Poison Tree

operator replied.

Alysia was a third-level member of Onyx; she had every right to enter the Hall itself, and unless Kral currently had someone in there, the interrogation room was probably unguarded.

One phrase from the posting particularly intrigued her, that bit about how the painting had been “lost in a bet six years ago.”

Apparently, a lot of important things had happened six years earlier.

With a shrug, Alysia wrote, Looking into it. It wasn’t a guarantee she would take the job, but it would let the client know that someone was considering the possibility. For the moderator, she added, Thanks. you were good before you disappeared don’t disappoint now, the operator replied, before erasing both that reply and Alysia’s thank-you.

There were a few questions Alysia needed answered before she went after the prize.

For one, she wanted to know why Kral had been making bets with Maya in the rst place. He didn’t seem like the gambling type, and if he was going to start, it probably wouldn’t be with a mercenary of Maya’s caliber, or with stakes as low as a 5K ritual-item painting that neither he nor Maya was likely to have any use for.

A second issue with the scenario was that Maya had been hired to kidnap Kral’s youngest daughter, Cori, right around the time the painting had supposedly entered Maya’s possession. It was reasonable that she might have returned it to him along with other items of value as part of an attempt to gain forgiveness and curry his favor after Cori’s death, but to someone like Kral, five thousand dollars was more of an insult than a gift.

There is one more thing, Alysia thought as she started to turn away from the board and then turned back. Once again using the pen, she wrote, Ben?

Was it possible? Ben had seemed about twenty years old, at most. Granted, Alysia had joined Frost when she was fourteen, but Sarta had assigned the Frost operator eight years ago, and as far as Alysia could tell, the individual running the boards hadn’t changed since.

Ben wouldn’t even have been in his teens yet.

She didn’t completely discount the possibility. There were plenty of reasons why a member of Bruja might look younger than he was, and the operator’s lack of respect for

Christian made it easy to believe he had never bothered to introduce himself to the guild’s new leader.

Alysia waited by the board until it turned itself o due to lack of activity. Either the operator had wandered off, or he just wasn’t inclined to confirm or deny his identity.

It was a mystery that had to wait for another day. She had other work to do, starting with a phone call she really didn’t want to make.

She stepped into one of the upstairs bedrooms and closed the door behind her before she took out her cell phone and dialed a number she had recently memorized. Like most of the rooms in the house, this one was soundproof, so she had no fear that other members might overhear her.

A wary voice answered. “Hello?”

“Jason? This is Alysia. I—”

He interrupted her with a rush of questions. “Alysia! Are you okay? Is Sarik—Sahara—

okay? Do you need anything?”

Relief and guilt washed over her, freeing an inappropriate giggle from her throat. “I’m more or less okay, and as far as I know, Sahara is, too,” she answered. “She’s back at

Onyx.” With Christian. Jason didn’t need to know that part. “I had no idea who she was, but her father apparently decided I did. He’s the one who put out the contract to kidnap me, to try to nd her. Now that we’re both gone, he shouldn’t have any more reason to harass

SingleEarth.”

Jason let out a slow breath, an odd self-calming habit for a vampire. “I know we all kept saying we didn’t want to force a direct confrontation between SingleEarth and Bruja. None of us realized we were saying we wouldn’t protect you. If you want to come back—”

“I don’t know what I want right now,” Alysia interrupted. “And I don’t know what

Sahara wants,” she added, since she suspected that was really what Jason wanted to know.

“I actually have a question for you. An awkward one, but it’s eating at me.”

“Go ahead.”

“You used to work for Maya, right?”

Silence. Alysia remembered what Jason had said when she had rst asked if anyone at

Haven #4 knew of Onyx. She remembered his tone when he referred to the woman he

“worked for.”

Eventually, he replied, “Yes.”

“Do you know anything about a painting she received? Small, magical, metal and stone accents. If I’m right about my time lines, it would have been around the time you and Saha

—Sarik hooked up, but I’m not sure if it was before or after.”

They both kept tripping over that name. Who was the tiger these days? If she had gone back to Onyx just to protect SingleEarth, then did she need rescuing? Or did she have her own plan? Was Christian in on it? What the hell was going on?

“I remember it,” Jason replied, his voice sounding very quiet and far away. “The magic has something to do with how the body feels pain, how it processes it and responds to it.”

That explained why Kral kept the thing in his torture chamber. Jason added, “Maya received it as payment for the last job I was ever involved in.”

“What was the job?”

And if it went to Maya, why does Kral have it now?

CHAPTER 22

CHRISTIAN GRABBED KEVIN’S arm before the human could sneak away, and hissed, “If you ever go to my home again, I will end you. Do you believe me?”

Kevin nodded, but protested, “But Kral—”

“I don’t care who your boss is,” Christian snarled. “You crossed a line. Cross it again and

I can do worse to you than Kral ever could.”

Sarik listened to the threats and felt a pit open in her stomach. She was back in a world where one’s threat meant everything. If Kevin believed Christian, then the balance of power would shift a little. If he didn’t, if he thought Christian’s threat didn’t have teeth, then he would see the words as an idle bluff.

“Do you know,” she said to Christian, though he was too busy watching Kevin slink o into the darkness to care, “I sat at the mediator’s table at SingleEarth Haven Number Four for almost a year. I counseled a survivor of foster-care child abuse who killed her parents the rst time she shapeshifted.” She shuddered, recalling that poor child’s guilt, anger, terror, and grief. “I worked with a twenty-year-old human-born Pakana who had been institutionalized since he was eleven, who had blinded himself in his madness four years before, and when he changed shape for the rst time, it healed his sight. I have talked people down from bridges and back from windows, found appropriate guardians for orphaned shapeshifter children, negotiated with lawyers and police and the royal houses of every remaining shapeshifter kingdom except the Mistari Disa herself.”

She hadn’t thought Christian was listening, until he said, “And then you shot your boyfriend and ran away.”

“I didn’t …”

Christian shrugged. “I’m Bruja, darling. I’m the last person to criticize you for looking out for yourself rst and screw the rest of the world. Just tell me: if you were so happy being that person, then what the hell are you doing here?” He looked at the two cubs, who were watching the discussion with deferential curiosity, probably trying to make sense of the power dynamics. “And why did you bring them?”

“You know what my father would do if I went back and SingleEarth tried to protect me,” she replied.

“Personally, I wouldn’t want to cross SingleEarth,” Christian replied. “They don’t have a lot of force on their