Page 7

It was about a twenty-minute drive from Felix’s humble neighborhood to the much swankier one where the Savarov home stood.

It had been beautifully restored after the brief siege when the tsar had been visiting and rebels had attempted to take him.

We’d all defended him. The front door had been splintered, Felicia’s bombs had left craters all over the yard when she and Eli had tossed them from the roof, and the dead were piled high.

Now the lawn looked green and smooth, though it was January. The roof had been reshingled, the windows replaced. The new front door was more handsome than the previous one. And all the blood had soaked into the ground.

We had defended the tsar vigorously. Alexei had been properly grateful, at least in that he’d paid for the repairs and the body removal.

But Alexei hadn’t been grateful enough to ask Eli to return to San Diego, to resume his place as a grigori who worked directly for him. Not grateful enough to summon Veronika back to court after the death of her traitor husband.

At least the repairs had been made.

A few months ago Captain Ford McMurtry, aide to the tsarina, had been given the green light to marry Veronika. Maybe soon, when Alexei could think of her more as McMurtry’s wife instead of Prince Ivan Savarov’s widow, she’d get reinstated to her former social position.

Veronika must have heard the car on the gravel of the drive. She was waiting by the door. Alice was right on her heels, eager to hear about our jaunt in the Japanese Friendship Garden. It was good to see Alice look excited.

Alice, Eli and Lucy’s little sister, had been hardest hit by her brother Peter’s death. In her letters to us, Veronika had expressed worry about Alice, hoping that something would happen to distract the girl (who was a little older than Felicia, but much younger in most ways) from her grief.

The excitement of the events surrounding the Wizards’ Ball had given Alice a lift. Up until San Diego, the festivities had been secret (though in some countries an open secret) because magic was frightening. The people who wielded it did not enjoy the limelight.

But San Diego was doing things differently.

The tsar loved his grigoris because Grigori Rasputin’s blood (and the blood of Rasputin’s descendants) had saved his life.

So all magic practitioners were welcome to be themselves in the Holy Russian Empire, formerly known as California and Oregon.

Newspaper and magazine articles were full of stories of the visiting families that practiced some form of magic, and their activities in and around San Diego.

I thought it was a big mistake to have a lot of the scheduled events listed in the newspaper, but no one had asked me.

Anyway, it kept Alice entertained. Veronika had told me Alice wasn’t officially “out,” whatever that meant.

But Alice was all dreamy about the list of dances and parties and whatnot taking place throughout the week.

Now in her early forties, Veronika was very attractive.

She’d been Prince Savarov’s second wife, much younger than him.

During the yearslong sea voyage with the royal family while they sought refuge, Veronika had had four children.

She’d weathered raising those children despite an uncaring husband who already had two uncaring older sons.

Veronika had endured Eli’s being thrown in jail for no reason, had survived being a hostage of a renegade grigori in this very house, and had lived through the coup attempt while the tsar was in her home, only to lose her second son.

I had gotten Eli out of jail, saved Veronika and the girls from the renegade, and defended the tsar and the house during the last coup attempt.

That was why Veronika had done her best to act happy when Eli chose to marry me. And she was proving a tremendous help this week, hosting us in her home and loaning us clothes and advice.

I had to give her credit for all this, but we did not like each other. The best we’d achieved was an uneasy truce.

“Did you have a good day?” Veronika asked Eli.

“Felicia, how was the garden?” Alice said eagerly. “Did you meet a lot of men?”

Felicia was halfway up the stairs. “I’ll tell you all about it after I get these clothes off,” she called. “It was all good but the arrow attack. Felix is okay. Lucy was a rock.”

Veronika and Alice turned to us, their eyes wide. Veronika was looking only at me, because obviously if there was trouble, I was the cause.

“I’ve got to change shoes,” I said. “Eli can tell you about it.” I went up the stairs as fast as my tired feet could carry me.

Damn heels. I was going to have blisters, I just knew it.

I plodded up the stairs and across the main landing to continue up a smaller flight of stairs. Every step was slower than the last.

I didn’t feel bad at all about leaving Eli to explain to his mother and sister.

Veronika had put us in the attic room again.

This third-floor area had been designed to be the maids’ room, but there weren’t any living in anymore.

The current maid, Leah, and the cook came in every morning and left after dinner.

Veronika had worked to make the room nicer, and it had much more privacy since it was the only room on this floor besides the attic.

And it had its own bathroom, which almost made up for the extra stairs.

I was unpleasantly surprised to realize Felicia was right behind me. She’d managed to change into a robe in record time, and she’d put a net over her hair to keep it smooth.

Okay, she wanted to talk.

She opened her mouth to begin, but I held up a hand.

“Give me a second,” I said. I undressed very carefully.

I’d have to wear this outfit again. No stains or rips, no arrow holes, no blood.

I turned so Felicia could lower the back zipper.

While I pulled a frilly robe out of the closet (it had been hanging there when we’d arrived, a gift from my mother-in-law), my sister hung up the dress and coat.

“What’s on your mind?” I sat in the armchair by the window, and Felicia perched on the bench at the end of the bed, her knees drawn up and her chin resting on them. I waited. She took a deep breath, glanced around the room. She let the breath out and shook her head.

If she would only get to the point, maybe I’d have time to take a nap.

“Spill the beans. Who is this Hans?”

Felicia’s big brown eyes fixed on me. “Dammit, I didn’t think I…”

“Who?”

She hugged her knees tighter. “During the attack on Segundo Mexia,” she said. “While we were trying to get to the Antelope. You were out, remember?”

“Thanks to your aunt,” I said. “As if I could forget that.” Isabella Dominguez had decided that if I died, Felicia would agree to be guided by her at the parties leading up to the upcoming Wizards’ Ball.

As Isabella saw it, a marriage advantageous to Felicia would be a marriage advantageous to her.

Isabella was also impulsive. She blasted me with a spell.

Felicia had stopped her from killing me by gripping her aunt with her own power.

“A man came out of nowhere. He helped me hold Isabella, but he advised me not to kill her. And he checked on you, told me you were alive.”

“I remember.” Just barely. “He was in disguise. After he made sure I was okay and stopped you from killing Isabella, he vamoosed.”

“Why do you say he was in disguise?”

I was taken aback. My memory of the evening was a little woozy, since not only had Isabella knocked me down hard enough that I’d slid across the road, but a few minutes afterward I’d had to fight for my life in my stepfather’s hotel.

But this I recalled. “He had a bandanna pulled up to his eyes, and he had a cowboy hat on, pulled down,” I said.

“That’s a disguise. It was getting dark, wasn’t it? ”

“I never saw him. He just… came up behind me. He laid his hand on my shoulder. He gave me strength to control Isabella. Which I was doing pretty well, by the way. But it helped.”

“So he was a grigori. Some kind of magician, anyway.”

“When he went to check on you, he had his back to me.”

You could tell she’d relived this in her head many times.

I felt more and more worried. “He must have had some reason for being there, just when the militia was attacking,” I said, very carefully. “He must have had just as good a reason for dodging out after he helped you. He never showed you his face. He left in an almighty hurry.”

Felicia nodded. She agreed that those things had happened. She did not agree with my interpretation. She looked a little miserable but a lot excited.

“You got fixated on this man who had his hand on your shoulder, though you never saw him and you didn’t even talk much?” Not only did this story sound like a bad novel, but I didn’t like that Felicia had kept this a secret… especially not when we were going all-out to give her this opportunity.

“I’ve thought about him a lot,” she said, talking to her knees. “You see why? He showed up, helped me, and vanished. Just like today.”

“Romantic and mysterious.” Two words I seldom said, and never with relish. I enjoyed romance and mystery in the odd book I had time to read, but not in real life.

Felicia nodded. “You noticed Hans didn’t talk until I said something directly to him?” she said, with great meaning.

“Yes,” I said cautiously.

“When he finally said something out loud, I was sure he was the man from that night.” She raised her face to look at me directly.

“You going to ask him?”

Felicia shrugged, with a totally unbelievable show of not caring one way or the other.

She looked away again. “We may not see him after today. If it was him, he saw me for the first time when bullets were flying, and now he sees me again and gets shot at by arrows. Japanese arrows,” she added, as if that made the attack much worse.

It was my turn to take a deep breath. “You will recall, right, that the reason you’re here is to maybe meet the right young man?

That you’ve waited months for this week.

That Eli and I have gone to considerable trouble to make sure you’re included in this event, though we were glad to do it.

And that you’re the strongest Listed woman at this ball. ”

My sister nodded, doing her best to look miserable and sorry.

But not quite miserable or sorry enough.

She went back to staring at her knees. “Hans has got to be seven or eight years older than me,” she said.

“He doesn’t look rich, like Ahren. That’s okay, though.

I’ve never been rich. If he’s that guy, he’s got power.

Just… Why is he hiding it? How did he get to be the humble kinsman traveling with the really eligible and cute Ahren?

How did he come to be in Segundo Mexia that exact evening? ”

I had no answer to any of these questions. My eyelids were feeling increasingly heavy. “Don’t get so fixed on Hans that you close doors,” I said. “We got to know more about him.”

“I agree with you,” she said, to my relief. “I can’t make a choice this early. I’m not even sure… I’m going to go lie down a little.” She stood suddenly. “You know the reason I hate healing a little wound?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“I give a little life back into the wound, to close the little bit of death it caused,” Felicia said. “And I get nothing back. If I kill something, I get its life, its power, so exciting. Wounds, nothing. Am I not a peach?” Bitter, for sure.

I couldn’t think of a single thing to make her feel better. She was what she was. I decided to change the subject. “We need to leave here this evening at six thirty, Eli says.”

This evening was the opening reception of the week of the Wizards’ Ball. For the first time in its history, the week of matchmaking and togetherness was being held openly and named for what it was.

Tsar Alexei was going to appear to give “opening remarks.” The tsarina, Caroline, would be with him.

There would be speechifying from a few members of the organizing committee, a “collation” would be served, and then there’d be singers from the San Diego Opera.

No dancing, very little sitting, no exhibition of magic in any form. Eli had spelled it out for me. We had to be all dressed up for this one. “Evening attire,” Eli had drawled in an assumed high-class accent… like he wasn’t really one of the aristocrats.

Felicia rose to leave. But she had a parting shot.

“Veronika put me in Peter’s room,” she said over her shoulder. “I think she’s punishing me.” And then she slipped out the door.

Peter had loved Felicia. But he was dead, and here she was, inviting the attention of other men. Eli had made Felicia’s future his business, so Veronika would support his effort. That didn’t mean she was happy. Eli’s mom was well-bred, but she wasn’t above giving a little stab when she could.

Not two minutes later, Eli came in. He began throwing off his clothes, too.

“You’re going to bathe?”

“If you are agreeable, I would like to enjoy some husband-and-wife time,” Eli said. “There’s nothing like having an arrow brush past your back to make you appreciate the things you can enjoy if you’re alive.”

“I’m agreeable,” I said, ditching the idea of a nap. This was something we hadn’t done in a while. I missed it. I slid the robe off and stood there in my fancy underwear.

Eli really liked that.

That was the best thirty minutes of my day. Afterward, I finally got in an hour-long snooze.