“Thank you.”

“This is a bad idea. Please reconsider.”

He shook his head. “No.”

I walked him through the privacy policy and had him sign all of the waivers. “What happens once we find whoever is responsible?”

“I’ll take care of things from there.”

“Meaning you’ll kill your wife’s murderer.”

“It’s the way Houses handle things,” Cornelius said.

“Well, I’m not a House. I’m a person with a family, and I respect and try to obey the laws of this country. I won’t hesitate to defend you or myself, but I won’t condone murder.”

“Understood,” Cornelius said. “How do we start?”

“I need to be able to speak to Matthias Forsberg. I need face-to-face time so I can ask him some questions. I can make the necessary calls tomorrow, but he’ll refuse to see me.”

“You don’t have the social status and you work for his competitor.” Cornelius nodded. “Matthias is an active participant in the Assembly. He never misses a session. Tomorrow happens to be December 15th. The session starts at 9:00 a.m.”

“I don’t have admission to the Assembly.” The Assembly was an unofficial executive body that governed the magic users at state and national levels. The Texas State Assembly met in Houston. A family had to have at least two Prime-caliber magic users in three generations to be considered a House and each House had a single seat. Technically the Assembly had no power within the U.S. government, but, practically, when the Houses spoke in one collective voice, both Congress and the White House listened.

“A family name has to be good for something, right?” Cornelius smiled. It never reached his eyes. They stayed bitter and haunted. “As a Significant and a scion of a House, I’m free to attend the Assembly and bring a companion of my choice. I intend to be an active participant in this investigation, Ms. Baylor.”

“Call me Nevada,” I told him. “Good. Then we’ll meet here tomorrow at seven.”

Cornelius and Matilda left, the hellhound Bunny in tow. I sat at my desk for a few moments, long enough to shoot a quick email to Bern with everyone’s names and a brief description of what happened, then took a deep breath and let the air out slowly. Breaking this to my family would be hard. My mother might disown me.

I fished the dollar-sign bride out of the trash, smoothed her out the best I could, and stuck her and the ME report into a manila folder. This job would affect the entire family. They had the right to know the risk. Besides, experience proved that keeping secrets when you were a Baylor didn’t work. Sooner or later all your hidden schemes exploded into the light, and then there was hell to pay and hurt feelings.

I tucked the folder under my arm and grabbed my book, Hexology by Stahl. A few weeks ago a package of books had arrived at our doorstep in a padded yellow envelope, six books in all, dealing with spells, arcane circles, and magic theory. A plain rectangular label had just one word printed on it—Nevada. Interrogation of my family provided no leads. They didn’t know where the books came from, they didn’t order them, and they had no idea who did, although they offered many wild theories.

I’d dusted the envelope for prints but I didn’t find any. The label proved to be a generic four-by-four inches, and a half-dozen office stores in the ten-mile radius carried identical labels. And of course, they also carried the same yellow envelopes. My name was printed in Times New Roman font, 22 pt size. I briefly considered swabbing the envelope for DNA and paying a private lab to analyze it to eliminate my family and run it through their database for possible matches, but the lab quoted $600 to run the swab and I couldn’t justify the expense to myself. It was still driving me nuts.

The books had proven incredibly useful and I’d been reading them nonstop trying to catch up on years of neglected education in magic theory. This particular book was on hexes—magic constructs that locked information within a human mind. I had encountered a very powerful hex several weeks ago and had to peer under it to save the city. The book confirmed that I had come perilously close to killing a man through sheer ignorance.

I made my way through the office back door into a wide hallway. The delicious smell of seared carne asada swirled around me. I turned right and headed toward the kitchen.

When Dad was fighting his losing battle with cancer, we sold our house. We sold everything we could, but we still had to survive and make a living, so a strategic decision was made: we used our business to purchase a large warehouse. On the east side, the warehouse was the front for Baylor Investigative Agency. We installed interior walls and a drop ceiling, making a small but comfortable office space: three offices on one side and a break room and conference room on the other. On the west side, the warehouse turned into a motor pool, where Grandma Frida worked on tanks and armored vehicles for the Houston elite. Between the office and the motor pool, separated from the latter by a large wall, lay three thousand square feet of living space.

My parents had this vision of making our living space look like the inside of an ordinary house. Instead we succeeded in throwing walls where they were needed and sometimes not at all, so in certain areas our place bore a startling resemblance to a home-improvement showroom. The kitchen was one of those spots. Square, roomy, with a generous island and a big kitchen table made from an old slab of reclaimed wood, it would give most cooking shows a run for their money. Right now it sat half empty: my mother, Grandma Frida, and my oldest cousin, Bern, were the only ones left. My two sisters and Bern’s younger brother, Leon, must’ve run off already. Just as well.

Small bowls filled the center of the table, holding everything from grated cheese and pico de gallo to guacamole. Soft-taco night. I refrained from cheering, grabbed an apron out of the kitchen drawer, put it on, and landed in a chair next to Grandma. There was no way I could get stains on my hideously expensive suit, and taking it off and changing into casual clothes would’ve taken too long. I was too hungry.

“And the hunter home from the hill,” Bern announced.

I squinted at him. “Decided to take British Literature after all?”

“It was the lesser of two evils. The next semester will try my patience.” Bern wolfed down his food and reached for another taco. Over six feet tall and two hundred pounds, most of it bone and muscle, Bern went to judo twice a week and ate with all the appetite of a bear preparing to hibernate for winter.

I pulled a warm soft-taco shell out and began filling it with delicious things. I’d had to bust my butt to get through college as fast as I could, because I was the primary breadwinner. But now the business was making money. We weren’t rich—we probably barely scraped the bottom of the middle class—but we could afford for Bernard to take his time with his education. I wanted him to have the whole college experience. Instead he took every opportunity to pile more course work on himself.

I eyed my mom’s plate. One lone taco. Where Grandma Frida was naturally thin, with a cloud of platinum-white curls and big blue eyes, my mother used to be muscular and athletic, built with strength and endurance in mind. That was before the war left her with a permanent limp. She was softer now, rounder around the edges. It bothered her. She’d been eating less and less and a couple of weeks ago we realized she’d begun skipping dinner altogether.