My mother sat at the other end of the table. She used to be a soldier, but her time as a POW left her with a permanent limp. She was softer now, her brown hair braided and pinned at the nape of her neck. Her eyes were brown like mine. When Dad got sick and after his death, Mom kept us together. I was just now beginning to understand how much it had cost her.
Grandma Frida sat beside Mom. One of my earliest memories was playing on the floor of the motor pool with little model cars, and Grandma Frida, who still had some blond in her hair back then, humming softly as she worked on some giant vehicle. Most people smelled engine oil and rubber and thought mechanic. I thought Grandma.
Family.
I loved them all so much. I had to do everything I could to keep them safe. This would be a Christmas we’d never forget.
“Victoria Tremaine knows who we are,” I said.
The words hit the table like a pile of bricks. Arabella paled. Catalina bit her lip. Bern became very still. Leon, oblivious, frowned at the pinched expressions he saw. Nobody spoke.
Truthseeker talents like mine were very rare. There were only three truthseeker Houses in the United States. House Tremaine was the smallest and the most feared. It had only one member—Victoria Tremaine. And she was coming for us.
“How sure are you?” Mom finally asked.
“She tried to purchase our mortgage.”
Mom swore.
“I thought House Montgomery owned our mortgage,” Leon said.
“House Montgomery owns the mortgage on our business,” Bernard said patiently. “The mortgage on the warehouse was held by a private bank until Rogan bought it.”
“To bring everyone up to speed,” I said before they could go off on a tangent, “Dad was Victoria’s only child. He was born without magic, and she hated him for it. He ran away after high school, met Mom, and lived quietly, so she never found him. But now she knows. She’s the only member of her family. Once she dies, House Tremaine will die with her.”
“How did I not know this?” Leon asked. “Am I the only one who didn’t know this? You guys knew and didn’t tell me?”
I raised my hand. “The point is, Victoria Tremaine desperately needs us. She’s the only surviving Prime of her House.”
“The House is everything,” Bern said quietly. “She needs you and the girls to qualify as Primes so she can keep her House alive.”
“Question!” Leon said. “If she is the only Prime, how can she still be a House?”
“Every time a new Prime is registered, the Office of Records checks to see if the family has two Primes,” Catalina said. “If there are two living Primes, the family is recertified as a House. They don’t take away the family’s rank until the last Prime alive at the last certification dies.”
My sister had been reading up on Houses.
“You know what I can do,” I said.
I could do plenty. Being able to detect a lie was the least of my talents. I could crack a human mind like a walnut and pull whatever knowledge I needed out of it. And I didn’t have to leave the mind intact.
“Victoria can do everything I do and much more, and she does it better. I’m just now figuring out the extent of my power. She’s been trained in the use of magic since she could hold chalk in her hand. She has power, money, and troops we don’t. She’ll do whatever she has to do to gain control of me and Catalina at the very least.”
Grandma Frida put her hand over her mouth.
Bernard was usually calm and steady, like a rock in a storm. But right now his eyes were full of fear. “She can do things with Catalina’s talent.”
Unspeakable, ugly things. Things that would make my thoughtful, kind sister hate herself.
“And if Arabella’s magic is discovered . . .” I didn’t finish.
I didn’t even want to go there. They would lock her away and keep her sedated for the rest of her life. She would never get to see the sun. She’d never laugh again, never love, never live.
My grandmother wouldn’t get her claws on my sisters. I wouldn’t let it happen.
Catalina leaned forward, her eyes defiant. “What are our options?”
I checked my mother’s face. She was sitting still, her expression grim.
“We can roll over,” I said. “That will likely mean that you and I will have to do whatever Victoria says. We’ll have to walk away from our business.”
Catalina winced. Our parents built Baylor Investigative Agency, and I spent seven years growing it. It wasn’t just a business. It was the future and the core of our family.
I had to keep going. “We probably won’t see Mom, Grandma Frida, or Bern and Leon again for a while.”
That got me a look of pure horror.
“We’d have to obey her and do whatever she wanted. I would be doing interrogations and lobotomizing people.” I kept my voice even. They didn’t need emotion from me right now. “Eventually Victoria will die. She’s old.”
And that didn’t sound morbid. Not at all.
I forged on. “Eventually we’d inherit House Tremaine.”
“How long?” Leon asked.
“I don’t know. She’s in her seventies. Ten years, maybe twenty.”
“Door number two, please,” Arabella said.
“I agree,” Bern said. “We’re not doing that.”
“We can fight,” I said. “Victoria has more money, more troops, and more of everything.”
“But Rogan would help us, right?” Arabella asked.
I struggled with the right words. “Yes. But we can’t always count on Rogan.”
Strictly speaking, that was a lie. Rogan would do anything and everything to help me.
“We shouldn’t always count on Rogan,” Mom said.
Everyone looked at her.
“This isn’t his problem,” she said. “It’s our problem.”
“If we let Rogan save us, we’ll be tying ourselves to him,” I said. “We’d be viewed as his vassals. We’d have his protection, but we would inherit his enemies, and he has some powerful ones.”
“And if your relationship with Rogan sours, things will get complicated,” Bern said.
“Yes.”
“So we don’t want to give up and we can’t fight the Evil Grandma. Is there a third option?” Arabella asked.
“Yes. We can become a House.”
My sisters and cousins stared at me. I’d brought up this possibility once before, but we were kind of busy at the time trying to solve a murder and accomplishing other important things like not getting killed.
“Whoa.” Leon blinked.
“No,” Mom said. “There has to be another way.”
I leaned back. “Becoming a House would grant us provisional immunity from any attacks by other Houses for three years. That’s long enough for us to establish a power base.”
“Would Victoria follow that rule?” Catalina asked.
“Rogan says she will. It’s in everyone’s best interest to protect emerging Houses, because otherwise inbreeding would become a real danger. Apparently, this is one of those rules Primes won’t break under any circumstances. It would buy us time to build up our power base and make alliances and do all the things Houses do.”
“You can’t be serious,” Mom said.
“I am.”
“She isn’t going to obey any rules. That woman is a monster. You can’t be that naive, Nevada.”
I met my mother’s gaze. “Yes, she may still attack us. But she will have to do it in a way that can’t lead back to her. Becoming a House would make it much harder for her to hit us.” And once we became a House, we could make alliances as equals.
“You’re filling their heads with visions of being a House. Why don’t you tell them what it’s really like? Tell them about Baranovsky.”
“Mom is right,” I said. “Houses are vicious. You remember that charity gala I went to in the black dress? It was very exclusive. The man who hosted it, Gabriel Baranovsky, was drinking champagne at the top of the stairs in the ballroom. David Howling froze the wine in Gabriel’s throat. He turned it into a blade that sliced Gabriel’s neck from inside out.”