“I didn’t want to spoil your fun,” I responded.
She laughed.
“Who did you piss off?” I asked.
She sobered. Looking around at her guardians and mine, she gestured me toward her. “Walk with me.”
We walked a little apart from the others.
“I don’t know what sparked this, but I have my suspicions. Remember that I told you to be careful of Courtney? Dani, George’s heart isn’t very strong. He had a heart attack a couple of weeks ago, but we’ve tried to keep it quiet. Now, as his daughter, of course Courtney knows. Courtney is ambitious, and so is her husband. Even more ambitious is Akiyama Benjiro, and he would love to install one of his allies as head of Findlay.”
“Well, that may play into what I came to tell you.” I informed her of the DNA test on the paper with my address.
“Yes, the two attacks may be connected,” she said when I finished.
“And that’s the second time in two days that someone has mentioned Akiyama to me. So, you think Courtney’s trying to cement her succession in case George keels over?”
She didn’t answer me directly. “Watch your back, Dani. Courtney is the obvious candidate, but you can’t rule out Helen’s brood. People might discount her, but she’s sneaky, and Veronica’s husband, Karl Rudolf, is also very ambitious.” Helen Dressler-Findlay was my Granduncle Richard’s widow, and Veronica was one of Helen’s daughters.
Great. One more—make that two more—reasons to stay as far away as possible from my father’s family. I didn’t have enough fingers and toes to keep track of all the people in the Findlay Family who might want to kill me. And that didn’t even count Johansson, Akiyama, and God knew who else.
One of her guardians approached. “My Lady. We captured one who’s still alive, and we’ve found five bodies. No idea if any of them escaped. Should I call in a tracker?”
Olivia thought about it for a minute, then said, “No. Get the survivor to a healer, and then turn him over to Osiris. Are any of our boys hurt?”
“No, ma’am. Just the car. I’ve called a wrecker to haul it.”
I glanced over at the burning vehicle. “Is that thing going to explode?” I asked.
“No, ma’am. The hydrogen cell already blew.”
He walked away, and I said in a low voice, “Are you sure one of our family members is behind this attack? Surely Courtney knows what you’re capable of.”
My grandmother shook her head. “Other than Helen, the ones who might have a motive were still children during the war. And Helen has led a sheltered life. I doubt if Courtney has ever seen me use my power.”
When mages of a certain age referred to ‘the war,’ it always meant the Rift War, the one they had fought against the demons and their vampire allies. It was my turn to shake my head. Even if I’d never seen Olivia fight, she was legendary. She, along with my Granduncles George and Richard Findlay, Frank Novak, and Thomas Whittaker, had led the effort to stop the demon incursion in eastern North America. It seemed to me that people should pay a little more attention to history, especially when most of the major bad-asses were still alive.
I looked at the forest where her lightning bolts had hit. On both sides of the road were areas at least fifty yards wide where the trees had all been blasted to burning splinters.
Olivia glanced at her watch. “Damn! Probably too late to make it to my hairdresser on time. This just screwed up my whole day.”
Before I took my leave, I told Olivia, “I know you have healers and doctors, but if you like, I could send Mom and Kirsten out to see Uncle George.”
She opened her mouth as though to say something, then shut it, and a thoughtful expression came to her face. After a full minute, she said, “It couldn’t hurt, could it? And I could depend on their discretion. I’ll give them a call.”
With my grandmother’s ambush in mind, I took a different route than usual back into the city. I arrived at the station about an hour before my appointment with Whittaker, so I had time to catch up with Novak.
“None of the numbers on their phones have any connection with any Family members we can identify,” Novak said in reference to the guys who tried to kill me. “On the other hand, that ifrit at the bar, or someone else who worked there, did know how to use a phone. Numerous calls to or from Johansson, David Moncrieff, and a number registered to Lucifer’s Lair.”
“Not surprising, considering the ownership.”
“Yeah, but some of the numbers called by that phone at Lucifer’s are interesting.”
“Oh? How so?”
“Calls to phones that appear to be part of an Akiyama network. Whittaker said he’ll work on getting to those phones, but since they’re part of a private network, we don’t have normal access to them.”
I chuckled. I had seen that scenario before. Whittaker wasn’t working on anything having to do with those phones. He planned to drop a hint to me and then pretend I didn’t hack the network. He had known my father and grandfather, and was quite aware of a magitek’s capabilities.
I headed back to Whittaker’s corner office.
“Hey, boss. Guess what? Some mages ambushed my grandmother today. A couple of miles from the estate.”
He sat straight up in his chair and gave me his full attention.
“She’s okay, isn’t she?”
“Oh, yeah, she’s fine. There’s a couple of big, black holes in the ground, and her guardians are a lot more respectful than they were yesterday, though.”
“Any survivors?”
I shrugged. “Don’t know. If there are, I imagine Osiris will let them go. You can’t buy that kind of advertising.”
Whittaker shook his head. “A lot of people don’t understand how the Ten got to the top of the heap,” he said. “I knew Olivia and Hunter back before the Rift opened. She was hell on wheels when she
