SWNOVELS White Hot: Chapter 3
Most of the Houston Houses had mansions inside the Loop, a long road that encircled the downtown and the pricey neighborhoods such as River Oaks. Having an address inside the Loop was as much of a status symbol as driving luxury cars and owning personal yachts.
However, Rogan was a fourth-generation Prime. He had no interest in impressing anyone. We climbed northwest instead, leaving the city, and then the main road, behind. Old Texas oaks spread their branches over green grass, stoically enduring the rain of Houston’s December.
My phone rang. Bern.
“Yes?”
“Hey, the Internet is buzzing with some sort of disturbance at the Assembly.”
Well, that didn’t take long.
“Do you know what’s going on?”
“Forsberg is dead. I didn’t kill him.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“I’m showing you moving northwest.”
He’d tracked my phone. “That’s right.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m going to Mad Rogan’s house.”
Silence.
“Don’t tell Mom,” I said.
Rogan grinned next to me, a quick parting of lips.
“I won’t,” Bern promised.
I hung up.
“Were you trying to murder Forsberg?” I asked.
“If I was trying, he wouldn’t have left the floor.”
“You looked like you were about to kill him.”
“I wanted answers and he was going to give them to me. If he didn’t, I probably would’ve.”
I didn’t even need my magic to tell me he meant it. “Will you be able to get your hands on his autopsy report?”
Rogan spared me a glance. Yes, of course. What was I thinking doubting the great Mad Rogan?
“How was he able to hop while dead?” I asked.
“Hopping is a two-step process,” Rogan said.
“It’s similar to breathing,” Cornelius explained from the back seat. “Forsberg pulled the magic in, inhaling, then let it out, exhaling, and it carried him forward. If someone killed him just as he exhaled, the jump would still occur.”
I really needed access to the House network and its explanations of higher magic talents. Unfortunately, I wasn’t a member, nor would I ever get to be one.
We came to a wrought-iron gate that swung open at our approach and Rogan drove up the long curving driveway, past the picturesque plants. The path turned and a massive Spanish Colonial house sitting atop a low hill came into view. Two stories tall, with thick stucco walls and red tile roof, it looked at the world with arched windows. A large round tower graced the right side, and a covered balcony offered the view from the second story on the left. Red-and-purple flowers dripped from flower baskets, stretching over the balcony’s dark wood rail. In the middle, a heavy rounded door, old wood with wrought ironwork, offered access to the inside of the home. It was impossibly romantic. If they ever made another Zorro movie, I knew just the place where they could film it. You half expected a man in a black mask and a cape to sword-fight his way across the balcony, leap onto a jet-black Andalusian horse, and gallop past us down the driveway.
I realized that Rogan leaned next to me.
“Do you like it?” he asked quietly.
People lied to me every day, several times a day, with the best and the worst intentions. I made it a point to lie as little as possible. “Yes.”
A self-satisfied smile lit up his face. Oh, for crying out loud, it wasn’t as if he had built it with his bare hands . . . Why was it even important if I liked it?
We followed him through the door into the formal entrance, with a cool limestone floor and massive columns. On the right, a curved staircase with a wrought-iron railing led to an upstairs hallway. On the left, a vast living room waited under the high ceiling crossed with rough wooden beams and lit by three rustic chandeliers, rings of metal studded with candle-shaped bulbs, that could’ve come from a medieval castle. Wide window-filled arches supported by stone columns interrupted the wall to the left, letting the light of the late morning stream into the space. Red-and-white Oriental rugs lay across the floor. The furniture was old and heavy, the cushions of the couches oversized and plush. A massive fireplace took up the far wall. It could’ve easily turned into a stuffy dark space, but instead it was light and airy, welcoming and clean. Plants stood here and there in large pots, adding bright spots of green to the stone walls.
Mad Rogan owned my dream house. Life just wasn’t fair. That was okay. I would work really hard and one day I would buy my own house—maybe not quite as big, or as tastefully furnished, but it would be mine.
Rogan went up the staircase and we followed him across an indoor balcony that spanned the living room to a hallway. Rogan turned right, and we walked up another short staircase to a metal door. He held it open for me.
I walked into a square room. The wall on my left and the one directly in front of me were thick tinted glass that showed a wide covered balcony and more walls—these windows opened into the inner courtyard. The other two walls were taken up by screens and computers, manned by two people with headsets.
“Leave us,” Rogan said.
They got up and left without a word. Rogan invited us to a U-shaped blue couch arranged around a coffee table. We sat.
“Bug!” Rogan called.
“Coming, Major,” a voice responded from some speaker.
Rogan looked at Cornelius. “Did you bond with your wife, Mr. Harrison?”
Cornelius hesitated. “Yes.”
What kind of a question was that?
“Was it a true bond?’
“Yes.”
Rogan looked at me. “Is he telling the truth?”
“You do realize that I work for him and not you?”
“If he’s lying to me, and I show him this, I may have to kill him.”
I looked at Cornelius. “Do I have your permission to tell him?”
“Yes,” he said.
“He’s telling the truth.”
Rogan walked over to the wall, slid the panel open, and came back with a glass and a bottle of Jack Daniels. He set the glass and the bottle in front of Cornelius.
“I don’t drink,” Cornelius said. “I’ll be sober for this.”
“What will happen after you find your wife’s killer?” Rogan sat down to my left.
“I’ll fire Ms. Baylor,” Cornelius said.
“Because of Ms. Baylor’s stubborn inability to compromise when it comes to legal matters?” Rogan asked.
“She made it clear she doesn’t want to be involved in what would follow.”
I waved at both of them in case they forgot that I was sitting right there.
“How committed are you to this course of action?” Rogan asked.
“I’ve taken measures already,” Cornelius said.
Rogan sat back, his eyes calculating. “I’m going to share some confidential information with you. It has wide-reaching implications. If you would rather not be involved, tell me now. The lives of my people depend on your discretion and if you betray my confidence, I’ll have to eliminate you.”
“Understandable,” Cornelius said. “Likewise, if I discover that you in any way caused Nari’s death, I’ll take the appropriate actions.”
This wasn’t the world of normal people. Yet somehow I kept getting stuck in it.
“For the record, I don’t consent to being killed,” I said.
They both looked at me.
“Just getting it out there in case there are any questions later.”
A careful knock sounded and Bug bounced into the room. One of my mother’s friends had a cairn terrier called Magnus. Cairn terriers were bred to catch vermin among the cairns of the Scottish Highlands, and Magnus was physically unable to sit still. He dashed about the back yard, he ran on walks, he chased toys, and if you blew bubbles, he turned into a bolt of black furry lightning until he murdered every single one. Moving was his job and he devoted himself to it.
Bug was Magnus in human form. He was always moving, typing, talking, tracking . . . Even though he often sat for most of the day, he wasn’t sedentary. He was never without a purpose or a task, and I had a feeling that if only he could stop doing all of his things and eat a sandwich once in a while, he would put on the twenty-five pounds his skinny frame was missing.
Bug was a swarmer. The U.S. Air Force had bound him to something they’d pulled out of the arcane realm. They called it a swarm because they had no better name for it. The swarm had no physical form. It lived within Bug somehow, which let him split his attention, process information faster, and made him into a superior surveillance expert. Most swarmers died within two years of being bound, but Bug had somehow survived and, until recently, lived in hiding, detesting all authority, especially the military variety. I’d occasionally bought his services with Equzol, a military-grade drug designed to even him out. Then Rogan had lured him from his hiding place with promises of Equzol, advanced computer equipment, and whatever else was part of the devil deal they struck.
Being lured into Rogan’s clutches agreed with Bug. His skin had lost its sallow tint, and while his eyes still brimmed with nervous energy, he wasn’t twitching or freaking out.
Bug dropped onto the couch and placed a laptop in front of him on the table. “Hey, Nevada.”
“Hey.”
A plump dog that was mostly French bulldog and part something unidentifiable sauntered into the room and rubbed its face on my pants leg.
“Hi, Napoleon.” I reached down and patted his head. Bug’s dog rambled over to Rogan and unceremoniously flopped on his feet. Rogan reached down without really looking, on autopilot, picked Napoleon up and put him on the couch next to him. The French bulldog sighed contently, wedged his butt deeper into the couch, and closed his eyes.
Rogan leaned back. “In the fall, Ms. Baylor and I were involved in apprehending Adam Pierce.”
“I know,” Cornelius said. “That’s how we met.”
Bug pulled a tablet out of his sweatshirt and began messing with it. A screen slid from the wall on the side.
“Adam Pierce didn’t act alone,” Rogan said. “Someone loaded him like a gun, aimed, and pulled the trigger.”
“Who?” Cornelius asked.
“We don’t know,” Bug said.
“We became aware of the conspiracy surrounding Pierce when we learned he was moving about the city undetected,” I said. “He didn’t just have a single mage cloaking him. There was an entire team shielding him. We know that an animator Prime was involved.”
In my head I flashed back to running across a parking lot as Rogan fought a whirlwind of metal and pipes that tried to crush him. We never did find out who the animator was.
“Pierce used a teenager to do some of his dirty work,” Rogan explained. “His name is Gavin Waller. Gavin’s mother is my cousin. I found out that she was part of whatever cabal was pulling Adam’s strings.”
That was news to me. So Rogan’s own cousin had betrayed him. Would he care? Would it even matter to him? He hadn’t seemed to have taken any interest in Kelly Waller or her son, until Adam Pierce made Gavin a part of his murder-and-arson spree.
“Whoever was behind Adam is well funded and powerful,” Rogan continued. “Fortunately for me, they overlooked a weak spot in their armor.”
Bug tapped the keys on the laptop. The screen ignited, showing a woman in a skin-tight black dress kneeling on a tall chair, her arms bent at the elbow, her forearms resting on the chair’s back so she could stick her butt out. A high-heeled shoe hung from the index finger of her left hand. She was looking straight at the camera with light grey eyes, her makeup fresh and flawless. Her strawberry-blond hair framed her face in a perfectly straight shimmering curtain. Her expression was vapid. She was biting her lower lip.
Ugh.
“Harper Larvo,” I murmured.
“Who is she?” Cornelius asked.
“A socialite,” I said. “She was involved with the people behind Adam Pierce.”
“I put her under surveillance,” Rogan said.
“We bugged her apartment, her phone, her cell, and her car,” Bug said. “We bugged all the shit.”
“A month ago Harper began an affair with Jaroslav Fenley,” Rogan said.
Cornelius leaned forward. Jaroslav had worked with Nari. He was one of the three other lawyers murdered with her.
“Then, last Friday we got this.” Rogan nodded at Bug, who reached over the top of the laptop and pressed a key.
“It’s happening,” Harper’s voice said. “They’re going to hand it over. They don’t want it leading back to them, so they’re looking for security for the meeting now.”
“We need the time and place,” an older female voice said.
A muscle jerked in Rogan’s face.
“I’m tired. Can I just be done? He’s boring and he smells. The BO is through the roof.”
“Do you need me to remind you who’s holding your leash?”
“Fine. I’ll call you when I get it.”
“The other woman on the tape is Kelly Waller,” Rogan said. His blue eyes were glacier-cold. He cared about Kelly Waller’s betrayal. He cared very much. If I were Kelly Waller, I’d make arrangements to run away to another continent.
Bug grimaced. “She used a burner phone. If she wasn’t clutching Sassy at the time, we wouldn’t have caught it.”
“Sassy?” I asked.
“Her foo-foo poodle,” Bug said.
“You bugged her dog?”
Bug drew back, outraged. “I bugged her collar! What, you think I’m a complete fart muffin? She shouldn’t have that dog anyway. She treats her like shit. She doesn’t deserve Sassy.” Bug tapped the keys. “We combed the net and the usual places a dimwit—”
Mad Rogan glanced at him.
“—a man who doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing might look for private security. We found Fenley’s job and we took the contract.”
“We?” I asked.
“I own a private security company,” Rogan said.
Of course.
“Fenley indicated that they were meeting with another party to exchange some data,” Rogan said.
“At Hotel Sha Sha,” Cornelius guessed.
Rogan nodded. “The timing and location weren’t ideal, but I took the risk. If my cousin wants this data, I want it more.”
He took the risk and his people had died. He blamed himself. It didn’t reflect in his face, but I saw it in his eyes for a brief moment, before they went back to their icy blue. The last time we talked, I was almost completely convinced that he was a sociopath. He seemed invulnerable, as if nothing could bother him. This did.
Bug pushed a key on the keyboard. I braced myself.
A woman in her mid-thirties wearing grey pants, a black shirt, and an odd-looking bulletproof vest appeared on the large screen. A thin strip of metal and plastic adhered to the left side of her forehead, disappearing under her dark hair, pulled back from her face. She touched it and the view shifted slightly. She was looking into a mirror.
“Stop screwing with it,” Bug’s voice said.
“It’s distracting.” Her voice carried traces of Louisiana. “I don’t like distracting.”
“It the best tech on the market,” Bug said. “And you broke the last two, Luanne.”
“They were also distracting.”
“Do you see the care in my eye?”
Luanne looked athletic and strong, and the way she held herself projected a dispassionate calm. Not serenity, just a quiet, competent alertness devoid of any emotional connection. I’d met her type before. She was a professional private soldier. You would look into her eyes and see nothing, and then she’d shoot you in the face, and as the bullets were flying, you’d still see nothing. It didn’t reach her, maybe because of her experience or perhaps it just never did. In everyday life, she’d look completely normal. You’d see her at the supermarket and never imagine that she could kill people for a living.
Behind her men and women in identical garb were checking their weapons.
“What kind of a vest is that?” I asked. It looked segmented under the grey fabric, as if made of small hexagonal sections. Flexible too. The hexagons shifted slightly as Luanne moved.
“That’s a Scorpion V,” Bug said. “Latest, greatest, classified, and civilians aren’t supposed to have them, so don’t see it or we’ll have to gouge your eyes out.”
“No heroics, Luanne,” Rogan said off camera. “I just want to know what they’re trading. Get in, stay alive, get out.”
“With all due respect, Major, this isn’t my first dance,” Luanne said.
“Major worries,” a younger man with a freckled face said as he rested a firearm on his lap. Heckler & Koch MP7.
I glanced at Rogan. His face was blank.
“Major always worries,” an older man said.
“It’s our job to prove that he’s worried for nothing, Watkins.” Luanne turned and the view swung to a group of private soldiers. “Time to earn the big money.”
The screen split into four, each feed attached to a different soldier.
“Fast forward,” Rogan said quietly.
The recording sped up. They divided into four huge black Tahoes, picked up the lawyers—putting them only into two Tahoes—and took separate routes to the hotel. The video slowed to normal speed. We watched them get out and escort two men and two women, all in Scorpion bulletproof vests, into the hotel, where another private soldier met them at the door. Rogan’s team must’ve scouted the location beforehand and done a walk-through.
As the lawyers were hustled into the hotel, the recording caught the taller woman’s face.
Cornelius took a sharp breath.
She was about twenty-eight or so, Asian, possibly of Korean descent, with a round face and large smart eyes that looked just like her daughter’s. Worry twisted her face. She seemed so alive there on the recording.
I was watching a dead person walking.
The lawyers and the private security people moved into the building. Four went ahead. The group directly responsible for the lawyers’ lives followed, clearing the hotel’s corridors in the “hallway” formation: one guard in front, the other slightly behind to his left, then the lawyers, then the third guard on the right and the final guard almost exactly behind the first. From above it would look like a rectangle set on a corner. Four remaining guards brought up the rear. They moved fast, took the stairs instead of the elevator, and arrived at a suite on the second floor. Another private solider, a woman this time, stood at the doors of the suite.
“Any security on the outside?” I asked.
“There are two people,” Rogan said. “One on the building northwest, covering the entrance, and one on the museum’s roof to the north, covering the two windows.”
Thorough. He’d covered the exit and the windows, so if anyone or anything that presented a threat tried to enter the hotel, his people would know instantly and neutralize it. I never took any private security jobs, but back when my father was alive, he and my mother had insisted I take a course on it at a training facility in Virginia. From what I could remember, Rogan’s people had crossed every t and dotted every i .
The lawyers and their bodyguards filed into a spacious suite. A dark coffee table—some sort of wood, nearly black and sealed to a mirror shine—stood in the middle of the room, flanked by a dark grey sectional sofa and two chairs, one upholstered in royal purple and the other in zebra print. The lawyers sat down. Rogan’s people spread through the room, one by the dark red draperies, one by the door to the bathroom, and the rest by the walls, forming a killing field in front of the door. Four people stayed with the lawyers.
The four feeds on the split screen showed every angle of the room. On two of them Luanne’s face was clearly visible and she was frowning. She was looking at the window. What did she see . . . ?
Condensation. A thin layer of fog tinted the glass.
“Bug,” Luanne said quietly. “What’s the humidity in here?”
“Ninety-two percent.”
“What’s the humidity by Cole on the roof?”
“Seventy-eight.”
“Abort.” Luanne bit off the word. “Move them out now.”
The room iced over. In a blink a layer of ice sheathed the walls, the weapons, and the furniture.
“I’m reading a temperature drop!” Bug’s voice called.
Then everything happened all at once.
A short African American soldier standing by the lawyers clenched her fists and jerked them down, as if ripping something. A low sound rolled through the room and the air around her turned pale blue. An aegis, a human bulletproof shield.
Three other soldiers by the aegis jerked the lawyers to their feet and shoved them into the blue sphere.
At the door another soldier grabbed the handle, yanked his hand free as if burned, and kicked the door. It held. The layer of ice on it kept growing, at least an inch thick.
“Make a hole!” Luanne barked.
The two men by the door snapped into mage poses, arms slightly raised, palms up as if holding an invisible basketball in each hand. Crimson lightning flared around their fingertips. Enerkinetics, commanding the raw magic energy. The wall was about to explode.
Suddenly Luanne’s face turned blank. She snapped her MP7 up and shot both enerkinetics in the head.
Across the room a middle-aged African American man spun toward her and fired. The bullets smashed into Luanne, jerking her back with each hit. The view of her camera trembled as each projectile ripped into her body. A small explosion flared before her camera, the bloody mist flying. A bullet hit Luanne in the skull.
She turned, oblivious to the stream of bullets. She should’ve been dead. She had to be dead, but her body rotated, swung the MP7 around, and unloaded the full blast into the aegis’s blue sphere. The bullets slid through, making ripples in the barrier and clattering harmlessly to the floor. The middle-aged man who’d shot her turned as well, the same slack expression on his face, and pumped a stream of bullets into the shield.
What the hell was going on?
I looked into Rogan’s eyes. I had expected anger and pain, but what I saw in their depths made me want to cringe. They were full of darkness, as if a layer of ice had formed over bottomless black water. There were terrible things in that water.
“Give me an exit!” the aegis screamed.
The soldiers near her fired back. Luanne careened and crashed down, her head bouncing off the floor, her camera still recording.
The two soldiers, one by the door and the other by the window, spun in unison and sprayed the room, cutting down the lawyers’ guards like they were straw, then turned their weapons onto the shield. The aegis screamed as multiple impacts ripped into her sphere. Blood poured from her nose. Her hands shook with effort.
The faces of the lawyers behind the shield were so frightened—contorted with panic and helpless.
The first bullet broke through and hit the young blond lawyer in the throat. Blood landed on Nari Harrison’s cheek and I saw the precise moment when she realized she wouldn’t be going home.
The blue sphere vanished as the shield failed. The aegis dropped to her knees, blood pouring from her mouth. Bullets ripped into the unarmed attorneys. For a few moments they jerked, suspended by the stream of armor-piercing rounds tearing into their flesh, and then collapsed. Nari landed four feet away from the camera. Her wide-open dead eyes stared at us through the screen.
Cornelius made a strangled sound.
A boot blocked Luanne’s camera view. Two shots popped like dry firecrackers. The boot moved as the soldier stepped over to Nari. A gun barrel loomed over her head. Two bullets punched her temple, misting blood onto her face. The soldier walked from lawyer to lawyer, pumping bullets into their heads, then stopped by the blonde female lawyer’s body. Blood soaked her blond hair. He crouched, pulled something from her hand, and stepped away. Glass shattered. He returned to sink two bullets into her skull.
The camera in the left top corner swung up and we saw the soldier’s young freckled face. His eyes were brimming with pain and fear. Slowly, he raised his middle finger and held it. A little message to Rogan. Fuck you.
The soldier pulled his sidearm out. His hand shook, as if he strained against the movement. His lips quivered. His eyes, wide open, nearly black with desperation and fear, stared straight at us. He pressed the huge black barrel of the Smith and Wesson against his own temple and pulled the trigger.
The camera clattered to the floor.
It hurt to breathe. I wanted to cry, to stomp, to do something to let what I’d seen out of my head, but instead it sat there, hot and painful, while I grew numb. I looked at Rogan and saw everything at once: his impassive face, his hands quietly locked into a single fist, and his eyes, dark with rage and grief.
“May I have some privacy?” Cornelius asked, his voice ragged and broken.
Rogan and I rose at the same time.
Rogan led me across the room and we walked out onto the balcony. Comfortable chairs and a chaise lounge with blue cushions circled a coffee table. I sat down.
Rogan pulled off his tabard. The black pants and the shirt hugged his frame, showing off his flat, hard stomach, his chest, and his wide shoulders. Normally I would’ve stared. Now I was too numb.
The menacing elemental force that had terrified Forsberg was gone. Instead Rogan was grim and resolute now, his magic coiling around him like an injured wolf with savage fangs ready for revenge.
“Beer?” he asked, his eyes dark.
“I can’t.”
He walked over to the fridge built into the stone side of the balcony and brought me a bottle of cold water.
“Thank you.”
I took the bottle and stared at it, trying to purge the visions of blood, Nari Harrison’s dead eyes, and the young soldier’s desperation. Right now Cornelius was inside struggling with images of his wife dying. The tinted wall of glass, opaque from the outside, hid him from us. Bug was probably monitoring Cornelius via his tablet. The swarmer had escaped through the back door as Rogan and I stepped out, but I highly doubted Rogan would leave Cornelius completely unsupervised.
“Can Cornelius hear us?” I asked.
“No. He can see us, but I’d guess he’s currently preoccupied.”
“Why did you ask him if he was bonded to his wife?”
“Pretium talent,” Rogan said.
The price of talent? “I don’t understand.”
“Animal mages bond with animals at a very young age, some in infancy. They’re too young to control their magic and they become attuned to dogs, cats, wild birds, squirrels, any living creature their talent can reach. That power comes at the cost of cognitive development and their relationship with humans. Some of them never learn to talk. Most don’t develop empathy toward other people, except for a bond with their parents, but, when parents themselves are animal mages, they don’t always bond with their offspring. It’s not something they advertise for obvious reasons. Meaningful adult relationships are very rare for them.”
“But Cornelius loved his wife.”
Rogan nodded. Sadness softened his harsh expression for a brief moment. “Yes. Somehow she broke through to him. She gave him something he thought he would never have and now she’s dead. He knows he probably will never experience that again.”
That explained so much and made everything even more horrible.
We sat in tense, heavy silence. The anger boiled inside of me, a self-defense against shock and brutality. I wanted to punch something. I rested my elbows on my knees and buried my face in my hands, trying to keep calm. Don’t rewind it in your head. Focus on the job. Focus on doing something about it.
“Do you think an ice mage was responsible?” I asked.
“Yes. To drop the temperature that fast, it would have to be a Significant, but probably a Prime,” Rogan said, his voice clinical and calm. “And an egocissor.”
“A manipulator?”
He nodded again, wrapped in an icy detachment. “Definitely a Prime.”
Manipulators were dangerous as hell. They could impose their will on others and their victim was usually aware of what they were doing. Luanne knew she had fired at her own people. She watched herself do it, but couldn’t do a thing about it. The freckled soldier had put bullets into his friends and was powerless to stop it.
And Rogan had watched it all. Knowing him, he had gone over that recording moment by moment, studying it, searching for the instant it had all gone wrong, looking for some slight hint of the enemy betraying themselves. How many times had he watched his people die? I searched his face and saw the answer—too many. They’d had his people murder each other and sent him a special fuck you at the end. They’d made it personal. They wanted him to blame himself and feel helpless. In his place I would’ve raged. I didn’t know these people. They weren’t my friends or employees, but after watching that, I had trouble keeping it together. He sat across from me, cold and calm.
An officer, I realized. He was acting like a capable military officer whose unit had taken heavy casualties—methodical, almost serene, while his mind feverishly sorted through threats and strategies. Rogan wouldn’t fall apart. He would stay just like that until he eradicated every last person responsible for his people’s death.
“Bug’s equipment says Luanne’s heart stopped beating three seconds after Rook fired at her,” Rogan said. “She was clinically dead. Only a Prime manipulator could’ve held on to her for a full ten seconds after death. An ice mage and a manipulator of that caliber working together means two different Houses.”
It meant a conspiracy and an alliance, the same type we had seen behind Adam Pierce. Rogan was right. Something big was happening and we had just grazed the edge of the storm.
“How many ice mages with that kind of capability are in Houston?” I asked.
“Sixteen, by conservative estimate. Twenty-two, if we’re being generous. Four Houses.”
Too many. “Manipulators?”
“Three Houses, but that doesn’t help us. I told you that animal mages don’t like to advertise the side effects of their powers.”
“Manipulators may not admit to being manipulators?”
Rogan nodded. “They rank as other telepathic specialties. Psionic inundation is a heavy favorite.”
Psionics had the ability to temporarily overload other minds. A psionic Prime could generate a field of mental effect and everyone caught in it would go blind, or fall to the ground in pain, or flee for their life.
“What about the glass breaking toward the end?”
“He dropped something out of the window. Bug thinks it may have been a USB drive. Whatever it was, a vehicle drove up and one of the passengers grabbed it off the pavement. My sniper had no clear shot because of the traffic.”
We sank into silence again. The recording kept playing over and over in my head, so visceral it shot right past all of my normal brakes and reached deep into the vicious part of me that usually woke only when my family was threatened. I wanted to kill the people who did this. I wanted to murder them and watch them die. It would be just. It would be fair.
I met Rogan’s gaze. “Do you have any leads?”
“Do you?” Rogan asked. “Did you get anything from Forsberg?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to tell me?”
“No.”
He stared at me.
“You’re not my client,” I told him. “I don’t work for you and I’m not going to share confidential information with you unless my client directs me to do it. Even then, I have misgivings. I’m still trying to come to terms with what happened to his wife.” Her death kept playing though my head, stuck on a perpetual loop.
He leaned back and studied me. An imperceptible shift took place in the way he sat, in the line of his shoulders, and in his eyes. Apparently we were done talking about work.
“What?”
“I missed you,” he said, his lips stretching into a slow, lazy smile. The ice in his eyes began to melt. “Did you miss me, Nevada?”
He said my name. “No.”
“Not even a little bit?”
“No. Never thought of you.” Just because I usually chose not to lie didn’t mean I couldn’t.
Rogan grinned and all of my thoughts went to the wrong places. He was almost unbearably handsome when he smiled.
“Stop it,” I growled.
“Stop what?”
“Stop smiling at me.”
He grinned wider.
“Why did you even get involved in this? Trying to punish your cousin?”
“Yes.”
And he’d just lied. I squinted at him. “Lie better.”
“Nice, Ms. Baylor. That was a partial truth and you still tagged it. Been practicing?”
“None of your business.” I hadn’t just been practicing. I’d been actively working on being better. I studied my books, I worked on arcane circles, and I experimented with my magic. I enjoyed it too. Using my magic was like stretching an aching muscle. It felt good.
“Mmm, prickly.”
“You’re not answering my questions. Why should I answer yours?”
He surveyed me, his eyes half closed, as if wondering if I were a delicious snack. I had an image of a massive dragon circling me slowly, eyes full of magic fixed on me as he moved, considering if he should bite me in half.
“Dragons.” Rogan snapped his fingers.
Oh crap.
“I wondered why I kept getting dragons around you.” He leaned forward. His eyes lit up, turning back to their clear sky blue. “You think I’m a dragon.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” My face felt hot. I was probably blushing. Damn it.
His smile went from amused to sexual, so charged with promise that carnal was the only way to describe it. I almost bolted out of my chair.
“Big powerful scary dragon.”
“You have delusions of grandeur.”
“Do I have a lair? Did I kidnap you to it from your castle?”
I stared straight at him, trying to frost my voice. “You have some strange fantasies, Rogan. You may need professional help.”
“Would you like to volunteer?”
“No. Besides, dragons kidnap virgins, so I’m out.” And why had I just told him I was not a virgin? Why did I even go there?
“It doesn’t matter if I’m the first. It only matters that I’ll be the last.”
“You won’t be the first, the last, or anything in between. Not in a million years.”
He laughed.
“Rogan,” I ground out through my teeth. “I’m on the clock. My client is in the next room mourning his wife. Stop flirting with me.”
“Stop? I haven’t even started.”
I pointed my bottle at him.
“What does that mean?” he asked me.
“It means if you don’t stop, I’ll dump this bottle over your head and escape this compound with my client.”
“I’d like to see you try.”
The door opened and Cornelius stepped out. His face was flat, his eyes bloodshot. All my selfish embarrassment evaporated. Rogan’s sensual smile vanished and I was once again looking at a Prime—cold, hard, collected, and looking for revenge.
Oh. He’d done it on purpose. He’d riled me up and pulled me out of the terrible place I was in after I saw the video. The awful loop of death no longer played through my brain.
Cornelius sat in a chair and looked at Rogan. “What are you offering?”
“You have an excellent investigator,” Rogan said. “Ms. Baylor is competent, thorough, and holds herself to a high professional standard.”
I waited for the other shoe to drop.
“But her firm is small. It lacks resources and power. Things I have in abundance.”
Was he trying to get Cornelius to fire me?
“I, on the other hand, require Ms. Baylor’s services,” Rogan said. “She has the ability to greatly speed up the search for the murderer of my people.”
“Because she’s a truthseeker,” Cornelius said.
I sighed.
“I’m not an idiot,” Cornelius said quietly.
“We’re after the same thing,” Rogan said. “I propose we join forces.”
“I need a few minutes with Ms. Baylor,” Cornelius said.
“Of course.” Rogan rose and went inside.
Cornelius waited until the door shut behind Rogan and leaned back against the cushioned seat. “I realize that this is an uncomfortable question, but I have to ask. What’s your relationship with Mad Rogan?”
“We cooperated to apprehend Adam Pierce.”
“I know that. I meant emotional relationship.”
He deserved an honest answer.
“It’s the same old story.” I made my voice sound as nonchalant as I could. “Billionaire Prime meets a pretty girl with a little magic, billionaire Prime makes the girl an offer, and the girl tells him to hit the road.”
And then billionaire Prime makes all sorts of heated promises and dramatic declarations that make the girl think that maybe he might actually view her as more than a pleasant diversion, except he disappears for two months and doesn’t follow through.
“Will it be difficult for you to work with him?” Cornelius asked.
His wife was dead, Rogan had offered him the deal of a lifetime, and Cornelius was thinking of my comfort. In his place, I didn’t know if I would be capable of that much compassion.
“It’s very kind of you to take my feelings into consideration.”
“We’re a team. I’m asking you to put yourself at risk for my sake. I want to know your opinion.”
“I’m a professional and so is he. We’re able to put things aside. Whatever discomfort I may or may not feel is irrelevant.”
“Do you think I should agree to this?”
“Rogan is a cold-blooded bastard, but he’s right. We’ll need muscle, money, and firepower. He has them; we don’t. And, despite all of his high-handed arrogance, he keeps his word.”
“How do you know?”
“He spared Adam Pierce. I needed him alive and Rogan refrained from killing him even though he would’ve loved to twist Adam’s head off.”
A hawk shrieked. Talon swooped past us and a dead mouse fell on the table. The big bird turned and landed on Cornelius’ shoulder. The animal mage raised his hand and stroked the bird’s feathers gently, his face thoughtful.
The hawk was trying to feed him. Even Talon realized Cornelius was grieving.
“Think of Rogan as a dragon,” I told him. “A powerful, ancient, selfish dragon who’ll devour you in a blink but who also has an odd sense of honor. If you make a deal with him, make sure to spell out all of the important things now and get him to agree to them.”
Cornelius picked up the dead mouse and held it up to Talon. “Thank you. Not hungry. You eat it.”
Talon regarded the mouse with his round amber eyes, grabbed it out of Cornelius’ hand, and flew off to the tree line. Cornelius walked over to the window and tapped on the glass. Rogan stepped out and joined us at the table.
Cornelius took his seat. “We’ve considered your proposal and I have some conditions. Only one, actually.”
“I’m eager to hear it,” Rogan said.
“I understand that there are forces bigger than all of this,” Cornelius said. “I’m not interested in that. I want the person who killed my wife. There may come a moment when that person may become extremely valuable to you because of the information he or she carries. You’ll want to keep them alive as an information source or a hostage. You must understand that I don’t care.”
Cornelius’ voice dropped into a quiet, fierce growl. The pain was so raw on his face he didn’t look quite human.
“No matter how important that person is to you, you’ll give them to me. My price is the life of Nari’s murderer. I, and I alone, will take it.”
A thoughtful expression claimed Rogan’s face. His eyes turned calculating.
Cornelius waited.
Rogan offered his hand. “Agreed.”
Cornelius took his hand. They shook on it.
“Shall we formalize the arrangement?” Rogan asked.
“Yes,” Cornelius said.
Rogan dialed a number on his phone. “Bring me a blank House contract, please.”
“You’re actually going to write out a contract where you specify that you surrender the right to kill Nari’s murderer to Cornelius?”
Both of them looked at me. “Yes,” they said at the same time.
I just stared at them.
“He’s a member of a House,” Rogan said. “Why would I treat him with anything less than courtesy?”
We weren’t even from the same planet.
A woman appeared with a blank contract. They worked on it, Cornelius’ face haggard and angry at the same time. He and Matilda deserved to know what happened to Nari, and Matilda deserved to have her father return home to her. I had given my word and I was committed already, but if I hadn’t been, this would do it. If I walked away, Cornelius would run straight into whatever deep water Rogan was wading through, and keeping up with Mad Rogan was bad for one’s life expectancy.
“I need a security team on my house,” I said.
Rogan picked up his phone, texted a short word, and looked at me. “Done.”
“Were they already waiting somewhere conveniently close?”
“Yes.”
I pulled out my own phone and dialed the house.
“Yus!” my youngest sister chirped into the phone. Arabella was fifteen, but going through this weird phase where she acted like she was eight.
“Is Mom home?”
“Yus!”
“Find her and tell her that Rogan’s security team is watching our house. Please ask her not to shoot them.”
“Okay! Nevada?”
“What?” If she asked me about Rogan, I swear I would . . .
“Will you pick up some sushi for dinner?”
“Yes.”
“No nasty mayo sauce?”
“No mayo.”
“Will you tell Mad Rogan that he should ma . . . ?”
I hung up and turned to Cornelius. “How would you feel about moving into our house for the duration of the investigation?”
Cornelius blinked.
“This is going to get dangerous and complicated,” I said. “The people behind this aren’t going to have moral scruples over doing terrible things such as kidnapping and torturing a child. Our warehouse has an excellent security system, and it’s protected by Rogan’s people. If they somehow get past Rogan’s soldiers, they’ll have to deal with my mother, who’s a former sniper; my grandmother, who builds tanks; and four teenagers who have no fear of death and who all have been taught to shoot properly. You and Matilda will be safe.”
“But we have animals,” Cornelius said.
“We have a lot of room and an entire guest apartment built into the corner of the warehouse. My sisters would love to watch Matilda.”
“She’s right,” Rogan said. “You’re welcome to stay here as well, if you would prefer.”
Cornelius blinked. Leaving your daughter in the house of a man who leveled cities when he got upset wasn’t the most prudent move.
“Thank you. It would be rude of me to reject Nevada’s invitation.”
“Of course,” Rogan said and winked at me.
And he’d just manipulated Cornelius. This would be one hell of a partnership.
“Do we have a plan?” Cornelius asked.
Both of them looked at me. Right. I was the investigator, so they expected me to investigate.
“Has Bug been able to identify who the lawyers were supposed to meet?”
“No,” Rogan said.
I turned to Cornelius. “And you have no idea whom Nari was meeting or why?”
“No,” Cornelius said.
“Has anyone talked to the family members of the other lawyers?”
“No,” Rogan said.
I got up. “Then I’ll start there.”
“I’ll come with you,” Cornelius said.
“Not this time,” I said gently.
“Why?”
“Because your wife and their spouses knew each other socially. They may have an emotional reaction to your presence, and we need information. I promise that I’ll let you know tonight what I’ve learned. Also, you have a household to move.”
“I’ll arrange for escort.” Rogan pulled out his phone.
“Thank you but I got it,” I said.
“Not yours. His.” Rogan texted on his phone. “I’m coming with you. I’ve agreed to a partnership. I’ll participate in this investigation or the deal is off.”
I’d just assured Cornelius that Rogan and I could work together. There was no reasonable pretext to keep him from coming with me. I had to stay professional about this.
“Very well. However, I have some conditions. You have to promise not to kill people I’m about to question or intimidate them unless I ask you to. Specifically, please don’t strangle anyone with their clothes again.”
Cornelius’ eyes widened.
“Fine. Anything else?” Rogan asked, his voice dry.
“Yes. Please change so you look less like a Prime. I don’t want anyone to recognize you. It’s very hard to get people to open up when they realize the Scourge of Mexico is on their doorstep.”