Chapter Six

The good thing about that morning was that no one tried to kill us. The bad thing was the road. It was paved. Well, it had been paved, once upon a time. But it hadn't been repaired any time in the recent past, and we lurched around like we were in a wheelbarrow. Paulina was driving, and when Eli got impatient, she snapped back, "If we go any faster, we'll break the underparts of the car, and then we'll be out in the middle of Bumfucking Nowhere and we'll have to walk." That was an entertaining way to put it. I had never heard a woman say that word out loud. I have to admit I'd thought it, after I'd learned it from Tarken. Eli took a deep breath before he said, "Given our current rate of speed, when do you think we might reach Juárez?" "I am not even going to try to guess," Paulina said, sounding a little less angry but just as disgusted. She wasn't the only one. All I had to do was look, and there was nothing to look at. The land was flat and full of nothing. So much nothing. Scrubby trees, sparse plants, lots of rocks, little deer, and probably thousands of snakes. The only good thing about this terrain was that there was nowhere for ambushers to hide. No daytime attack could be a surprise, unless the attackers dropped from the sky. And if anything was rarer than good cars in this area of our planet, it was airplanes. When we stopped to eat—Jim had packed some food into a little box with an ice compartment, for a pretty penny—Paulina and Eli hunched over the map, trying to find a place we could reach before nightfall. They came up with nothing. We drove and drove the rest of the day, taking turns at the wheel. I didn't mind driving when there was so clearly no one else around. While I was at the wheel, Paulina and Eli both fell asleep after they were sure I was competent. I didn't have anything to think about that I hadn't already gone over in my mind a million times on this trip, and it was hard to push off the sadness. I was still grieving for my friends, but I didn't want to talk about it to anyone else . . . if there'd been anyone around who cared. It was my own grief. I could feel it fading away into something I simply accepted, because that's the way I am. I knew I'd feel better. It was living until then that was hard. By dusk I was so ready to get out of the car and stop being bounced around that I could hardly bear it. I did not mind spending the night out in the open, because at least we would get to be still. After the long silences of the day, I was ready to talk to someone, even them. We made a fire and heated up some stuff from Jim's provisions. "What is your home like?" I said, aiming the question somewhere between Eli and Paulina. They were both surprised I was starting a conversation. For a moment neither spoke. "I live in San Diego, close to the palace of our tsar. I have a room at my guild house," Paulina said. She spoke real carefully, like she was testing the information lest she reveal any big secret. "How big?" She looked blank. "How big is your room?" "About as big as both the bedrooms we had last night put together. It has a sink. There are big bathrooms with toilet stalls and shower stalls, shared by all. We eat in the guild dining room." That sounded real . . . institutional. "Did you get to pick your own furniture?" "I picked the furniture, yes." She was warming up to the topic. "Can you do your own cooking?" "I eat in the dining room, almost always. But I can make tea in my room, and sometimes when I am out, I go to the bakery and pick up something for a meal." "What about your washing?" "All my clothes and sheets, I take them to the laundry in the basement of the guild house." "Do you clean your own room?" "No, there are cleaners who do that. They are all men and women who are relatives of wizards, so we have a hold on them if they steal or if they are bribed to take hair or any body waste from one of us." That was charming. Bottom line was that Paulina had almost no responsibility for her own upkeep. I hoped she was doing a great job at whatever she did day to day, to make her worth being waited on like that. My mouth was full, so I pointed at Eli to indicate it was his turn. "I live at the palace," he said. I'd expected his story to echo Paulina's. I glanced at her, but she'd ducked her head to look at her food. Okay, I was learning something now. "I have a little room, very humble, in a wing far, far away from our tsar's. My mentor, Dmitri Petrov, lives closer to His Imperial Highness." Eli smiled and tried to catch Paulina's eye. "That's funny?" I said. "He is so close to the tsar that he has the honor of being wakened very often in the night when the tsar is in pain." He was still trying to get Paulina to look at him, to share his little bit of humor that living in the palace was a real big pain in the ass. But Paulina wasn't having any of that. She would have given a finger or two, it was easy to see, if she could have been inconvenienced by Tsar Alexei waking her in the night. "Alexei's sickly with the bleeding disease?" I said cautiously. It was no big secret anymore. Couldn't keep things under wraps in the Holy Russian Empire the way you could in imperial Russia. They both nodded. "His wife is pregnant with their first child to be carried this long," Eli said. "That's big news, I guess." What I didn't know about the Russians . . . well, it was a lot. "Yes, very big, to us," Paulina said, her tone telling that "us" was all that mattered. "It's the second time he's been married, right?" "Yes," Eli said. "His first wife died of influenza." "She was the rich one," I said, knowing as soon as the words had left my mouth that I shouldn't have said it. "Yes," Eli said without any expression. "She was from the Ballard family." The Ballard family pretty much ruled a lot of Dixie. Family members had made huge fortunes on cotton, sugarcane, and timber, planted and harvested by the labor of people who were real poor and really unable to leave their situation. My friend Galilee had been the daughter of such a man. He owed the company store so much he could never discharge his debt, though he worked day in and day out. There was nowhere for him to go that the debt would not follow him, unless he somehow got a huge amount of money and could get out of Dixie with speed. That wasn't going to happen. But when Galilee had come up pregnant, her mom and dad had scraped together the money to get her out of there. They'd hired an Indian, a Choctaw, who seemed to be invisible to white people. He hadn't been a bad man, Galilee had told me, but he'd been a man, and sometimes it had been a harder journey than she'd ever counted on, until they reached a place she felt safe and she could tell him to leave her. And I was not going to think about Galilee now. I put my mind back on the tsar's situation. I could see how the grigoris would try to maintain a sort of militant silence about the tsar's first wife. Thanks to that marriage, the Russian royal family could act royal again, since they had the padding of the Ballard money. "None of the tsar's daughters have this bleeding disease?" "No. But Olga and Tatiana each have a son who does." The most memorable thing about the previous tsar, Nicholas, was that when he'd fled the godless country, he'd formed engagements for all his five children within two years, starting with his oldest daughter and working down to Alexei, his youngest child. At least as far as we Texomans were concerned, that was the most memorable thing. Thanks to his daughters of marriageable age, the tsar who'd escaped the rebels in his country had flourished, especially after he'd landed in America. And he'd had some real shrewd advice in farming them out. There had been people who'd wanted to connect with royalty—even royalty in exile—so bad they'd practically drooled at getting one of the grand duchesses yoked into their families. Even at the risk of having grandchildren who stood little chance of living to grow up. "So it's only boys who get this bleeding thing?" Paulina and Eli looked at each other. "It's not certain," she said. "But it looks that way." "But some boys don't get it." They nodded simultaneously. "There's no way to know, if the woman's going to pass it to her baby?" Again the nod. Tsar Alexei and his second wife, a Danish princess, were probably praying every day for a healthy boy who didn't have the bleeding disease. What if the tsar's wife had a girl, and then the tsar died? My stepfather, who read every newspaper he could get and also listened to the radio, had told me it was a miracle the tsar had lived so long. Alexei'd almost passed so many times there was probably a coffin and a plan of the funeral somewhere in a drawer in the palace in San Diego. I thought about it for a few minutes that night, lying on my blanket in nowhere, listening to the little sounds of the two grigoris sleeping, the movements of small animals in the sparse brush. No matter what glorious marriages Alexei's sisters had made, they could not rule if Alexei died. His baby boy—if he had a boy—would inherit the throne. Babies were fragile. I could see why it was so important to keep Alexei alive and breeding. But why was the blood of one half-assed wizard essential, the point of this search by Eli and Paulina? Why had the guilds sent these two on this quest? They needed the blood of Oleg Karkarov specifically, and that was just weird. And since my father was dead, his kids' blood would be the best substitute, apparently, given the grigoris' reaction to the idea that the girl in Juárez might be a daughter of Oleg's. If this child in Juárez was not Oleg Karkarov's, I was his only living child, as far as I knew. Or at least the only living person who knew she was his. If Eli and Paulina figured that out, and sooner or later they would, I was going to be made to go someplace I didn't want to go, to serve someone I didn't want to serve. And maybe my life would be taken. There was no point wishing the grigoris had never heard my name or come to my door. Wishing never gets you anywhere. I had a practical idea. If I were smart, I'd just kill my companions right now, while I could catch them by surprise. It would have to be one killing shot apiece, bam bam. If either one had a chance to work magic, I was done for. But by the time I went to sleep, I hadn't killed them.