Master of Fire

by Angela Knight

  She straightened guiltily. “Fine.” The word emerged as a mumble. “I’m fine.”

  Unconvinced, he eyed her. “Give us a minute, Mount.”

  “Sure,” the big cop said. “I need to go take some pictures of the rest of the house anyway.” Catching Giada’s puzzled expression, he explained, “Gotta document the crime scene.” He bent over to dig the digital camera from an equipment bag, then ambled out.

  A warm hand came to rest on Giada’s shoulder. She looked up to find Logan gazing down into her face.

  “You’re good at that,” she told him, exhaustion making her a little too blunt.

  “Good at what?”

  “Looking like you care.” As anger narrowed his dark eyes, she silently cursed herself.

  She hadn’t intended to say that out loud.

  “And . . . bang.” Terrence pushed the send button on his cell and waited for the blast.

  Nothing happened.

  “Fuck!” He sat up straight on the deer stand, peering through his binoculars. The house remained stubbornly undamaged. How the fuck had the blonde managed to bugger his device?

  “Well, not this time, bitch.” Viciously, he thumbed another set of numbers on his cell and hit send, triggering the backup device he’d planted.

  BOOM!

  With a grin of satisfaction, he watched the detonation lift the roof off the house.

  The shock wave rolled from the rear of the house, picking Giada and Logan up and slamming them into the cabinets like the batting hand of an angry giant. The carbonated wood crumbled into ash under the impact, and they hit the floor, stunned and helpless.

  Which was when Giada felt Mark Davis die.

  Agony blinded her as a hail of ball bearings ripped through the big cop’s body. Her abused eardrums couldn’t even detect her own screams.

  A muscled arm closed around her waist and jerked her effortlessly off the ground. Giada almost fried her would-be attacker with a spell before she realized it was Logan.

  His lips moved, something that looked like “Come on!”

  She let him hustle her through the kitchen door and down the brick steps. “Mount!” Giada still couldn’t hear herself yell, though that didn’t stop her from trying. “The bastard killed Mount!”

  She’d failed. She’d failed them all. She’d seen the blast, found the first device the bomber planted, and made the lethal mistake of thinking that was all there was. And Mark Davis had paid for her error with his life.

  She thought of the little girl he’d bragged about, the bright three-year-old who walked on her tippy-toes and called her grandma “uncouth.” The little girl who now had no father because Giada had failed.

  Logan pushed her into the arms of the firefighters who staggered out to meet them. Even as they surrounded her, he turned back toward the house. His soot-streaked face looked as stunned and blank as the firefighters’. Blood covered his chin from a split lip and swollen nose.

  The Hillsborough chief grabbed Logan’s shoulder as the men gathered around him, mouths moving, arms gesturing. The argument was short, fierce, and utterly silent, as if somebody had hit the mute button on Giada’s personal soundtrack. The expression on Logan’s bloody face was savage as he finally jerked free of the chief and headed for the house over the firefighters’ evident protests.

  The house stood smoking, its formerly undamaged end now blown to hell, roof half-collapsed. Giada and Logan had survived only because they’d been in the kitchen, at the opposite end of the building.

  Davis had been standing in the hallway with his camera when the improvised claymore mine had gone off. The bomb she’d seen too late.

  The assassin had planted the device in the little girl’s room, inside one of the cushions of that little pink flowered couch.

  Which was why Giada was going to kill him.

  With all the firefighters distracted by Logan, she turned and walked toward the woods. The woods from which an assassin would be watching as he gloated over a good man’s death.

  Oh, yeah. The bomber was going to die. Screw trials. Screw mercy.

  Giada was going to fry him like an egg.

  Smoke raced through the woods, his small furry body a streak of black. He’d been trying to track the arsonist by scent when he’d heard the house blow. For a moment, his heart simply stopped in his chest as if gripped by a giant’s fist. Then he’d forced himself to calm down and reach for Giada and the boy, and he’d found them both, dazed but alive.

  But there was something wrong with the girl. He couldn’t touch her mind. It was as if she’d shut down.

  He found her striding through the woods, her face blank and bloody and soot-streaked, clothes dirty and torn. “Giada!”

  She didn’t respond to his voice, just kept moving in that mechanical stride, like a windup toy with a broken spring.

  “Giada, child, what’s wrong?” Panic touched him. He knew Logan was uninjured, so what . . .

  Death. He felt the ugly psychic reek of it. One of Logan’s men had died.

  Smoke cursed softly in a language that had been dead long before the birth of the Christ. Logan being Logan, and Giada having the same overdeveloped sense of responsibility, they’d blame themselves. “Giada . . .”

  She ignored him utterly. He scanned her and realized why. The blast had damaged her hearing just as her friend’s death had wounded her soul.

  None of his cat forms would do for this. He had not walked on two feet since old King Dearg Galatyn had ruled the Sidhe, but one did what was necessary. Sighing, he gathered his power and let it roll.

  Giada jolted backward, startled, when the man appeared by her side. For a moment she thought it must be the one she hunted, until she recognized the crystalline slit pupils and the inky fall of hair striped with silver. “Smoke?”

  His lips moved, shaped words she couldn’t quite make out. His face was both stunningly beautiful and utterly masculine, ears forming elegant Sidhe points, nose an aquiline sweep, sulky mouth drawn into a frown of worry. He looked like sin and sex, and he made her uncomfortable as hell.

  Then he took her face between broad, long-boned hands, and she froze. Magic poured into her, warm as a father’s kiss, and she found herself relaxing into it.

  With a loud crackling pop, her hearing returned. “I’m sorry, child.” Smoke’s voice sounded the same as always, deep and rumbling, though now it seemed to suit his big body.

  Her eyes stung. “He’s dead, Smoke. Mount’s dead.”

  “I know, my dear. I know.” Those were not empty words. Sadness darkened his pale eyes like a shadow over the moon.

  She wanted to crumple into his arms and sob out her pain and failure, but that would be a betrayal. She had a killer to find. It was the last thing she could do for Davis, and she was not going to fail him this time.

  “How?” Giada choked out. “How did I miss this? I should have seen it. I should have known.”

  Smoke shook his head. “The killer has to be blocking our magical scans somehow. There’s no other explanation.”

  “Unless I’m just not powerful enough.”

  He gave her an impatient look. “I know you want to wallow in your guilt, my dear, but I can assure you, I am definitely powerful enough to detect him.”

  “So how is he blocking us?”

  Smoke shrugged broad warrior shoulders. “When we catch him, we’ll ask him.”

  “Mount! Dammit, Mark, answer!” Logan shouted. He couldn’t have heard a reply even if his partner had made one—he was still stone deaf—but he knew the firefighters would. They’d waded into the debris with him, gone grimly to work with shovels and gloved hands to throw hunks of roof and wallboard and two-by-fours aside as they searched for the missing cop. From the corner of one eye, he saw whirling blue lights appear as patrol cars approached, eerily silent in his deafened world. No surprise—an officer was down. Every cop in thirty miles would show up to help search.

  Then Logan found the first hunk of red-splattered wallboard.

>   And knew.

  He heaved it aside with an utter disregard of its value as evidence, unaware of the prayers he was chanting. Heaved another chunk aside, forgetting to disguise the Latent strength that was so much greater than a human’s.

  When he found Mark Davis crumpled between two chunks of red-soaked wallboard, Logan crashed to his knees in the wreckage and almost impaled himself on a broken two-by-four. For a long moment, he simply knelt there, staring.

  His friend was unrecognizable.

  Men gathered around, stood staring in frozen horror. He was dimly aware of someone staggering, falling over a pile of board, then vomiting in helpless spasms. He was too busy trying to control his own rebelling stomach to care.

  A thick arm slid around his waist and helped him to his feet. As he stood, his gaze fell on yet another red-splattered chunk of wallboard. This one was dimpled with an odd pattern of metal circles. A river of ice slid over him.

  Logan grabbed the chunk of board and stared at it in horror. “Jesu!” He wheeled toward the dazed crowd of firefighters and cops, raised his voice in a bellow he couldn’t even hear. “Pull back! Get the fuck out of here!”

  The man beside him jerked him around with a hand to his shoulder. It was only then that he recognized Sheriff Bill Jones. The man looked blasted, older than his years, grief aging his pale eyes. His lips shaped a single word: “Davis . . .”

  Logan lifted the chunk of wallboard and pointed at the metal dimples. “Those are ball bearings, Sheriff. Mark was killed by an antipersonnel device specifically intended to kill first responders. And there may be more than one. We’ve got to clear this scene now.”

  They moved through the woods wrapped in an invisibility shield Smoke had generated with an ease Giada could only envy. He was back in cat form now, though he was a very big cat indeed. She wouldn’t want to be the assassin when Smoke got those dinner plate-sized paws on him. His claws were the length of steak knives, and just as sharp.

  “He may be able to block magic,” the cat murmured as he ghosted along. “But I doubt he’s thought to block scent. And I have a very good nose.”

  He knew what he was doing, too, working a spiral pattern in the woods surrounding the scene. It was a damned good thing they were invisible, given the furious activity around the house. Gazing back the way she’d come, Giada saw that the cops had strung crime scene tape and corralled the crowd that always shows up for a fire. Judging by the grim expressions on the deputies’ faces, somebody had finally realized Mark had been killed by a bomb.

  She probably should have told them that before she left, but it hadn’t even occurred to her.

  Giada frowned. She was keeping too many freaking secrets. It was one thing when she’d thought Logan was the only one in danger and she could use her magic to contain the situation. But it seemed the other cops were now targets, too.

  If she’d told Logan the truth, would Davis still be alive?

  Oh, yeah, she’d blown it in a big way. And there was no way to repair the situation. Imagining Logan’s reaction when she came clean, she winced.

  “I’ve got the bastard’s scent.” Smoke didn’t even lift his head from the ground as he headed off into the woods. “This way.”

  Giada’s lips twisted into an expression halfway between a snarl and a grin. The one thing she could do was avenge Mark’s death. And by Merlin’s Cup, she was going to do just that.

  The spy slipped into the woods, intent on finding Terrence Anderson before Logan’s little blond witch did. That Giada Shepherd was out looking for him was apparent from the fact that she was nowhere to be seen.

  Damn good thing the spy’d had the foresight to give Terrence one of the sorcerer’s bracelets. Otherwise the witch would have been all over him days ago.

  As it was, this was a perfect opportunity to rid herself of the blonde.

  She was looking forward to it.

  Logan walked over to one of the paramedics. His hearing had finally returned, though it had brought a pounding headache with it. He was starting to wonder if he had a concussion. He asked the guy for an Excedrin and a cup of water, then moved on to his real objective. “What was wrong with Giada? Was she badly hurt?” Jesu, he hoped not.

  The paramedic’s long, pleasantly homely face went blank. “Giada?”

  “Yeah, the blond woman who came out of the house with me. Didn’t one of you guys take her to the ER?”

  The guy shook his head. “We’re the only unit here, man. We haven’t taken anybody anywhere.”

  Logan tensed. Then where the hell is Giada? When he hadn’t seen her after he’d found Mark, he’d assumed she’d gone to the emergency room.

  “Shit.” Turning away, he scanned for a bright blond head among the milling men.

  Giada was nowhere to be seen.

  He glanced uneasily toward the woods. Could she have been taken?

  Rein in the imagination, MacRoy. Nobody’s going to kidnap a woman in front of fi fty cops and fi refighters.

  But she might have walked off on her own. Particularly if she was still disoriented from the blast. Following that uncomfortable hunch, he headed for the woods.

  The assassin sat on a camp stool he’d put on a deer stand mounted in a tree, staring intently through a pair of binoculars at the police working the murder scene. A broad grin of murderous delight stretched his mouth.

  Smoke looked up at Giada—though not far up; in his current form, his head came to her hip. “Shall I do the honors?”

  “Hell, no. He’s mine.” Giada summoned her power through Morgana’s emerald, letting it lift her skyward like a leaf sailing on the wind. Fury pounding a drumbeat in her head, she snarled silently as she rose toward the tree stand. The bomber was so intent on his binoculars that he didn’t notice when she drew even with him.

  “Hello, you murdering pig,” Giada purred. “That was a good man you killed.”

  The assassin jerked around so fast, he almost fell off his perch. Giada relished his expression of uncomprehending astonishment as he gaped at her floating body. “What the fuck?” His voice cracked on the last word. “How’d you . . .”

  “I’m a witch.” She felt her lips draw into a smile that wasn’t the least bit pleasant. “And I’m going to show you magic that will make you scream for the rest of your very short life if you don’t tell me who the hell hired you. Now.”

  His mouth worked silently before he managed, “This ain’t possible.”

  “Obviously it is, or it wouldn’t be happening.” Magic poured from her hands, ripping him off his stand and dragging him into the air. A second ball of force clamped around his throat. He choked, kicking. Giada watched his face darken with snarling satisfaction.

  “Don’t kill him, child,” Smoke called from below. “At least, not yet.”

  She let up the pressure on his windpipe and added just enough support to keep from breaking his neck. Judging from the way his face was going dark, he probably had his doubts. “Now, let’s try this again. Who. Hired. You?”

  His mouth worked, but no sound emerged. She let up on the pressure another fraction, and he squeaked, “I don’t know!”

  “Now you’re just being insulting. Guy like you? You know. Or you’ve certainly got a damned good idea. Otherwise . . .” She tightened her grip on his throat. “Not feeling the need to keep you alive.”

  His eyes wheeled like those of a panicked horse, face purpling as he gagged out, “She’s got money. Never . . . never tried to haggle. Gave me what I wanted.”

  Giada loosened her hold another fraction. “She? And how much money?”

  “Three million.”

  “You were underpaid. What did she want for her three million?”

  “MacRoy dead. With a lot of collateral damage. Wants to send a message to somebody.”

  “Who?”

  “I can’t . . .”

  She cranked down on the force again. “Who?”

  “His father! MacRoy’s father!”

  “You know, I’m still no
t hearing her name.” Something crunched. He choked. “I really want her name.”

  This would not do at all.

  The spy studied the situation, and did not particularly care for the view.

  Giada Shepherd hovered on a cloud of magic that foamed around her like a fountain of glowing force. Coils of the same energy wrapped the assassin’s neck and torso in strangling bands.

  Who’d have thought the little twit was capable of that kind of magic?

  To make matters worse, at the base of the tree crouched an enormous feline . . . thing. It was black, but far too massively built to be a panther. She thought it looked more like a tiger, what with the pewter fur striping its brawny black haunches and massive forelegs. Its head was longer and more elegant than a tiger’s, with long ears rising to tufted points. It radiated such power, the witch looked like a firefly by comparison.

  Fear iced the spy’s spine. She could not afford to leave Anderson in the witch’s hands—it would not take the little blond bitch long to wring out every detail the bomber knew. Which might be nothing . . . but then again, perhaps he knew entirely too much. God only knew what information he’d unearthed.

  So. The cat first. The cat was most dangerous. Luckily, the spy had approached from downwind, so the big beast had not scented her—yet.

  As if sensing that thought, the creature’s head swung in her direction. Instantly, the spy exploded toward it in a furious rush of muscle and power. If she didn’t strike fast and hard and now, there would be no second chance.

  The cat roared, rising onto its powerful haunches to meet her with extended claws. Magic poured from its open jaws, boiling like an electrical storm. The blast slammed into the spy’s face with such force, it would have killed anyone not of her kind.

  Before the cat could register that its blast had done nothing, she locked both hands in its ruff. Clawed paws ripped her forearms, but she ignored the pain, whipped into a spin, and heaved. The beast yowled as all eight hundred pounds of it sailed through the air to slam into a tree trunk halfway across the clearing. The furry body bounced, landing in a dazed heap. Crackling like a volley of rifle fire, the tree toppled, landing right on top of the huge cat.