Burn for Me: A Hidden Legacy Novel (9 page)

Being scared took a lot of energy. Now I was tired and kind of flat.

People milled around the plaza. To the right of me two women chatted on a bench. The one on the left had long silver-blond hair that fell down to her chest without any hint of a curl. She wore a peach teardrop dress that stopped midthigh and probably cost about as much as my best professional suit. Her tan was golden, her makeup bright and flawless. Her dark-haired friend had chosen a pearl-colored asymmetric top with a soft feminine ruffle and a pale grey pencil skirt. Both wore high-heeled shoes so delicate that they looked like they would break if any actual weight rested on them.

They saw me. Both looked me over with identical expressions of attractive women evaluating another young woman in their orbit. Judging by the raised eyebrows and the brunette’s stifled sneer, my faded jeans, plain blouse, and beat-up Nikes failed to make an impression. They went on chatting. Probably critiquing my lack of taste and money. They dismissed me as a peasant, I dismissed them as shallow, and we were all happy like that.

Past the women a couple of men lingered midway down the plaza. Both wore light-colored loose pants, expensive shirts, and designer sunglasses. Both were groomed to within an inch of their lives, and the perfection of their faces signaled money and magic.

The men were discreetly checking out the women, while the women pretended not to notice. It was an old dance. Eventually the men would break the ice and the women would pretend to be surprised but receptive. They looked like they could reasonably belong together.

A dark-haired man walked out from one of the side trails into the plaza. He wore jeans and a plain black T-shirt and carried something that looked like a roll of fabric in his hand. His T-shirt stretched tight across his broad shoulders. Muscle corded his arms, the powerful, supple muscle of a fighter, built by practice to punch and rip through his opponents. He stepped lightly, his stride sure and unhurried, like a huge jungle cat, an apex predator out for a prowl in his domain. There was no hint of submission anywhere in his body. He walked like he didn’t know his spine could bend.

I leaned forward, trying to see his face.

The two illusion-smoothed men simultaneously moved out of his way.

I saw him. My heart skipped a beat.

He had a sturdy, chiseled jaw, a strong nose, and a square forehead. He looked rough around the edges, from the trace of stubble on his jaw to the short, tousled dark hair. Rough, masculine, and arrestingly sexual. His eyes, smart and clear under the thick, dark eyebrows, evaluated everything he saw with calm precision, but deep inside those blue irises, a cold fire glowed. The same kind of lethal fire you would see in the amber eyes of a tiger, predatory yet irresistible. It compelled you to stare, even though you knew that if you caught his gaze, that icy fire would swallow you whole. He pulled me like a magnet. Every female instinct I had went into overdrive.

Oh wow.

He didn’t simply walk into the plaza. Those eyes told me that the moment he stepped foot into it, he owned it. I knew I should’ve looked away, but I couldn’t. I just sat there, shocked, and stared.

The two women saw him and stopped talking. He cut right through the layers of civilization, politeness, and social snobbery to some preternatural female sense that said, “
Dominant male. Danger. Power. Sex
.”

Why couldn’t I find someone like that? Why couldn’t he be my guy? If he ever talked to me, I probably wouldn’t be able to string words together into a sentence.

The man was looking at me.

Wait. There were two other attractive women in his way, both brightly dressed, better styled, and telegraphing “available” with every cell in their bodies. They were roses, and in my current getup, I was a daisy. He should’ve looked right over me. I was pretty, but not that pretty.

He was looking at me like he knew who I was.

My brain took a quarter of a second to process that fact before spitting back a cold rush of alarm. Stay or go?

I wasted another precious second trying to listen to my instincts and my magic. My gut feelings were almost always right.

Stay or go?

I looked into his blue eyes. No, I was wrong. He wasn’t a tiger. He was a dragon, regal and deadly, and he was coming for me.

This was bad. Bad, bad, bad. I had to go. Now.

I jumped right off the bench and made a beeline for the trail leading out of the park. He made a slight adjustment to his course, heading for me.

I sprinted down the trail. The greenery flew by. People stared at me. The trail turned and I chanced a glance back.

He was running full speed toward me and gaining.

I dashed forward, squeezing every drop of effort out of my body. The air turned hot in my lungs. My side hurt. The path turned again and I shot out into the open plaza with the gift shop. The entrance was only a hundred yards away.

I felt the magic behind me. It swelled, furious and unstoppable, like a cataclysm.

I glanced back.

He was twenty-five yards behind me.

I wouldn’t make it to my car.

Too far for a Taser, and I didn’t want him any closer. I pulled my .22 Ruger Mark III out and flicked the safety off. I had practiced with this gun every other week. I would hit him.

“Stop. I
will
shoot you.” I didn’t want to shoot him. I had no idea who he was. I had no idea what he could do. I didn’t want to fire a gun in this crowded place. I didn’t want to kill him.

He kept walking. I
felt
him coming closer. I’ve never felt magic like that in my whole life. It was like trying to stand in the path of a tornado. Fear shot through me, turning the world crystal clear and sharp.

“Help me!” I yelled.

Nobody moved. There was a plaza full of people and nobody moved.

Damn it. I raised the gun, barrel up and to the left over the trees, and fired a warning shot.

He threw the roll of fabric at me. I saw a flash of blue silk and then my arms were pinned to my body by a crushing force, my gun flat against my leg. The fabric clamped me, like a straitjacket.

Strong arms grabbed me. Something pricked my neck. My legs went soft and I fell over. He caught me and picked me up as if I weighed nothing.

The world was turning fuzzy. I wanted to yell at the top of my lungs, but instead a weak whisper came out. “Help . . .”

“Hey!” A man in a cowboy hat moved toward us.

“I wouldn’t advise it,” the man told him, his voice like ice.

The cowboy froze.

The man shifted me in his arms and I saw his eyes up close, blue eyes, on fire with magic and tinted with self-awareness.

Oh my God. My lips were too puffy to speak. “Meh . . . ma . . . mad . . .”

“Mad Rogan,” he said.

Someone shut off the sun, and I fell asleep.

I
opened my eyes. A pale ceiling stretched above me. I sat up. Folds of blue silk slid off my body, slippery over my skin.

I was in the middle of the floor in a large rectangular room. No windows interrupted the dark walls. Two floor lamps placed in the corners spilled soft yellow light into the room, not so much banishing the darkness but gently diluting it. The floor was smooth polished concrete. Lines crossed it, circles, triangles, and arcane symbols drawn in chalk, charcoal, and pure intense blue, which could only come from grinding lapis lazuli into powder. The lines glowed with gentle radiance, some parts of the pattern flat on the surface of concrete, some floating a few inches above it. I followed its flow with my gaze to a circle ringed in symbols. Someone sat inside the circle. I looked up.

Mad Rogan stared at me with his blue eyes. They opened wide, like two windows into the depth of him, and magic glared back at me. Monstrous, shocking magic, a living darkness filled with flashes of intense light and power. I might as well have looked into the heart of a supernova. I forgot to breathe. My heart tried to run away without the rest of me. My hands shook.

I jerked back and fell. Something was holding me to the floor. I pulled the silk away. Two steel cuffs enclosed my ankles. Metal rods secured the cuffs, disappearing into the concrete. I strained. My feet didn’t move at all.

“You chained me to the floor.” My voice trembled, and I hated it.

The demonic, inhuman thing that was Mad Rogan tilted his head, watching me. He sat cross-legged. He wore only dark loose pants that flared at the bottom. His feet were bare. His torso was bare too. Supple, hard muscle corded his frame. Carved biceps stood out on his arms, like living steel. His powerful chest slimmed down into flat planes of hard, ridged stomach. Pale stripes of scars crossed his bronze skin. He wasn’t just toned. He had the kind of body that was meant for combat: strong, flexible, hard, and fueled with explosive power. If Adam Pierce were present, he would perish in a fit of jealousy.

I forced my brain to work. Thin blue lines marked his skin, blending into glyphs. He had written arcane symbols on his chest and stomach. He was amplifying his power, which was dangerous to his health. Why? Why could he possibly need more power if he already forced all the air out of this big room with his presence?

“What gives you the right to grab me off the street and chain me in your dirty basement?”

“Do you know what this is?” His voice matched him, deep and slightly raspy. If dragons existed and could talk, they would sound just like him.

I strained my neck, trying to get a sense of the pattern in the scattering of symbols and lines. I was locked in a circle ringed with several larger concentric circles. Straight lines fanned through the circles, connecting to a triangle. The “top” point of the triangle contained a smaller circle, where Mad Rogan sat. Lines of runic script and arcane characters wound through the pattern, glowing with magic. My insides went cold. Acubens Exemplar, named after the “Claw” star in the Cancer constellation.

When my parents discovered the nature of my magic, we had a long talk, and my father explained to me that there was only one profession for someone with my talents. I could be an interrogator. No matter what other things I wanted to do, once my talent became known, either the military or the civilian authorities would pressure me into becoming a human lie detector. They would keep the pressure on until I gave in. I would witness torture and see horrible things done in the name of the greater good, and it would destroy my chances at a happy life. He told me that when I was old enough, I could always make the choice to become an interrogator, but until then, my ability needed to stay secret. To make his point, he made me watch a documentary on the Spanish Inquisition. I was only seven years old, but I understood. That horrible life could be my future.

When I was twelve, I began rebelling against everything my parents stood for, and I studied interrogation techniques and spells. Acubens Exemplar was one of the most potent. It took days of careful preparation to set up, and there was a very narrow window in which it could be used before the magic it accumulated dissipated, but it was almost completely foolproof. Like the claw of the crab for which it was named, the spell would allow a telepath to put crushing pressure on the person trapped in its center. The spell would amplify the pressure until the victim’s will broke and they revealed whatever secret they had been trying to hide.

“Acubens Exemplar requires a telepath.” I was grasping at straws. “You’re a telekinetic.”

The lines around Mad Rogan pulsed brighter. Okay. So he was also a telepath. Or he had some sort of will-related magic.

“I want to know everything you have on Adam Pierce,” he said. “His location, his plans, his family’s plans for him. Everything.”

I crossed my arms. “No. First, I was hired to find Adam Pierce, and my client has an expectation of confidentiality. Second, you attacked me and then chained me to the floor.” I tried to rattle my cuffs to underscore the point, but they remained completely immovable.

Mad Rogan fixed me with his blue eyes. There it was again, the predatory, merciless power. Alarm squirmed through me. He
was
a dragon in human skin, powerful, ruthless, and dangerous. My mind locked, struggling to come to terms with it. The muscles in my legs and arms tensed; my chest tightened. I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs to just vent the fear out of my body.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. “I want the information.”

True.

“Forcing you gives me no pleasure.”

True. “If you don’t like forcing me, you should let me go.”

“Tell me what I want to know, and you can walk out of here.”

“No. It would be unethical and unprofessional.”

He was a Prime telekinetic. Sometime Primes had secondary talents, but they were never as strong as their primary magic. Telepathy was will based. My magic was also will based, and in all of the time I had been alive, I had never met a person on whom it hadn’t worked. I grabbed onto that thought and used it to steady myself. He might be a dragon, but if he tried to swallow me whole, I’d make him choke. I scooted forward, trying to get as comfortable in my restraints as I could, and licked my dry lips. “Okay, tough guy. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Mad Rogan shrugged his shoulders. Magic pulsed from him, running down the lines of magic, turning them brighter, like fire traveling along a firing cord. Pressure clamped me, squeezing my mind in an invisible vise. I clenched my teeth. He was strong.

I pushed back. His eyes narrowed.

“Adam Pierce.” He would keep repeating the name. The more he repeated it, the harder it would be not to think about it, and the harder the spell would grind against my defenses.

I braced myself against the pressure. He wouldn’t break me. “Eat dirt and die.”

T
he pressure crushed my mind, pushing against it like an impossibly heavy weight. It felt like my head was locked inside a giant lead bell, and it kept growing tighter and tighter, compressing my skull. The relentless assault of magic had turned into a steady, terrible pain. It hurt to think. It hurt to move. Time had dissolved into ache in my mind.

The heat from all the energy rushing back and forth through the spell had turned the room into a sauna. Sweat slicked my skin. I had pulled off my T-shirt ages ago. I would’ve stripped off my jeans too if I could’ve gotten them over the cuffs.

Across from me, Mad Rogan sat motionless in the circle. A damp sheen beaded at his hairline and slicked his chest and carved biceps. The blue runic script covering his body still held, but some symbols were beginning to smudge. The effort of crushing my will was wearing him out. In the soft illumination of the room, he looked barely human, a feral, predatory creature of some arcane magic. I would’ve loved nothing more than to walk over there and kick him right in the face. As it was, I glanced at him anytime the pressure got to me, and a fresh jolt of fear kept me going.

The pressure ebbed slightly. He was tired.

“You’re rich, right?” My voice came out rough.

“Yes.”

“Couldn’t you spring for air-conditioning in the room?”

“I didn’t expect to sit here for hours. But if you’re too hot, feel free to take the bra off.”

I gave him the finger.

“What are you?” he asked.

“I’m the woman you chained in your basement. I’m your captive. Your . . . victim. Yes, that’s the right word. All of that education. How come nobody ever explained to you that you can’t just kidnap people because you feel like it?”

He grimaced. “You had a full second to shoot me.”

“I don’t just shoot strangers unless my life is clearly in danger. For all I knew, you could’ve been a cop assigned to Pierce’s case. If I fire, I have to be prepared for the possibility of killing my target. Besides, discharging a firearm into a crowd is irresponsible.”

“A .22 will bounce off wet laundry on the line. Why even carry it?”

I leaned back. Something in my spine popped. “Because I don’t shoot unless I mean to kill. A large caliber will tear a hole through the target and exit, possibly striking innocent bystanders. A .22 will enter the body and bounce around inside it, turning your insides into hamburger. Small-caliber gunshots to the chest and skull are nearly always fatal. Had I known you were going to pull a pretty ribbon out of your sleeve like some two-bit magician, tie me up with it, and indulge your mental torture fetish in your basement, I would’ve shot you. Many times.”

“Two-bit magician?”

“Men like you enjoy being flattered.”

The muscles on his arms bulged. Magic clamped me, hard and painful. The familiar fear flooded me in a slow wave. I was really tired.

“I’ve broken Significant mages in this trap,” he said, his voice matter-of-fact.

True.

“I’ll break you.”

“You will try.”

The pressure on my mind skyrocketed. The magic turned into a beast, chewing on me. Its teeth ripped a quiet moan from me. I stared at him, channeling all of my anger into my defenses.

Blood slipped from his nostrils and slid down his face.

“Give up,” he growled.

“You first.”

It hurt. The weight was so heavy. My defenses quaked. My hands were shaking.

Mad Rogan growled like an animal. It hurt him too.

Adam Pierce, Adam Pierce, Adam Pierce . . .
The name resonated through my mind like the toll of a church bell. I wanted to clamp my hands over my ears, but it wouldn’t help. The sound and pressure were everywhere. The magic devoured my barriers, seeking its prey.

My thoughts began to dissolve, slipping away from me. He was almost through.

Adam Pierce, Adam Pierce, Adam Pierce . . .

The basement swam around me. The walls turned liquid.

My mind boiled under pressure. I had to give in. I had to feed the beast to save myself.

I couldn’t betray my client. He couldn’t win.

Feed the beast. Feed it something secret, something I kept buried so deep in my soul that I swore never to let it out.

No, I can’t.

The magic ripped apart the inner walls of my mind.

I can’t.

My defenses burst, and with one last effort I shoved my deepest secret in front of the beast. It snapped my guilt into its jaws and tore it out. The words spilled out of me in a rush.

“When I was fifteen years old, I found the letter from our physician with my father’s diagnosis on it. He caught me and made me promise not to tell anyone. I kept his secret for a year. I’m the reason why my father died when he did. If I had told Mom, we could’ve started treatment a year earlier. I’m responsible. I didn’t tell. I didn’t tell anyone to this day, because I’m a coward.”

The magic shot through the Acubens Exemplar like a blast wave. The glowing lines pulsed with brilliance and vanished, exhausted, all of their power expended in trying to rip my secret out of me.

I slumped over on the floor, my face cold. The lack of pressure was pure, distilled bliss. I felt so light.

Mad Rogan walked over to me, moving carefully, and swore.

“Fuck you too,” I told him.

He knelt by my feet. How the hell could he even move after this? I heard metal clanging. He lifted my head and put something to my lips.

I clamped my teeth together.

“It’s water, you stubborn idiot,” he snarled.

I tried to shake my head, but he forced my mouth open. Water wet my tongue. I swallowed, fighting the fog.

Fatigue wrapped me, or maybe it was some sort of blanket. Then we were in a car. It was dark outside.

The car stopping. Car door swinging open. Mad Rogan carrying me. Warehouse door. Cold cement.

The door opening.

Mom.

I
woke up in the living room. Someone had left the table lamp on. It glowed with soft electric light, and the room looked so cozy, with its dark blue-green walls and warm yellow lamps. I snuggled into the throw someone had put over me. I’d had a really ugly nightmare.

I stretched. The muscles of my legs and arms cramped. Ow, ow, ow.

Not a nightmare. Mad Rogan really did chain me in his basement.

I sat up. Everything hurt. My back felt like it had been beaten up by a sack of potatoes.

That bastard. I’d file a police report, except nobody would believe me, and explaining how I’d held him off inside the spell would make things really complicated. That’s okay. I would find some way to get even.

Voices floated to me from the kitchen. Mother. She sounded upset. I squinted at the clock on the Blu-ray player. 11:45 p.m. Given a chance, we argued until we turned purple in the face and passed out from the effort, but this was late for a fight even by our family’s standards. I pushed myself upright and staggered toward the voices.

My mother’s voice cut through the night. “. . . Pierce? Irresponsible and stupid. Stupid, Bernard!”

Right. We’d been busted. After that ass dropped me off at my doorstep, my mother must’ve leaned on Bern for explanations, and he must’ve broken down and told her everything.