Burn for Me

Chapter 9

“You killed Peaches.” I stepped over the gap in the bridge.

“Of course I killed him.”

I opened my mouth and closed it.

“Okay,” Mad Rogan said. “This is distracting you, and I need you to function, so let’s fix this. Which part of what happened is upsetting?”

I opened my mouth again and closed it again without saying anything. Peaches would’ve attacked us, possibly killed us, so what Mad Rogan did was justified. It was the sheer sudden brutality of it. It was the way he did it, without any hesitation. One moment Peaches was there, and then he vanished. No trace of him remained. He was crushed out of existence. He was . . . dead.

“Let me help,” he said. “You’ve been taught all your life that killing another person is wrong, and that belief persists even in the face of facts. Not only would Peaches have killed us given the chance, but this way I only had to kill one person rather than kill half a dozen of his followers. I saved several lives, but your conditioning tells you I’ve done the wrong thing. I didn’t. He started it. I finished it.”

“It’s not that. I was getting ready to shoot him in the head.” But when you shot someone, there was a slight chance they might live. There would be a body. What he did was so complete and sudden that I needed a couple of moments to come to terms with it.

“Then what is it?”

“It’s the . . .” I struggled for words. “Splat.”

Mad Rogan glanced at me, his eyes puzzled. “Splat.”

“Yes.”

“I had briefly considered impaling him with one of those steel poles from the roof, but I decided it would be too graphic for you. Would that have been preferable?”

My mind conjured up Peaches with a steel pole sticking out of his stomach. “No.”

“I really would like to know,” he said with genuine curiosity. “The next time I kill someone, I’d like to do it in a way that doesn’t freak you out.”

“How about you don’t kill anybody for a little bit?”

“I can’t make that promise.”

Small talk with the dragon. How are you? Eaten any adventurers lately? Sure, just had one this morning. Look, I still got his femur stuck in my teeth. Is that upsetting to you?

Ahead Xadar building loomed, top three stories above the water, its faded green sign grimy and stained with swamp algae. The tangle of wires on the roof looked like a black spiderweb. Somewhere inside, Bug sat in the center of this web, wrapped in his hysterical brand of crazy. I stopped.

“Don’t kill Bug,” I said. “I’m dead serious.”

Mad Rogan smiled.

“I mean it. Do not murder Bug. If you kill him, our deal is off.”

“Fine,” he said.

I resumed my walking.

“Maybe you should make me a list of people I can kill and ways in which they’re allowed to die,” he said.

“You are not funny.”

“I’m very funny. Just ask Peaches.”

We reached the building and climbed through a large second-story window. A damp, musty smell emanated from the commercial rug. Slugs crawled across the fallen cubicles. An old motivational poster hung on the wall. It showed a mountain climber hanging by his hands off a cliff. The caption said Break the Boundaries. The glass was cracked.

“Don’t touch anything,” I said. “He has the whole place booby-trapped.”

I followed a narrow path between the cubicles, stopped before a camera mounted in the corner, and held up the vial of orange pills.

An intercom somewhere close crackled with static and a scratchy male voice said, “Stay there. I’ll send Napoleon.” The static cut out.

“Have you ever killed someone?” Mad Rogan asked me.

“No. I saw a man die once.” I shouldn’t have said that.

“How did it happen?”

I glanced at him and stopped. He was focused on me, as if I was about to tell him the most intriguing thing in the world and he was prepared to absorb every word. Even his magic hovered around him, anticipating. For a few moments I had Mad Rogan’s undivided attention, and it wasn’t frightening. It was . . . flattering. As long as I told him things, he would keep looking at me just like that, and that alone was enough incentive to compel most women to tell him anything he wanted. And if I did tell him things, he would likely use them against me in some way.

He was still waiting. Oh what the hell.

“My dad wanted me to get a taste for the different areas of PI work, so when I was sixteen, I interned with a repo agent. He worked with his two sons. Our first few runs were great. We’d find the vehicle, sneak up, and tow it off, like spies on some secret operation in a movie. It was exciting. The guys told me how people try to scam the banks out of money, so we were doing a good thing.”

My lips had gone dry. It still bothered me after almost a decade.

“What happened?” he said, his blue eyes welcoming. A man had no right to be this fiercely sexual without even trying.

“We were trying to repossess a truck from a small suburban home, when a woman came out of the house. She was holding a toddler, and her eyes had this hollow look. She said, ‘Take it. I can’t afford to put gas into it anyway.’ The expression on her face was terrible. I should’ve quit right there. I should’ve called my dad and asked him to come and get me. But I was trying to do the right thing. My dad got me this job, and I was going to do it, even if it sucked.

“The guys just attached the tow, and then this man tore out of the house with a rifle and started shooting at us. No warning. We couldn’t even get into our truck. We just hunkered down behind it. The woman was screaming, but he kept firing at our truck. Doug called the cops. They got there fast. The man shot at the police cruiser, and the cops gunned him down. I saw the bullets hit him in the chest, and then he collapsed. More kids ran out of the house, and everyone started crying and screaming. I remember cops led his wife away and she kept trying to tell them that he was a good man and wouldn’t do something like this. I found out later he lost his job four months before that and his house had gone into foreclosure. My dad came and got me, and I never had to go back.” For which I’d thanked my lucky stars every morning for a month. “Your turn. First person you ever saw die.”

“I was seven,” he said, his voice intimate and quiet. “I was practicing spells, and my grandfather was watching me. He had dozed off in a chair, the way he usually did. Suddenly he clutched his head, groaned, and fell down. I ran to him, but he wasn’t breathing. He had a brain aneurysm. I ran downstairs and told my grandmother that Grandfather died. She told me that laziness was the worst trait in a man, and making up lies to get out of practice wasn’t much better. Then she told Gerard, her servant, to take me to the study and lock me in there. I sat on the floor for two hours looking at my grandfather’s corpse.”

Oh God.

A faint noise came from the hallway. A small dog trotted into view. He was squat, with huge, triangular ears and a pushed-up muzzle that said that somewhere in his ancestry there was an adventurous French bulldog. The origin of the rest of his DNA was a mystery. He was solid black, his coat fuzzy and wiry, and he moved like he owned the place.

“Hey, Napoleon,” I said.

Napoleon regarded me with solemn dark eyes from his cute gargoyle face. Then he turned around and padded into the hallway.

“A dog guide,” Mad Rogan said.

“Yes. Be careful. Bug likes to string clear fishing line around. If you pull one, bad things will happen.”

“What kind of bad things?” he asked.

“Exploding kind.”

We followed Napoleon through the maze of hallways up to the third floor. A heavy steel door barred our way. I took the Taser out of my backpack.

“No killing.”

“I’ll be on my best behavior,” Mad Rogan assured me.

The door clanged and opened, revealing a room lined with monitors. They sprouted from the walls and ceiling on narrow mounts, like rectangular electronic flowers blooming among vines of cables. In the middle of this digital jungle, in a broken circle of keyboards thrusting from the walls, a man sat on a rotating platform. His clothes, a grimy, dark, long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of fatigue pants that had seen better days, hung on his slight frame. His disheveled dark hair, dragged rather than brushed from his broad, high forehead, competed with his clothes to see which lasted without washing the longest. A small nose and a small mouth combined with a triangular jaw made his face look top-heavy. His big eyes with brown irises burned with a manic intensity. His hands shook.

“Give it to me.” He jumped off his chair. He was about my height and weighed maybe twenty pounds less. “Give me.”

I raised the Taser. “Work first.”

He bounced in place. “I need it. Give it to me.”

“Work first.”

“Give! Give, give give gimme . . .” He was moving too fast, jittery, shaking. His words began to blend. “Giveittomebitch give giveme need-need-need . . .”

“Work first.”

“Fuck!” Bug spun on his foot. “What?”

“Adam Pierce. Find him.”

He held up a finger. “To take the edge off. One. One!”

I passed the vial to Mad Rogan, keeping the Taser on Bug. He’d made a lunge at me before. “Please give him one pill.”

Mad Rogan opened the jar. A pill rose in the air. Wow. The man’s control was crazy.

The pill floated to Bug. He snatched it out of the air, yanked a knife from the sheath on his belt, put the pill on the table, and sliced a third off. His fingers trembled. He swiped the smaller section of the pill off the desk and slid it in his mouth. Bug froze, standing on his toes, his hands straight down, as if he’d been about to take flight. The shaking stopped. He became completely and utterly still.

Mad Rogan glanced at me.

“Equzol,” I told him.

Equzol was a military drug designed to level you out. If you were sleepy, it would keep you awake; if you were hyper, it would calm you down. When you took it, the world became clear. You saw everything, were aware of everything, reacted fast, but nothing freaked you out. It was issued to snipers and convoy drivers. They would take it to keep from overcorrecting or giving in to fatigue, and once it wore off, they’d sleep for twenty hours straight. It was a classified substance, but my mother still had connections.

Bug opened his eyes. The strange, jittery hysteria was still there, but it receded, curling down for a rest deep inside him.

“They’re quiet,” he said softly and smiled.

I nodded at the jar. “Adam Pierce.”

Bug slid into his seat and pulled up the sleeves of his dark, grimy, long-sleeved shirt. Dozens of tiny dots marked his forearms, each a tiny individual tattoo blending together into an arcane design. His hands flew over half a dozen keyboards as if he’d been a virtuoso pianist. Tranquil sounds of trance music filled the space. The screens scrolled too fast to follow, the images flickering. He was tapping into the security cameras on the streets. I’d seen him do it before, and he was expert at it.

Mad Rogan’s face had hardened into a cold, determined expression. His eyes turned merciless.

“What is it?” I asked quietly.

“He’s a swarmer,” he ground through his teeth.

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“How long has he been one?”

“Yes.”

“Three years. He was bound to a swarm two years into his enlistment, and he’s been out of the Air Force for one.”

Mad Rogan stared at Bug. “He should be dead. Their life expectancy after the binding is eighteen months.”

“Bug is special.”

Swarmers were surveillance specialists. They were bound by magic to what they themselves described as swarms. Swarms had no physical manifestation. They lived somehow inside the swarmer’s psyche, letting him or her split his attention over hundreds of independent tasks, like a river splitting into narrow streams. Swarmers processed information at a superhuman speed. Most of them had the binding done in the military, and most of them didn’t live two years past that. Those who volunteered for the procedure were either terminally ill or tempted by a huge bonus payable to their families. Bug somehow survived. It might have been his deprivation chamber, or maybe he was just better suited for it than most, but he lived, got out of Air Force, and hid here, away from everyone.

Mad Rogan locked his teeth. It made his jaw look even more square.

“Does it bother you?” I asked.

“It bothers me that they do this to soldiers, squeeze everything they can out of them, and then discard them like garbage. People know this goes on and nobody gives a shit. Acceptable losses.” He said the word like it burned his mouth.

So some part of the dragon was human after all.

My cell phone beeped. Unlisted number. Again. I answered it.

“Yes?”

“Hello, Snow,” Adam Pierce purred into my ear.

I fought an urge to scream into the phone. “Hi, Adam.” I put him on speaker. “Did you decide to turn yourself in?”

Mad Rogan went from icy anger to predatory alertness in a blink.

“Depends. Are we still in lust? I mean in love. Funny how I keep making that mistake.”

“Depends,” I said. “Do you want to meet so we can talk about it?”

“Not right now,” Adam said. “I’m busy tonight. Maybe later.”

“Found him,” Bug pressed a key on the keyboard.

The screen flickered and showed the same image from different angles. Adam Pierce stood on the corner of a busy street, holding a phone to his ear. Faded jeans hugged his ass and long legs. He wore his trademark black leather jacket and black boots. A tall building ten floors high rose in front of him, its dusky, smoke-colored glass crossed by stripes of bright yellow. To the left, another building, a tall, narrow tower, offered silvery windows to the rays of the evening sun.

“Were you looking for me?” Adam asked. “So sweet.”

“You sure you don’t want to meet?”

“Yeah. Turn the TV on. I’ve got something to show you.”

The phone went dead. On the screen Adam tossed a cell phone onto the street, shrugged off his jacket, revealing bare, muscled back, and let the jacket fall to the ground. His face was plastered over every local news broadcast at least once a day and here he was, in broad daylight, taking his clothes off in public. Somebody would recognize him and call the cops for sure. Damn it.

Adam strode into the intersection, oblivious to traffic. Tires screeched as a dark sedan swerved, desperately trying to avoid plowing into him. He raised his head. The air around him shimmered, rising. A stray paper receipt carried by the wind fluttered by and burst into white-hot flame before raining down in a powdery ash.

A ring of fire ignited on the asphalt around him. The bright orange flames rushed outward, spreading in a complex pattern. An arcane circle blazed into life. He must’ve painted it on the asphalt with some kind of fuel.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Rogan growled. “It’s fire-attuned. I can tell you it’s a high-level circle. He’s about to offload a lot of power.”

Adam leaned back. The tightly defined muscles flexed and bulged under his skin. He spread his arms wide, his biceps trembling with the strain. His body froze, every muscle tight, every tendon ready. The panels of a green jaguar parked on the street a few feet away began to melt.

“Where is this?” Mad Rogan asked.

“Corner of Sam Houston Drive and Bear Street,” Bug said.

About ten minutes from us, off Sam Houston Parkway. Around Adam, traffic stopped. People got out of their cars and stared.

“Zoom in,” Mad Rogan ordered.

Bug touched a key. The camera zoomed in on Adam. His eyes were gone. In their place a blazing yellow inferno glared at the world. A translucent new shape overlaid Adam’s body, shining here and there with deep, fiery orange. His hands spouted foot-long, angular phantom claws, as if he had put on a pair of demonic glass gloves. Translucent curved spikes burst from his spine.

“Goddamn moron,” Mad Rogan snarled. “I know what this is.”

Brilliant, white hot fireballs formed between Adam’s opened fingers, churning with red and yellow.

“It’s Hellspawn,” Rogan said. “House Pierce-specific high spell.”

High spells were the result of generations of research and experimentation, and Adam Pierce was about to use one of them to cause havoc in the middle of the city. Right now House Pierce was collectively having fits.

Adam opened his mouth and vomited a torrent of fire at the dark building. Glass shattered, raining down. The fire punched through the building. Part of the flames shot straight up, melting glass in a column of fire.

People screamed. Fire alarms wailed. The towering column of fire shot higher, an unbridled power of a Prime running wild.

A fire engine came down the street, swerved to avoid Adam, and pulled into the parking lot of the silver high-rise. Odd.

“Are you seeing this?” I asked.

“Yes.” Rogan focused on the fire engine.

The doors of the fire engine opened. People in firefighter suits jumped out and moved toward the building in a determined way.

I thought out loud. “Why evacuate that building instead of the building he’s burning? Can you zoom in?”

Bug struck a quick staccato on the keys. Three of his screens zoomed in on a firefighter crew.

Two of the people carried fireman axes. The other three people were carrying rifles. There was no conceivable reason for the firemen to carry rifles. When people faced the prospect of being trapped in a burning building, they panicked. That’s why we spent a great deal of time training children to never question what a man in a fireman suit said. We were conditioned from a very early age to not think but just blindly obey whatever order the fireman gave us, because he was there to save us. If a fireman said to evacuate, we would run for the nearest exit.

As if on cue, the doors of the building opened and people in business clothes rushed out.

Mad Rogan’s face turned grim.

Adam Pierce was a diversion. The real target was located in that building, and the “firemen” with rifles were going after it.

The screens turned dark.

“Shit fire and save the matches,” Bug swore. “Someone took out the street-level cameras. Let me get a different angle . . .”

The screens flickered, still dark.

“No cameras on the other side of the block either.” Bug’s eyebrows came together. “Dickfuckers.”

Mad Rogan grabbed my hand. “Now we really have to go. Come on.”

“Equzol first!” Bug yelled.

I tossed him the jar. He snapped it out of the air. “Napoleon, out!”

Napoleon jumped off the pillow and bounded out of the room. I chased him.

Mad Rogan rattled off a phone number at Bug. “Get eyes inside that building, and I’ll get you twice as many of your happy pills.”

We ran through the hallways, careful not to trip on anything. Mad Rogan put his cell to his ear. “I need the list of businesses in a high-rise on the corner of Sam Houston Drive and Bear Street. Blueprints, ownership, send me everything.”

“Think Adam’s a diversion?” I almost ran into a pile of chairs.

“If he is, it’s a good one.”

We burst out onto the wooden bridge. Something flashed in an empty window in the building across from us, reflecting the sun. I grabbed Mad Rogan’s arm and yanked him toward me. A shot rang out.

“Where?” Mad Rogan growled.

“Top floor, left corner.”

A chunk of concrete the size of a basketball shot out from the pile of rubble and rocketed into the dark window. A muffled scream echoed through the building sounding a lot like “Ow!”

We ran down the bridge.

“Crown Tech,” a calm male voice said from Mad Rogan’s cell. “Emerald Drilling, Palomo Industries, Powell Piping Technologies, Bickard, Stang, and Associates, and Reisen Information Services Corporation.”

Mad Rogan hung up.

“Does that tell you anything?” I asked.

“No.”

Ahead, a pattern crossed the bridge, drawn in chalk and coal. It hadn’t been there when we had come the other way. Mad Rogan frowned. The boards with the pattern broke. A flash of vile-smelling green mist shot into the air. He jumped over the gap. I followed.

“I think they’re trying to kill me,” he said.

“You came into the Pit and punked them in their own territory. Of course they are trying to kill you. Get used to it.”

The bridge shuddered under our footsteps. We ran through the island and onto the bridge leading out.

Ahead, sun reflected in a long, horizontal spark right at the level of Rogan’s throat.

“Wire!”

“I see it.” He pulled a knife out of his jeans and slashed at the wire. It snapped, the two ends coiling to the sides. We ran down the bridge into the parking lot and jumped into the Range Rover. Mad Rogan peeled out of the parking lot so fast that the car almost banked. I grabbed onto the door handle out of sheer self-preservation.

“If he is using Hellspawn, we might not be able to get him,” Mad Rogan said.

“What?”

“Hellspawn creates null space.”

“In English?”

“The amount of magic he’s using is so high that the boundary of the circle he’s in doesn’t exist in our physical realm.”

“How can it not exist? What does that—” A tiny grey body shot in front of the Land Rover. “Squirrel!”

Mad Rogan swerved to the side, trying to avoid the suicidal beast. The SUV hit a curb and jumped. For a terrifying second, we almost flew, weightless. My heart leaped into my throat. The heavy vehicle landed back on the pavement with a thud. The squirrel leapt into the grass on the other side.

I remembered to breathe. “Thank you for not killing the squirrel.”

“You’re welcome, although now I want to go back and strangle it.” Mad Rogan took a ramp onto the interstate. “Back to arcane circles. The boundary of the circle is where our physical reality meets the arcane realm, the ‘place’ where we reach to get swarms for swarmers, for example. It’s a small hole in our space. Nothing can penetrate the circle while the null space is active. You can stand on the street and lob grenades at Pierce, and they’ll just bounce off.”

We’ll see about that.

While the Land Rover hurtled down the interstate, an imaginary conversation between Adam and me played in my head. Hi, Adam. Did you set fire to my house? Did you try to kill my grandmother? They said I had to bring him in alive. They didn’t say anything about what condition he had to be in.

Maybe I could do it again, that thing I did with Mad Rogan—lock Adam in place and make him answer me. I bet I could. Just thinking about Grandma Frida made me shake.

Mad Rogan took the exit, and I glanced at the clock. Four minutes. We made it in record time.

Ahead the street rolled out, devoid of traffic. In the middle of the intersection, Adam Pierce spat a torrent of white-hot flames at the building. Two wrecks that used to be cars slowly melted a couple dozen feet from him.

Mad Rogan slammed on the brakes, and the Land Rover screeched to a halt.

“Get us closer, please.” I reached for my gun.

“Too hot. Look.”

The pavement just outside Adam’s circle had turned dark and soft. He was melting the road.

I jumped out of the car. Heat bathed me, blocking my way like a wall.

A car door clanged as Mad Rogan leaped out of the vehicle. A metal pole holding up a streetlight snapped in half and flew like a spear toward Adam Pierce. The pole hit the circle and ricocheted, spinning back at us through the air. I gulped. The pole reversed and punched the invisible boundary of Adam’s magic circle, grinding against it.

Mad Rogan grimaced.

The pole clattered to the pavement.

“Null space,” he said. “Come on.”

I could see Adam. He was right there. Argh.

“Nevada! We’re wasting time.”

Right there.

But the firemen and Adam were working together. If we got what the firemen were after, Adam would come to us.

We spun around and hopped back into the Land Rover. Mad Rogan took a sharp turn left, circling the buildings, heading for the silver tower. He drove up to the front steps and parked the car, then we got out. The moment I stepped onto the stone steps leading to the door, a blinding headache gripped my brain and squeezed like a vise, tighter and tighter. I took another step up the stairs. The doorway wavered in front of me, distorted. The pain scraped the inside of my skull. I had an absurd feeling that my brain had swelled like an overinflated water balloon and was about to pop.

“They have a mage blocking the door.” Mad Rogan backed away onto the pavement and jogged right, looking at his phone.

I followed him. As soon as I left the stairway, the headache vanished. That was a nice power to have. If I’d had that power, I wouldn’t have had to build retractable stairs to my room.

In the distance sirens wailed. The emergency responders were on their way, which meant the fake firemen in the building would speed up whatever they were doing so they could get away before Houston’s finest showed up in force. We had to find a way in, and we had to find it now.

Since the firemen left someone covering the front entrance, it was highly likely they were still on the first floor. Their team was small. If their goal was on a different floor, they wouldn’t have left anyone covering the front entrance; they would’ve all gone to that floor instead. But they left a guard, so all of them were probably on the first floor, and they were armed, which meant they would probably defend the side entrances. That left us with windows, but the bottom floor of the tower was solid stone, and the first row of windows started about eighteen feet off the ground.

“They’ll expect people coming through the side exits,” I called out.

“That’s why we’re not going through the side exit.” Mad Rogan showed me a blueprint on his phone. “There are five ways to access the lobby, front entrance, two side exits, elevator, and an internal stairway.”

“Perfect.” They’d evacuated the building, so they wouldn’t expect us coming from the internal stairway. “Now we just have to get into the building itself.”

Mad Rogan pointed at a pair of green industrial-size Dumpsters. They slid across the pavement toward us. The first Dumpster bumped into the wall. Mad Rogan strained. The second Dumpster rose in the air and landed on top of the second one, hanging off one side. Together, they were just tall enough to let us reach the second-floor windows.

I grabbed onto the first Dumpster and climbed up. Black and white bags filled it nearly to the brink, and I had to cross to get to the second Dumpster. I stepped down and sank in to my knees. The top bag popped, and a metric ton of old lasagna spilled onto my pants. The stench of soured spaghetti sauce washed over me. Ew. Of all the trash from this whole giant building, I had to step on a bag from the food court. Damn it.

Well, they’d definitely smell me coming.

I mashed my way through the bags to the second Dumpster, climbed up, pulled out my gun, and hit the butt of the gun against the glass. It shattered. I knocked the shards in and climbed inside.

A conference room: a long table, chairs, and a flat-screen TV on the wall. Mad Rogan climbed in behind me, pulled out his phone, and showed it to me. A text message from a blocked number with a video clip. He clicked the link. A grainy video filled the screen, showing a lobby of a building, with a polished greyish floor and two rows of wide columns. At the top of the screen the glass front entrance spilled sunlight onto the floor. A man in fireman’s gear leaned against the wall near it, a rifle in his hands. Below him, on the right, another gunman leaned against a marble column. A little lower still on the left, right past the elevators, three people stood by the wall. One held his hand against the marble, the other swung an axe, hitting the wall below, and the third covered them with the rifle. The clip stopped, barely five seconds long. Bug had come through.

Whatever it was they wanted was in the wall. The man with the hand on the marble had to be a sniffer. Sniffers had higher sensitivity to magic, and they could find a magical object even through stone.

“The stairway will put us here.” Mad Rogan pointed to the left bottom corner of the screen.

We’d be in full view of the three gunmen. “Are you bulletproof?”

“No, but the metal door that blocks the staircase likely is. Do you have your Ruger?”

I pulled the gun out of its holster.

“I’ll hold the door as a shield, but you’ll have to fire.”

“Why can’t you just slice them to pieces like that chopstick?”

“Because my telekinetic magic doesn’t work on living things. I can throw something metal fast enough to slice an opponent to pieces. I can hurl a board at him, because cut wood is dead. I can choke him with his own clothes if they are loose enough. But I can’t simply throw a body.”

Oh. “So the best way to fight you is to strip naked and attack?”

His eyes flashed with a wicked light. “Yes. You should try it and see what happens.”

Well, I did walk right into that one.

“I could try to slice the barrels off their guns, but considering the distance, I would need several seconds to aim, and they would likely shoot us. So, I’ll provide a shield, but the rest is up to you. I’m a less than mediocre shot.”

I leaned back. “Humility? I had no idea you had it in you.”

“No,” he said. “Honesty. I’m not very good with a gun. I don’t typically carry one.”

The pile of rubble that had buried Peaches flashed before me. Not that he ever needed one. “Good that I brought mine, then.”

“Nevada,” Mad Rogan said.

The sound of my name coming from him short-circuited my brain. All of my thoughts stopped. Damn it. I had to get over this, and fast.

“These men are well trained.”

Of course they were. They’d positioned themselves so that every entrance was covered by at least two intersecting fields of fire. No matter where we entered, at least two of them could shoot us from different angles.

“If we walk in there, they’ll shoot us. They won’t hesitate—they’ll do it on instinct. It’s second nature to them, a reflex, like stopping before a red light.”

“Mhm.” It’s good that he was here to explain it to me. I would’ve never figured it out on my own.

“You have to shoot them back. Is it going to be a problem?”

“There is only one way to find out,” I said.

He nudged the door open. An empty hallway lay before us. We ran down the hallway, passing the elevators. I stopped and mashed the down button. A diversion never hurt.

The elevator doors slid open with a chime.

“Good idea.” Mad Rogan stepped in, pushed the button for the lobby, and stepped out.

We jogged to the end of the hallway where a large sign said EXIT. Behind us, the doors of the elevator chimed as it began its descent to the lobby. With luck, they would all be looking at the elevator instead of the stairs.

We ran down the stairwell. My blood was rushing through my veins, my heart pounding too loud and too fast.

If I didn’t shoot them, they would shoot me.

I’d never killed anyone before.

The stairs ended in a large door. A grey-haired man in a dark security guard uniform sprawled facedown on the landing in front of it. The back of his head was one huge, red, wet hole. No, they didn’t hesitate to shoot. Not at all. They killed this man. Probably someone’s father, someone’s grandpa . . . This morning he got up, ate his breakfast, and came to work, and now he lay here facedown, alone and cold. He would never get up again. He would never speak, never hug anyone, never smile again. They killed him and left him here.

I had to stop Adam Pierce. Not only because I would lose everything if I didn’t, not only because he tried to kill Grandma, but because right now he was outside, spitting fire and not caring how many people he would hurt. The fastest way to stop Adam would be to get the thing he was after.

I was doing the right thing.

Mad Rogan stepped to the door, his feet shoulder-wide, his hands raised.

I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready . . .

“Aim for the center of mass,” he whispered.

Center of mass my foot.

“Ready?” he whispered.

No. No, I wasn’t. I took the safety off the Ruger. The firearm felt so heavy in my hands. Heavy and cold. “Go.”

The door shot forward, six inches above the floor, and rotated, turning horizontal, like the top of a table.

Three gunmen, one directly in front, one on the right by the elevator, the third on the left by a column.

The gunmen swung away from the elevator and toward us. I sighted the one by the elevator—it felt slow, so impossibly slow—and squeezed the trigger. The gun barked. The bullet ricocheted from the elevator doors with a metallic clang. I corrected a hair and fired the second shot. The gunman’s head snapped back. I swung left and fired at the second man by the column. The first shot took him in the neck, the second in the lower part of the face, right in his mouth.

The third gunman opened fire. The door spun, vertical again, like a shield. Bullets hammered against it.

Mad Rogan grabbed my hand and pulled me toward a column on our left. I ran with him, shielded by the door, and pressed my back to the cold marble. The hail of bullets followed us.

The whole thing must’ve taken a second, maybe two.

I just killed two people. Don’t think about it, don’t think about it . . .

Mad Rogan gaped at me, a look of utter shock on his face. I’d laugh if I could.

“My mother’s a former sniper,” I squeezed out. “I know how to shoot properly.”

The bullet stream changed direction. The gunman was walking toward us.

The door spun around the column, hovering in front of us.

“Cover me.” Mad Rogan winked at me.

I leaned left and fired at the couple by the wall in short bursts. Boom-boom-boom. They ducked behind a column. The woman-sniffer jerked a handgun up and returned fire. Bullets tore through the air next to me. I hid behind the column, stuck my gun out, and shot in her general direction. Boom-boom-boom. Out. I ejected the magazine, pulled the spare from the pocket, slapped it in, and thumbed the release forward. Ten more rounds. That’s all I had. The next time I went anywhere with Mad Rogan, I’d bring one of those bandoliers action stars wore when they routed terrorists from jungles.

Mad Rogan lunged to the left.

I fired again, the gun spitting bullets and thunder. Boom, boom. Eight rounds.

Someone screamed. The rifle fire vanished, cut off by the sound of shattering glass. Mad Rogan ducked behind the column next to me.

“Where’s the door?” I asked.

“Outside.”

I leaned out from behind the column. The man pulled something out of the wall. The woman spread her arms, snapping into the familiar mage pose. Oh no, you don’t. I fired at her twice, the bullets piercing the air in rapid twin bursts. A dense curtain of smoke shot up in front of her and my bullets vanished. I was down to six rounds.

There was a side entrance right behind them. They were about to split.

Bullets tore out the curtain of fog, too wide, chipping the wall behind me. The man and the woman couldn’t see through the smoke either.

Mad Rogan raced to the side entrance.

Ahead the man shot out of the smoke, knife in one hand. Mad Rogan rammed straight into him. He blocked the man’s right arm with his left forearm and jabbed the heel of his right hand into the man’s nose. The man staggered back. Mad Rogan snapped a kick. His foot smashed into the man’s side, right against his liver. The fireman clutched at his side and fell to the floor.

Okay, fighting him, naked or no, was a terrible idea.

A bullet tore past me. I shied back. The woman leaped out of the smoke and crashed into me. The barrel of her gun yawned at me, dark and impossibly large. The world shrank to that barrel. I grabbed her wrist and hung on, throwing all my weight into it, trying to wrestle the gun from her. She jerked me toward her and swung her right hand. Pain slashed my forearm. I caught a glimpse of knife. I struck at her face with the gun, but she twisted out of the way and slashed my side. An icy burn lashed my ribs. She was stronger and better trained. For a fraction of a second our stares connected, and I saw cold calculation in her eyes. She would kill me.

Some instinctual switch flipped inside me. Magic burst into pain in my shoulder, rolled down into my fingertips, and exploded into frothy lightning on the woman’s hand.

The woman’s eyes rolled back in her head.

It hurt. It hurt so much. My chest shuddered. It felt like every nerve in my arm snapped loose, frayed with agony.

The woman shook in my grip. The magic linked us, the pain binding us together into one.

I unlocked my fingers, severing the connection.

She crashed to the floor. Her feet drummed the ground. Foam slid from her mouth. She shuddered one last time and lay still.

“You’re full of surprises,” Mad Rogan growled next to me.

The pain receded, a dull echo of the burning agony. My right arm was red with blood.

“Are you okay?” he asked me.

The woman on the floor didn’t move. It didn’t look like she was breathing. Jesus. I dropped by her and felt for a pulse. Nothing. I didn’t mean to . . . No, I guess I did.

Mad Rogan reached over and gently raised my arm to look at the two-inch-long cut. “Shallow. You’ll live.”

My lips had gone numb. I made my mouth move. “Thank you, Doctor.”

He held up a large piece of jewelry studded with small pale stones, each about the size of a pomegranate seed. It looked like two elongated oval loops, one on top of each other, as if a child had tried to draw a hamburger and had forgotten to draw the top half of the bun. A straight piece, studded with the same stones, ran vertically through the center of the two loops. In the center, the straight piece widened into a ring about as big as my index finger and thumb touching. If it was a brooch of some sort, it was the strangest design I had ever seen.

“Is this what they were after?”

Mad Rogan nodded.

“What is it?”

“I have no idea,” he said. “Why don’t you ask him?”

I looked past him to where the last firefighter slumped against the wall, clutching at his side. Okay. I could do that. It didn’t require me to kill anyone.

I walked over and crouched by the fireman. His breath was coming out in ragged gasps.

“What did you do to him?”

“I kicked him in the liver and then broke two of his ribs. He’ll live if paramedics get here in the next ten-fifteen minutes.”

I held up the piece of jewelry. “Is this what you came here for?”

He stared at me. I focused, trying to re-create the lasso of magic that had clamped Mad Rogan and squeezed the answers out of him. Nothing happened.

“Compel him to answer,” Mad Rogan said.

“I’m trying.”

Mad Rogan picked up the knife the woman had dropped. “We can always go to Plan B.”

“Give me a minute.”

“Nevada, you’re wasting time.” His voice turned cold and precise. “Be useful for a change.”

Useful? You asshole.

“I’m tired of dragging around your dead weight.”

Nothing stirred inside me.

“Do something, don’t just sit there.”

“Has anybody told you that you’re a colossal asshole?”

Mad Rogan grimaced. “Apparently anger isn’t your trigger, and we don’t have time to figure out what it is. Oh well.”

He jabbed the knife into the man’s leg. The fireman screamed. I winced.

“Is this what you came here for?” Mad Rogan barked.

“Yes.”

True.

“Is it magic?” I asked.

“No.”

“Lie,” I said.

Mad Rogan yanked the knife out and jabbed it into the man’s leg again. The man howled.

“I’ll keep cutting you until your leg turns into hamburger,” Mad Rogan told him, his voice light. “Then I’ll put a tourniquet on it and start on your other leg. Answer her questions, or you’ll never walk again.”

“Are you working with Adam Pierce?” I asked.

“No.”

“Lie.”

Mad Rogan stabbed the man’s leg again.

“What does it do?” I asked.

The man stared at me.

Mad Rogan jabbed his leg again, methodically, calmly, the knife going in and out, in and out . . .

The man cried out, “It opens the gate to enlightenment!”

“True.”

Mad Rogan glanced at me.

I spread my arms.

“What time is it?” the man groaned.

I looked at the electronic clock above the elevator. “Five thirty-nine. No, wait, five forty.”

The man smiled. “Three . . .”

Mad Rogan spun around.

“Two . . .”

Mad Rogan lunged at me, knocking me off my feet.

“One . . .”

An enormous fireball erupted from the side entrance. Orange flame boiled, raging toward us. Heat bathed my face.

That’s it, flashed in my head. I’m dead.

The floor surged up and swallowed us whole.