SWNOVELS White Hot: Chapter 7
I sat in near absolute darkness. Around me the cave stretched on, deep, deep into the black. Watching me. Breathing cold that seeped into my bones. The jungle waited around the bend of the brown wall. Something stalked within it, something with long vicious teeth. I couldn’t see it or hear it, but I knew it was there, waiting. Other shapes rested next to me, swathes of deeper blackness. They knew it too.
The cave breathed. Something was biting my legs and I knew it was ticks and I should pick them off, but moving seemed too hard. I was too tired.
The sniffers were out there, waiting for the faintest splash of magic. Desperation had passed. Emotions too. We were numb animals now, trying to get from point A to point B. Animals who didn’t speak, who communicated with glances, and who moved as one.
A watery green light to the left announced someone had sacrificed a glowstick. The shapes around me shifted, drawn like moths to this pathetic ghost of a real fire, starved, filthy, stretching hands to each other looking for some human touch in the nightmare.
A smaller shape scuttled to the side and fell under someone’s knife. Another squeaked and died. Rats. At least we’d eat tonight . . .
I sat upright in my bed. The shreds of the nightmare floated around me, melting. I groped for the lamp on the night table and flicked it on with trembling fingers. The welcome electric glow flared into life. My phone next to it told me it was almost two in the morning.
I wasn’t in a horrible cave. I was in my bedroom.
I felt clammy all over. I’d had nightmares before, but this was different. Oppressive, chilling, and hopeless. My room didn’t seem real, but the cave was. It was very real and it waited for me just beyond these walls. I was trapped.
I shuddered.
Pulling the blanket to my chest and clenching it didn’t seem to fix my freak-out.
I peered around the bedroom with wide eyes. There was no way I could go back to sleep. There was no turning off the light either. My stomach growled. I’d gone to bed without dinner. I’d been too tired to eat.
Okay, sitting in bed and shivering really didn’t accomplish anything. What I needed was to get out and go downstairs to our clean modern kitchen, and drink a hot cup of chamomile tea and eat something that didn’t look like a rat. Possibly a cookie. Cookies were as un-ratlike as you could get.
I pulled the blanket back, put on a pair of yoga pants, and opened my door, half expecting to see the cave walls.
No cave. No secret enemy with terrifying teeth waiting in the darkness. Just the familiar warehouse.
I tiptoed down the ladder and went along the hallway toward the kitchen. The above-the-table lamp was on and warm electric light pooled at the doorway. Rogan sat at the table, a laptop open in front of him. He leaned forward, his chin resting on his chest. His eyes were closed. He dwarfed the chair. He was so well proportioned it was easy to forget how big he was. His shoulders were huge and broad, his chest powerful, his arms made to crush and rip his opponents.
His hair wasn’t really long enough to be tousled, but it looked unbrushed and messy. Dark stubble touched his jaw. He’d lost some of that killer efficiency that made him so terrifying. He was human and slightly rough. I could picture him looking just like that, stretched out on a bed, as I climbed in there next to him.
Mad Rogan in his off mode. All of his titles—Prime, war hero, billionaire, major, butcher, scourge—lay at his feet, discarded. Only Connor remained, and he was so unbearably sexy.
I could just turn around and go back the way I’d come, but I wanted him to open his eyes and talk to me. My mother taught me that former soldiers could fall sleep anywhere, in any position. And they didn’t react well to being surprised.
“Rogan,” I called from the door. “Rogan, wake up?”
He awoke instantly, going from deep sleep to complete awareness in a blink, as if someone had thrown a switch. Blue eyes regarded me. “Problems?”
“No.”
I walked into the kitchen. Electric kettle or single-use coffeemaker? Coffeemaker was faster. I took a cup out of the cabinet, dropped the tea bag into it, and watched as the coffeemaker poured hot water over it.
He checked his laptop. “What are you doing up? I thought we agreed that you would rest.”
“I had a nightmare.” I extracted the jar of cookies from the pantry and brought it and my tea to the table.
He straightened, squaring his shoulders, stretching slightly. The chair couldn’t have been comfortable.
“What are you doing?” I peeked at his laptop. A shot of the video with the Suburban passing our Range Rover, ice frosting the road behind it. He must’ve been going frame by frame through it, trying to see some clues he missed.
“Bug is really good at this sort of thing, you know,” I told him.
“I know.” He pushed the laptop away. Drowsiness still hid in the corners of his blue eyes.
A cup of coffee sat in front of him. I stole it.
“I wasn’t finished with that.”
“It’s cold. I’ll warm it up so you will have something to drink. You can’t eat cookies without a drink.” I stuck the mug into the microwave. “Why aren’t you asleep on your air mattress?”
“I was working. What happened in your nightmare?”
The microwave beeped and I took the cup out and placed it in front of him.
“I was trapped in a cave. It was cold and dark. Something scary was waiting outside and then someone killed a rat, and I knew we were going to eat it.”
I shuddered and sipped my tea. It was almost scalding, but I didn’t care.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s not your fault.” I opened the plastic cookie jar, extracted a fat chocolate chip cookie, and offered it to him. He snagged it and bit into it.
“Good cookies.”
“Mhm.” I broke my cookie in half and bit one piece. There are times in life when sugar turns into medicine. This was one of those times.
“Did you make these?”
“Ha. I wish. It was probably Catalina. I can’t cook.”
He frowned at me. “What do you mean, you can’t cook?”
“Well, I can make good panini, but that’s about it. The way I look at it, someone has to put the food on the table and someone has to cook it. I’m the put-it-on-the-table type.”
He was looking at me oddly.
“Can you cook, Mr. I-Am-Prime?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you have people for that?”
“I like to know what’s in my food.”
I propped my elbow on the table and leaned my chin on my hand. “Who taught you to cook?” He wouldn’t tell me, but any little glimpse into him was worth taking a chance.
“My mother. One summer when she was six, her family was celebrating her older sister’s birthday back in Spain. Her sister loved cream puffs so the caterer brought a tower of cream puffs drizzled with chocolate and strands of sugar. It was the best thing my mother had ever seen up to that point.”
His voice was quiet, almost intimate. I could just sit here and listen to him talk all night.
“As adults were putting candles on the tower, her five-year-old cousin stole a cream puff and ate it. My mother was outraged, because the cream puffs belonged to her sister, so she slapped him. His sister, Marguerite, took offense to the slap. They had a brawl right there on the lawn. Half of the children started fighting, the other half cried, and everyone was sent to their rooms without dessert. The tower was covered with plastic, because their mother was determined to still have the celebration once everyone calmed down. The cousin died half an hour later.”
My heart dropped. “Poisoned.”
Rogan nodded. “They were involved in a long feud with another House.”
“They targeted the children?”
“Children are the future of any House. When my mother was fourteen, she killed the person responsible. She collapsed their summer villa.”
Somehow that didn’t surprise me.
“My mother cooked all of my food herself from ingredients she grew or purchased. So I eventually learned to make my own. Who do you think made that enormous stack of pancakes Augustine had to eat for his initiation?”
“Did you put anything weird into those pancakes?”
“No. That wouldn’t be fair.” He grinned at me. It was a sharp, amused grin that made him appear wolfish. “The real question here is would you like me to cook something for you?”
“Like what?”
“What are you in the mood for?”
Sex.
Rogan leaned forward, muscles rolling under the sleeves of his T-shirt. His face took on a speculative expression. There was something slightly predatory about the way he focused on me; it wasn’t the fear of being in the presence of a man who posed real danger. It was the feeling of being in the presence of a man who was about to try to seduce me. Anticipation zinged through me. Had he actually plucked the impression of my lust out of my head? Maybe it was just a coincidence.
He reached over.
I tensed.
His fingers slid so close to mine, I thought for a moment we touched. He stole the remaining half of my cookie and looked at it.
“That’s mine,” I told him.
“Mhm.”
“There is a whole jar of cookies.”
A light sparked in his eyes. “I want this one.”
“You can’t have this one. Give it back.” I held out my hand.
He examined the cookie and slowly raised it to his mouth.
“Connor, don’t you dare.”
He bit the cookie and chewed it. “I took your cookie and ate it. Are you going to do something about it?”
I was playing with fire. Fine. He ate my cookies, I’d drink his drink. I reached for his coffee. It slid out of my reach and settled next to him.
“Not fair.”
“This isn’t about fair. This is about delicious cookies.”
“In that case, that will be your last.” I grabbed the jar and put it in front of me. It shot straight up and hung above us. My half-empty teacup took off like a rocket and landed on the far end of the island. Okay, enough is enough. This was my kitchen.
I jumped up and marched around the table.
He surged up and his arms closed about me, catching me. His touch was light, but I knew with absolute certainty that there was no getting away. He had me.
Only two thin layers of fabric separated me from him. I wasn’t even wearing a bra. My breasts brushed against the hard wall of his chest. My hands rested on his shoulders. A low, insistent feeling began to build between my legs. I wanted to be touched and stroked.
He was looking at me like I was the most beautiful thing in the world.
“What are we doing?” I asked. My voice came out quiet.
“You know exactly what we’re doing.”
His breathing deepened. Need and lust swirled in his eyes. I searched their depths for the familiar icy darkness, but it was gone. I had chased it away. He was focused on me completely and I drank it in. Oh, I wanted him.
I slid my hands up his arms, feeling the hard cables of muscle tense and bulge under the pressure. He made a low male noise but didn’t move. His body was hard with tension against mine, but he didn’t move an inch.
It dawned on me that he was waiting for me to decide.
“You’re being very patient.”
“I can be a good dragon, when the occasion requires it.”
I licked my lips. His gaze snagged on my tongue.
I had to decide. I couldn’t stand it any longer. Either we did this, or I needed to march back upstairs. I was a grown woman, damn it. I’d almost died less than twelve hours ago and he was here, protecting me, making sure my family survived the night. He didn’t have to do it. Maybe he was a sociopath, but if he was, for some reason, I mattered to him. In this moment, right now, he belonged to me.
“This one time, maybe you shouldn’t be.”
“I shouldn’t be what?” he asked.
“Maybe you shouldn’t be so good.”
He spun me around. My back pressed against the kitchen wall. His big muscular body caged me in. His blue eyes laughed at me. “How bad am I allowed to be?”
“I don’t know. Let’s find out.”
“Try not to scream.” He winked at me.
His magic touched my skin just above the knee, a familiar heated velvet pressure. His arms stroked mine, pinning them against the wall. Try not to scream, huh. Aren’t we full of ourselves . . .
The pressure burst, prickling my skin with raspy heat. Oh my God.
I gasped and his mouth sealed mine, stealing the sound. The taste of him flooded my senses, overloading me. I wanted my hands on him, but he held me tight, pinning my wrists against the wall with his left hand.
His magic stroked my skin and slid sideways, to the sensitive spot on my inner thigh just above my knee. It felt rough, a little like a burn, a little like pain, and a lot like pleasure. It lingered and slid up, higher and higher, setting my sensitive skin and nerves on fire. My head spun. I wanted sex. I wanted him inside me, right now. I wanted to feel the full length of him stretching me and feel his body shudder on top of mine.
I moaned into his lips. He kissed me, pillaging my mouth, the slick heat of his tongue taking over, and I teased him with my tongue, nipping at his lower lip. My breasts felt heavy and full; my body turned pliant. He was all hard muscle and rigid strength, and I stretched myself against him, seducing, enticing. He groaned.
The magic spilled over my inner thigh and licked the sensitive lips around my clit with its velvet tongue. Pleasure washed over me. I cried out. He caught it with his mouth, smothering the sound.
The heat was building between my legs, a crazy mix of pain and ecstasy. I was breathing too fast and I wanted more of him.
Please. Please, more. Please.
“Shhh, baby,” he whispered into my ear, his voice rough with desire. He kissed me again and again, trailing a line of kisses down my neck. Each touch of his lips sent bursts of electric shocks through me. His gaze roamed my body. “You’re so beautiful. You have no idea.”
I wanted to see more of him. “Let me go, Connor,” I whispered.
He hesitated for a moment and released me.
I pulled his shirt off and looked at him, taking in the solid strength of his shoulders, the powerful chest, and the flat hard lines of his stomach in a single supercharged second. The sheer physical power of him was overwhelming. He had the kind of body that made women sigh because they knew they would never be able to touch it. And here it was, all mine. Not a fantasy. Not an image on the screen. Right here, the reality.
His hands caught my T-shirt. He pulled it off, picked me up, and slid my ass onto the kitchen table, sliding between my thighs. My nipples were cold and as he pulled me to him, they mashed against the heated wall of his chest.
I wrapped my arms around him, feeling the muscles of his back roll in response to the pressure of my fingers. I was so far gone I felt like I was drunk.
He was kissing my throat, trailing a line of heat down my neck. I found his lips and kissed him, quickly, deeply. I was in a hurry.
“Say my name again,” he growled into my ear.
The magic licked me, each stroke pushing me higher and higher. My skin burned in its wake as if slapped. It was beyond anything I’d ever tried, but it felt so good. Aaaaah . . . Please, please, please please please . . .
“Say my name, Nevada.”
“Connor.”
The magic drenched me, wringing pleasure from me. I felt on fire. I dug my nails into his back. This was sweet torture and I didn’t want it to end. He bent down, his rough fingers teasing my nipples. His mouth closed on one tight aching bud and he sucked.
I arched my back against the liquid tease of his tongue. More. More.
We were about to have sex on the kitchen table. Some part of me insisted I should care, but it was so hard to hear it.
I found his belt, undid it, and reached inside.
Oh dear God. I might need two hands.
He made a harsh male noise and I slid my hand up and down the shaft of his cock, pumping the smooth skin . . .
His phone screeched.
“Fuck!” Rogan grabbed the phone. “What?”
A brisk male voice spat out the words, loud enough that even I heard it. “Semi and four ATVs coming fast.”
Shit. ATVs, light armored vehicles, served as the armed forces’ version of a Jeep. They carried personnel and each sat four people and sometimes a gunner, which meant more than a dozen attackers were coming our way. We were about to have company. I grabbed my shirt and threw Rogan’s at him. He caught it with one hand. “Which direction?”
“They just turned onto the west access road.”
The access road let trucks roll up to the back of the warehouses. We used it for tanks and armored vehicle transport. They’d hit us from the motor pool side.
“Correction, not a semi. A tanker truck.”
Better and better.
“ETA?” Rogan barked.
“Sixty seconds.”
Rogan ran for the motor pool, pulling his shirt on.
I ran to the alarm console and hit the internal panic button. A loud metallic screech rolled through the warehouse. I pressed the intercom’s button. “A tanker truck and four ATVs coming at us from the west access road.”
I ran for the motor pool. The two industrial garage doors were up, the light of the street lamp spilling through the rectangular bays. Rogan strode into the pool of light and went down the street. Unarmed.
I keyed the correct sequence into the laptop and the feed from four cameras flared up. I pushed the intercom. “I’m in the motor pool.”
Grandma Frida burst through the door in her yellow rubber-ducky pajamas.
“Grandma’s here,” I added.
“In position,” my mother reported.
“I’m up,” Bernard said from his post in the Hut of Evil.
“We have Matilda and Cornelius,” Catalina reported.
I heard the roar of a tanker truck picking up speed. Out of time.
I need stopping power. I grabbed an AA-12 shotgun from the weapon cage, unlocked the ammo cage, and slapped the twenty-shell drum containing high-explosive Frag-12 shells and grabbed a grenade.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Grandma Frida yank the tarp off of Romeo. Romeo’s real name was M551 Sheridan. He was a light armored tank. He carried nine antitank Shillelagh missiles, and Grandma Frida kept him in perfect health.
I sprinted to the garage door and stuck my head out. The truck tore toward us on the access road, making no effort to slow down. An oblong cistern loomed behind the green cab. There was no telling what the hell was in that cistern. At this speed, the truck could ram the warehouse and rip through the walls like paper and whatever it was hauling would spill over.
I couldn’t let it get to the warehouse.
Behind me Romeo growled into life. It required a four-person crew to effectively operate—a tank commander, a loader, a gunner, and a driver. By the time Grandma swung it around, the tanker truck would have hit us.
Rogan strode down the road. Apparently he’d decided to play chicken with the tanker.
I ran after him. If I could toss a grenade under it, I’d derail it before it reached the warehouse.
The tanker roared toward us.
Twenty yards between the tanker and Rogan.
Fifteen.
“Get out of the road!” I yelled.
Ten yards.
“Connor!”
The truck smashed into empty air. Its hood bent, crushed by an invisible hammer, and tore. The black engine parts bulged out, as if the truck was trying to vomit, and disintegrated from the impact. The top part of its cab folded on itself. Its windshield exploded in a thousand shards, spilling over the exposed motor.
Holy crap.
The tanker truck still revved, trying to push its way forward. Its tires spun, spitting acrid smoke, and burst like two loud gunshots.
Behind us the tank engine growled. I glanced over my shoulder. Romeo tore out of the garage bay and turned left, away from us and the truck, going around the corner to the other side of the warehouse. The attack force must’ve split.
The truck’s engine snapped, crying and screeching, and began to turn back in on itself, folding. The metal popped, groaned, snarled, folding tighter, and collapsing backward, from the front of the hood toward the cab.
I stopped in spite of myself as my brain tried to make sense of what I was seeing.
He was rolling the truck up like a half-empty tube of toothpaste.
A loud thud echoed through the night. Grandma Frida fired Romeo.
Rogan took a step forward. The truck slid back.
Another step. Another slide.
The cistern exploded. The blast wave punched me. I flew back as a colossal ball of fire roared up, blossoming against the night sky, brilliant white in the center, then yellow, then deep ugly orange. I curled into a ball trying to shield my head. The pavement slapped my back and side. Ow. Something in my spine crunched. Chunks of burning pallets clattered around me.
Gasoline didn’t burn when shot. You could unload a full magazine into a car with a full tank and it would just sit there. They must’ve rigged the cistern to remotely detonate. That huge fireball had been meant for my family.
A piece of wood smashed against my arms, burning. Shit. I kicked the chunk of a broken pallet off of me and jumped to my feet.
The street was empty, except for the massive fire. Where was Rogan? Was he dead? Please don’t be dead . . .
The fire growled like an animal. Wind howled and the fireball snapped up, shaping into a tornado of flames. The tornado spun and slid sideways like some crazy colossal spin top. The light of its fire illuminated the warehouse across the street, and I saw Rogan pressed into the narrow alcove next to the AC units.
The tornado edged closer to him.
If the whirlwind of flames found him, he’d burn alive. The mage controlling the tornado had to be down the street in one of the ATVs that had been following the tanker truck.
I jumped the concrete barrier separating me from the twin squat buildings of OKR Industries and dashed through the narrow gap between them. Thunder cracked behind me. The air smelled of ozone.
The gap ended. I glanced around the corner. In front of me, two people in tactical gear and armed with automatic weapons stood on the edge of the street, hidden from Rogan by the front OKR building. The third, in the mage pose—arms bent at the elbow, palms up—floated three feet above the pavement. An aerokinetic.
Behind them, on the street, one ATV was a crushed mess, with a chunk of the truck’s cistern sticking out of its smashed windshield. Past it, thick steel bars blocked the street. I was one hundred percent sure they hadn’t been there when I drove home.
“He has to be near that building. Swing it more to the right,” a man next to the mage said, his voice accented.
I took a deep breath, steadying myself. I should’ve brought the rifle instead.
“That’s it. Cook him.”
I braced myself, put the shotgun to my shoulder, and fired. The automatic shotgun barked, spitting death. An AA-12 combat shotgun fired three hundred rounds per minute. Each three-inch cartridge in the drum held a tiny warhead that armed itself three meters after it left the muzzle and exploded on impact.
I put two rounds into the mage before he realized what was happening. The high explosive ripped his body apart, tearing through flesh. He didn’t even scream. He just fell, but I was already swinging the shotgun around at his friends. Five rounds left the muzzle. The other two bodies jerked and went down without a word, turned into human meat.
The other side of the street erupted with gunfire. Bullets buzzed, biting chunks from the building around me. I ducked back into the gap. Five rounds for two people at that range was overkill. My adrenaline was too high. I had to calm down or I would panic and then I’d die.
I grabbed the grenade, jerked the firing pin out, and hurled it across the street. The loud boom of the explosion echoed through the night. I leaned out and ducked back in as a bullet grazed my shoulder, like a red-hot bee. Didn’t get them. Damn it.
To the right of me, the wind mage twitched on the ground, convulsing. He should’ve been dead. How was he not dead?
The fiery tornado swung into my view, zigzagging wildly all over the parking lot. It veered toward me. Unbearable heat stole all the air, as if a bonfire had exhaled into my face. It hurt to breathe. I backed away through the gap.
The mage still twitched. I raised the shotgun and fired. The round took him in the head. The fire loomed over me and rained down. I sprinted back out of the gap toward my home and burst into the parking lot.
Behind our warehouse, on the other side of the building, lightning cut the sky, flashing again and again, answering a steady staccato of gunfire. On the street, the remnants of the tanker truck burned, the orange flames fighting with the darkness.
Shots ripped through the night. I spun around. It was probably the same people who’d shot at me from across the street when I took out the mage. They weren’t shooting at me this time. They couldn’t see me behind the building, so Rogan had to be the target.
A twisted chunk of truck cab shot down the street, as if launched from a cannon. Metal clanged and the shots died. Ha!
I turned and saw him pressed against a building across the street. He slumped over. Shot? Fear gripped me. No, no blood. Not shot. Tired. Rogan was spent.
Shadows leaped over the remnants of the cistern, illuminated for half a second by the flames. Hairless, wrinkled, about four feet tall, they didn’t look human. Nor did they look like any animal I had ever seen. Their legs bent backward, like the hind appendages of some demonic grasshopper, while the front of their bodies curved up, ending in two muscled arms equipped with two claws longer than my hand and a dinosaur head with round yellow eyes and a forest of teeth.
Holy crap.
The front creature let out a gleeful bloodthirsty screech. As one, the pack spun toward Rogan’s hiding place.
Oh no, you don’t.
I jerked my shotgun up and fired.
The first round took the leading creature in the stomach. It kept coming. I squeezed the trigger and kept firing. The Frag-12 rounds chewed through the monster flesh, shredding their bodies. Strange intestines spilled out. An awful sour stench polluted the air. The creatures fell, one, two, three . . . Seven rounds gone.
The leading beast was too close to Rogan. If I aimed for it, I’d hit him. The creature leaped almost ten feet, flying at Rogan, his black claws poised to rend into flesh. Rogan sidestepped like his joints were liquid. A knife flashed in his hand. He dodged and buried his knife in the beast’s side. The creature flailed, ripping a gash across Rogan’s chest. Rogan kept stabbing with brutal efficiency, sinking the blade into the wrinkled alien body again and again, slashed its throat, and dropped it aside, his knife bloody.
Only twenty yards separated me from the last three creatures. They turned and charged me. I fired twice. The shotgun clicked, empty, the drum spent, one beast unmoving on the ground.
The first beast leaped, claws raised like sickles. I jumped aside and swung the shotgun like a club. The shotgun connected, but the beast was too huge. I might have hit it with a fly swatter for all the good it did me. The creature whirled.
A chunk of metal smashed into its side, sweeping it off its feet. Rogan.
The second beast rammed into me, its claws locking onto my shotgun. I hit the pavement with my back and clamped the shotgun with both hands, trying to keep it between us. Across the street Rogan was running to me.
The dinosaurian jaws gaped open. The monster reared, about to plunge for the kill.
A dark lean body flew above me. Bunny’s teeth flashed and locked onto the creature’s throat. The Doberman swung its body, throwing all of its weight into the bite. The wrinkled flesh of the beast’s neck tore. Bunny landed on the pavement, snarling. I scrambled upright.
The monster shuddered, dazed, shook its head . . . The creature’s skull exploded with red. My ears almost didn’t register the shot.
Mom.
Two more shots cracked, one, two, with barely a pause. The first took the last creature in midleap as it tried to carve Rogan’s chest. The other shot took down someone out of my view.
The night was still.
Rogan stood ten feet away from me, looking like he hadn’t gotten enough blood on his hands. The sudden silence was deafening.
It was over.
“Sixteen people,” Rogan’s right-hand man in charge of the warehouse defense crew reported.
His name was Michael Rivera and he had the athletic build of an MMA lightweight fighter—he could pass for a normal man until he flexed and then you realized that he could break your bones with his bare hands. Rivera was in his mid-thirties, Latino, with medium brown skin, dark hair, and an absurdly jovial, kind smile. When he grinned, his whole face lit up. Since he was smiling at eleven corpses neatly laid out in a row on our street, the smile was alarming.
Rogan watched with a dispassionate face. He’d promised me that if anyone disturbed my rest, they would sleep forever. He’d kept it. A long gash snaked its way across his chest, currently covered by a bandage. The wound had looked shallow, but there was no telling what sort of bacteria and poison rode on that creature’s claws. I’d gotten away with a gash on my thigh and some scrapes on my lower back. The medic that had cleaned and treated our wounds hovered protectively near Rogan, ready to spring into action but trying to stay out of his direct line of sight.
My sisters and cousins stood just outside, huddled together. Arabella covered her mouth with her hand. Catalina’s eyes were huge. She looked completely freaked out. Bernard was solemn enough for a funeral. Leon, for some bizarre reason, seemed excited, like he’d just ridden a roller coaster. My mother leaned in the doorway. Grandma Frida had ducked into the motor pool for something and was taking her time coming back.
Cornelius knelt by the corpses of the beasts, lost in thought. Matilda sat on the side, on some pallets, with Bunny. When I objected to her presence in view of the dead bodies, Cornelius patiently told me that they were dead and couldn’t hurt her and that this was her heritage and she needed to know. She didn’t seem disturbed by it, which in itself was enough to unsettle anyone with a conscience.
“Eleven dead here,” Rivera said. “Two burned up in the ATV Mrs. Afram shot with her tank. We’re gathering the body parts. Two we can’t recover until equipment gets here because Major dropped a truck engine on them and we can’t move it. Then we have seven MCMs.”
“Seven what?” I asked.
“Magically Created Monsters,” my mother said. “It covers all nonhuman combatants of unknown origin.”
“These are not Earth animals,” Cornelius said. “This is something pulled from the astral realm by a summoner.”
Great. Just great.
“Of these eleven, three magic users,” Rivera continued. “The summoner, the fulgurkinetic, and the aerokinetic.”
“Elementalist,” Rogan corrected. “An aerokinetic would’ve made the tornado, but couldn’t twist fire into one.”
Elementalists were rare. They controlled more than one element, usually air in conjunction with water or fire. They almost never reached the rank of Prime, but even at Average level, they were dangerous as hell.
It finally sank in. Someone really had tried to kill my family. They had come in with professional soldiers, military equipment, and heavy-hitter mages. Nausea swelled in me. My stomach tried to clench and empty itself. Now was so not the time.
An armored car rounded the corner behind us. Two of Rogan’s people got out and dragged a man into view, half carrying, half walking him.
“And number sixteen,” Rivera said, his voice precise. “Who tried to flee in the last ATV. We got ourselves a coward. We love cowards.”
“Why?” Leon asked.
“They talk,” Rogan said. His voice sent icy shivers down my spine.
They dropped the man in a heap on the ground. Dark-skinned, bleeding, he was somewhere between thirty and fifty. With all the soot covering his face it was hard to tell.
I glanced at Cornelius.
“Matilda,” he said. “Please go inside.”
“I’ll keep an eye on her,” Catalina said. Her voice squeaked. She picked Matilda up and took off inside at a near run.
“Leon, Arabella, inside,” my mother said.
“But . . .” Leon began.
“Now.”
They went into the warehouse.
The man stared at me, his face twisted with fear.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
He pressed his lips together.
“I can compel you to respond,” I said. “I really don’t want to. Please just answer my questions.”
Sweat broke out on his forehead and ran down, leaving a clean track in the soot. I pushed with my magic. Strong will. He looked tough, like he had been through more than one interrogation before and it had just made him harder. He wasn’t posturing and he wasn’t making any promises. He just stayed silent. This one would need a careful interrogation. Antonio had needed a punch; this man required a scalpel.
Rivera glanced at Rogan. Rogan shook his head.
“Chalk?” I asked.
Rogan reached into his pocket and pulled some out.
“Why didn’t you draw any circles when the truck was coming?” I asked.
“Because they would’ve veered off course,” Rogan said. “They had a plan. I wanted them to stick to it.”
Because nobody would expect one man to stop a tanker truck. A Prime in a circle was another matter. I crouched and drew an amplification circle on the ground: small ring around my feet, larger one around that, and three sets of runes in between. Rogan watched with a pained expression. Primes practiced circlework since birth. My circles made his brain hurt.
I straightened and held the chalk out to him. “Thank you.”
I pulled the magic to myself and shot it into the circle. It reverberated back into me as if I had bounced on a magic trampoline. I kept bouncing. One, two, three, each jump stronger than the last. Four. Should be enough.
My magic snapped out and clamped the man in its grip. My voice gained inhuman strength. “Tell me your name.”
Rivera’s eyes went wide. All around us Rogan’s people took a few steps back.
The man froze, gripped tight by my magic.
“Rendani Mulaudzi.”
“What is your profession, Mr. Mulaudzi?”
“Mercenary.”
His breath was coming in shallow puffs. I’d been practicing on my family. My sisters were only too willing to cooperate. It was a game. They tried to keep from telling me the truth and I learned how to do it carefully. This man’s will was strong, but Arabella’s was stronger. Sometimes she passed out rather than break, and before she did, her heart rate sped up and she started to hyperventilate. I’d have to watch him.
“What is the name of the company that hired you for this raid?”
“Scorpion Protection Services.”
“How long have you worked for Scorpion?”
“Six years.”
“What were you before?”
“Recces.”
“South African Special Forces,” Rogan said.
No wonder he was strong-willed. He wasn’t that young either, which meant he must’ve done at least a few years in the military and then survived six years as a mercenary.
“Where is Scorpion headquartered?”
“In Johannesburg.”
South Africa. He was a long way from home.
“How big is Scorpion?”
“It has four tactical teams, sixteen to twenty members each.”
“How many teams are involved in this mission?”
“One.”
“Were you hired specifically for this mission?”
“Yes.”
“Who hired you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who would know?”
“My team leader.”
“What is his name?”
“Christopher van Sittert.”
“Do you see him among the dead?”
“Yes.”
Of course. It couldn’t be that easy, could it? “Point to him, Mr. Mulaudzi.”
He pointed to one of the corpses.
“What was the objective of this mission?”
“To eliminate the following targets: Nevada Baylor, Cornelius Harrison, Penelope Baylor, Frida Afram, and Bernard Baylor within twenty-four hours of arrival.”
I’d never been number one on anyone’s hit list before. “What about the minors present in the house?”
“Their lives were left to our discretion. We weren’t paid to kill them.”
“Were you planning on killing the children?”
“I don’t know.”
The question had been too general. “Did you personally plan to kill the children?”
“Nevada,” Rogan said softly.
I raised my hand, warning him off. This was important to me.
“Not unless they presented a threat.”
“Do you bear any personal animosity to the targets you listed?”
“No.”
I glanced at Rogan. “Before we go any further, he is a mercenary; he was hired to do a job and he failed. He is now unarmed and a prisoner.”
Rogan’s eyes were dark. “You don’t want me to kill him.”
“No. I would like you to send him back to Scorpion wrapped up like a Christmas present. If their whole team disappears, they will have to send someone to investigate. I don’t want them coming back. This way, they don’t have to wonder. He’ll tell them that they came here armed and ready to kill, and we let only one of them live. They’re mercenaries. I want them to understand that it isn’t cost effective to continue this fight.”
“Be careful,” Rogan said. “You’re thinking like a Prime.”
I waited.
“Very well,” he said. “We’ll ship him back to his friends.”
“What do you want to know?” I asked.
“Ask him when he was hired.”
“When were you hired?”
“December 14th .”
Cornelius hired me on December 14th . That seemed really fast.
“Doesn’t make sense,” Rivera murmured. “Johannesburg to Houston is at least a twenty-hour flight.”
“Where were you when you received the orders for this mission?” I asked.
“Monterrey, Mexico.”
“What were you doing there?” The pauses between his replies were getting longer and longer. I would have to let him go soon.
“We had an alternative mission in Montemorelos. We were rerouted.”
“Montemorelos to Houston is a two-hour trip. They pulled them off a job,” my mother said. “They needed a team from out of town that couldn’t be traced to any existing House. The Scorpion team was likely the closest.”
“Describe your actions since arriving to Houston, Mr. Mulaudzi.”
“We arrived to Houston airport via Aeromexico Flight 2094. We proceeded to the base of operations.”
Rogan raised his hand. “Was the base set up by them or third party?”
I repeated the question.
“The base was prepared by a third party. We were issued weapons and gear and attended the briefing showing recon of the warehouse and the surrounding area. We formed a battle plan. We waited until the optimal time and executed the plan. The attack failed.”
No kidding.
“What is the address of this base?”
He gave the address in Spring, one of the little towns Houston had gobbled up as it grew, about forty minutes north of us. Rivera took off at a run. Three of Rogan’s people peeled off and followed him.
“Anything else?” I asked Rogan.
He shook his head.
I let the mercenary go. He collapsed on the ground and rolled into a ball, covering his face. His body shook and an unsettling low sound came from him. He was sobbing. I had opened his mind with my magic can opener, scooped out the contents, and displayed them for all to see. It was a deep violation of his person.
People were staring at me, their eyes brimming with fear. A couple of them gripped their weapons in alarm. I had horrified the professional soldiers. I looked at my mother. Sadness softened her face, her mouth slack.
It hit me. I was the monster on the street. Without me, they would’ve questioned and even tortured this veteran mercenary. They would’ve done it with the understanding that he would resist and he wouldn’t have faulted them for it, because in their place he would’ve done the same. There was a twisted kind of professional courtesy about it all. But me, I didn’t torture. I broke his will without even breathing hard. Each one of them could see themselves in the mercenary’s place. I could make them tell me all their secrets and that was more frightening than Rogan stopping a massive tanker truck at full speed.
I’d never felt so alone in my whole life.
Rogan stepped between me and them, his eyes full of something. Whatever it was—pride? Admiration? Love?—I held on to it like it was a lifeline. He understood. At some point in his life he had stood just like that, while people stared at him in horror, and he must’ve felt alone, because now he was here, and he was shielding me from their judgment.
“You’re amazing,” Connor Rogan said and smiled.
For some unfathomable reason Bernard had let Leon operate the remote cameras during the attack. They had an almost 180-degree rotation on their mounts and you could point them with precision, which was exactly what Leon had done during the fight. I was now in the motor pool, watching the recorded feed on Grandma Frida’s computer. Rogan and Cornelius both stood next to me, watching over my shoulder.
Leon had decided that the video needed narration and provided running commentary as it was being recorded. Apparently, he found the whole thing incredibly exciting.
The camera panned to capture two ATVs approaching from the north.
“Oh yeah, we got ourselves a badass killer vehicle,” my cousin’s voice came from the speakers. “We’re so cool, we’re so cool, we’re going to roll up and kill everybody. Wait, what? Oh no, is that a tank? It is a tank. It’s headed straight for us. Run, run, run . . . Too late. Hehehe.”
The front ATV exploded, taking a missile from Romeo straight on. The second vehicle swerved and screeched to a stop on a narrow side street next to the automotive shop, out of Romeo’s sight. People in tactical gear jumped out and ran into the night, looking for cover.
Leon zoomed in on the man in his forties on the right, who’d crouched by the ATV. “I’m a veteran badass. I’ve seen bad shit. I’ve done bad shit. I’ve survived five months in a jungle eating pinecones and killing terrorists with a pair of old chopsticks. I’m one bad motherfucker.”
Behind me Rogan laughed.
“I’ve got two days to retirement. After I kill everyone here, I’ll go to my retirement party. They’ll serve shrimp on crackers and give me a gold watch, and then, I’m going to have my midlife crisis and buy a Porsche and . . . Oh shit, my head just exploded.”
Either my mother or someone on Rivera’s team had found the mercenary’s head. Blood and brains splattered on the ATV.
The camera swung wildly to the right to a woman advancing toward the warehouse. She had gone to ground by the oak, hidden by the low stone wall bordering the tree.
“I’m death. I’m a ghost. I’ll find you. You can run, you can hide, you can beg, but none of it will help you. I’ll come for you in the darkness like a lithe panther with velvet paws and steel claws and . . . wait, brains, wait, where are you going? Why are you all leaking out of my head? Don’t leave me!”
I put my hand over my eyes.
“Oh no, look—my feet are twitching. That’s so undignified.”
I would kill Bern for letting him do this. And then I would have a serious talk with Leon.
“Your cousin has an interesting sense of humor,” Cornelius noted.
“I’m Mr. Ripped,” the computer announced in Leon’s voice. I didn’t even want to look anymore. “I live in the gym. My teeth have biceps and my biceps have teeth. I chew up weights and shit out lead bricks.”
Rogan’s face turned speculative.
“Don’t,” I told him.
“In about three years or so, I could use him. He’s demonstrating a very specific moral flexibility . . .”
“I’ll shoot you myself,” I told him.
Grandma Frida tore into the motor pool from the street, followed by an Asian woman in her late twenties. The woman wore Rogan’s team’s tactical gear. My grandma wore her “talk to the hand” face. She also carried a can of spray paint in her hand.
“What is it, Hanh?” Rogan asked.
“She marked all of the ATVs with her initials!” Hanh declared.
“Because they’re mine,” Grandma Frida growled.
“She doesn’t get all the ATVs.”
Rogan’s face took on a very patient look.
“Yes, I do. I tagged them, they’re mine.”
“Just because you tagged them doesn’t mean they’re yours. I can walk into this motor pool and start tagging things left and right. That doesn’t make them mine.”
“Aha.” My grandma picked up a huge wrench and casually leaned it on her shoulder. “How are you going to tag things with broken arms?”
“Don’t threaten me.” Hanh turned to Rogan. “She can’t have all of them.”
“Yes, I can,” Grandma Frida put in before Rogan could open his mouth. “The enemy attacked our position; it’s an emergency, and since I’m the acting platoon sergeant for this family, I’m requisitioning my Class VII supplies. They’re on our land.”
“Those three ATVs are on your land. The one down on the access road is on our land,” Hanh said.
“Nguyen, let her have the ATVs,” Rogan said.
Hanh opened her mouth to argue and clamped it shut.
“Ha!” Grandma Frida pointed her wrench at Hanh.
“Grandma . . .” I started. “If that other vehicle is on their land . . .”
Wait a minute.
I pivoted toward Rogan. “What does she mean that ATV is on your land?”
Hanh froze.
Rogan looked like he wanted to strangle somebody.
“Rogan?”
He was thinking of a clever way to phrase his answer.
“Did you buy property adjacent to this warehouse?”
He closed his eyes for a second, then looked at me, and said, “Yes.”
“How much property did you buy?”
“Some.”
I stared at him. “Could you be more specific?”
“Everything between Gessner, Clay, Blalock, and Hempstead.”
Dear God. That was almost two square miles of industrial real estate and our warehouse was sitting smack in the middle of his land. Every day I drove past these businesses and nothing seemed different.
“When did you buy this land?”
“I started the day Adam Pierce was arrested.”
“Why would you do this?”
“Because you live in the middle of an industrial jungle, Nevada.” His face was hard. “You have a number of small roads, you have industrial traffic going through here, and there are about a thousand places one could hide a strike team. I bought it because there is no way to effectively secure this location.”
“And you’ve secured it?” I had diagnosed him as a control freak long ago, but this was going too far.
“Yes. Now this area is patrolled, equipped with structure defenses, and secured by armed personnel.”
“No, Rogan. Just no.”
“The only reason these people came in on that particular road was because I allowed it. I shut down all nonessential roads at night. I made sure that stealth wasn’t an option. They were forced to punch through and come in hot, rather than use covert tactics and slit your throats while you slept. Even so, an assault of this scale is difficult to control. That’s why I stood there and presented a convenient target. Now we have a solid lead.”
So that’s where the spiked barricades came from. I should’ve known. When you worked for Rogan, he made sure you were defended. He went so far as to make you immune to financial pressure from outside sources: his companies provided your car loan, your kids’ college loans, your mortgage . . .
Oh no. No, he wouldn’t.
My voice could’ve frozen the air in the warehouse. “Rogan, do you own my mortgage?”
“Not personally.”
“Damn it!” He couldn’t have touched our business. Augustine would never sell, so he went after my home instead.
“Nevada, it’s in a trust. I don’t personally own it. One of my companies owns it. I can’t foreclose on it and I can’t sell it. The terms remained exactly the same.”
“You had no right to buy my mortgage!”
“I had every right. It was right there. Anybody could’ve bought it and used it as leverage.”
“You and I’ll never be financially equal; I get that. But you can’t just buy up chunks of my life. For anything between us to work, I have to be able to say no to you. If you own my house, I lose that ability. I lose my independence.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“There is no such thing as a simple meeting now. Any communication from you will be an invitation from a man who owns my house.”
“Have I used it as leverage? Have I mentioned it? Did I wrap it up with a pretty ribbon and offer it to you on a silver platter and said, ‘Here is your mortgage, sleep with me?’”
“You didn’t have to. It’s enough I know you could.”
“So now you’re blaming me for the things I could theoretically do?”
“I’m blaming you for the thing you already did. You bought every business around me and then you bought my mortgage. For any kind of relationship to work, I have to have a choice to walk away from it. You’re taking that ability away from me. You know I would do anything to keep the roof over my family’s head.”
“That’s not even logical,” he said, his voice precise and sharp.
“Oh? Then why didn’t you tell me about it?”
“I did tell you when you asked.”
“Let’s look at the sequence of events: you proposition me, I tell you no, you buy my mortgage. The fact that you don’t tell me about it just reinforces the fact that you may have used it as leverage. Because you would, Rogan. You will use every resource at your disposal to win.”
“I don’t want to win.” He locked his jaw. “This isn’t some idiotic competition between you and me to see if I can wear you down. I didn’t tell you because I knew you would react just like this.”
“You knew it was the wrong move.”
“Wake up,” he growled. “Tonight sixteen trained killers came here to murder you. They had military-grade weapons and equipment. They would’ve driven a tanker truck into this place, detonated the charges, and shot all of you as you ran out with your skin on fire. Do you honestly think that your seventy-three-year-old grandmother in an aging tank, your mother with a permanent injury and a sniper rifle, and a cage full of guns can protect you? This is House warfare. You were vulnerable. You were vulnerable physically and financially. I eliminated those vulnerabilities.”
His magic flared around him, raging, and met mine. Our powers collided.
“I didn’t ask you to eliminate them. They were not yours!”
“Your normal existence is over, Nevada. It was over when you took Harrison’s contract. The first time you popped on these people’s radar, you were forced to go after Adam Pierce. This time you voluntarily put yourself in the crosshairs. They can no longer ignore you. This isn’t about ethics, laws, or noble adherence to the rules. This is about survival. I didn’t tell you about it because you desperately cling to the illusion that you’re still a normal person living a normal life, and I tried to preserve it for you, because I wanted to keep your head above the river of shit and blood as long as I could.”
“I waded into that river on my own. I don’t need your help. Get off my property,” I ground out.
Rogan marched through the open garage door to the middle of the street, turned toward me, and spread his arms. “I’m on my property now. Is everything fine now? Did all of your problems disappear and none of this happened?”
“I’m going to shoot him,” I squeezed through my teeth.
“No, that would be murder,” Grandma Frida told me, her voice soothing. “You’ve had a long day. Let’s put your magic away. You know what you need? A nice cup of chamomile tea and a tranquilizer . . .”
I turned and marched out of the motor pool. It was that or I would explode.