Burn for Me

  The redhead opened her mouth, and John bent down and dutifully kissed her.

  Liz would pay us a thousand dollars when I brought her the proof. It was all she could get her hands on without John knowing about it. It wasn’t much, but we weren’t in a position to turn down work, and as far as jobs went, this one was simple. Once they walked out of the hotel, I’d leave through the side exit, notify Liz, and collect our fee.

  The hotel doors swung open and Liz Rutger walked into the lobby.

  All my nerves came to attention. Why? Why don’t people ever listen to me? We had expressly agreed that she wouldn’t do any sleuthing on her own. Nothing good ever came of it.

  Liz saw them kissing and went white as a sheet. John let go of his mistress, his face shocked. The redhead stared at Liz, horrified.

  “This isn’t what it looks like,” John said.

  It was exactly what it looked like.

  “Hi!” Liz said, shockingly loud, her voice brittle. “Who are you? Because I’m his wife!”

  The redhead turned and fled into the depths of the hotel.

  Liz turned to her husband. “You.”

  “Let’s not do this here.”

  “Now you’re concerned with appearances? Now?”

  “Elizabeth.” His voice vibrated with command. Uh-oh.

  “You ruined us. You ruined everything.”

  “Listen . . .”

  She opened her mouth. The words took a second to come out, as if she had to force them. “I want a divorce.”

  I’ve been working for the family business since I was seventeen, and I saw the precise moment adrenaline hit John’s system. Some guys get red-faced and start screaming. Some might freeze—those are your fear biters. Push too far and they will go crazy. John Rutger went flat. All emotions drained from his face. His eyes opened wide, and behind them a hard, calculating mind evaluated the situation with icy precision.

  “Okay,” John said quietly. “Let’s talk about this. It’s more than us. It’s also the kids. Come, I’ll take you home.” He reached for her arm.

  “Don’t touch me,” she hissed.

  “Liz,” he said, his voice perfectly reasonable, his eyes focused and predatory, like the hard stare of a sniper sighting his target. “This isn’t a conversation for the hotel lobby. Don’t make a scene. We’re better than that. I’ll drive.”

  There was no way I could let Liz get into his car. His eyes told me that if I let him gain control of her, I would never see her again.

  I moved fast and put myself between them.

  “Nevada?” Liz blinked, thrown off track.

  “Walk away,” I told her.

  “Who is this?” John focused on me.

  That’s right, look at me, don’t look at her. I’m a bigger threat. I body-blocked Liz, keeping myself between them.

  “Liz, go to your car. Don’t drive home. Go to a family member’s house. Now.”

  Muscles on John’s jaw bulged as he locked his teeth.

  “What?” Liz stared at me.

  “You hired her to spy on me.” John shrugged his shoulders and turned his neck like a fighter loosening himself for a fight. “You brought her into our private life.”

  “Now!” I barked.

  Liz turned and fled.

  I raised my hands in the air and backed away toward the exit, making sure the camera in the hotel lobby had me in plain view. Behind me the door hissed as Liz made a break for it.

  “It’s over, Mr. Rutger. I’m not a threat.”

  “You nosy bitch. You and that harpy are in it together.”

  At the desk the concierge frantically mashed buttons on a phone.

  If I’d been on my own, I would have turned and run. Some people stand their ground no matter what. In my line of work, a stint at the hospital, coupled with a bill you can’t pay because you’re not working, cures that notion really fast. Given a chance, I’d run like a rabbit, but I had to buy Liz time to get to her car.

  John raised his arms, bent at the elbow, palms up, fingers apart, as if he was holding two invisible softballs in his hands. The mage pose. Oh shit.

  “Mr. Rutger, don’t do this. Adultery isn’t illegal. You haven’t committed any crimes yet. Please don’t do this.”

  His eyes stared at me, cold and hard.

  “You can still walk away from this.”

  “You thought you could humiliate me. You thought you’d embarrass me.” His face darkened as ghostly magic shadows slid across his skin. Tiny red sparks ignited above his palms and flared. Bright crimson lightning danced, stretching to the tips of his fingers.

  Where the hell was the hotel security? I couldn’t take him down first—it would be an assault, and we couldn’t afford to be sued—but they could.

  “Let me show you what happens to people who try to humiliate me.”

  I dashed to the side.

  Thunder pealed. The glass doors of the hotel shattered. The blast wave picked me up off the floor. I saw the chair from the lounge fly at me and I threw my hands up, curling in midair. The wall smashed into my right shoulder. The chair hit my side and face. Ow.

  I crashed down next to the shards of a ceramic pot that had held a plant two seconds ago, then I scrambled to my feet.

  The red sparks ignited again. He was getting ready for Round Two.

  They say a hundred-and-thirty-pound woman has no chance against an athletic two-hundred-pound man. That’s a lie. You just have to make a decision to hurt him and then do it.

  I grabbed a heavy potsherd and hurled it at him. It crashed against his chest, knocking him off balance. I ran to him, yanking a Taser from my pocket. He swung at me. It was hard and fast, and it caught me right in the stomach. Tears welled in my eyes. I lunged forward and jammed the Taser against his neck.

  The shock surged through him. His eyes bulged.

  Please let him go down. Please.

  His mouth gaped open. John went rigid and crashed like a log.

  I knelt on his neck, pulled a plastic tie from my pocket, and wrestled his hands together, tying them up.

  John growled.

  I sat next to him on the floor. My face hurt.

  Two men burst from the side doors and ran to us. Their jackets said security. Well, now they show up. Thank God for the cavalry.

  In the distance police sirens blared.

  Sgt. Munoz, a stocky man twice my age, peered at the security footage. He’d watched it twice already.

  “I couldn’t let him put her into the car,” I said from my spot in the chair. My shoulder hurt and the handcuffs on my hands kept me from rubbing it. Being in close proximity to cops filled me with anxiety. I wanted to fidget, but fidgeting would make me look nervous.

  “You were right,” Munoz said and tapped the screen, pausing on John Rutger reaching for his wife. “That right there is your dead giveaway. The man’s caught with his pants down and he doesn’t say, ‘Sorry, I fucked up.’ He doesn’t beg for forgiveness or get angry. He goes cold and tries to get his wife out of the picture.”

  “I didn’t provoke him. I didn’t put my hands on him either, until he tried to kill me.”

  “I see that.” He turned to me. “That’s a C2 Taser you’ve got there. You do know range on those things is fifteen feet?”

  “I didn’t want to take chances. His magic looked electrical to me, and I thought he might block the current.”

  Munoz shook his head. “No, he was enerkinetic. Straight magic energy, and trained to use it, courtesy of the U.S. Army. This guy is a vet.”

  “Ah.” That explained why Rutger went flat. Dealing with adrenaline was nothing new to him. The fact that he was an enerkinetic made sense too. Pyrokinetics manipulated fire, aquakinetics manipulated water, and enerkinetics manipulated raw magical energy. Nobody was quite sure what the nature of that energy was, but it was a relatively common magic. How in the world did Bern miss all this in the background check? When I got home, my cousin and I would have to have words.

  A uniformed cop s
tuck his head in the door and handed my license back to Munoz. “She checks out.”

  Munoz unlocked my cuffs, took them off, and handed me my purse and camera. My cell and my wallet followed. “We have your statement, and we took your memory card. You’ll get it back later. Go home, put some ice on that neck.”

  I grinned at him. “Are you going to tell me not to leave town, Sarge?”

  Munoz gave me a “yet another smart-ass” look. “No. You went up against a military-grade mage for a grand. If you need the money that bad, you probably can’t afford the gas.”

  Three minutes later I climbed into my five-year-old Mazda minivan. The paperwork described the Mazda’s color as “gold.” Everyone else said it was “kind of champagne” or “sort of beige.” Coupled with unmistakable mom car lines, the minivan made for a perfect surveillance vehicle. Nobody paid it any mind. I once followed a guy for two hours in it on a nearly deserted highway, and when the insurance company later showed him the footage demonstrating that his knee worked just fine as he shifted gears in his El Camino, he was terribly surprised.

  I turned the mirror. A big red welt that would mature into one hell of a purple bruise blossomed on my neck and the top of my right shoulder, like someone took a handful of blueberries and rubbed it all over me. An equally bright red stain marked my jaw on the left side. I sighed, readjusted the mirror, and headed home.

  Some easy job this turned out to be. At least I didn’t have to go to the hospital. I grimaced. The welt decided it didn’t like me grimacing. Ow.

  The Baylor Investigative Agency started as a family business. We still were a family business. Technically we were owned by someone else now, but they mostly left us alone to run our affairs as we saw fit. We had only three rules. Rule #1: we stayed bought. Once a client hired us, we were loyal to the client. Rule #2: we didn’t break the law. It was a good rule. It kept us out of jail and safe from litigation. And Rule #3, the most important one of all: at the end of the day we still had to be able to look our reflections in the eye. I filed today under Rule #3 day. Maybe I was crazy and John Rutger would’ve taken his wife home and begged her forgiveness on bended knee. But at the end of the day, I had no regrets, and I didn’t have to worry about whether I did the right thing and whether Liz’s two children would ever see their mother again.

  Their father was a different story, but he was no longer my problem. He made that mess all on his own.

  I cleared the evening traffic on I-290, heading northwest, and turned south. A few minutes later I pulled up in front of our warehouse. Bern’s beat-up black Civic sat in the parking lot, next to Mom’s blue Honda Element. Oh good. Everyone was home.

  I parked, went to the door, and punched the code into the security system. The door clicked open, then I let myself in and paused for a second to hear the reassuring clang of the lock sliding home behind me.

  When you entered the warehouse from this door, it looked just like an office. We built walls, installed some glass panels, and laid down high-traffic beige carpet. That gave us three office rooms on the left side and a break room and large conference room on the right. The drop ceiling completed the illusion.

  I stepped into my office, put the purse and the camera on the desk, and sat in my chair. I really should do a write-up, but I didn’t feel like it. I’d do it later.

  The office was soundproof. Around me everything was quiet. A familiar, faint scent of grapefruit oil in the oil warmer floated to me. The oils were my favorite little luxury. I inhaled the fragrance. I was home.

  I survived. Had I hit my head on the wall when Rutger had thrown me, I could’ve died today. Right now I could be dead instead of sitting here in my office, twenty feet from my home. My mom could be in the morgue, identifying me on a slab. My heart pounded in my chest. Nausea crept up, squeezing my throat. I leaned forward and concentrated on breathing. Deep, calm breaths. I just had to let myself work through it.

  In and out. In and out.

  Slowly the anxiety receded.

  In and out.

  Okay.

  I got up, crossed the office to the break room, opened the door in the back, and stepped into the warehouse. A luxuriously wide hallway stretched left and right, its sealed concrete floor reflecting the light softly. Above me thirty-foot ceilings soared. After we had to sell the house and move into the warehouse, Mom and Dad considered making the inside look just like a real house. Instead we ended up building one large wall separating this section of the warehouse—our living space—from Grandma’s garage so we didn’t have to heat or air-condition the entire twenty-two thousand square feet of the warehouse. The rest of the walls had occurred organically, which was a gentle euphemism for We put them up as needed with whatever material was handy.

  If Mom saw me, I wouldn’t get away without a thorough medical exam. All I wanted to do was take a shower and eat some food. This time of the day she was usually with Grandma, helping her work. If I was really quiet, I could just sneak into my room. I padded down the hallway. Think sneaky thoughts . . . Be invisible . . . Hopefully, nothing attention-attracting was going on.

  “I’ll kill you!” a familiar high voice howled from the right.

  Damn it. Arabella, of course. My youngest sister was in rare form, judging by the pitch.

  “That’s real mature!” And that was Catalina, the seventeen-year-old. Two years older than Arabella and eight years younger than me.

  I had to break this up before Mom came over to investigate. I sped down the hallway toward the media room.

  “At least I’m not a dumb ho who has no friends!”

  “At least I’m not fat!”

  “At least I am not ugly!”

  Neither of them was fat, ugly, or promiscuous. They both were complete drama queens, and if I didn’t break this party up fast, Mom would be on us in seconds.

  “I hate you!”

  I walked into the media room. Catalina, thin and dark-haired, stood on the right, her arms crossed over her chest. On the left Bern very carefully restrained blond Arabella by holding her by her waist above the floor. Arabella was really strong, but Bern had wrestled through high school and went to a judo club twice a week. Now nineteen and still growing, he stood an inch over six feet tall and weighed about two hundred pounds, most of it powerful, supple muscle. Holding a hundred-pound Arabella wasn’t a problem.

  “Let me go!” Arabella snarled.

  “Think about what you’re doing,” Bern said, his deep voice patient. “We agreed—no violence.”

  “What is it this time?” I asked.

  Catalina stabbed her finger in Arabella’s direction. “She never put the cap on my liquid foundation. Now it’s dried out!”

  Figured. They never fought about anything important. They never stole from each other, they never tried to sabotage each other’s relationships, and if anyone dared to look at one of them the wrong way, the other one would be the first to charge to her sister’s defense. But if one of them took the other’s hairbrush and didn’t clean it, it was World War III.

  “That’s not true . . .” Arabella froze. “Neva, what happened to your face?”

  Everything stopped. Then everyone said something at once, really loud.

  “Shush! Calm down; it’s cosmetic. I just need a shower. Also, stop fighting. If you don’t, Mom will come here and I don’t want her to—”

  “To what?” Mom walked through the door, limping a little. Her leg was bothering her again. Of average height, she used to be lean and muscular, but the injury had grounded her. She was softer now, with a rounder face. She had dark eyes like me, but her hair was chestnut brown.

  Grandma Frida followed, about my height, thin, with a halo of platinum curls stained with machine grease. The familiar, comforting smell of engine oil, rubber, and gunpowder spread through the room. Grandma Frida saw me and her blue eyes got really big. Oh no.

  “Penelope, why is the baby hurt?”

  The best defense is vigorous offense. “I’m not a baby. I’m twenty-fi
ve years old.” I was Grandma’s first grandchild. If she lived until I turned fifty, with grandchildren of my own, I’d still be “the baby.”

  “How did this happen?” Mom asked.

  Damn it. “Magic blast wave, wall, and a chair.”

  “Blast wave?” Bern asked.

  “The Rutger case.”

  “I thought he was a dud.”

  I shook my head. “Enerkinetic magic. He was a vet.”

  Bern’s face fell. He frowned and marched out of the room.

  “Arabella, get the first-aid kit,” Mom said. “Nevada, lie down. You may have a concussion.”

  Arabella took off running.

  “It’s not that bad! I don’t have a concussion.”

  My mother turned and looked at me. I knew that look. That was the Sgt. Baylor look. There was no escape.

  “Did paramedics look at you at the scene?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did they say?”

  There was no point in lying. “They said I should go to the hospital just in case.”

  My mother pinned me down with her stare. “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “Lie down.”

  I sighed and surrendered to my fate.

  The next morning I sat in the media room, eating the crepes and sausages Mom made for me. My neck still hurt. My side hurt worse.

  Mom sat at the other end of the sectional, sipping her coffee and working on Arabella’s hair. Apparently the latest fashion among high schoolers involved elaborate braids, and Arabella had somehow cajoled Mom into helping her.

  On the left side of the screen, a female news anchor with impossibly perfect hair profiled the recent arson at First National, while the right side of the screen showed a tornado of fire engulfing the building. The orange flames billowed out the windows.

  “It’s awful,” Mom said.

  “Did anybody die?” I asked.

  “A security guard. His wife and their two children came by to drop off his dinner and were also burned, but they survived. Apparently Adam Pierce was involved.”