“No. He isn’t in trouble, but I’m forced to work with him.”
“Shit on a stick!”
“Bug, I don’t have a choice. Can you do this for me or not?”
“Of course I’ll do it. Here is my price. Next time you see him, I want you to tell him, ‘Hey dickfucker, Bug is watching you.’ Because I am.”
He hung up.
Well, that went well.
Shadow stood up on her hind legs and leaned on my leg, looking up at me with big brown eyes. I petted her. “Let’s go.”
I walked into the kitchen. The whole family had gathered around the oversized dining room table. Bern, my oldest cousin, big, broad-shouldered, with tousled hair that couldn’t decide if it was light brown or dark blond. Leon next to him, a sharp grin on his face. Arabella, looking surly, her long blond hair curled into ringlets.
On the other side of Bern, at the head of the table, Grandma Frida loaded her taco. Thin, bird-boned, with a halo of platinum curls and a hint of machine grease at her hairline, she saw me and winked. On her left, Mom scooped mango salsa onto her plate. Dark haired and bronze skinned, the only person in the family with darker skin than me, Mom used to be athletic and hard. During her last tour in the Balkans, she’d ended up as a POW. The experience robbed her of the full use of one of her legs. Even after two surgeries, her knee still hurt.
Nevada sat next to Mom. She wore a pristine white dress with a boat neckline, three-quarter sleeves, and a knee-length paneled skirt that draped gracefully over her bump. Her hair framed her face in a sophisticated updo and her makeup was perfectly done. She must’ve come from a business meeting.
Nevada picked up a pickle, dipped it into honey, and stuck half of it into her mouth.
“Eww,” Arabella said. “Someone take that away from her.”
Nevada squinted at her. Most of the pregnancy books I read warned to expect mood swings in the last trimester. Nevada was forty weeks pregnant and cool as a cucumber. She claimed she’d put on forty pounds, which didn’t slow her down any, and if she had mood swings, we sure as hell hadn’t seen them. She was her calm, sometimes scary, self, and the look she gave Arabella would have given the five Primes I’d met today serious pause.
“Touch my pickles and die.”
I took the chair next to Nevada. She reached over and patted my back. Leon must have brought everyone up to speed on our monster adventure and race to MII.
Arabella squinted back. “You’re almost nine months pregnant. Shouldn’t you be soft, and happy, and glowing? When are we gonna see some glow?”
Arabella clearly had a death wish.
Nevada finished her pickle spear and licked honey off of her fingertips. “My back hurts, the kid inside me keeps kicking me in the kidneys, I have to pee every five minutes, my legs cramp, and I can’t get out of bed by myself. I have to roll to the side, which is harder right now since my husband is somewhere in the Russian Imperium and he isn’t there to steady me. And how was your day of being young, beautiful, skinny, and carefree? Why aren’t you glowing?”
Arabella stuck her tongue out and turned back to her plate. Something was wrong.
“What happened?” I asked her.
“Nothing happened.”
“Something did.”
Arabella rolled her eyes. “I can’t get any privacy in this family.”
No, you can’t. “What happened?”
“Some guy rear-ended me with his Tahoe on Wilcrest Drive.”
The collective chewing stopped.
“Are you okay?” Nevada asked.
“I’m okay, Baby is okay; he just bounced off my bumper.”
“Damn right he did,” Grandma Frida said between bites. “That’s 7.5 mm ballistic steel.”
Arabella loved her red Mercedes. We bought it for her used, and she had been in three accidents since getting her license. This made four. After our warehouse was attacked by an elite mercenary team, Grandma Frida tried to convince her to switch to something more “sensible,” but my sister refused, since Grandma Frida’s idea of sensible was a tank. Grandma settled for upgrading the Mercedes to VPAM 7 armor. She souped up the engine to compensate for the added weight and now the Mercedes sounded like a pack of hungry lions.
“What were you doing out on Wilcrest?” Mom asked.
“I wanted oyster nachos from Cajun Kitchen.”
Nevada’s eyes glazed over for a second. “Oh, that does sound good.”
“I’ll get you some next time,” Arabella said.
Leon dropped his fork on the table and shook his hands. “What happened with the accident?”
“Nothing happened. He got out of the car. I got out too. I was in a really good mood because I’d curled my hair and had a sundress on.”
And that was my younger sister in a nutshell. Curling her hair and putting on a sundress meant the world was hers.
“He came out, looked at his grille, and then he grabbed his hair and started screaming that it was an aftermarket grille. He accused me of driving my mom’s car, not knowing how to drive, called me the C-word. And his friends in the car laughed and pointed at me.”
“So he just screamed at you?” Nevada leaned forward, her expression focused.
“Pretty much.”
“And what did you do?” Nevada asked.
Arabella sighed. “You want to know what I did? Nothing. I stood there like a moron and let him scream at me. I don’t even know why I did that. I’m not a pushover.”
Three years ago, Arabella would have exploded. She would have changed shape right there in front of the Cajun Kitchen, stomped on that Tahoe, and rode it like a skateboard up and down the street. We had dodged a giant bullet.
“What did the driver look like?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I didn’t look at him that well. Blond, well-built, jock type, probably twenty-five, twenty-eight, between one hundred and sixty and one hundred and eighty pounds, about five foot ten, clean shaven, black T-shirt with a grey outline of Texas on it, khaki cargo shorts, carrot-red Nikes with white laces, a fake Rolex. And not a good fake Rolex either. He was driving a black Chevy Tahoe, maybe 2012 or so, with a small dent in the bumper on the driver’s side. There were three other people in the car.”
“Did you take a pic?” I asked.
“No,” Arabella squeezed out through clenched teeth. “Like I said, I stood there and let him yell at me. He didn’t even give me his insurance. Since he kept screaming about his grille, I told him he could sell the knock-off Rolex he was wearing to pay for a new one. He started cussing, and I said that we needed to get the cops involved. Then he just drove off. It was a random thing. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. We were talking about Nevada. When is Connor coming home?”
Really? That was a low blow.
A week ago, Connor got word that one of the soldiers he served with got himself entangled in a kidnapping in Russia. He was part of the rescue team, which hadn’t come back to base. Alan was one of the sixteen soldiers who made it out of the Belize jungle with Connor. My brother-in-law would do anything for them, but Nevada could be due any day, so he’d hesitated. And my pregnant sister practically pushed him into the plane to the Russian Imperium to go and rescue the rescue team. We hadn’t heard anything since.
“Arabella,” Mom said in her sergeant voice.
Arabella looked at her plate.
“You’ll know when I know,” Nevada said. “He’ll handle it and come home.”
“Heart called,” Mom said, keeping her voice casual.
Suddenly everybody decided that their food was fascinating, me included. The tacos were to die for.
Heart was Rogan’s second-in-command, in charge of the military operations conducted by Rogan’s mercenaries. Six months ago, Mom had called him for help. We couldn’t afford him, but Heart dropped everything and came to protect us anyway. We paid for his protection—he’d quoted us a ridiculously low rate—but after his employment ended, he’d stuck around, reviving Rogan’s old HQ across the street. He and his soldiers returned to it between jobs, which conveniently offered us additional security. Our own security chief, Patricia Taft, was now fully up to speed, leading a crew of new, handpicked guards, but having Heart near made everyone feel better.