White Hot

by Ilona Andrews

  “What’s in the bag?” Melosa asked.

  “He won’t tell me. For some reason I thought it might be body parts, and now I can’t get rid of that thought.”

  “It’s not body parts. The bag would be lumpy.”

  “That occurred to me as well.”

  While we waited for Cornelius, Bug emailed me Forsberg’s autopsy report. No traces of foreign particles had been discovered; however the wounds contained traces of frozen tissue. Someone had frozen Forsberg’s eyes and the brain behind them, turning it into mush. Somehow I wasn’t surprised. Sadly there was no way to narrow it down. The Assembly’s visitor logs were handwritten and kept confidential. Even Rogan couldn’t gain access to them.

  This mysterious ice mage was really getting on my nerves.

  Ferika Luga was a short, plump woman of Native American heritage. Her shop occupied one of the business suites in a high-rise, sandwiched between an accounting firm on the floor below and an Internet start-up on the floor above. Cornelius mentioned that she saw clients by appointment only, so he had called ahead. I don’t know why I had expected a retail space, but there was none. The front of her workspace was a simple open room with a row of chairs at one end, floor-to-ceiling window on the right, and a wall of mirrors on the left.

  Ferika looked Melosa and Cornelius up and down and pointed to the chairs. “Wait here. You—come with me.”

  I followed her to the back, through a door, into a dressing room with a round platform in the middle. A large mirror occupied one wall. Through the open door on my left, I could see a sewing workshop and rows and rows of dresses in plastic, hanging on a metal rods suspended from the ceiling.

  “You’re going to the Baranovsky’s dinner.” Ferika faced me. “What do you want people to see? Don’t think, say the first thing that pops into your head.”

  “Professional.”

  “Think about it. Picture yourself there.”

  I pictured myself on a shiny floor. Rogan would be there in all of his dragon glory. I’d need a spear and a helmet.

  “What is it you do?”

  “I’m a private investigator.”

  “Are you going to hide that thing on your neck?”

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  The older woman crossed her arms, thinking. “How did you get it?”

  “A man tried to kill me.”

  “Since you’re standing here, he didn’t succeed.”

  “No.”

  “Wait here.”

  She disappeared between the racks of clothes. I looked around. Nothing caught my eye. The floor was plain chestnut-colored wood. The ceiling had lots of white panels. The mirror offered my reflection—the bruise really was a wonder.

  “How long have you worked for Rogan?” Cornelius asked.

  The wall, apparently, was paper thin, because he hadn’t raised his voice, but I heard him clearly.

  “A long time,” Melosa said. “You might say I’m one of the original employees he hired after separating from the military.”

  “In your experience, does he often become infatuated?”

  Where was he going with that?

  Melosa cleared her throat. “I’m not at liberty to discuss my employer’s personal life. And even if I was, I wouldn’t. The major has earned my loyalty. I would take a bullet with his name on it. He is entitled to his privacy and I’ll safeguard it, so I suggest you choose a different line of questioning.”

  Well, she’d shut him down fast.

  Ferika returned, accompanied by a younger woman carrying a black dress. “Put this on.”

  I stripped and slid into it as she watched. It was surprisingly heavy. Ferika’s helper zipped the back, held out her hand, and helped me step back onto the platform. I looked into the mirror and held still.

  The silhouette was timeless: two thin straps supporting a sweetheart cleavage that left my neck and most of my chest bare, close fitted waist, and a skirt gracefully falling into a train, not long enough to become cumbersome and allowing me to move fast if I had to. The fabric of the dress, black silk tulle, would’ve been completely sheer if it wasn’t for the thousands of black sequins embroidered into it. The complicated pattern curved around and over my breasts, lined my ribs and hugged my hips, finally fracturing into individual whorls just below mid-thigh. They slid down the sheer tulle skirt like tongues of black flame, melting into nothing near the hem. The dress didn’t look embroidered; it looked chiseled out of obsidian, like some fantasy bodice of a Valkyrie. It looked like armor.

  “How much is it?”

  “Fifteen thousand.”

  “I can’t afford it.”

  “I know,” Ferika said. “You can rent it for one night for ten percent of the cost. The shoes and clutch will be complimentary.”

  Fifteen hundred dollars for one night and I wouldn’t even own it. Technically this was a necessary expense and I would bill Cornelius for it, but just because I had the ability to bill things didn’t give me the license to be careless with my client’s money.

  The look on Rogan’s face when he saw it would be worth it.

  “Shoes,” Ferika said.

  The assistant placed a pair of black pumps in front of me. I stepped into them. They fit perfectly.

  “Hair.”

  The assistant moved behind me, released my hair from the ponytail, rolled it into a crown around my head, and expertly pinned it in place.

  Ferika held out her hand. I took it and stepped off the raised platform, and she led me out into the open space.

  Cornelius blinked. Melosa’s eyebrows crept up.

  “It’s fifteen hundred for a night,” I said. “Yes, no?”

  “Yes,” Cornelius and Melosa said in one voice.

  It was Friday evening. I sat in my office, trying to get some peace and quiet while staring at the pictures of magical heavyweights likely to be at Baranovsky’s party. Augustine had emailed them to me segregated into two helpful categories: will kill you and can kill you. This was going to be one hell of a soiree.

  The doorbell chimed. I tapped my laptop to bring the view of the front camera. Bug’s face greeted me. He stuck his tongue out, crossed his eyes, and waved his laptop at me.

  I got up and opened the door. “What, you’re not going to ask me if you can enter my territory?”

  “Pardon me, Your Divine Princess Majesty.” Bug executed a surprisingly elegant bow with a hand flourish and began backing away, bowing. “Pardon this lowly wretch, pardon . . .”

  “Get into my office,” I growled.

  “What the hell, Nevada? No, I’m not going to ask permission.” Bug came in and landed in my client chair. “Nice digs.”

  “Thanks,” I sat in my chair. “What’s up?”

  He opened his laptop, tapped a key, and pushed it toward me across the table. “Any of these assholes look familiar?”

  I stared at the row of faces, all men ranging from about fifteen to sixty. “Ice mages?”

  “Mhm.”

  I scrutinized them one by one. “No.”

  Bug sighed and took his laptop back. “Are you sure of what you saw?”

  “Yes. I’d recognize the smile for sure. He showed me his teeth before icing the road.” I showed him Augustine’s list. “He isn’t on there either.”

  “Shit,” Bug said, his face sour. “It’s that thing again. We’ve been dealing with it since Pierce. You think you have a lead and then poof”—he made a puffing motion with his fingers—“it melts into nothing and all you have is frustration and the fart noise your face makes when you hit your desk with it.”

  Fart . . . what? “We’ll find him. As long as we keep investigating, he’ll show himself sooner or later.”

  Bug looked behind him, leaning to get the better view of the hallway. “Got something else to show you.”

  He came around the desk, leaned on it next to me, and tapped his laptop. The security video from last night’s shooting came on, complete with Leon’s awesome voice-over.

  I gri
maced. “Yeah, I know. My cousin got excited. Look, he is fifteen. He thinks he’s immortal.”

  “No.” Bug’s face was completely serious for once. “Watch.”

  The recording zoomed in on an older mercenary. “I’m a veteran badass,” Leon’s voice said. “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 . . .”

  “Where was he while this was happening?” Bug asked.

  “In the Hut of Evil. I mean, in the computer room.”

  “. . . Oh shit, my head just exploded.”

  The camera panned to the right to a woman crouching by the oak.

  “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?”

  I sighed.

  “Oh no, look—my feet are twitching. That’s so undignified.”

  Maybe there was something wrong with Leon. I should give him more work to do. That would keep him from being bored and trying to get guns. “Whatever it is you want me to notice, I don’t see it,” I told Bug.

  “How does he know who will die next?” Bug asked. “He pans the camera to them in the exact sequence they are killed.”

  That couldn’t be right. I rewound the recording. Older male mercenary, an athletic female mercenary, bodybuilder mercenary, thin mercenary, a large female mercenary . . . Five targets in the precise order they were killed. In each case the camera panned to the victim and Leon started his narration before the shot ever rang out.

  Oh crap. I put my hand over my mouth.

  “If your mother called out the shots, it would make sense,” Bug said. “But two of these were popped by our guys. At first I thought he was a precog.” He rewound the video to just after the first female mercenary died. “Look, you see here he swings the shot to the left first?”

  I followed the camera as it tilted to the left, focusing for a second on the lamppost as if Leon was waiting for something. The camera tilted up, catching a glimpse of the window in the building across the street and moved to the bodybuilder mercenary.

  “He didn’t do it in any of the other cases, so I went to talk to our guys.” Bug typed on the laptop. The image of the street filled the screen.

  “We had a guy here.” He tapped the window with his finger.

  “Is that the window in the video?”

  He nodded. “The skinny guy that got killed after the bigger dude is here.” Bug pointed at the spot by a warehouse, shielded from the view by the low stone wall. “The guy in that window didn’t have a direct shot at the thin guy. So for shits and giggles, we put a dummy in the spot where the skinny guy was.” He clicked a key and the screen showed the street from a different angle with a mannequin crouching by the wall, a canvas bag on his head.

  “Why did you put the bag on his head?”

  “You’ll see in a minute. This is the view from the sniper’s window.” The screen split in a half. “No shot.”

  “Yep.”

  The sniper sighted the spot on the lamppost, where Leon had zoomed in before, and fired. The bag on the mannequin’s head tore and a thin trickle of sand spilled out.

  “Ricochet,” I whispered. Leon wasn’t a precog. He’d evaluated the potential targets and positions of the shooters, calculated the trajectory of the bullet, and waited for it to happen. When it didn’t, he moved on to the next most likely target. And he did all this in a split second.

  “I don’t know what this is,” Bug said. “It’s some sort of wonderful whatthefuckery I’ve never seen before. But I thought I should tell you.”

  Leon would never have a normal life. There was only one path open to his kind of magic.

  I looked at him. “Please, don’t tell Rogan.”

  “I’ll have to tell him if he asks me about it,” Bug said. “But I won’t volunteer. Does Leon know?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s your call,” Bug said, picking up his laptop. “But a word of advice. From personal experience. When you keep people from doing things they are destined to do, they go crazy. Don’t let him go crazy, Nevada.”

  Chapter 9

  It was six o’clock on Friday evening and I was sitting in our media room in a fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-night dress, holding a tiny evening bag containing my phone, and trying not to move. Arabella had done my makeup. Catalina had rolled my hair into a suitably messy crown on my head and pinned it in place with a black metal hair brooch. My shoes were on. I had gone to the bathroom before I got dressed, I hadn’t eaten anything that would give me gas, and I was probably dehydrated, because Murphy’s Law guaranteed that if I had a drink in my hand, I would spill some of it on my nice dress.

  I was ready to go. Grandma Frida and my mom were keeping me company until Augustine showed up.

  I had spent the last several hours memorizing names and faces from Augustine’s list and my poor brain buzzed like a beehive. Several of the men in the photographs were blond. I had stared at them for an hour, trying to match their features to the smudged blur I had seen through the rain-speckled window of the Suburban. I failed.

  On TV the talking heads speculated about Senator Garza’s murder. The police were still sitting on the details of the investigation and the rabid intensity of the earlier commentary had died down to annoyed declarations that sounded suspiciously like whining. The press so desperately wanted the story, but there was only so much speculation you could come up with, and starved of information, they were ready to admit defeat and move on to more exciting topics.

  The pictures of Senator Garza came on the screen again. Young, handsome, politician’s haircut, and probably politician’s smile. He’d been murdered, and somebody had to answer for that.

  “Poor family,” Grandma Frida said.

  Leon ran into the room. “Neva—”

  He stopped and stared at me.

  “Yes?”

  “Nevada, you’re pretty.” He said it with a sense of wonder, as if he had discovered some alien life-form.

  “And normally I’m . . . ?”

  “My cousin,” he said, loading a lot of duh into his voice. “There’s a limo outside. Two limos.”

  I held out my hand and Leon helped me stand up.

  “How do I look?”

  “You look good,” Mom assured me.

  “Break a leg!” Grandma Frida told me. “Take lots of pictures!”

  I stepped out of the media room. Cornelius was waiting for me. He wore a black tuxedo that hugged his body and set off his handsome features. He looked sharp and elegant, a man who belonged in the world of fifteen-thousand-dollar dresses. I felt like a little girl playing dress-up.

  Cornelius offered me his arm. I rested my fingers on his forearm and we walked through the hallway to the door.

  “This is like going to the prom,” I said.

  “I didn’t go to mine,” he said. “Did you?”

  “I went to my junior prom. My date’s name was Ronnie. He joined the Marines and was due to ship out two weeks later. He showed up high as a kite and proceeded to cheat on me with weed the entire evening because it was his last chance to let loose. I got fed up and ditched him thirty minutes after we got there.” I had gleefully skipped the prom my senior year.

  “I promise not to abandon you,” he said.

  “Between you, Augustine, and Rogan, there is no danger of that.”

  Cornelius opened the door for me and I stepped out into the night. Two limousines waited. Augustine stood by the second limo. He wore a tuxedo as well and it fit him like a glove. I took a second to come to terms with it. Wow.

  “Nevada, you look perfect. Harrison, good evening.”

  “Good evening,” Cornelius echoed.

  The driver of the first limo, a tall blonde woman, stepped out and held the door open. “Mr. Harrison.”

  “Ar
e we arriving separately?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Cornelius said. “I’ll be arriving in the limo of my House.”

  And I would be going with Augustine as his employee. Just as well.

  “I’ll see you there.”

  His limo slid into the night. Augustine held the door open for me. I sat very carefully.

  He shut the door, walked around, got in next to me, and we were off.

  “The bruise is a masterful touch,” Augustine said.

  “The two of you said Baranovsky prefers unique.”

  “It’s certainly that. It draws the eye. Together with the dress it’s a powerful statement. Have you noted that Rogan tried to dissuade you from attending?”

  “Yes.” Where was he going with this?

  “Rogan is, at the core, an adolescent,” Augustine said. “Driven, dangerous, and calculating, but an adolescent nonetheless.”

  No. Rogan was anything but. He sought to maintain control over his environment, his people, and most of all himself. On the rare occasions his emotions got the best of him, the glimpse of his true nature was so brief I still hadn’t been able to completely figure him out. There was nothing impulsive about him.

  “Adolescents are ruled by their emotions,” Augustine continued.

  You don’t say. If only I had some adolescents in my life with whom I had to deal on a daily basis.

  “Abandoning your family obligations and running away to join the army is a teenage move,” Augustine said. “It is one peg above dramatically declaring that you didn’t ask to be born.”

  Given that Rogan was nineteen when he joined the army, the teenager criticism wasn’t exactly fair. I finally understood why Rogan had joined. He was trying to escape the predetermined path of all Primes: go to college, attain an advanced degree, work for your parents, marry a spouse with the right genes, and produce no less than two and no more than three children to ensure succession. The path that Augustine himself had studiously followed with exception of finding a spouse.

  “My point is, occasionally Rogan has an emotional reaction and acts accordingly. He had an emotional reaction to sharing you with the rest of the world. I don’t know the nature of his fascination. Perhaps it’s personal. Perhaps it is professional interest. I don’t believe you realize how valuable you are, but Rogan does and so do I. And I don’t like to lose.”