“You mean, like the way you were getting rid of me? Sending me far away with a man I didn’t know?”
“Hey! You didn’t know me, either!”
Felicia opened her mouth to give me an angry answer, but then she smiled just a little. “I didn’t,” she admitted. “I was scared of you. You told my uncle you were my sister. Is that true?”
I hadn’t known she still wondered about our exact relationship. I hadn’t really thought about all this at all. I’d taken care of her by finding her a place to live and a means to better herself, and I’d only felt pretty proud of that. I had been an idiot.
“Yeah, it’s true. I’m your half sister. Your dad was my dad. Oleg.”
“So what happened to him? Uncle Sergei never explained it. They went up to Texoma to earn some money. Only Uncle Sergei came back alone. Dad’s dead, right? Or was Sergei lying about that? He never hurt me, but he didn’t always tell me the truth.”
“Our father is dead. I do not want to talk about that now.” I didn’t want to talk to her about it, ever.
Felicia looked like she meant to ask me another question. But she didn’t ask the one I expected. “Is your mother alive?”
I nodded. “Yes. Her name is Candle. She’s a schoolteacher. Lives in Segundo Mexia, like me. She’s married to a man named Jackson Skidder. He’s been good to me.”
We looked at each other for a long moment. “You remember your mother?” I asked.
My sister shrugged. “A little. Her name was Marina Domínguez. She was half-Russian, and her mom was a witch. Her Mexican part was from a middle-class family in Ciudad Juárez. I don’t know how she met Dad.” Felicia paused, trying to think of what more to say, I guess. “Her family disowned her, Dad said. She died of a fever. Dad didn’t want to take her to the hospital. I was five. I saw my grandparents at the funeral, and some cousins. They blamed my dad. I never saw them again.”
People were failing Felicia right, left, and sideways.
“I want to listen to whatever you got to say. But I’m guessing they expect you back at the school before long. Please tell me about Eli.” It was all I could do to keep my voice level.
“I see Peter at least once a week. He has a class next to my classroom. He’s nice to me.”
“I’ve met him.” Because of Peter, I’d had to spend months recovering from a gunshot. But I thought the better of an eighteen-year-old who would pay attention to a kid Felicia’s age.
“I know,” Felicia said, as dryly as an eleven-year-old can. “He talks about it. A lot.”
“Why? He doesn’t really know me.”
“About as well as I do.”
“Ouch,” I said. “I note that. Get on with it.”
“Instead of Peter, Eli came to see me. The Friday after he got back from his last trip. To Dixie, right?”
I nodded.
“He told me you’d had to wear dresses in Dixie. He thought it was funny, but he said you looked real pretty.”
“Eli’s idea,” I said, looking the other way.
“I figured.” She smiled. “And I was glad to see him. Even if he talks to me like a child.”
She was eleven. Would Felicia ever get to the point?
“Eli didn’t want to come back here. He didn’t want to leave you,” Felicia said.
I sucked in my breath hard. Why had he not written me?
“Tsar Alexei ordered Eli to come to court. Everyone at school’s been talking about the plot against the tsar. For a while, no one wanted to be friends with Peter because of his dad being involved. Then Vladimir got killed somewhere in Texoma. Was that you?”
“Yes. But I got shot by his bodyguards.” Thanks to Peter’s unwanted intervention. “Took me a while to get well. You better get a move on with the story. I don’t think they’ll be happy if I keep you out all afternoon.”
“Why’d you shoot Eli and Peter’s dad?”
“Eli made me promise to kill him if I ever saw him again.”
Felicia laughed, as if she couldn’t believe that, but it was true.
“Thanks to Peter, I almost died,” I said. “I’m not holding it against him, because he didn’t know. I’m just saying you better be sure you understand a situation before you act.”
Felicia looked at me for a long spell. Maybe she was thinking about me dying. Then she’d have no family at all. Or maybe she was thinking about what a rube I was.
Felicia started her story again. “When Eli told me the tsar had called him in, and gave me the mushy message for you, he said that the tsar didn’t know the truth about anything, and that he—Eli—felt like no matter what he’d done, he hadn’t cleared his half of the family name.” Like me, Eli’s father had another family, from a wife who had come before Eli’s mom, Veronika. Bogdan and Dagmar Savarov, Prince Vladimir’s older sons, had joined with their father in plotting with Grand Duke Alexander, who wanted to seize the throne.
“Eli told me to explain to you that he didn’t know what was going to happen to him, but he was afraid that someone was trying to put the whammy on him and Peter and his sisters and mom.”
“What does that mean?”
“That someone wants to do them in. Discredit them.”
“I don’t know why anyone would do that.”
“Eli thinks it’s his older brothers.” She clenched her teeth before she could call me an idiot.
I gaped at my little sister. “This is the kind of thing you talk about at school?” When I’d been at school, we’d talked about who was sweet on whom, and the price cattle were fetching, and how long it would be before the whole town got electricity. My life was a lot simpler.
“At our school, anyway.” Felicia looked hard and cold. “Politics. We’ll all serve the tsar in some way. Me and the other bastards keep him alive. The grigoris will keep him safe. Some of us can do both.”
I didn’t think I’d known the word “politics” when I was eleven. “Wait,” I said, reviewing her words. “Wait. You have magic ability?” Made sense, now that I knew she was three-quarters grigori.
“You know someone’s been watching us?” Felicia said.
“Yep, that grigori from the school. The receptionist.”
“Tom O’Day. He’s from Texoma. You know him?”
“No.” As far as I knew, grigoris always came from Russian families who’d emigrated with the tsar, or from England, Scotland, or Ireland. “I never knew there was such a thing as a homegrown grigori,” I told Felicia, making myself smile. “Does some grown-up from the school always watch you when you leave the grounds?”
Felicia nodded, also smiling. “And it’s called the campus. When we go out, we’re usually with a staff grigori. They’re afraid we’ll try something magical when we’re out. And in this instance, they don’t know you.”
I knew we weren’t sticking to the subject—our watcher—but I couldn’t help but ask, “Are there others besides you? Not full grigori?”
“A boy older than me. He’s another Rasputin grandkid. A couple of babies, the same.”