An Easy Death Read online

  “A terrible accident,” Eli said without expression. “He was swimming by himself in the tsar’s pool when his foot got caught in a drain and he drowned.”

  I shook my head. “Accidents will happen.” Unless someone was there to prevent them.

  “There was an investigation, which came up with nothing.”

  “And who headed that investigation?”

  He hesitated. “Actually, my father.”

  “Wow. That’s an important responsibility. Did your family come over with the previous tsar’s?” Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children had been rescued in the nick of time by a team of White Russians and the English. Nicholas was first cousins with the English king. But Parliament had voted to keep Nicholas and his family from settling in England, so the royal family and all its retainers had started roaming in a little flotilla, until the offer came from the Hearst family to settle in California.

  “Yes, my father . . . owned an estate next to the royal family’s. In the country. He and Nicholas grew up together. My father is still alive.”

  “Your mom, too?”

  “My mother is my father’s second wife, and much younger than him. She became an attendant to the tsarina when they went into exile. She was on the same ship. Any other suitable ladies-in-waiting had been killed, or were too old or too young.”

  “Were you born then?”

  “Yes. I was very young. I had two older brothers by my father’s first marriage. Mother was carrying my little brother when we landed in America.”

  “And she’s had two more children since she got to these shores. Girls.”

  He nodded proudly. “Yes, plenty of family. Do you have any sisters or brothers? By the man your mother has married now?”

  I shook my head, my bristly hair brushing his shoulder. He rubbed my head like it was a good luck charm. “Not a one. Jackson has a brother, but no kids.”

  We sighed at the same time, because we had to get back to the real world, where none of our family history mattered because we didn’t need to get to know each other . . . because we were both (probably) going to die soon.

  I was surprised we’d lived this long, but it was waving a red flag at fate to say that out loud.

  “Okay, then,” I said, sitting up and swinging my legs over the side of the bed. “Where’s the car?”

  “It’s parked behind the hotel, you can see it from the window,” he said. “It’s a black Proenza. It has only five thousand miles on it, at least that’s what the odometer says, and the mechanic I hired to check it told me it was in reasonably good shape. I’m not sure what that means, but he said the brakes work and the tires are okay. I had to accept that.”

  I went to our window and looked down. There was a little parking courtyard behind the inn. There were four cars parked there, a shiny black Proenza among them.

  “You got a mechanic to check it out,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound amazed. I’d never thought of doing that. Of course, I’d never bought a car before, and all the people I knew who’d bought vehicles had been mechanics, more or less.

  “Sure,” Eli said, trying just as hard not to sound surprised.

  Galilee had once told me she knew an early boyfriend wasn’t going to work out because there was a difference between them as wide as a river. There was more like an ocean between Eli and me. At least our parents both served their communities, my mother by teaching and his father by helping the tsar.

  I’d been staring at Eli, and he was beginning to look uneasy. I had to talk fast. “That was a good idea. So the Proenza runs, it’s downstairs waiting for us, and how much money do we have left?”

  Eli sat up, too, and bent over to get his trousers from the floor. I tried not to think too much about the long line of his back, to say nothing of his butt. He rummaged in his trouser pocket and pulled out a much smaller wad of money, which he handed over to me.

  I felt like his mom. I counted it, trying not to make a big show of doing that. But I had to know if the cash could fund our trip out of Mexico. I breathed out, long and slow. “This should cover us,” I said. “For the distance we got to go.” I tried not to think of the many things that could happen to eat up that money.

  “I haven’t paid you,” Eli said, holding his shirt in his hand. I could tell from the way he looked at it that he was thinking that if he talked about money while he was putting on his clothes, it would feel awfully like asking a prostitute how much he owed her.

  “At this point I’ll be glad to get out of Mexico alive,” I said. “If we manage to do that, I trust you for my pay.” More or less. But I had to say it. I handed him the cash.

  Eli looked a little embarrassed and a little gratified. He didn’t have simple emotions except when he was naked with me.

  “But I’m going to give you some expense money. You’ll need it in hand, in case I’m not near when you need to make a purchase,” Eli said, sounding very reasonable. He divided the money and set some bills on the night table for me, putting the rest in his pants pocket. “So what do we do now? Start out of town?” He felt he could dress now, so I did, too.

  “Maybe I should find out what Chauncey is up to. I don’t know if we can drive out of the area without someone noticing, now that I’ve seen him prowling. If he’s watching, maybe other people are, too. Cee knows for sure I’m with you. Maybe he doesn’t know Paulina is dead.” There were too many things I did not know. I was trying to steer a course that would take everything into account, and that was impossible. “The thing is, I wouldn’t have thought he was smart enough to have acted so innocent when I saw him, and now to seem so deep into the plot . . .” Imagining Chauncey caring about Russian politics almost made me laugh.

  “Maybe he’s just doing it for the money,” Eli said.

  “Exactly like me,” I said. “I got a deep interest in this whole thing now, but I took the job for the money. Also, I had to find out what you and Paulina were up to, naturally. And if I had a sister.”

  Eli’s accent got stronger as he said, “I hope now we can be honest with each other.”

  “I hope so, too,” I said, but I didn’t have any surety that would be so.

  I thought while I pulled on the new skirt and blouse. I didn’t mind the sandals so much, or the hat. But after a couple of days I was getting tired of skirts flapping around my legs. I opened the room door, and I heard a familiar voice floating up the stairs. I raised my hand and Eli stopped to listen, too.

  “You got a young gringo gal here, maybe twenty, with real short black hair and a lot of guns? My boss asked me to track her down to offer her a job, and I ain’t had any luck.”

  “No, sir,” said the desk clerk politely. “We have no one here like that.”

  “She might be with a tall woman and a man, older than her. Some of them tattooed Holy Russians?”

  “I haven’t seen people of that description,” the clerk said just as politely.

  “Lucky I blurred his memory,” Eli said into my ear.

  If we ever got naked together again, I was going to do something really special for Eli.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  We waited until Cee had left—and then a bit more—before we went down. The clerk pointedly nodded to us without looking directly at us, and Eli slid a coin across the counter to the young man, which appeared to startle and confuse him. I pulled my straw hat over my hair, tied the damn kerchief around my neck (which looked and felt much better), and prepared to step into the street.

  “He went to the right,” the clerk murmured almost as if he were talking to himself, and we went to the left without saying a word. When I glanced at Eli, who was a step behind me, I saw I was actually accompanied by Jim Comstock again. It gave me a little shock, and I glared at him.

  “Let me know when you’re going to do that,” I said, and then I steered us back to one of the open-air markets and got a very thin shawl to drape around me, the kind that’s not meant to keep you warm. It was just for pretty. Off went the hat, folded under my belt, and I
covered my hair with the shawl and tossed the ends around my neck. It was red and green, and I was looking almost as colorful as the other young women on the street.

  Eli said, “It becomes you, Lizbeth.”

  I smiled up at him and took his arm. We didn’t look like an employer and his gunnie, for sure, especially now that he was Jim Comstock. We looked like an older man and his young companion, who was well paid and not abused . . . and, therefore, happy.

  We wandered and shopped for a little, to see if anyone was paying attention to us. I was always on the alert. It paid off. We saw a grigori, a very old woman, walking through the driveway that led to the back courtyard of our little hotel. She had a cane and her hair was white, but if you peered under the brim of her hat (which was very like mine), you could see the faded tattoos.

  “Shit,” said Eli. “It’s Klementina.”

  “She’s . . . ?”

  “She’s the head of my order,” he said. “And she’s the one who sent me on this mission.”

  “So she might be here to rescue you?” I sounded doubtful, and that was how I felt.

  “Klementina might be here to help me and Paulina,” he said, but sounded even more doubtful than I had. “But she’s not exactly a rescuer. She believes a good wizard should be able to rescue himself.”

  She would be awfully disappointed in the wizards we’d killed in the past week.

  “Klementina preferred Paulina to me, by a large margin.”

  I tried to figure out what he was really telling me. “You don’t want to approach her?”

  “I wonder why she went to the parking space behind the hotel,” he said, instead of giving a direct answer. And I figured that was an answer in and of itself.

  So we returned to the hotel, and the clerk was luckily turned away from us, putting notes in the key boxes. Maybe it wasn’t luck. Maybe he was making a conscious effort to not see us. Or maybe it was Eli’s spell. We ran up the stairs as quietly as we could, and were in our room and at the window.

  Klementina was looking at all the cars. From the way she bent over, I decided she was actually smelling them. Her hands were moving. She was trying to find out if a grigori had been in one of them.

  Because there was really nothing to say, I calculated angles. “Shall I shoot her?”

  Eli looked at me as if I had suggested shooting God. “She might be looking for me to . . .”

  “Help you? Right, so why aren’t you running out there yelling, ‘Klementina, I’m so glad to see you’?”

  “You are a sour person,” Eli said. Now he looked like Eli again, and himself was being pretty judgmental, though there was a little smile on his face.

  “Yeah, that’s my job,” I said. “I just want to stay alive, and we have only each other to depend on.”

  “I am sad,” Eli said, his face expressing that sorrow. I could tell he was expressing a new and deep truth, and it had made him a different person. “I see traitors everywhere, and I don’t know who is for me and who is against me.”

  I said, “I just assume everyone is against me.” Except for the few people I trusted, who all lived in Segundo Mexia. But three of those people had died less than a month ago. “And if you tell me what a terrible world I live in, I’ll punch you. We do live in a dangerous world, all of us.”

  I raised the Winchester and experimented with the shot. “I can take her.”

  Still Eli hesitated. “What if it’s not really her?” he said. “Or what if she knows we’re here watching her, which is quite possible, and she is waiting for us to reveal how we are going to proceed?”

  “All that might be true,” I said. “Make up your mind.”

  “Hide,” he said. In the next instant he opened the window and leaned out, while I flattened myself on the floor. “Revered mother,” he called.

  “Ah, good to see you. You have saved me from having to wait for you to come, in this hot sun.” The voice definitely belonged to an older woman, but there was no tremor, no hesitation. This Klementina had all her wits, and maybe more than her fair share.

  “She’s on her way up,” Eli said. “It’s really Klementina.”

  “How do you know?” I sat up and dusted off my skirt. This hotel was not as well kept as the one in Mil Flores.

  “She used the word ‘hot,’ ” he said.

  “Code word?”

  “Yes.”

  “No one else could know it?”

  Eli shook his head. He seemed certain.

  “And you don’t think there’s a chance that the word ‘hot’ would be easy to use in Mexico, even if she didn’t know it was the code word?”

  And then there was a knock at the room door, and no more time to think about what danger we were in.

  Eli moved to open the door, and Klementina strode in. No other word for it. She glared at me, and I realized she was very sharp. Well, shit.

  “And you are?” the older woman said.

  Up close she looked much older, her face seamed and cracked like dry dirt in the desert. But Klementina’s eyes were a bright brown, and her hair was wiry and thick.

  “I’m the gunnie. Lizbeth Rose.” I was too tense to be frightened, which was an advantage.

  “And did you want to shoot me, young woman?”

  “So much.”

  “What stopped you?”

  “Eli says you are who you say you are. Though I’m not sure that’s a good thing.”

  Klementina laughed. “And you call him Eli, eh?”

  “What should I call him?” I didn’t understand this question, or comment, at all.

  “Where is Paulina?” Klementina asked, turning to Eli, as if one thought led to another.

  “She’s dead. She died in the desert when we were abducted, and they made her rise again to attack me.”

  This seemed to be a real shock to Klementina. Her mouth tightened, her whole face shut down. It was possible she might be willing herself not to cry.

  “You must tell me everything,” Klementina said, and she sat on the chair. Eli sat opposite her on the edge of the bed. I stood by the window to one side, where I wouldn’t be easily seen. One of us had to keep watch.

  Eli told the story of the last few days well. From Josip the Tatar, who’d tried to kill them in my cabin, to the clue we’d picked up in Cactus Flats, through the expedition and all the attacks since then. He concluded with the terrible previous day. Then he told Klementina how many times I’d saved their lives, until I hadn’t. Saved Paulina’s.

  “I tried,” I said, unable to stop myself. I almost added, She might have lived if she hadn’t been so intent on saving Eli, but there was no point in talking about that.

  “I’m sure you did,” Klementina said, with no meaning in her voice at all.

  “That wasn’t her yesterday,” I said, still full of anger. I hadn’t liked Paulina, but someone had used her body in a horrible way. She would have hated that, I thought. Or she might have shrugged indifferently. I never knew her well enough to say, and now she would always be a puzzle to me.

  “That was a zombie of Paulina,” the older woman said, mostly to Eli. “It really was her body, since you say it kept her appearance after you killed it again. The simulacrum of your brother was a clever use of magic. The zombie of Paulina was an even stronger use of magic. You have a powerful enemy.”

  I glanced at Eli, who looked as though he was biting his tongue not to say, I know all that.

  “Don’t you mean, ‘We have a powerful enemy’?” I said. “Aren’t you the head of his clan, or whatever you call it? So his enemies should be yours.”

  The sharp eyes fixed on me again, but I was not sorry I’d spoken. If Eli had such a mass of other magic people behind him, it was time for them to show up and help. I couldn’t do this alone, and neither could Eli.

  “You are very aggressive,” Klementina had the gall to tell me.

  “Yeah, I’ve been trying to keep him alive for a week,” I said. “And it’s been killing, killing, killing. And almost bein
g killed.”

  “And you think I should put up or shut up?” Klementina thought using that saying was very funny, and she produced a rusty laugh. Neither Eli nor I smiled.

  I kept my mouth shut. It was time to hear from Eli. “I need help,” he said. “Paulina was a great wizard, very tough and more experienced, but now she is dead. We have strong opponents within our own profession, and it makes my heart hurt. And it makes me very angry. Gunnie and I are trying to get out of here, get home again.”

  “Why will you be returning, if you don’t have what you set out to seek?”

  Klementina might as well have slapped Eli. “It’s not available,” he said. “The girl says she is not the daughter of Oleg Karkarov. Have any of the other searchers found a direct descendant?”

  Klementina looked surprised, just for a moment. I expected her to ask Eli a question, and from his face, so did he. But the old woman just nodded.

  “It’s not her,” I said, and in the interest of silence I pulled out my knife and stabbed her, under her ribs and up.

  Eli was so shocked his protest was just a sound pushed through a choked throat, reedy and high like a bird’s cry.

  Klementina’s eyes bored into me, and I felt the hate in her. But I had hit her first, and hardest, and her eyes dulled.

  That’s why I like guns so much more than knives. I was too close to her.

  I pulled out the knife and stepped back and waited to see what happened. I am pretty sure that only the fact that we’d had sex kept Eli from attacking me. He looked from the body to me, over and over, as if that would undo what I’d done. She’d crumpled sideways to the floor, and I flipped her so the wound was up—I didn’t want the blood to stain the wood. I yanked a washrag off the rack by the sink and pulled up her shirt, then pulled it back down again so it would hold the washrag in place over the incision. Not that she’d bleed much more.

  Eli squatted beside me and seized my shoulder, turning me to face him. I really hate being made to do anything, and I yanked myself out from his grasp. He didn’t seem to notice. “Why did you do that?” His voice was shaking.

  “Not her,” I told him. “She didn’t know there were other teams of grigoris looking for other descendants. She only knew about Paulina and you.”