Burn for Me: A Hidden Legacy Novel (7 page)

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 of 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.”

G
ustave’s Custom Cycles occupied a rectangular steel building with corrugated metal walls. It was exactly 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.

The building looked older than either of its neighbors. The corrugated walls had suffered some dents over the years. Someone had painted the front facade solid black and airbrushed a hell bike on it: huge, shiny, and framed in billowing flames full of grinning red skulls.

The parking lot held two vehicles, both Dodge trucks, one white, one black. Good. I wouldn’t have to do my show-and-tell in front of the whole class. I parked next to the white truck, grabbed my business fake-leather folder, and walked into the office. Nobody was manning the counter, so I rang the bell and waited.

The door swung open and a man in his early thirties shouldered his way in. Tall and lanky, he looked spare; not underfed but dried like jerky under the sun. He wore a T-shirt smudged with oil and faded old jeans. His skin was a rich olive brown, about a shade or two darker than my own. He’d shaved his head, but a short, carefully shaped beard hugged his jaw. I recognized him from the image Bern had dug up during his research—Gustave Peralta, the owner.

He saw me and blinked. I clearly wasn’t someone he’d expected. “How can I help you?”

“My name is Nevada Baylor. I’m looking for Gustave Peralta.”

“Call me Gus,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

I passed him my business card.

“Private investigator.” He frowned. “That’s new.”

“I was hired by House Pierce to find Adam Pierce.”

“Can’t help you,” Gus said. “Haven’t seen him in the last six months.”

An annoying magic click. A lie.

“He hasn’t visited the shop in the last week?” The Twitter photo was shared this Monday.

“Nope.”

A lie.

“Gus . . .”

“Mr. Peralta. I have nothing to say to you. You can show yourself out.” He turned to leave.

I opened the folder and pulled a piece of paper out. “This is the printout of your payments received.”

He stopped and turned on his heel toward me.

I put a second piece of paper on the counter. “This is the printout of your outgoing payments. And this is your payroll.”

He grabbed the paper off the counter. “Where did you get this?”

“We hacked your office computer.”

“That’s illegal!”

I shrugged. “I told you, I’m not the cops.”

He reached for his cell phone. “How about I’ll dial nine-one-one right now and report this?”

I smiled. “Let me get to the end, and if you still want to call the cops, I won’t stop you. If you look over here where I drew a small star? This shows a payment in the amount of nine thousand nine hundred and ninety dollars labeled ‘Motorcycle repairs.’”

The righteous anger died down a little in Gus’s eyes. “So what?”

“This is a recurring payment that’s coming out of Christina Pierce’s personal account.” Mrs. Pierce was a wild guess. The best we’d been able to do was determine that the payment had been made from an account owned by someone within House Pierce. Adam’s mother seemed like a safe bet.

“So? I did some work for Adam back then, and he was low on cash. His family makes payments.”

“No, Mr. Peralta. You and I make payments. Adam Pierce walks in and says, ‘I’ll take one of each color’ and throws down his Visa Black Card. If you look right here, in your payroll, you will see a gentleman by the name of Reginald Harrison listed as an independent contractor. You will also see that Reginald Harrison is paid nine thousand nine hundred and ninety dollars in cash. The nine thousand nine hundred and ninety dollars number is very interesting because the IRS pays attention to any cash transaction in the amount of ten thousand dollars or above.”

“So what? Reginald works for me.”

Lie. “Reginald Harrison’s net worth is close to twenty million dollars, so I very much doubt that. He does have a younger brother, Cornelius Harrison, a very nice man, who happens to be Adam Pierce’s childhood friend. You’re washing Adam’s money. His family makes a payment and you pass it on to Adam in cash, while Reginald claims it on his taxes. You receive five hundred dollars in compensation via the second payment, two days later, once Adam gets his money.”

Gus crossed his arms.

“The payments are made on the seventh of each month. That means the next payment is in two days and Adam Pierce will visit you to pick up his pocket change. I’m guessing you didn’t mention this to the nice detectives who interviewed you.”

If I’d had the manpower, and if I’d been confident that Houston’s finest wouldn’t find Adam for two more days, I would have laid a lovely trap. But Adam would burn through anything I could throw at him, and the manhunt had reached hysterical levels. Talking Adam into surrendering to his House was still my best and only strategy. To do that, I had to show that I wasn’t lying.

“He didn’t do it,” Gus said. “Adam is a stand-up guy.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “Right now most of the city’s police force is foaming at the mouth hoping to blow his brain over the nearest sidewalk. You’re a reasonable man. Honestly, what do you think his chances are of getting out of this alive?”

Gus grimaced. “Look, I don’t know where he is.”

True. “I just want to bring him home safe to his mother. She loves him. He is her baby boy. She doesn’t want to lose him to some trigger-happy SWAT sniper.” I pushed my card across the counter. “Tell him I came by. That’s all I’m asking.”

T
he shark fin of Montgomery International Investigations rose among the towers of Houston’s downtown, still as menacing as ever. I stuck my tongue at it. It didn’t seem impressed.

I parked and marched to Augustine Montgomery’s office. The immaculate receptionist spoke into her headset and motioned me to follow.

“So how long did it take you to figure out which shade of liquid foundation would cover up your bruise?” she asked.

“About half an hour. Did it work?”

“No.”

Touché.

Augustine Montgomery, still impossibly beautiful, raised his eyes from his tablet. “I am not a terrible person.”

“Yes, you are. The note in the file states that House Pierce cut off Adam financially. They are still giving him money. His mother is probably the culprit.”

Augustine leaned back and braided his long fingers into a single fist. If their shredder stopped working, they could just dump the paper over his head and his marble-perfect cheekbones would slice it to ribbons on the way down.

“I was assured that all financial ties were severed.”

I put the printouts of Gustave’s business hijinks on Augustine’s desk. He studied them for a long moment. “Do I want to know how you got these?”

“No.”

Augustine motioned to me. “Stand here.”

I came over and stood next to him.

“Say nothing,” he said. “I want you to understand that if this information is in error, the consequences for you will be serious.”

His fingers flew over the keyboard. A large monitor came to life, showing an office backdrop and a trim man in a business suit at a desk. Peter Pierce, Adam’s older brother. The traces of Adam’s beauty were definitely there, in the dark eyes, the bold line of the nose, and the shape of the mouth, but Peter lacked the pretty-boy smolder that turned Adam into the darling of the media. Peter was at least ten years older, and he radiated “respectable” the way his young sibling radiated “edgy.”

“Augustine,” Peter said. “Have you found him yet?”

“We’re working on it.”

We
meant me, and Peter saw my face. I was now irrevocably connected to the search for Adam.

Augustine leaned back. “I have reason to believe House Pierce is still supplementing his income. I can’t stress how important the financial incentive is to bringing him in safely. If you keep giving him play money, he will keep taking his chances.”

Peter waved his hand. “Yes, yes, we must make it as nasty for him as possible. I remember the lecture. I assure you, no payments have been made to him.”

Augustine ran through the transfer for him.

“Give me the account number,” Peter said.

Augustine typed it in. A computer chimed on Peter’s side. He peered on another monitor to his left and shook his head, his expression grim. He pushed a few keys on the keyboard. “Mother?”

“Yes?” an older female voice said on the other end of the line.

“You have to stop funneling money to Adam.”

“Oh, please, it’s an insignificant amount.”

“He can’t have money, Mother. We’ve discussed this.”

“But then he will be poor. This is ridiculous. Do you want your brother to be poor, Peter? Why do all of you have to make it so unpleasant for him?”

Augustine kept his face perfectly neutral.

Unpleasant.
That was a good word, especially considering that right now a widow with two children was getting ready to bury the charred corpse of her husband.

“Perhaps you want him to be like the dirty migrants begging for a dollar by the traffic lights?”

Charming. If I never met Christina Pierce, it would be too soon.

“Yes,” Peter said. “I want him to be poor and desperate. So desperate that he comes to us for help.”

“Absolute and utter . . .”

Peter waved at us and pushed a key on his keyboard. The feed stopped. We both looked at the screen for a blink or two.

“So, if I make less than nine thousand nine hundred and ninety dollars per month, does it mean I can legitimately beg at intersections?” I couldn’t help myself.

Augustine took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“Do your clients know that you hire dirty migrants?”

“Stop,” Augustine said. “Christina Pierce is a third-generation Prime. She hasn’t been poor a day in her life. It colors her mind-set.”

“If I do track Adam Pierce down, are you going to provide me with support?”

“It depends on the situation.”

Lie. “I stand by my earlier statement. You will have to live with yourself.”

I walked out of his office. My cell phone rang midway through the lobby. An unfamiliar number. I took the call.

“Nevada Baylor.”

“Adam Pierce,” a male voice said. He sounded just like I thought he would, with a slightly sardonic voice, the kind that would fit a self-aware spoiled rich boy to a T.

I had to bait the hook just right. My heart was beating too fast. Deep breath. I could do this.

“Gustave tells me you derailed my money train.”

“Yes, I did. Your brother and your mother are having a conversation about it right now. Does she have something against migrant workers?”

He chuckled. “She probably meant vagrant. So you want to find me?”

“
Want
is the wrong word. I’m forced to find you. I don’t particularly want to.”

“Who’s forcing you?”

Got you. “What are the chances of you surrendering to me?”

He laughed again, a distinct male chuckle. “Come see me and we’ll talk about it.”

Score. “Sure. Where?”

“Mercer Arboretum, Shade Bog Garden. In half an hour.”

He hung up.

Half an hour. Mercer was twenty miles north of downtown. Twenty miles in Houston traffic might as well have been sixty. Bastard.

I double-timed it to the car, texting Bern on the way. He would still be in class.
“AP just called my cell. Meeting in half an hour, at Mercer Arboretum.”

No response.

Bern could track my phone anywhere, but tracking wouldn’t do me any good if Adam turned me into burnt ends. Half an hour would give me just enough time to get to Mercer Arboretum. Not enough time to wrangle any backup. Besides, backup wouldn’t do me any good.