Burn for Me: A Hidden Legacy Novel (17 page)

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?”