him.
“What?” He raised his arms. “He was breathing fine when I left. They put one of those masks on his face and he kept taking it off to curse. All is well that ended well. And now I’ve got cool scars. Chicks dig scars.”
“Such a fascinating family,” Konstantin said.
He didn’t know the half of it.
“Okay,” I said. “We all know what we’re doing. Arabella, you are guarding, I’m going to deal with Arkan’s accounts, Alessandro and Konstantin will go after the mole.”
“What about us?” Ragnar asked.
“You recuperate. We don’t know when we will get attacked again.”
“Before we adjourn,” Cornelius said. “Has anyone seen the spider?”
“There is a spider?” Konstantin asked.
Arabella opened her eyes wide. “Yes, very large, very venomous.”
Bern tapped his laptop. The security feed from the office hallway ignited on the screen on the wall. On it, Jadwiga leisurely made her way across the carpet and scurried into Arabella’s office. The timestamp said 03:41 a.m.
“Well, she’s still alive,” Cornelius said.
“She’s in there.” Matilda pointed at the side wall. “I will try to coax her out when it’s quiet.”
“I want to stress that an attack can come at any time,” I said. “He will throw everything he can at us. Nevada and Connor are dealing with Matthew Berry and his PAC mercenaries. The government is pretending that this problem doesn’t exist. The National Assembly is trying to manage the death of its Speaker. We are on our own.”
Everyone nodded. Nobody seemed alarmed or surprised. They just accepted it. Somewhere along the line in the last three or four years, House Baylor had become a combat House. If Arkan thought his blitz would break us, he was in for a lot of disappointment.
“You should make some of those little sandwiches with Hawaiian rolls and leftover pork tenderloin,” Grandma Frida told me. “So your mother won’t starve in her crow’s nest.”
The conference room emptied.
Leon paused by Alessandro on his way out. “How did you know about Buller being vulnerable to knives?”
“Watched a recording of him fighting a praelia once,” Alessandro said.
Mages with the praelia talent summoned weapons and amplified them with their magic. They were usually called warrior mages and they were hell in a fight at close range.
“The praelia had a glowing katana,” Alessandro said. “It did nothing. Toward the end of the fight, he ran out of juice and his sword disappeared. Buller grabbed him by the throat, and the mage pulled out a knife and tried to force it through the armor. He was pushing it in and it looked like it hit home, because Buller went berserk and stomped the guy to death.”
“Nice find,” Leon said and left.
It was just Arabella, Alessandro, and me.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
“How much time did I have left when you revived me?” she asked.
“Twelve minutes,” I told her. “You were the first one Halle detoxified.”
Arabella gave me a brooding look.
“I’m sorry,” I told her.
“I’m tired of bad shit happening.”
“Me too.”
She sighed and pushed to her feet. “I’m going to go . . . do things.”
She left the room and shut the door behind her. Alessandro and I looked at each other.
“Explain the Cousin Sasha thing to me, please. How are you involved with the Imperium?”
He sighed. “How much do you remember about the change of the Russian dynasty?”
“Not that much. In 1916, the power balance in the First World War shifted in favor of Russia. The German Empire suffered heavy casualties and decided to assassinate Czar Nicholas II. I think they bombed his family’s motorcade during Easter. Only Anastasia and Alexei survived because they were not in the two front cars.”