Burn for Me: A Hidden Legacy Novel (21 page)

Mad Rogan swiped his phone and held it to his ear. “This is Mad Rogan. Meet me in the Galleria by the fountain at Nordstrom in an hour.”

He hung up and looked at me. “Would you like to come?”

“Sure.”

“Front door in fifteen minutes.” He turned around and strode out.

I glanced at Bug’s face on the monitor. “When I met you, you told me you’d rather drink sewage than work with a Prime or anyone from the military again.”

Bug bristled. “So?”

I pointed with my thumb over my shoulder. “He’s a Prime and ex-military.”

“You don’t understand,” Bug said. “He’s . . . he’s Mad Rogan.”

“Oh spare me.”

He waved at me and Bern. “Kid, I’ll be moving soon. If you want the M9, you can have it.”

“That’s mighty big of you,” Bern said. “What’s the catch?”

“No catch. I’m getting something better, so don’t go thinking I’m being nice. It just saves me from having to torch all this junk.”

The screens went dark.

“Did Mad Rogan just recruit Bug?” I asked.

“Appears that way,” Berg said.

We stared at each other.

“Did you get anywhere with the ornament?” I asked.

“No. It’s an odd shape. I got a hit on a Japanese dragonfly brooch, but I don’t think that’s it,” he said. “The pattern is slightly wrong.”

“Will you please keep looking? I know it’s like looking for a needle in the haystack, and I really, really appreciate it.”

“Of course,” he said.

“I just don’t trust Mad Rogan. We need to figure this out.”

“Don’t worry,” Bern said. “We’ll get it. Here, I’ve got something for you.”

Bern opened a drawer and pulled out a Ziploc bag containing a metal doohicky. “Found this on your car. A standard GPS transmitter.”

That’s how Mad Rogan had known I’d gone to meet Adam Pierce at the arboretum. I sighed.

“Are you okay?” Bern asked.

“Yes,” I lied. “I’m going to get dressed.” And get my gun.

“Nevada,” he called after me. “That M9 would be really nice! Do you have a problem with it?”

“If you can make a deal with Bug, go for it. Just try not to owe him any favors you can’t repay.”

I stepped out the front door of the warehouse and did a double take. Mad Rogan waited in the driver seat of the perfectly intact Range Rover. It had been a charred wreck only a few hours ago. It couldn’t be the same Range Rover.

I saw him looking at me through the window. His eyes were very blue this morning. A by-now familiar feeling zinged through me, two parts lust, one part alarm, and the rest frustration with myself. The impact of all that masculinity should’ve faded by now. I should’ve become inoculated and immune. Instead he again knocked my socks off.

Chains, I reminded myself, as I got in. “Do you have more than one Range Rover?”

“I have several,” he said, his voice calm.

“So I guess it’s not a big deal that Adam blew it up?”

“I have several because I like them.”

I looked at him. His jaw was set. His mouth was a straight, hard line. His eyes under the dark eyebrows had acquired a cold, steel-like hardness and I saw anger in their depths. Not the loud, ranting kind of anger, but a bone-chilling determined fury. My instincts screamed at me to get out of the car. Get out now and back away with my hands in the air.

“That particular Range Rover was the one I liked best,” Rogan said, his voice and expression still calm and pleasant. “When we find Pierce, I’ll take it out of him.”

Out of him? If this wasn’t personal for him before, it was definitely personal now. “We need Adam Pierce alive,” I reminded him. “You promised me.”

“I remember,” Rogan said. His tone suggested that he really didn’t like it. Maybe I would get lucky and Adam would lay low today, because if Rogan ran across him now, he might murder him and really enjoy it.

I buckled up, and the Range Rover rolled onto the street. It would take us about forty-five minutes to get to the Galleria. “Do you know Harper Larvo?”

“Never met her,” Rogan said.

“Then what makes you think she would even show?”

“I know her type.”

“What type is that?”

“The failed vector.”

I glanced at him.

“Her grandfather was a Significant,” he said. “He had three children. All of them are Notable. And all of their children are either Notable or Average.”

“How do you know?”

“I checked the House database while Bug was talking. I didn’t mention it at the time, because Bug was doing an excellent job, and it was his moment to shine. You have to let your people take pride in a job well accomplished and recognize them for it. You will get better results.”

Everything Rogan did was driven by efficiency, even his treatment of his employees. Happy employees worked hard and were more loyal, so he took the time to recognize them for their achievements. I wonder where I stood on that recognition ladder. He probably considered me his employee. Well, I wasn’t his employee, and the only thing I wanted from him was Adam Pierce, preferably hog-tied.

“In approximately seventy percent of the cases, magic passes from parent to child without a significant change in power,” Mad Rogan said. “A few descendants, about three to five percent, show a sudden uptick. The rest lose magic with each generation. You can see traces of this pattern within the same family. Even if both parents are Primes, there is usually a variation in power among their children. You asked me once why I was expected to have no more than three children. This is the other reason. If the first child is a Prime, there is a good statistical chance that the second child might not be. Still, most Houses prefer that the head of the House have at least two additional children. You know what they’re called?”

“No.”

He glanced at me, his face grim. “Backup plan. The Houses war with each other. We don’t always have the best life expectancy. Do you know why Adam was conceived?”

“No.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

“Because Peter, his brother, was a late bloomer. The full extent of his magic didn’t manifest until he was eleven. They thought he was a dud, and that left only Tatyana, his sister, as the Prime of the House. If someone managed to kill her, House Pierce would be without a Prime. So they hurried on with making another baby just in case.”

“This sounds so cynical. And joyless.”

“It often is,” Mad Rogan said. “If the fading magic effect persists over two generations, that particular bloodline becomes a failed vector. Each generation is weaker than the previous one. The Houses fear one thing and one thing only: losing power. If I’m a failed vector, whoever marries me does so knowing her children will be less magically powerful than she is.”

The pieces came together. “Nobody will touch Harper with a ten-foot pole.”

“Exactly. Her grandfather had strong magic, and that afforded her entrance into society. She probably appeared as a fresh, wide-eyed debutante, sure that she would meet the love of her life and marry into a powerful House. Over the years she realized that men date her, fuck her, but always leave her. She’s twenty-nine. By now the bloom has worn off the rose. She knows the facts, she knows a match with any of the Houses is impossible, but she still wants it desperately. She watched her grandfather be a part of the power circle, she watched her parents wield a fraction of that influence, and she’ll do anything to claw her way back to the top. I’m an unmarried male Prime. I’m powerful, handsome, and filthy rich.”

“Also humble and self-deprecating.” I couldn’t help myself.

“That too,” he said without blinking an eye. “She’ll show. She can’t pass on the chance I might get smitten.”

“That’s really sad. I’m really glad I’m not a Prime, because the lot of you are a bunch of sick bastards.”

Mad Rogan gave me an odd look. “Power has a price. We don’t always want it, but we always end up paying. You held power over life and death yesterday. How does it feel?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”
I’m not going to have a heart-to-heart with you.

“The first time I killed someone, and I mean an up close, personal kill where I watched the life fade out of his eyes, I waited. I’d read all the books and watched all the movies, and I knew what was supposed to happen. I was supposed to feel sick, throw up, and then deal with it. So I stood there, waiting, and I felt nothing. So I thought, maybe it will happen next time.”

“Did it?”

“No,” he said.

“How many people did you kill?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I stopped counting. It was a hard war.”

His words kept rolling around my head. He shared something private and personal with me. He probably wouldn’t understand, but I felt the urge to tell him about it anyway. I had to tell someone.

“It feels like I lost a part of myself,” I said. “There is a big hole inside me, like something has been violently ripped out. I was brushing my teeth today, and I thought of those two men and the woman. They will never brush their teeth. They’ll never go to breakfast. They’ll never say hello to their mother. They won’t get to do any of those simple things. I caused that. I squeezed the trigger. I realize that they were trying to do the same to me, but I feel guilty and I mourn for them and for me. Something is gone from me forever. I want to be whole again, but I know I will never get it back.”

“What happens if instead of Harper we walk into an ambush and someone points a gun at you?” he asked.

“I’ll shoot him,” I said. “It will be bad later, but I’ll deal with it. It would help if I knew why. Why are they willing to kill? What’s so important that Adam will burn a whole office building just to provide a distraction?”

“That’s a good question,” Mad Rogan said.

“All of it—the bank, the office tower, the team of people—it seems too complicated for Adam.” It had been nagging at me ever since I’d seen the team of fake firefighters go into the tower. “He doesn’t like to work. This whole thing is well organized and carefully planned. He doesn’t strike me as a guy who would bother with that much planning.”

Mad Rogan changed lanes with surgical precision. “I learned a long time ago to only employ the best. I choose my people carefully. They’re competent, well trained, and diligent, and right now they are scouring the city. I have considerable resources at my disposal. I have contacts among people who run Houston’s underworld.”

I didn’t want to know how he got them.

“I’m not telling you this to aggrandize myself. I’m establishing the frame of reference. When I want someone found, they are brought to me within hours.” Mad Rogan glanced at me. “I can’t find Adam Pierce.”

For a moment the calm mask slid and I saw straight into him. He wasn’t just frustrated. He was furious.

“He’s moving through the city like a ghost,” Mad Rogan said. “He appears and disappears at will.”

Now I understood why he had zeroed in on me. Everything his people had done failed, and here I was, buying T-shirts for Adam Pierce.

“Do you think he is being cloaked by an illusion mage?” I asked. Really strong illusionists could distort reality.

“Not by one mage. He is being cloaked by a team. Cloaking a moving target takes a coordinated effort and a special training. The team we took down in the tower had that kind of proper training.” Rogan grimaced. “Pierce wouldn’t have connections or the knowledge to put an op of this size together. He doesn’t have the finances, he doesn’t know the right people, and even if he had somehow managed to acquire financial backing and contacts, nobody would take him seriously.”

He was right. “It wouldn’t even occur to Adam. He isn’t a team player. Someone else must be pulling his strings.” Anxiety washed over me. “Who could have that much influence over Adam? His own family can’t control him.”

Mad Rogan’s face turned grim. “I don’t know. Maybe Harper can tell us.”

We rode in silence.

“I want some justification for having ended the lives of these people,” I said quietly. “I want to know why.”

“I promise you, we will find out why,” Mad Rogan said.

I didn’t need my magic to tell me he meant it.

The Houston Galleria was the largest mall in Texas. It had hundreds of stores—Nordstrom, Saks, two separate Macy’s—and an ice rink, open year round. It was built in the late ’60s by Gerald D. Hines, who in turn had gotten the idea from Glenn H. McCarthy, Houston’s legendary wildcatter and oil man, known as Diamond Glenn. Since its opening in 1970, the mall had undergone several expansions. We were heading into the newest wing, Galleria IV.

The mall sprawled before us, two levels of stores, all glass, pale tile, enormous vaulted skylights interrupted by white arches. We strolled through it casually. I’d gone for the jeans and blouse again, and I’d brought along my favorite purse, tan leather, light, small, easy to fit over my shoulder, with a modified front compartment that let me pull out my firearm in a fraction of a second. I was carrying a Kahr PM9. At five and a half inches long, it weighed about a pound with the 6-round magazine. It had no hammer, so it wouldn’t catch as I pulled it out of my modified purse, and it had an external safety selector, which made me feel better. My Plan A for when things went wrong was to run away without shooting anyone. Plan B was to show the gun and make the person back off, in which case the last thing I wanted was an accidental discharge. Only Plan C involved actually firing the firearm, and considering where we were, I would have to be very sure I could pull the trigger without injuring an innocent person.

Mad Rogan strode next to me. He wore a grey suit with a black shirt he’d left unbuttoned at the collar. The clothes he wore were neither elaborate nor showy. They just fit him with tailored precision and were exceptionally well made. We should’ve coordinated better. We didn’t exactly fit together, but the Galleria was home to an odd crowd. Young mothers walked with babies in their strollers, mingling with scene teenagers with blue, purple, and pink hair. In front of us, two middle-aged women in expensive pantsuits, their faces smoothed by illusion magic into near plastic perfection, ducked into a store, narrowly avoiding a collision with a man in a ball cap and paint-smeared shorts.

A young woman passing us glanced at Mad Rogan and slowed down. We kept walking, and I saw her reflection in a mirrored display. She was still looking at him in that appraising female way. A couple of men walked out of the store on the right and paused, giving Mad Rogan the same appreciative look. The younger of the two winked at me.