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“Well, Oleg was my father in the smallest sense of the word,” I said dryly.

He’d put my mother under a magic spell and raped her.

Then he’d left town with his little magic show, and he hadn’t come back.

Six years later, Oleg had eloped with Felicia’s mother, who was not anything like my mom.

Valentina Dominguez was the oldest daughter in a very powerful family of witches in Ciudad Juárez.

That kind of heritage and reputation were sure to attract a lot of attention. My sister already had a scary reputation. Felicia was fresh, pretty, smart, and lethal.

Last year Felicia had killed all the Dominguezes (including her grandfather, Francisco) with one exception: Isabella, the aunt who’d actually helped Felicia when she was living in Ciudad Juárez.

(In Felicia’s defense, her family had tried to abduct her and give her as a bride to the scion of the Ruiz clan, also based in Mexico.) My sister was a death grigori.

She could kill, and she could restore life…

sometimes. Mastery over death could give you mastery over life, under some circumstances. Felicia’s power was strong and rare.

To my mind, anyone considering marrying Felicia was a moth to her flame. But the attraction of her huge magical talent outweighed her lethal reputation… in some circles.

As early as months before, while Felicia had been staying with me in my cabin in Texoma, interested suitors had begun to drop in—sometimes literally.

They took advantage of their window of opportunity.

Once my sister returned to the Rasputin School, such attempts were out of the question.

A drop-in visitor at the Rasputin School, run by the magically gifted and for the magically gifted, would be dead on arrival.

Felicia had been both delighted and angry at the various attempts to get her attention, one of which had consisted of abduction. Others had been pleasant and flattering. She’d been talking about that the day before, at our planning session. She’d sounded (I had to admit) full of herself.

Felix had snapped, “My girl, you are a powerhouse. But don’t let it go to your head! Nothing’s more off-putting than conceit.”

He should know.

Felix had continued, “There are girls as powerful as you, girls as pretty, girls with money, girls with long and honorable pedigrees. What you have is people who are interested in your power, but afraid of it, too. People who are afraid will back off at the merest sign of trouble.”

Felicia had looked flattened after this truth-telling. That was better than letting it all go to her head.

Her deflation hadn’t lasted long enough.

When Eli and I had come down for breakfast this morning, Felicia had been all lit up like a candle. She’d been chattering at Veronika, Eli’s mother, nonstop. Veronika’s new husband, Captain Ford McMurtry, had been hiding behind his newspaper. I’d only been able to see his reddish hair.

The headlines had all been about the unrest in Europe.

I spared a moment to wonder if the foofaraw this Hitler was causing might keep some of the European magicians from getting to San Diego. That was my whole scope this week.

Not that I wanted Felicia to marry someone from Spain or Switzerland and move to Europe.

Any of the five countries from the divided United States would be fine: Britannia, Dixie, New America, the Holy Russian Empire, Texoma.

(It would be hard to swallow Dixie, because I’d had such a bad time there, but I would.) Even Canada, which had encroached on the northern part of the United States when the collapse had come.

Even Mexico, which had taken a big bite out of the southwestern United States. Anywhere a train ran.

I wanted Felicia to have all the choices she could. I was fixed on my sister’s future. She would graduate from the Rasputin School in little more than a year. That was, if she didn’t get to skip some classes she had already surpassed. Then it would be time for her to pick a profession or a path.

When we’d been alone in our bedroom after two hours of planning, Eli had said, “I’m surprised you are so determined that Felicia should do this. I believed you would hate the whole idea.”

I heaved a sigh. “At first I did. But then I figured… I never had many choices.” I pulled off my boots.

“When I left school, I had to find a way to support myself. I wasn’t about to get married that young, not after what happened to my mother.

I didn’t want any of the jobs open around town, like helping at the feed and seed store.

” That had sounded like slow death. “But by then I’d learned to shoot, thanks to Jackson.

” Jackson Skidder was my stepfather. He was the only father I’d ever known.

“And I liked the work, the travel, being alert, having purpose.” Being a gunnie, guarding people or goods in transit, was a good job for me.

I was suited to it. Though I had a shorter life expectancy than someone who clerked in a store, I had a broader horizon than a clerk.

Felicia, who’d been trapped into looking ten years old by her father’s spell, had proved to be much more than a grubby little girl with Rasputin’s blood in her veins.

After we’d rescued her from Ciudad Juárez and put her in the Rasputin School in San Diego, Felicia had gone from looking like a child to looking her real age (which we figured was fifteen or sixteen) in a matter of months.

It had been a shocking growth spurt, and it had been hard for her emotions to catch up with her body.

Though she’d never said it out loud, Felicia had been angry.

Our father and his brother (Oleg and Sergei Karkarov) had taught her to steal to support them and kept her small to avoid the consequences. They’d left her in indifferent care for weeks at a time, while they traveled around doing easy magic tricks and making money from the uneducated.

And taking what they wanted from girls, like my mother. Oleg had left something he didn’t want with my mother. Me.