Sapphire Flames

by Ilona Andrews

  The desiccated body on the table next to me lunged up. I saw it coming but my mind had half a second to react, and it refused to accept what it was seeing. The corpse leaped at me. Cold, hard fingers locked on my throat.

  Panic slapped me. The air vanished. Pain clamped my throat in a steel vise and squeezed.

  Conway sprinted to the door. Fullerton stepped aside, letting Conway pass, his face perfectly calm as if we were at a society lunch. Runa spun, aiming at Conway with her hand. If she poisoned him, whatever he knew would die with him.

  I clamped my hands together and drove them up between the corpse’s arms. Its hands fell off my neck and I rammed my heel into its midsection. It stumbled back.

  “No!” I croaked.

  A burst of green shot from Runa like a striking viper and lashed Conway’s shoulders, just before the other corpse jumped over me and landed on her back. Conway dove through the doorway and vanished from sight.

  Crap.

  The first corpse righted itself. I sucked in a breath—my throat was on fire—and pulled my knife out. The reanimated bodies didn’t act like zombies; they were simply vessels for the reanimator’s magic, like puppets on invisible strings. Stabbing it in the heart or the head would get me nowhere. I had to disable it.

  My magic sparked, pulling me, and I let it guide my strike. My siren talent came from my father, but this I inherited from my mother. It made her a deadly sniper, it allowed Leon to make impossible shots, and it never steered me wrong.

  The desiccated husk of a human charged at me with its arms open wide. I caught its right wrist, stabbed my blade into its armpit, and twisted. The seven-inch CPM-3V high-carbon steel sliced through the shriveled gristle of the tendons and cartilage like it was old, dry leather. The arm fell from the shoulder, hanging by a thin strip of flesh.

  I let go of its wrist, jerked the blade free, and slashed across the back of the corpse’s neck. Its head rolled off its shoulders. I stabbed my knife into its other shoulder, wrenched the bone out of the socket, cut across the body’s lower back, severing the vertebrae, and hammered a kick to the back of its knee. The corpse collapsed, falling apart. Pieces of the body writhed on the floor, no longer a threat.

  The second corpse had sunk its fingers into Runa’s hair, hanging off her. Green mist wrapped around both, turning the body’s charred flesh green.

  “Don’t touch!” Runa screamed. “I’ve got this. Go!”

  I dashed past Fullerton and out of the room. The hallway on the right lay empty. On the left, Conway staggered forward, bent over and grabbing the wall for support. Yep, she poisoned him.

  Never again. Runa Etterson wasn’t coming with me to interrogate any more leads. I had minutes, maybe seconds, to squeeze answers out of him.

  I ran.

  Conway glanced over his shoulder and sped up. He was nearly to the corner. I had to get to him before her poison finished him off.

  He stumbled, clutched at the wall, and pulled himself up. I was almost to him.

  A tall, lean man in an expensive black suit rounded the corner and stalked toward us. He moved with grace, not like a dancer but like a swordsman, swift and supple, and carried himself with complete assurance as if he owned the whole building and his mere presence was an honor to behold. His longish brown hair had fallen over one side of his face.

  Conway lunged to the left, trying to avoid him.

  The man’s hand snapped out. He caught the AME’s shoulder, steadying him, pulled a long, narrow dagger out of his jacket, and stabbed Silas Conway in the heart.

  It was a breathtaking strike. Smooth, fast, flawless. My magic sparked, as if acknowledging the beauty of it. He didn’t even aim. He did it all in a single offhanded motion, as if he had taken his car keys out of his pocket and tossed them to a friend. This wasn’t expertise, this was mastery, born of pure muscle memory and superior reflexes.

  The man raised his head. Alessandro Sagredo looked at me over Conway’s shoulder, smiled, and smoothly withdrew his knife from the AME’s chest.

  My brain short-circuited. I tried to stop, but I was sprinting on a polished concrete floor, and the laws of physics conspired against me. I slid. The floor squeaked under my boots, and I skidded past the two men at full speed. Alessandro tilted his head and watched me slowly come to a stop.

  How was this possible? Alessandro Sagredo was a playboy. He took pictures in the Caribbean with his shirt off. He surfed in Fiji and shopped in London. He didn’t stab random government workers in the heart with surgical precision.

  Alessandro was looking at me. Right at me. Like I was the only thing in the world. A hot, predatory fire played in his amber eyes. He looked at me like I was a delicious steak and he was a hungry wolf.

  Say something smart, say something smart . . . “Hey!” Oh my God.

  Without saying a word, Alessandro stepped over Conway’s body and walked toward me. I should have turned around and run the other way, or at least raised my knife. Instead, I just stood there, like a complete idiot.

  Alessandro reached over and offered me his bent arm. I rested my fingers on his forearm. The muscle under the suit’s fabric felt like steel. Alessandro moved, and we strolled around the corner.

  I was hallucinating. I had to be.

  “I . . .”

  “Shh,” he said in a slightly accented voice. “Just keep walking. Building security will be here soon, and we need to not be here.”

  He had killed Conway. It didn’t bother him. It didn’t disturb him any more than swatting a fly. Alessandro had stabbed a human being in the heart before. Many, many, many times before.

  I’d made a serious error in judgment.

  “I like your knife,” he said. “You might want to put it away though, before someone gets excited.”

  I slid the blade back into its sheath in my coat. Wait. He’d shushed me. Like I was five. He told me to put my knife away and I did. And now I was letting him walk me away.

  What the hell am I doing?

  “Why are we walking?”

  He glanced at me, his tawny eyes amused. “Because I’ve just knifed someone. Security will want to ask me a lot of boring questions. I hate boring questions. And there will be paperwork. I hate that too.”

  Oh yeah, well, in that case. “You killed Conway.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  I stopped. He stopped too and looked at me.

  “Alessandro, what are you doing here?”

  “Trying to get you to walk faster?”

  My brain finally regained the ability to form complete sentences. “Why did you kill Conway? He was a lead in my investigation and now he’s dead.”

  “He was a very bad man. You were chasing him with a knife.”

  “I needed to ask him some questions.”

  He smiled like a wolf baring its fangs in a dark forest. “Were you going to stab him if he didn’t answer?”

  “I don’t need to stab people to get answers.”

  He sighed. “Collect your friend and go home, Catalina. There are no answers for you here.”

  What?

  Runa rounded the corner at full speed, saw us, and froze.

  “I’m so sorry,” Alessandro said. “I have to leave now. Go home, stay safe, and forget all about this.”

  Ahead the elevator chimed.

  “I’ll see you around.” Alessandro raised his hand. Somehow there was a gun in it. I didn’t see him draw one. The gun barked, spitting bullets, the window to our right shattered, and Alessandro jumped out of it.

  The elevator doors slid open, and guards in grey uniforms poured out, guns drawn.

  “Put your hands up!” the leading guard roared.

  I put my hands on my head and let them handcuff me.

  Ten minutes after the building security apprehended me, the Houston PD House Response Unit arrived at the scene in a blaze of glory. They released Fullerton, who was clearly a neutral third party, detained Runa and me, and asked us questions for forty-five minutes. The way they concentrated on the
description of the mysterious male who stabbed Conway made me think Alessandro had tampered with the hallway cameras. After the third round of the same questions, I dug my heels in, gave them the name of our attorney, and pointed out that my client was traumatized by having her family reanimated and that she had enemies powerful enough to corrupt an AME and that I could see at least three spots from which one could line up a long-range shot and snipe her. After that I answered every question with “Are we free to go?” They gave up and released us. I grabbed Runa and all but shoved her into the elevator.

  The moment the elevator doors closed, Runa spun toward me. “You lied to me!”

  “Not here,” I warned her. “When we get out of the elevator, walk next to me. Stop when I stop and if I tell you to run, run.”

  Runa’s face hardened. “You think they’ll try to kill me.”

  “Yes.”

  “I hope they try.”

  Right. Runa’s emotions had clubbed her rational thinking over the head, dumped its body on the side of the road, and took my friend for a joy ride. Just what we needed.

  Client. Not friend; client. Friends were for other people. You wanted your friends to like you, and when I wanted someone to like me, the chances of my magic leaking out and enthralling them was much higher. I’d spent twenty-one years avoiding making friends. It was irresponsible to start now.

  I did like Runa. I liked her when I first met her, and I wished I could be more like her, funny and charming and comfortable in her skin. Seeing her now broke my heart. I wanted to fix all the shitty things for her, and I had to watch myself very carefully. Besides, she didn’t need a friend right now; she needed a professional investigator.

  The elevator opened. I took a second to scan the lobby. No visible threats. I walked out and headed for the door, my head held high. Next to me Runa marched like she was daring someone to block her way.

  We exited the building, and I accelerated, almost breaking into a jog. The space between my shoulder blades itched, as if someone was aiming at me through a rifle scope.

  Get to the car, get to the car . . .

  I popped the locks, and we jumped into the Element. I started the engine, reversed out of the parking spot, and sped out onto the street.

  “Alessandro was in that building. I saw him, Catalina, with my eyes.”

  “I had no idea he would be there.” I concentrated on driving. The car shot down the road. Nobody followed us.

  “What was he doing there?”

  “Killing our suspect.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Call Bern.”

  The sound of my phone dialing came from the car’s speakers and Bern picked up. “Yes.”

  “You were right.” I took a turn a little too fast and accelerated up the access road, shifting to the left to enter the highway ramp. “It’s House warfare. We’re coming back to the warehouse. Lock us down.”

  “On it,” Bern said. “Are you coming in hot?”

  “Not that I can see.” I merged into the traffic.

  “Is my brother awake?” Runa asked.

  “No,” Bern said. “I’ll call if there is any change.”

  “I need everything you can dig up on AME Silas Conway. In particular, sudden large payments to his accounts in the last month or so and where they came from.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He tried to prevent us from viewing the bodies, and when the Scroll rep showed up, he reanimated the corpses of Runa’s mother and sister and tried to kill us with them. The cops are digging into Conway’s past as we speak.”

  “Are you okay?” my cousin asked.

  “Yes. Fullerton got the samples, but Conway died before I could question him.”

  “What happened?”

  “Alessandro Sagredo.”

  The phone fell silent.

  “I’m sorry, say again?”

  “Alessandro Sagredo happened. He showed up in the Harris County IFS and stabbed my suspect in the heart. He did it as if he had a lot of practice. Then he told me to collect my friend, go home, and not to worry my pretty little head about it.”

  And when I found him, he would regret every word. He’d surprised me this time, but he wouldn’t again.

  “He said what?” Runa asked.

  The car speaker remained silent.

  “Bern, are you there?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “You’ve had a pretty big morning.”

  “See you soon.” I hung up.

  “How is Sagredo involved in all this?” Runa asked.

  “No idea. Do you know him? Do you know his family? Did your mom have any contact with him?”

  “No.”

  “But you recognized his picture,” I reminded her.

  “I recognized him because I had a giant crush on him in high school, like every other girl my age. When he got engaged for the first time, Felicity, Michelle, and I had a pity party with cheesecake and whipped cream.”

  When I heard about his first engagement, I locked myself in my room and cried alone. I had cried the next two times too, because I was a moron.

  Runa shook her head. “Trust me, if anyone has any connection to Sagredo, it’s you. He doesn’t even know I exist.”

  If House Etterson had no connection to House Sagredo, then why was Alessandro at the morgue, and why had he killed Conway and told me to go home? He was involved in this somehow. He had to be.

  I needed to find Alessandro, and for that I would need Bug.

  Bug served as Rogan’s surveillance specialist. Magically altered, he processed visual information at an astonishing rate. He could sift through the simultaneous feed from dozens of CCTV cameras and track a person across the entire city. If anybody could find Alessandro, Bug could.

  He was also fanatically loyal to Rogan. The moment we involved Bug, Rogan would know every detail of what we asked, real and imagined, because Bug wouldn’t just report the facts, he would embellish them with his conclusions delivered with his particular flair.

  I could just imagine the way that report would go. Hey, so you’ll never believe this dick fart thing: they want me to find Alessandro Sagredo. The gnome molester apparently stabbed somebody, and your sister wants to marry him. She’s paying me a fortune to find him before he kills again and ruins the romance. She believes the dimwit shit-for-brains can be redeemed, I guess, by the love of a good woman. Isn’t that just reindeer balls?

  Nevada would then drop everything and fly back here to help and fix things which would jeopardize Mrs. Rogan’s claim. Rogan’s grandfather was difficult in life and he saw no reason to change in death. His will specified that unless Rogan and Nevada were present for the entire duration of his funeral and the mourning period, Mrs. Rogan would be cut out of her father’s will.

  Mrs. Rogan wanted to inherit only one thing from her late father: the family’s summer house on the coast where her late mother had planted a beautiful garden. When Mrs. Rogan was a little girl, before her mother’s death, the family would vacation there. It was the place of her happiest memories.

  For the past three years Mrs. Rogan educated and trained me. She found tutors for my magic, she arranged for etiquette lessons, she took me to museums and art galleries trying to hone my taste. She did it all never expecting anything in return, except a thank-you. Nevada and I wanted her to get that house more than she did.

  I loved my brother-in-law, but to say that he was paranoid when it came to safety was like saying a typhoon was a gentle breeze. I had no doubt Connor had us watched. He couldn’t help himself. That meant he already knew that Augustine showed up at our place in the middle of the night and that I left with him and came back with Runa and her unconscious brother. Whether he shared it with my sister was another question, but sooner or later Nevada would find out that we took a dangerous case. The likelihood of her rushing back home was already high, and Bug’s litany of curses could push her over the edge.

  The only way to stop this from happening was to leve
l with her. It was too late to call her now. She would be in bed.

  We needed Bug now. It was vital that we got a handle on where Alessandro was and why he was here. I couldn’t wait till tomorrow.

  “Call Bug.”

  The phone barely had a chance to ring before Bug snatched it up. “What do you want?”

  “I need to hire you to find somebody, but you can’t tell my sister. I’ll tell her myself first thing in the morning. Can you wait that long?”

  “Depends on who it is.”

  Nice try. I wasn’t born yesterday. “Promise first.”

  “Fine. I promise.”

  “Alessandro Sagredo.”

  Bug’s voice spiked. “Your virgin girl crush? The Italian Stallion?”

  “Does everybody know that I had a thing for Alessandro?”

  “Anybody who knows you. What did he do? Have you given up on pining from afar and decided to sweep him off his expensive cordovan leather loafers?”

  I ground my teeth. “He killed my prime suspect.”

  Silence.

  “How?”

  “He stabbed him in the heart. Less than five feet away from me.”

  “Ohhh. That’s good. That’s too good. I’ve got to tell the Major.”

  “Bug! Think way back, about two milliseconds ago, when you promised me that you wouldn’t tell?”

  “You tricked me. I don’t know if I can hold it in. It’s too good.”

  Argh. “Okay, you can tell Connor if you swear him to secrecy. He can’t tell Nevada. I’ll explain it to her myself, tomorrow morning. Can you do that?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “They’re asleep, anyway.”

  Bug snorted. “The Major never sleeps. Sometimes he rests his eyes while thinking deep thoughts.”

  “Connor is at his grandfather’s funeral trying not to murder his obnoxious family. He’s dealing with a lot right now, Bug. You don’t want to add to that, do you?”

  “You always ruin things with your logic. Fine. Where was the fancy boy last seen?”