Burn for Me Page 6

  “Why go through the trouble? Why didn’t House Pierce bail him out?”

  “Because he publicly turned his back on them.” Cornelius grimaced. “His bad boy image would take an unrecoverable hit if it became known that his mommy and daddy put up the money to spring him out of jail.”

  “But you, being the ‘boyhood’ companion, were safe.”

  Cornelius nodded.

  This was beginning to look like a dead end.

  A hint of movement on the stairs made me turn. A Himalayan cat, its fur cream and chocolate, ran down the stairs, followed by a raccoon and a white ferret.

  “Excuse me,” Cornelius said.

  The three animals ran to his feet and sat, staring at him.

  “I take it Matilda is awake.”

  Three heads bobbed in unison.

  Cornelius rose, took a sippy cup with a bright red top out of the refrigerator, and washed it under the faucet. The raccoon stood up on her hind legs. Cornelius held the cup out.

  “Take the juice to her and entertain her until I come up.”

  The raccoon took the juice into her dark paws and ran up the stairs on her hind legs. The cat and the ferret followed.

  “You are an animal mage.” They were so rare that I’d only met one before.

  “Yes. I’m not a Prime, so you shouldn’t worry about me summoning a pack of wild wolves to rip you to shreds.”

  “Why did you wash the cup?”

  “Because if I don’t, Edwina will wash it for me. It’s instinct, and she can’t help it. Unfortunately, she can’t distinguish between the water from the sink and the water from the toilet, as both smell clean to her. Are we finished?”

  “Just a few basic questions. Do you know where Adam Pierce is?”

  “No.”

  True. “Do you have a way to contact him?”

  “No.”

  True.

  “Does he have any friends or acquaintances with whom he keeps in touch?”

  “Not from his old life. I’m his only link. He wasn’t unpopular—he was too handsome and wealthy—but he didn’t form any lasting friendships.”

  “Do you have any information that could help me find him?”

  “Direct factual information, no. But I can tell you that Christina would never allow her golden boy to suffer discomfort. One way or another, she is supporting him somehow. My advice is to follow the money.”

  “End of interview.” I turned off the recorder and pulled out my business card. “Thank you so much, Mr. Harrison. If you happen to speak with Adam Pierce, please give him my number. He allegedly murdered a police officer. His family is worried about him, and I’m his best chance at surviving this mess.”

  “You’re not going to ask me if I think he did it?” Cornelius asked.

  “Honestly, I don’t care. My job isn’t to prove that he’s innocent. I just have to bring him in in one piece.”

  “Very well.” He walked me to the door, opened it, and hesitated. “Ms. Baylor, if you speak to House Pierce, they will claim that Adam was an exemplary human being until he went to college, where he somehow got all these radical ideas into his head. They have most people convinced of it.”

  He cleared his throat. “Our elementary school was less than five blocks from my house. When we were in third grade, we were given permission to walk home, with our bodyguard following us at a discreet distance. We would stop at a shop on the way. The first three times we did, Adam stole. Nothing much, a candy bar, a drink. He wasn’t subtle about it. He just took it and walked out of the store, as if he was proud of the act. The fourth time, a relative of the owner grabbed his hand and took the candy bar away from him. Adam burned him. He burned him so badly that by the time the bodyguard got there, the man’s skin had bubbled on his face. I still remember the smell. This acrid, terrible stench of human flesh cooking. House Pierce tried to say that Adam was a child who was completely terrified and lashed out on instinct. They threw enough money at the family, and the whole matter was swept under the rug. But I was there, and I saw his face. Adam wasn’t scared. He was furious. He was punishing the man because he dared to prevent him from stealing.”

  Cornelius leaned toward me slightly, his eyes serious. “He would’ve burned that man to death over a candy bar. Adam takes what he wants, and if you tell him no, he will hurt you. That’s the kind of person you’re dealing with. I won’t say good luck, but take care.”

  By the time I left Cornelius’ modest palace, the sun had rolled close to the horizon. I sat in my car for a while and surfed the net. A quick search of my inbox revealed no new developments, but a search of motorcycle-related businesses within Houston city limits led me to Gustave’s Custom Cycles. The picture of the business looked a lot like the backdrop in Pierce’s Twitter shot. Gustave’s Custom Cycles was clear across town. By the time I got there, it would be close to getting dark.

  Let’s see what was around there . . . Steel Steed Bar and Grill on one side of the shop, Rattlesnake Body Art on the other. If the bikers had a mall, this would be it. That meant that Gustave’s shop was open after dark and would have a steady stream of customers and visitors who came there to be social. If I went there now, I’d have an audience. They all knew each other and I would be coming in as an outsider, asking them to rat out someone they considered a friend. I could talk to the same guys one on one at their jobs during the day and they would be polite and calm. But get them all together, let them soak in a couple of beers, and group machismo kicked in. They would look for trouble, and if trouble walked in in the shape of a young woman with uncomfortable questions, they would rise to the challenge. Best-case scenario, they would catcall and posture and run me off. Worst-case scenario, someone would get hurt. There was no need for that. I could just as readily speak to the owner of Gustave’s tomorrow morning, bright and early, when everyone would be sober.

  I started the engine and went home. Adam Pierce had evaded capture for twenty-four hours. He would have to evade it until morning.

  The traffic was murder. Unlike predictions of weather men and market analysts, Houston’s world-famous traffic was 100 percent reliable—it never failed to show up and clog the roads. I drove through it, inching forward and avoiding drivers who barreled into the seemingly solid wall of cars as they switched lanes, and thought about Adam Pierce. He hadn’t turned himself in. Nothing on the Twitter feed. Bern was scouring the Internet for any hint of him and Gavin Waller, and Bern was exceptional at what he did. So far he had turned up nothing.

  Why torch the bank? Was it a bungled robbery attempt? It wasn’t a political statement, otherwise Adam would’ve left some sort of loud declaratory message. Up yours, oppressors, or something along those lines. Was it a drunken prank that got out of hand? What was Gavin’s role in all of it? I really hoped the boy would come out of this alive, if not for him, then for his mother’s sake. Kelly Waller’s financial record showed a life of sacrifice for her children. Whatever Gavin’s sins were, Adam Pierce was older than he was by almost ten years. He was the ringleader.

  How the hell was I going to convince Pierce to come in? John Rutger was nowhere near a Prime, and he’d tossed me against a wall. Too bad I couldn’t spit fire. Wait, that wouldn’t really help me. Too bad I couldn’t spit ice? Theoretically, if you did spit ice, you wouldn’t be able to spit much. A human body held only so much water. Now if I could summon binding chains . . . Pierce would probably melt them. Would molten metal burn him if he was the one who melted it?

  Mad Rogan’s image popped into my head. There was something about those blue eyes looking into the camera. Not exactly sadness, but a kind of self-awareness, underscored by a slightly bitter smile. Almost as if he knew he was a human hurricane and regretted it, but he wouldn’t stop. I was probably reading too much into it. How in the world did they contain him in the military? I’d seen firsthand the damage that war did to people. If a Prime snapped, hundreds of soldiers would die.

  Forty-five minutes later, when I finally pulled in front o
f the warehouse, I was tired of the question marks and thinking in circles. And I was really hungry. The moment I stepped into the hallway, the scent of freshly baked biscuits, barbecue sauce, and spicy meat swirled around me. Cinnamon, garlic, cumin . . . mmmm. I pulled my shoes off and let the scent carry me into the kitchen. A note and two plates with pulled pork and biscuits waited for me on the island. The note said, “Nevada, I called it an early night. Help yourself and please take a plate to your grandmother or she’ll forget to eat again.”

  My mother called it an early night when she missed Dad and didn’t want us to see her cry. I understood. It was five years, but I missed Dad, too. I could close my eyes and imagine him rummaging through the pantry, complaining that someone ate the steak he’d been saving and he was now reduced to eating unnatural things like salad and croutons. Mom was always the hard one. When Dad was around, she laughed. She still laughed now. Just not as often.

  I gobbled up my food, rinsed the plate, stuck it into the dishwasher, and took the second plate and a glass of iced tea to the back of the warehouse. Once you passed through the main wall, no hint of our living space remained. It was all motor pool: sealed concrete floor polished to a shiny dark smoothness, tools on the walls, armored vehicles, some with small guns, some with tanklike barrels, crouching in the gloom, and the Grandma smell: gas, engine oil, and gunpowder.

  A midsize armored track vehicle sat in the middle of the floor, bathed in the glow of the floodlights. Grandma Frida’s skinny legs in jeans stuck out from under the vehicle. To the right, Arabella lounged on the gutted shell of a Humvee covered by a dark green tarp. I had grown up just like this. When I would get home after school, Mom and Dad would still be gone, so I’d grab a snack and go hang out with Grandma in her shop. You could tell Grandma anything. She said that vehicles spoke to her if she let them. Children did too. She never judged, and even if you cursed or admitted to doing something terminally stupid, she would never tell Mom and Dad. I vented most of my fears and worries here. Then it was Bern’s and Catalina’s turn, then Arabella’s and Leon’s. We all were busy now, so we didn’t visit as much, but at least once a week one of us would end up hanging out here, spilling our guts and shaking our fists.

  “Dinner!” I called.

  Arabella scooted further up the tarp. She looked glum. Something didn’t go well at school.

  Grandma slid from under the vehicle and sat up. “Grub. Yes. Hungry.”

  I handed her the plate and nodded at the vehicle. “What’s his name?”

  “Thiago.” Grandma touched the metal. Her eyes grew distant for a second—her magic making the connection to the inner workings Thiago’s engine. “Wolf-Spider class. He seems like a Thiago to me.”

  Mech-mages like my grandmother were rare. Some made guns, others worked in civil engineering, but all shared a magical connection to things of metal and moving parts. For Grandma Frida, it was armored things that moved. It didn’t matter if they rolled, crawled, or floated. She lived and breathed the deep-voiced rumble of their engines and the smoky odor of their guns. Tanks, field artillery track vehicles, personnel carriers, she loved them all. Luckily, many of the Houses maintained private security forces, and she had a steady supply of clients.

  “Is your mom okay?” Grandma asked. “She was in a funk earlier.”

  “She’s fine,” I told her. “She just misses Dad, that’s all. I’ve got a question for you.”

  “Shoot!” Grandma said.

  “In the military, how do they keep mages in line? If one of them snaps, wouldn’t they nuke their whole unit?”

  “Shockers,” Grandma Frida said. “Also referred to as joy buzzers, the shakers, squid shivers.”

  “Squid shivers?”

  “A squid is a navy grunt,” Grandma said. “The navy was the first to use the shockers, because it quickly found out that mages and ships don’t always mix well.”

  Made sense. If you set fire to the ship or summon a swarm of poisonous flies, there was nowhere to go.

  “It’s some kind of device they implant into your arms. Completely invisible from the outside, but it lets you shock anyone with magic. Hurts you like hell, but it hurts whoever you grab even more. Seriously nasty gadgets. People used to die from those.”

  “People who got shocked?” I wondered if Mad Rogan ever got shocked . . . okay, I needed to stop obsessing over those eyes. I was a freshman in high school when that recording was made. He probably didn’t even look the same anymore. He definitely wasn’t the same nineteen-year-old. He’d been through six years of war. War chewed people up and spat out the gristle. If I kept going this way, I’d end up on Herald, trawling for Mad Rogan fanfic. We made love as the city fell around us, raining down concrete in chunks of despair . . . Yeah, right.

  Grandma nodded. “The shocked and people who did the shocking. A shock works two ways. First, you have to prime it with your own magic, and only then it hits the other guy as you make contact. It sucks a good chunk out. If it takes too much magic, your body gives out and it’s curtains. First generation of trials had a mortality rate of over thirty percent. By the time Penelope enlisted, they had done a lot better with them. You wouldn’t believe the stuff they’ve got now. I know a guy who can implant one.”

  That didn’t surprise me. “Is it illegal?”

  “Oh yes.” Grandma grinned. “And you might die from it. You want a set?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “You sure?” Grandma winked at Arabella. “You wouldn’t need a Taser anymore.”

  “No, I’m all good. Besides, the plan is to avoid being in a situation where I have to use the Taser in the first place.”

  “Aha.”

  “For example, I had a chance to interrogate an owner of a biker shop late at night and I decided instead to come home.”

  Grandma Frida set the plate down and picked up the five-foot-long breaker bar used to break track on the vehicles. In the right hands, it could disable a tank, and Grandma Frida was an expert. “I don’t understand you, Neva. You’re twenty-five years old. Where is your sense of adventure? When I was your age, I was half a planet away from the place I was born. You’re just so . . . sensible.”

  Arabella perked up, sensing blood in the water. I had to nip this in the bud, or the teasing would never end. She who showed weakness to teenagers would be picked on to death. True fact of life.

  “I have a family full of quirky people. Someone has to be sensible so all of you can enjoy being reckless weirdos.”

  “You have to live a little.” Grandma fitted the track bar into the cog on the track. “Go out with a bad boy. Run headfirst into a fight. Get roaring drunk. Something!”

  A guilt trip. Unfortunately for Grandma, I grew up with four younger siblings. Guilt tripping was sometimes the only reason anything got cleaned in our house. “Grandma, why don’t you knit?”

  “What?”

  “Why don’t you knit? All grandmas knit.”

  Grandma leaned into the track bar. The track split open and crashed to the floor with a loud clang. She stared at me with big blue eyes. “You want me to knit?”

  Arabella snickered.

  “If you look in the dictionary under grandmother, you’ll see a little old lady with two knitting needles and a ball of yarn.” I pretended to stir imaginary spaghetti with two imaginary chopsticks. “Sometimes I sit and think, if only my grandma had knitted me a hat or a scarf . . .”

  “We live in Houston, Texas!” Grandma wiped her hands with a rag. “You’d get heat stroke.”

  “Or a stuffed animal. I would’ve cuddled with it at night.” I sighed heavily. “Oh well. I guess that’s never going to happen.”

  Arabella giggled. Grandma pointed the breaker bar at her. “Quiet in the peanut gallery.”

  I gave them a nice, sweet smile. “Well, I’m going now. You two have fun. I have to work tomorrow.”

  Chapter 4

  Gustave’s Custom Cycles occupied a rectangular steel building with corrugated metal walls. It was exac
tly two hundred feet wide and eight hundred feet long, manufactured by Olympia Steel Buildings, delivered to the site and assembled there four years and seven months ago. Bern had pulled up the city permits for me.

  Before I went to bed last night, I spent hours reading the background file on Adam Pierce and whatever Bern had been able to dig up during the day. I read interviews with Adam Pierce’s parents and teachers, tabloid articles, credible gossip on Herald, and what little Adam’s college friends said about him. I read his speeches. Adam liked making speeches, especially after giving his family the finger, and the message wasn’t so much anarchy but right of might. If you can take what you want, you should be able to do so, and government and law enforcement shouldn’t be able to prevent you because they have no right to exist. He threw around terms like negative liberty and quoted Hobbes.

  I knew about Hobbes only because my major had required some political science courses. Hobbes was a seventeenth-century English philosopher best known for his belief that without political community, man’s life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Adam had found a different sentiment from Hobbes: “A free man is he that, in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to.” He repeated it on at least three occasions. Adam felt society hindered his freedom by not letting him do what he wanted to do. Unfortunately for him, if what he wanted to do was set people on fire, he was out of luck. The rest of us wouldn’t stand for that.

  I now knew more about Adam Pierce than I ever wanted to. He was smart, at times cruel, and easily bored. He wouldn’t trust me no matter what I did. Establishing some sort of friendship was out of the question. If I tried to be earnest and sincere, he’d laugh; if I tried to use reason, he would yawn. My only chance was to be interesting. I had to catch his attention and hold it.

  The Twitter picture of him in front of the bike shop kept bugging me. A real biker didn’t let just any mechanic put hands on his bike. No, real bikers picked their mechanics carefully. There was a good deal of trust involved. So last night I looked into Gustave’s Custom Cycles, and when a couple of red flags went up, I asked Bern to help. He found a number of interesting things. This morning I ate breakfast, put on my jeans and comfortable running shoes in case I had to run for my life, and drove to the motorcycle shop. Adam wanted amusement out of life. I was about to tap him on the shoulder. I just had to do it hard enough for him to turn around.