Fire Raiser (36 page)

“You waste my time.”

“Go on,” he invited. “Order your guys to shoot me.” At the edge of his vision he saw Jamey flinch and frown. “Fire away,” he added, and glanced at Holly.

“Tempting,” Weiss replied, gaze narrowing.

“Before you take him up on his offer,” Jamey said, sounding peeved, “I want to know how you intend to evade the police of about a dozen countries. We know about the prostitution, and the human trafficking, and—”

“What
I
want to know,” Evan interrupted, “is what’s going on with the cryogenics. Little Master Race embryos, right? But not blue-eyed blond Aryans. You’re after the magic. Whose kid is that, anyway? Whose baby did you put into that girl?”

His abrupt smile made Lachlan’s skin crawl. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. No, you really would not. Mrs. Lachlan, Mr. Stirling, you will have the goodness to go along quietly to the ambulance. I’d intended to use your vehicle, Sheriff—”

“—but anything will do, as long as you can fire up the lights and siren?” He flicked his gaze once more to his wife, whose eyes widened a bit before she nodded slightly. When her fingers twitched at her sides, he knew she’d finally gotten the idea, and readied himself for some very vast shooting.

Weiss’s face caught on fire.

All Evan had ever heard from the girl was furious screaming—but he recognized her laughter as if he’d heard it in nightmares all his life.

The man holding Holly shoved her down, turning to defend Weiss, and dropped his pistol with a yelp of pain as it sprouted tiny flames. Evan went for his Glock, a motion that caught the attention of the second man, who instinctively turned his gun toward the new and obvious threat.

“Jamey! Down!”

Evan shot the guard high in the chest as a bullet went past his ear and thunked into a support column. He fired again, and the first man staggered, clutching his belly now instead of his burned hand.

Weiss lurched past Evan, plunging down the steps into the rain. The fire burned even more brightly, more fiercely, spreading down his neck and chest. He tried to run, thrashing his arms, trailing horrific pennants of red and orange and gold. A single howl escaped him—and his next gasping breath sucked the flames down his throat into his lungs.

She was laughing. She ran from the shadows to the verandah banister, leaning out into the rain, raking the long dark hair from her face as she watched him burn. He staggered out onto the storm-soaked lawn and crumpled to his knees.

Evan felt a hand touch his ankle. He bent to help Holly to her feet and wrapped an arm around her as they watched Weiss blaze like a torch. At length there was nothing left to feed the flames. The rain fell, the fire withered, and the laughter faded away.

Lachlan slid his gun back into his waistband and put both arms around Holly. She clung to him for a moment, then eased away and lifted her head. He saw for an instant what she would look like when she was old.

“We need—” She coughed thickness from her throat and tried again. “We need to find Lulah. And Alec and—”

“It’s all right, child,” her aunt said from behind them, and they turned. “We weren’t hurt. Just—we weren’t hurt.”
Just frightened
was something Tallulah Eglantine McClure would never say in a million years.

Nicky had approached the girl, who was leaning against the banister, surveying them all with a challenging glint in her pale blue eyes. He said something low and indistinct in what Lachlan presumed was Hungarian. She replied in English.

“I took his life because he took mine.”

Her lips curved at one corner in a smile that mocked and hated. Lachlan wondered suddenly if she would ever forget how to smile that way. Somehow he doubted it.

SHE FEELS THINGS FLICKERING inside her like distant stars.

When she is finally free of the baby and the kind blond man touches her forehead and she sleeps, she wakes without truly awakening to a painful blaze that sets her whole body stinging for one endless instant. She has not truly been asleep one moment since. Conscious in a vague way of being carried, of voices, of some other man touching her without touching her—that is when the pinpricks of light flare painfully behind her eyes. Slowly, tentative and quivering, tendrils of light lace together in a complex white-gold glow until she experiences true awareness for the first time in her life. When some man’s disembodied touch shrouds the lovely radiance, she hates him. When he ties the string around her finger, she gives a soundless scream.

But then the strangest thing happens. All the vivid little sparks pulse, shift, dance this way and that, seeking each other in new patterns. They settle, poised in quivering anticipation. She watches them, feels them, wondering if they can free themselves from the binding.

That thought is all they have been waiting for.

They work swiftly, merrily, finding and immolating the specks of light twined around the binding threads. Finished, they seek new work before she can fully realize she is free, before she can call them back to her. When there is nothing more for them to do, they spark and shimmer, and return. By the time she opens her eyes, and stands, and hears his arrogant menacing voice, the separate constellations inside her have resolved into a river of light as brilliant as the Milky Way.

The woman from the book cover is nearby, and for an instant she is tempted to take her revenge. If not for this woman’s words, he would never have known that she understands English. But it seems a trivial betrayal now, compared to what he did to her. And he is there, so close, so unaware of her—so superbly unaware that her fire has been his freeing, and her fire will be his death.

She takes his life because he has taken hers. Sending out her little shining ones to swarm and glow feels dimly familiar, though nothing has ever felt as wonderful as this.

She smiles.

And then she begins to hurt.

CAM GRIFFEN HAD TAUGHT DEMOCRACY in countries where getting to his job required an armed escort. He had spoken for the majesty of American constitutional law in places where doing his job meant carrying a fully loaded automatic. But, damn it, he hated guns—and not just because he saw the muzzle of one tucked against Jamey Stirling’s throat.

He would never know how Evan managed it; he only knew he owed his cousin’s husband more than could ever be repaid. He had about three seconds to think about this before Bernhardt Weiss went up in flames.

A need to touch Jamey, maybe even to hold him the way Evan was holding Holly, got lost in dread as the girl’s blue eyes rolled in their sockets and she wilted into a whimpering heap of white nightgown. Her fingers curled into her palms, the bones of wrists and shoulders and knees cracking as a spasm surged through her. Tiny bursts like firework sparklers danced around her, the kind of white-gold fire that meant magic. They flickered, died, and she moaned.

Cam knelt beside her, scarcely hearing Lulah’s frantic warning. Arrogance or outrage or fear of what might come next made him weave stillness into the soft cotton threads of her nightgown. Her body relaxed, her eyes opened, and what he saw in them scared him more than Beirut or Kosovo.

“Cam—help her!” Jamey’s voice, behind him, very far away.

He shook his head. “She’s—it’s her brain, what the magic is doing to her.”

“You could do something for her—help her the way you helped me.”

“It’s
brain
tissue, it’s neurons and electricity and—”

“And neural fibers, a fiber is a fiber—”

He tried. He tried when he wasn’t even sure how to touch her. A hand across her forehead, like a nurse in a mawkish Victorian mezzotint? Fingers splayed around her face, like a Vulcan performing a mind-meld? Her head had fallen to one side, and he automatically slid a hand beneath her nape, and the anarchy within her skull brought a cry to his lips. If his weaving of silence through the silk lining the corridors was a linkage of threads of light, her mind was a weave coming apart. Every intersect point was a spurt of power, each center detonating, pulsing fire along delicate filaments that swelled and twisted and disintegrated. The magic was an uncontained nuclear reaction spreading through her brain.

He scuttled back until his spine was tight against a wall, shook his head, wrapped his arms around his knees. “No—it’s not—there’s nothing I can—”

“Hush.” Holly had her arms around him. She stroked his hair, the frantic motion contrasting to the softness of her voice. “Shh, it’s all right, you’re all right.” Then, sharply: “Get him a blanket, dammit, he’s shaking.”

“I can make her comfortable,” he heard himself say. “But the kindest thing would be to let her die.”

Jamey crouched beside them, gripping a blanket, his face stricken. “You don’t know that for sure—”

“You don’t understand. What I did for you—it was different.” He met Jamey’s gaze. “What’s going on inside her—the magic, it’s ripping her brain apart. Even if I could knit all of it back together, there’s so much damage, so much that’s gone black and dead—”

“I’ll take a look,” said Alec.

“No!” Cam seized his hand. “Don’t—please, Uncle Alec—”

Nicky hushed him with a gesture. “If the boy says not, then we don’t.”

“We’re responsible for this,” Alec said. “We kept working spells on her and near her—we kindled her magic—”

“It’s just as likely that the staircase was restraining it,” his partner argued. “When that was gone—”

“Your ‘laws of physics’ dictum?” Jamey snapped.

“How the fuck should I know?” Cam cried.

“So you can’t help her? Or you won’t?”

Nicky caught his breath, Alec stiffened defensively, but it was Evan who spoke.

“Don’t answer that, Cam.”

There were angry glints of green and gold in Evan’s dark eyes as he glared down at Jamey.

“You trust him or you don’t.”

Cam hid his face on his drawn-up knees.

“Listen, Jamey. This is the way it is with them. They have their ethics, and their codes of conduct—except there’s nobody to enforce those rules but themselves. You have to decide whether you trust Cam to know what’s right and do what’s right.”

When Jamey said nothing, Evan spoke again. “You and I, we don’t know anything about how they were educated, what they were taught—but we know what kind of people they are. What honor looks like. What it comes down to is believing they’re going to make the right decisions about things you and I don’t understand.”

It took a significant fraction of forever before Cam felt Jamey’s hand on his shoulder. Warm, in the chill of the rainy night; but whether the touch was trusting or apologetic, he couldn’t tell. He lifted his head.

Deep within cloud-gray eyes was everything.
Everything.
No one had ever looked at him this way, not even Jamey, years ago when they were young.

“Forgive me.”

Unable to speak, Cam nodded once. Then he turned his head, resting his cheek to Jamey’s hand for a moment before pulling away from Holly’s comforting arms. He shifted closer to the girl, fumbling for and gripping tight the amber around his neck, and made himself look into the wild violence of her eyes. As her brain imploded, something feral glowed from her, like the eyes of a trapped predator.

He didn’t dare touch her again. He wove warmth around her, and freedom from pain. It was all he could do for her. He sat beside her and watched her die.

Twenty-one

DAWN WAS MORE an agreed-upon description of the time than an observable event. The storm sweeping in from the Atlantic had stalled against the Blue Ridge, and while thunder and lightning had died away, rain continued its unrelenting gray cascade.

From it, in a blue sedan with windshield wipers unequal to the torrent, came the manager of Westmoreland, a local woman who had no reason to think she wasn’t running just a normal hotel and spa. No one disabused her of this notion. Fresh from a pleasant Sunday off, she was appalled by the heavily edited version of the night’s occurrences given her by Lulah McClure—her mother’s high-school classmate—and readily accepted a promise to be told later all the details of break-ins, accidental shootings, Mr. Weiss’s abrupt departure on urgent business, and a slight problem with the lap pool. She took charge of the staff when the timelock freed them from their dormitory, set them to their duties, and to all intents and purposes Monday morning of Labor Day Weekend was much like any other at an upscale resort.

“Not a clue about any of the other stuff going on?” Jamey asked Lulah.

She shook her head. “And I’ll vouch for her family back three generations. Not a hint of magic in any of them.”

This proved to be true of the entire staff. Alec stood casually in the kitchen drinking espresso in a twelve-ounce mug as they filed past at five in the morning, and reported not a quiver that would warn either of magic or of efforts to conceal it.

Not even the security guards knew about the staircase, the clinic below the spa, or the rooms in the attic. Lulah had no idea how Weiss had done it. Neither did anybody else. Not that they had much energy left for speculation—not after cleaning out Weiss’s office. Luther arrived from the Sheriff’s Station with the other county SUV, into which were loaded computers, financial records, and anything else Evan and Jamey happened to feel like seizing for examination. Jamey’s BlackBerry, with its download from Weiss’s laptop and hard drive, was privately stashed in Holly’s car.

Matt, who had watched Weiss’s incineration, would never remember it. As the four men with gunshot wounds were handcuffed and loaded into the ambulance, first Alec and then Lulah and then Nicky in their varying ways made small suggestions. All these were reinforced by traces of Holly’s blood. By the time he got behind the wheel for the drive to Dr. Steinmetz’s office, Matt was convinced that Weiss had never been there at all.

“I hate having to do that,” Alec murmured.

Cam arched a brow at him. “You’d prefer the alternative?”

“Don’t tell me it’s for his own good. The only people whose good it’s for is us.”

Cam shrugged; it wasn’t an argument that interested him. “Did you take care of the guards, too? The ones who saw what happened, I mean.” He took an involuntary step backward as Alec glared at him. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry!”

“You ought to be,” was the sharp reply, but in the next moment dark eyes softened. “It’s been a rough night,” he went on. “Worse for you than just about anyone else, I’d say.”

They both turned to watch as Lulah, cradling the baby in her arms, went down the front steps, the two girls in their nightgowns and robes trailing obediently behind her. Cam shivered at the sight of their apathetic faces.

“Does anybody know if they’re pregnant?” he whispered. “Or if they’re Witches?”

“No, and yes,” Alec murmured. “Dr. Cutter will look after them.”

“And you as well,” Nick said, unexpectedly appearing at Cam’s shoulder. “Get in the car.”

“I’ll drive,” said Jamey, approaching with the keys in his hand.

“The hell you will!” Cam exclaimed. “I don’t care how many gallons of espresso you poured down your throat. You got shot!”

“I’m fine.”

“What part of ‘you got shot’ do you not understand?”

“I’m
fine,
” Jamey repeated. “I’ve felt worse after an all-nighter before a Con Law final.”

Alec settled the question by grabbing the keys from Jamey’s hand. “Come along, children. I am a man of many talents—I can drive with only one thumb.”

“
Akana mukav tut le Devlesa,
” muttered Nicky, and trudged down the steps to the rental car Alec had arrived in.

Cam snorted.
“I now leave you to God”
was exactly the benediction for anyone subjected to Alec’s driving. But at least Jamey wouldn’t be behind the wheel. He watched them load into the big green SUV, and as Alec drove off in a spraying of mud and a slewing of tires, he murmured again, “You got
shot.
” Then, aware that Holly and Evan were watching him fret, he turned and said, “If this was anywhere but the back of the goddamned beyond, there’d be a news crew out here right now.”

“And aren’t we glad there isn’t,” Holly remarked.

“Are you kidding? Film coverage of this, and they’d be begging Evan to become FBI Director! Plus John Warner will probably retire from the Senate in 2008—we could run Jamey for that seat and pull down ninety percent of the vote!”

Holly met her husband’s gaze. “Did I mention that between college and law school he spent a year working for the House Democratic Caucus?”

“Can’t speak for Jamey’s ambitions,” Evan said, “but I’d rather give myself a frontal lobotomy with a baseball bat. Can we go home now, please?”

Holly pointed to Cam, then to the BMW. “Evan can take Lulah’s truck.”

“Aw, come on, Freckles—you think I’d get lost going to my own ancient family homestead?”

“I think,” Evan said, “she wants to have a talk with you.”

Cam eyed her beneath a frown. “You can’t yell at me—you destroyed my Armani.”

“I’m not going to yell at you,” she said with a smile that made him nervous. “And I didn’t destroy your Armani. But I will admit that I owe you two Cohibas.”

For the first ten minutes of the drive she said exactly nothing. That made him even more nervous.

At last she spoke, as if continuing a conversation they’d been having for years. “You don’t get it, Peaches. It’s as if you’re—I don’t know, challenging? Yeah. You challenge the caring that people give you, even the idea that they
do
care, because you don’t think you deserve to be cared about. You don’t believe it when somebody offers you love and support—somebody who isn’t a relative, I mean, because they’re
obligated
to care about you and they don’t really count—”

“Holly—”

“Shut up. I’m lecturing. You know it’s true, Cam. Your face is an open book whenever you look at Jamey—and I’m very well-read. I know you. I was the same way. If somebody wants to be around us, it’s because we’re entertaining, or because of our talents or our magic, because of what they could get out of a relationship. Nobody could possibly love us just to love us.”

“And now you’re going to tell me how Evan changed all that for you,” he mocked.

“No,” she replied seriously. “I wish I could say that, but it wouldn’t be true. I’m not that smart. It kind of snuck up on me gradually, and one day reached critical mass. Oh, I knew what I’d been doing all those years. It wasn’t entirely my fault that my relationships with men went sour, but I had more to do with it than I realized at the time.”

“Was that when Evan came along?”

“It happened pretty much simultaneously. Susannah gave me almost this same lecture, and it was finally sinking in.” She paused. “I miss her.”

They were quiet for a time. Cam sank deeper into the leather seat, watching the paling clouds and the silvering rain as daylight asserted its claim on the sky.

“And now here you are, with Jamey ready to give whatever you need whenever you need it, and he’s not asking for anything more than the chance to love you the way you deserve to be loved—and you’re still pushing him away, convinced you’re not good enough for him.”

“You know him. Am I?” he asked bitterly. “I’ve spent my life hiding a whole lot of who and what I am—but he just—it’s part of him to be honest, completely honest. About everything.”

“Scary. Yeah, I’ve gotten to know him. He’s a sweet man. And I know exactly why he loves you.”

Another silence, smaller this time. Cam spent it thinking determinedly about nothing at all.

Holly cleared her throat. “I was up with Bella one night—she has a terrible time teething, poor sweetie—and I was watching a talk show. One of the
West Wing
guys was on, being rather rueful and self-deprecating about the fact that whereas his ancestors had raised cattle and worked the land,
he
had to admit to his kids that he had a favorite moisturizer. Made me want to smack him upside the head, because it reminded me of something John Adams wrote—something about how he studied war so his sons could study politics and
their
sons could study poetry. That this guy became an actor—that’s
exactly
what his ancestors had in mind when they came to this country and cleared the land and fought in the wars. They did it so
we
can study poetry, and if we’re lucky we get to create a little poetry of our own. Whether it’s crafting a character and speaking other people’s words in front of an audience, like he does, or writing books like I do, or keeping people safe the way Evan does, or making sure the law does what it’s supposed to do, like Jamey—or teaching people how to get a government going that will let them live their lives—”

“Poetry?” He smiled. “I can’t say that I ever saw it like that.”

“You heard Jamey tonight. You think that wasn’t poetry?”

“I think that’s when I started thinking about the Senate seat—”

“I think you’re full of shit. I think you need to stick around PoCo for a while and convince that man that you really are worth what he feels for you.”

He considered his answer for a little while before saying, “
Numquam poetor nisi podager
.”

“Oh, Christ—don’t you dare start! Rom and Hungarian from Nicky, Jamey with his infernal Latin all the time—”

“—when the only person worth quoting is you, right?” He grinned, and she glared.

He waited. Sure enough, within a mile or so she said, “Well? Translate it.”

“Ennius. ‘I only spout poetry when my feet hurt.’ ”

“I’ll make you walk the rest of the way back to Woodhush,” she threatened. “That ought to produce an entire sonnet cycle.” She braked for a stop sign and drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “Or I could let you out here, and you’d be at his house in twenty minutes.”

Cam strained to see the street sign. “Where are we? I can’t read the—”

“Oh, that’s right—when they divvied up the Addair plantation they put in a new access road. Turn right, take the second left, and four miles later—”

“You’re kidding. That’s where he lives?”

Shifting back into first, she tossed a smile at him. “The old carriage house, yes. Backs right up onto Dragon Swamp. From his upper windows you can even see the chimneys.”

Dragon Swamp—named not for any actual swamp on the property but because the original Bellew land along the James River had borne the same name—had been the inheritance through their mother of Thomas and Tallulah McClure. When Thomas married Margaret Flynn, he traded his share in Dragon Swamp for her sister Elizabeth’s share in Woodhush. Upon her marriage to Cam’s father, Lizza had bought out Tallulah’s interest in the property, the McClures having their main residence in the village of Willowmere. The Griffens had lived in the five-room cottage at Dragon Swamp until Thomas and Margaret were killed, had returned there for a few years during Cam’s childhood, and finally sold the land to the county in preference to selling it to a developer. It was county property still, and no one had lived there in more than twenty years.

“Want to hear something weird?” Cam leaned his head back and watched the rain. “I dreamed a few weeks ago that I was back in that house. It was empty, and needed a wash, and there were sheets on the furniture. I walk through the parlor and into the kitchen, and then open the door to the cellar stairs.”

“But—”

“Yeah, I know. That house doesn’t have a cellar. But there it was, and it didn’t seem weird at all, I just accepted that now there was a cellar. No sense of disorientation or anything. There was a lot of stuff in storage, things I didn’t recognize, boxes, some furniture. Then this iron door, the kind you see in a loft apartment, with a security bar that swung down. This didn’t strike me as strange, either. I didn’t wonder what needed to be locked in like that. I was just wondering what was on the other side of the door.

“So I open it and inside is this twenty-by-twenty room, really high ceiling, no windows. There’s a bed, a dresser, a microwave, a frosted glass door into a bathroom—like a studio apartment. But the incredible thing is that the walls are covered in a painted forest. Somebody had drawn trees on each wall, connected up by ivy and Spanish moss meandering all over, and on every branch was a scene of something or somebody. Imaginary stuff, all painted like those early American portraits. The ones where the painters would travel around with the background already done, and then they’d paint the kid’s face or the lawyer’s face onto it—I forget what that school of art is called. American Primitive or whatever. But that’s how all the people were—”

“Without faces?”

“Yeah. Landscapes and interiors—somebody was getting ready to put people into whichever scene they’d chosen and paid for. I’m walking slowly around the room, peering at all these little paintings—there are hundreds of them, like on one of those family tree things with spaces to put photos. Then this voice says, ‘Well, it’s about time you got here!’ The guy is—I don’t know, just ordinary. Maybe thirty, maybe forty, hard to tell. Not thin or fat or tall or short, just a regular ordinary man, the kind you pass on the street a thousand times a month and don’t notice. He’s sitting in this armchair, and he’s smiling at me like he’s been expecting me. I’m the one who’s there to let him out. He’s been living in this little apartment and painting the walls with trees and faceless portraits and landscapes, just waiting for me to come and let him out. He’s not angry, and he’s not in any hurry. It doesn’t occur to me to be surprised, even by the implication that I’m the one who put him in there. I know I wasn’t, that’s the thing. It wasn’t my doing that he was there. But I was the one who’d come to let him out.”