Burn for Me: A Hidden Legacy Novel (24 page)

I grabbed the chalk. Amplification circle was magic 101. Small circle around the mage’s feet, larger circle around him, three sets of runes. I’d just never tried to draw one on the asphalt while a wind mage was throwing invisible air blades at us.

The hood directly in front of Rogan split with a screech. A bright red line swelled across his chest. He grimaced. The hoods spun around us, faster and faster.

I finished the smaller circle. It wasn’t perfect, but it was round.

Something pelted the hoods, sounding like hail. The mage couldn’t see us, but we couldn’t see him either.

I finished the second circle.

Another hail of air blades, this time from the right. The aerokinetic had us pinned.

I drew the runes out. “Done.”

A tiny puff of chalk escaped from the lines into the air. Rogan flexed, his arms bulging. A vein shook in his neck.

The hoods kept spinning. If I were a wind mage, I’d try to get a drop on us . . .

I looked up. A graceful figure soared above us in the sky.

“Up!” I yelled.

The aerokinetic raised his arms. We were wide open.

A Greyhound bus smashed into the wind mage. I caught a glimpse of him, pressed against the bus’ windshield like a bug, his eyes wild. The bus crashed into the pavement in front of the mall, sinking three feet into the ground but remaining half upright.

Mad Rogan smiled, like a smug cat who’d just gotten away with stealing something off the counter. “Wind mages. They’re all fancy dancing until you drop something heavy on them.”

I stared at the bus like an idiot, still holding the chalk in my fingers. A car tire was heavy. He had dropped a damn bus.

My wrists and ankles were bleeding. My knees too—I must’ve scraped myself trying to draw the circle. So far today I’d seen a woman almost die, I’d shot a person, I’d killed another person with my shockers, I’d been strung up on wires and almost crushed by a car, and now I was bleeding all over the place. If I could, I would punch today right in the face.

Bern’s black Civic pulled into the parking lot and swerved to avoid the bus.

Mad Rogan looked down at my chalk lines. “This is the lousiest circlework I’ve ever seen. Were you drawing with your eyes closed?”

That was it. I threw the chalk at him, got up, marched to the Civic, and got inside. “Drive, Bern. Please.”

To my cousin’s credit, he said nothing about the blood, the bus, or Mad Rogan. He stepped on the gas and drove straight home.

B
ern drove with steady surety, obeying all traffic laws and regulations. Leon and Arabella both had their learner permits. Five minutes in the car with one of them behind the wheel was enough to turn my hair white, but riding with Bern was completely stress free. He had made a simple calculation: the cost of a speeding ticket in Houston ranged from $165 to $300 and would bump up his insurance. He didn’t have $165 to spare.

Three cop cars, their sirens screaming, barreled down the opposite lane. Good. As far as I was concerned, Mad Rogan could deal with them and leave me the hell alone.

“Remember you told me about how the Great Chicago Fire wasn’t started by Mrs. O’Leary’s cow? Your professor had some sort of alternative theory about it?”

Bern gave me a funny look. “Did you see the bus halfway in the ground?”

“I don’t want to talk about the bus.”

“Okay,” Bern said in a soothing voice. “We don’t have to talk about the bus. We can talk about the cow instead.”

“Is there any chance we could talk to your professor?”

“Professor Itou? Sure. I think he has office hours today. I’ll check when I get home. Why?”

“Something Harper said. She called Adam a glorified O’Reilly’s cow. I think she meant O’Leary.”

“She might have been using it figuratively,” he said.

“Sure, but I just want to tug on that string and see where it leads. It was so random and out of nowhere.”

“No problem, I’ll take care of it,” he said. “MII called. Twice. Sounded annoyed. They want you to call them back.”

Figured. House Pierce wasn’t happy about Adam setting an office tower on fire, so they likely leaned on Augustine Montgomery, and now he would lean on me. Crap rolled downhill.

I would have to call Augustine Montgomery. I wasn’t looking forward to it.

The cuts on my neck and wrists turned out to be shallow. Catalina helped me clean up and put Neosporin on them. I didn’t get much of a chance to recuperate. Bern came back with Professor Itou’s office hours, which were between two and four. I fixed my makeup and hair, put on a business suit—not one of my expensive ones but the simple middle-of-the-road grey—then we jumped into the car and drove to the University of Houston.

We found Professor Ian Itou in his office in the history department. He had someone with him, so we sat in the hallway, twiddling our thumbs. Students hurried back and forth, dragging their bags and overly caffeinated drinks. Everyone seemed so young. I wasn’t that much older, but for some reason I felt ancient. I was probably just tired.

Even when I was in college, people seemed young to me. I had a full-time job. For me, going to college meant get in, sit in class, turn my stuff in, and get out as soon as I could. I went to one fraternity party, and that was because I had a crush on the guy in my Criminal Justice Organization and Administration class. He had huge brown eyes and freakishly long eyelashes. Every time he blinked, it was an experience. We went on three dates, agreed that this was a bad idea, and parted ways. Eventually I ended up dating Kevin. He was a great guy, and he made my sophomore and junior years awesome. I was so comfortable with him. He just had this way of putting me at ease, and he almost never lied to me. We talked; we hung out; we had good sex and did all of the things that two young people in love usually did. I thought I would marry him. Not that he asked or I did, but back then I could see myself being married to him. It wasn’t a wildfire, high drama, heart-pounding-excitement kind of relationship. People started telling us we were like an old married couple three months after our first date. Kevin was just solid, like a rock. Being with him was so easy. No pressure.

My mother didn’t like him. She thought I was settling because Dad had died less than a year before and I wanted stable and normal. At the time it didn’t feel that way. Then, in our senior year, Kevin got accepted into a graduate program at CalTech. He invited me to move with him to Pasadena. I told him I couldn’t. My family was here, my business was here, and I couldn’t just abandon it all. He said he understood, but he couldn’t miss this opportunity. Neither one of us ended up being that upset about it. There was no ugly breakup, and there were no tears. I was bummed out about it for the first few weekends, and then I moved on. Kevin was in Seattle now, working for an engineering firm. He was married and he and his wife had twins six months ago. I had looked him up on Facebook. It made me a little sad, but mostly I was happy for him.

The point was that, while I was in college, I didn’t do all those typical things. I was never in a sorority. I didn’t belong to any clubs. If I came home at dawn, it was because there was some surveillance involved. People spoke about their college “experience,” and I really had no clue what it was all about.

I glanced at Bern. “Hey. You know, if you want to join a fraternity, you totally can.”

My cousin’s shaggy eyebrows crept up. He reached over and carefully put his hand on my forehead. Checking for fever. “I’m worried about you.”

I pushed his hand off. “I’m serious. I don’t want you to feel like you have to miss out on anything.”

He pointed at himself. “Programmer and cybermagician. We don’t join fraternities. We hide in our lairs in darkness and bloom under the glow of computer screens.”

“Like mushrooms?”

“Just like that. Except that mushrooms don’t bloom. They produce spores.”

The door to Professor Itou’s office opened and a girl with a dark ponytail walked out, waving a stack of papers. She glared at us. “He can take his B and shove it. A B! It was the best essay in the class!” She stomped down the hallway.

Bern caught the door before it closed. “Professor? I emailed you earlier?”

“Come on in,” a cheerful male voice called.

Professor Itou was about my height and about fifteen years older, athletic, with a compact, powerful build and hooded dark eyes. He seemed full of energy as he shook my hand and sat behind his desk, poised against a massive bookcase filled to the brink. His expression was cheerful.

“What can I do for you, Ms. Baylor?”

“I was hoping to find out more about your theories regarding the Great Chicago Fire. Bern mentioned that you didn’t think the cow had started it.”

Professor Itou smiled, threw one leg over the other, and braided his fingers on his knee. He looked like someone had just told him a really funny joke and he was still inwardly chuckling over it.

“It’s not something that’s often talked about in historians’ circles. In fact, my research into it has actually made me an object of not so gentle mockery. Academics.” He opened his eyes wide in pretended horror. “Vicious beasts. They’ll rip your throat out if you aren’t careful.”

Bern grinned. I could see why my cousin liked Professor Itou. This one academic clearly didn’t take himself too seriously.

“I’m armed,” I told him. “And if we get in trouble, we can put Bern in front of the door. He can hold off a whole hallway of academics. Nobody will get in.”

Professor Itou’s eyes sparked. “Are you sure you want the full account, because I’m not asked about this that often, and once I start, I will get giddy and might not stop for a while.”

I pulled out my recorder. “Yes, please.”

“Prepare to be amazed.” Professor Itou leaned back. “First the basic facts. It’s 1871 and the summer is very dry. Chicago, which was mostly wood, bakes in the heat, drying up until it becomes a tinderbox. It’s Sunday, October 8, 1871. Night has fallen and everyone is in bed. A few minutes after nine o’clock, Daniel ‘Pegleg’ Sullivan sees a fire through the windows of the barn belonging to his neighbors, Patrick and Catherine O’Leary. He sounds the alarm and runs to save the animals. Firefighters are notified, but they had spent the day before putting out a large fire and they’re tired. They go to the wrong neighborhood, and by the time they find the right house, the fire is blazing. They try to put it out and fail. For two days Chicago burns, until on October 10, rains finally smother the fire. Three hundred people are dead, over a hundred thousand are homeless, and the heart of the city is burned to the ground. The official cause of the fire was never determined. Later a
Chicago Tribune
reporter writes about the fire, claiming that a cow owned by Mrs. O’Leary kicked a lantern, knocking it into the hay. Mrs. O’Leary becomes a social pariah and dies a few years later, heartbroken, according to her family.”

Professor Itou leaned forward. His face took on a conspiratorial expression. He motioned me closer. I leaned toward him.

He lowered his voice and said softly, as if telling me a great secret, “The cow didn’t do it.”

“No?” I asked.

“No. The reporter admitted later that he added the cow for dramatic purposes. At the time, it fed right into anti-Irish attitudes. Here is another interesting detail: a study of the street proves that Pegleg Sullivan couldn’t have seen the fire from where he had been standing.”

“He lied,” Bern said.

“Exactly!” Professor Itou stabbed the air with his index finger, triumphant. “The Chicago fire was the subject of my undergraduate senior thesis. I have a somewhat obsessive personality, so I obtained a copy of an archived map of Chicago and was busily re-creating the spread of the fire on it by means of painting the buildings with a brush dipped in coffee.”

“Why coffee?” I asked.

“At the time it was the only dye available to me in large quantity. I was a poor college student, but I always had coffee. It was a required food group.” Professor Itou crossed his arms. “As I was mapping out the fire, a roommate of mine, silly practical mortal that he was, came to the kitchen in hopes of using the table for the mundane purpose of making himself a sandwich. He was a pyrokinetic, and he noted that the pattern of the initial burn was eerily consistent with burn rings that occur when a pyrokinetic employs concentric fire. Meaning someone had burned Chicago in circles. The fire had spread north and south, against wind direction. Furthermore, the velocity of the burn indicated presence of magic. Entire neighborhoods had been engulfed in moments.”

Late nineteenth century. The trials of the serum that brought out magic abilities were beginning, but it wasn’t common knowledge yet. It was possible that some early pyrokinetic made it to Chicago. “But why deliberately burn the city?”

Professor Itou raised his hand. “That’s the question I asked myself. I will spare you the full explanation. Here is the short version: the British military was administering serum to some of its officers in an effort to maintain its grip over the Commonwealth. One of these officers was Colonel Rudyard Emmens. The colonel had spent most of his service to the British Empire in “the Orient.” Unfortunately I could never quite figure out which part of the Orient. Eventually he retired to Chicago. We do not know for sure what his talent had been, but we do know from his personal journals that it had to do with fire. He was very conflicted about it. He was equally disturbed that these “hellish” powers had passed to his only son, Edward. At the time of the Chicago fire, Edward was eighteen. Here’s an interesting account: according to a noted Chicago historian, the center of the city remained extremely hot for almost two days after the fire died down. When firefighters were finally able to enter the steaming wreck that was Chicago, they found Edward Emmens in the middle of it. He was exhausted, dehydrated, and smeared in soot but otherwise unharmed.”

Only a pyrokinetic mage could stand in the middle of an inferno and survive. “Was he a Prime?”

“You would think so, but no.” Professor Itou grinned. “His magic was classified as Notable later in his life.”

“That seems an awful lot of power for a pyrokinetic mage of Notable rank,” I said.

“Indeed.” Itou turned around, peered at the bookshelves, and pulled out a red book. “David Harrisson, one of Chicago’s twenty-six police lieutenants at the time, took a particular interest in this occurrence and in the causes of the fire. Nobody knows what he actually found, because the powers that be seemed to have suppressed his investigation, but years later he began publishing crime fiction under the pseudonym John F. Shepard.” Itou flipped the book open. “‘The Devil’s Fire.’ A short story about a young man who steals his father’s prized African artifact and uses it to burn down Boston.”

He showed me the page and snapped the book closed.

“There exists a deathbed confession by one Frederick Van Pelt, detailing how he and three other young men met with Edward Emmens, who had taken a magical object from his father and was going to show them wondrous things. They met up at a barn whose owners were known to call it an early night, and they paid a local man to keep watch. He claimed that after the fire, the magical object was broken into three pieces and each piece was hidden away.”

I put two and two together. “So let me make sure I got it. Rudyard Emmens brings home some sort of artifact with him from somewhere in Asia. Then years later, his son uses it to impress his friends, loses control, and burns down Chicago?”

Professor Itou looked at me for a long second and smiled. “Yes.”

“How did it go with the senior thesis?” Bern asked.

Professor Itou’s eyes got really big. He waved the book around. “Funny you should mention it. I got terribly excited. I had all my sources. I worked for weeks. I had written a paper that would’ve made angels weep. I was the last to present my thesis before a panel of professors. They listened to me, nodded, and offered me a full graduate scholarship. Guaranteed admission, BA to PhD track, all expenses paid. Just one small thing—my thesis couldn’t be published. It wasn’t in the public’s interest.”

“They bribed you,” I guessed.

He leaned forward and tapped the book on the table to underscore his point. “And I took it. Back then I took it because I was poor and had no choice. Now I would’ve taken it for a completely different reason. The existence of amplification artifacts has been debated for years. We know that some people develop magic powers without the serum, and we know that magical objects can be created, so there is a possibility that an item which makes your magic stronger does exist. If such an artifact could be found, only tragedy would come from it. If it could be controlled, it would be given to a Prime and turned into a devastating weapon. If it couldn’t be controlled, any attempt to do so would result in a natural disaster. It’s best for this theoretical artifact to stay hidden. It is a lesson for us and a legacy of Colonialism. Stealing another nation’s treasures never turns out well.”