Sapphire Flames

by Ilona Andrews

  Mom shrugged.

  Ragnar got up. “I’m going to the kitchen to get snacks. Please don’t worry. I won’t go outside, and I’ll try very hard to not kill anyone.”

  He left. It was just me and Mom.

  “It won’t work,” I told her. “They’ll never trade Halle. She’s a potential witness.”

  “I know,” she said. “We have to bleed them. We have to make it so expensive that they’ll drop it. They’re a business.”

  “We’re gambling with her life.” Anxiety churned inside me.

  “It’s not about Halle now,” Mom said. “It’s about keeping that wild wrecking ball and her brother alive.”

  My stomach dropped. “I’m going to try, Mom. Halle’s still alive. There is still a chance.”

  “Then you go and try. Heart and his people will be here tonight. That should give you some freedom of movement.” Mom sighed. “I miss doing small, quiet jobs. Insurance fraud. Cheating spouses.”

  “I miss them too,” I told her. “But we are who we are. There’s no going back.”

  Alessandro had taken the top floor in the three-story brick building that used to be a fire station years ago. Rogan purchased it but never did anything with it, and eventually we bought it from him.

  I had walked through this building before when we purchased it. The first floor, with an unusually high ceiling, served as the garage for the fire trucks. The second, accessible by an iron staircase, housed the offices, and the third contained the rec room, sleeping quarters, and a big kitchen once capable of serving food to an entire fire team.

  I climbed the iron stairs, with my hip screaming at me the entire way. I had left Shadow in the warehouse. She seemed susceptible to his bribes, and I had no idea what sort of bizarre thing he would try to feed her this time.

  The original plan was to turn the fire station into barracks, but the building proved to be too old. Fixing it up would be more expensive than building a brand-new structure. Rogan let it go for next to nothing. At some point, Leon, obsessed with the fire pole, had tried to convince Bern to move there with him and turn it into a “hip bro cave.” That plan died when they realized rewiring the place was out of their budget.

  The stairs brought me to a wide-open door. I stepped through and ended up in the rec room, flooded with daylight from huge windows. Someone had swept the concrete floor. On the right a large pack of bottled water waited on the counter of a kitchen right out of the seventies, complete with wooden paneling. Straight ahead, in the corner, an inflatable mattress rested on the floor. Between me and the mattress stood two plastic fold-out tables filled with weapons and equipment. A high-tech-looking laptop, parts of a drone, six, no, nine guns, including a BFR, four knives, two daggers, a machete, a garrote, and a compound bow. The assassin’s tool kit.

  The assassin himself was nowhere to be seen. I walked to the tables. Whatever his faults were, Alessandro had excellent taste in blades. Everything was functional, sharp, and sturdy. And generic. No custom-made pieces, no family heirlooms. Nothing irreplaceable or that could be traced.

  I reached for the Ka-Bar and tested the balance. Seven-inch straight blade angled at the tip. Heavy.

  I turned to get better light. Alessandro sat on the kitchen counter, one leg bent, the other hanging free. I almost threw the Ka-Bar.

  “Adorable,” Alessandro said. “Do that little jump again.”

  I put the Ka-Bar down before the temptation got the better of me. “I brought you the recording.” I held up the thumb drive.

  He jumped off the counter and stalked toward me.

  I circled the tables, looking at his collection and keeping the furniture between us. “You seem to know a lot about Benedict.”

  “Mhm.”

  “What is he?”

  “You were with him. What do you think he is? What did you feel?”

  “Revulsion and fear. His magic manifested as dark phantom serpents. He opened himself, and a nest of ghost snakes slithered out wanting to bite me.”

  “That’s why he calls himself the Adder,” he said.

  “The Adder? Really?”

  “It goes with the territory. Nobody wants to hire a Mr. De Lacy or Madame Laurent. They want to hire the Adder or Mort Noire.”

  “Please tell me there isn’t an assassin calling herself the Black Death?”

  “More than one.”

  It seemed so childish except people were dying. “So, what’s your nickname? Instagram Famous? Playboy Killer?”

  “Are you teasing me, you sexy beast?”

  The careful train of my thoughts derailed, flipped over in the air, and burst on fire. Think of a witty comeback, come on . . . How did he keep short-circuiting my brain?

  He laughed. “If looks could kill.”

  I resumed our dance around the tables. “Benedict is a psionic, isn’t he? Probably a phobic subtype.”

  Psionic mages affected survival emotions. Fear, disgust, rage, anxiety, shame. The primal, powerful urges that kept humans breathing thousands of years before tools and weapons came along. Psionics induced these emotions in their targets. Phobics specialized in fear. They had an innate ability to find your worst phobia and project it into your mind, dragging you into paralyzing madness. I’d dealt with a phobic before, although she wasn’t a Prime. Benedict’s magic elicited that same instinctual punch of revulsion and terror.

  “Close,” Alessandro said. “His mother is a phobic. His father is a mind cutter.”

  A menincissor mage. A particularly nasty branch of mental magic that attacked consciousness. Mind cutters punctured mental shields and induced pain and the inability to think. They weren’t lethal on their own, but they excelled at disabling their target.

  “Are you running away from me?” Alessandro asked.

  “No.” We had come full circle around the tables.

  “Yes, you are. Are you afraid of what I’ll do if I catch you?” He raised his eyebrows at me. “Or are you scared of what you might do?”

  I stopped. “I’m not afraid of anything.”

  He vaulted over a table and landed next to me. I tilted my head and looked at him. Magic roiled just under his skin. His amber eyes all but glowed.

  Kiss me.

  “When a phobic and a mind cutter have a child . . .” He spoke softly, his voice warm and low, meant just for me. When he told someone he loved them, he might sound just like that. “. . . they have a one in a quarter chance of producing a crime against nature called a mind ripper. Benedict can penetrate mental defenses like his father and then scramble the mind, inducing panic like his mother. Benedict didn’t just happen; he was a planned project by a mind cutter House. They wanted a dark horse to handle their dirty deeds.”

  He was standing way too close. Looking at him made it difficult to concentrate. “What happened?”

  “They had a difference of opinion. Now House Weber is no more.”

  I held out the USB drive. He took it from my hand. His long fingers brushed mine.

  Alessandro opened the laptop and plugged the drive in. Sigourney appeared on the screen.

  I crossed my arms on my chest and leaned against the wall by the window. If Alessandro ever kissed me, I wouldn’t want him to stop. When he came to see me that time after the trials, asking me to go for a ride, I wanted him so much, it took all of my will to not open my wings and make him love me. In that moment, it didn’t matter that it wouldn’t be real. Being loved by him was all I had cared about.

  I got so scared that I would lose control, I called the police and asked them to make him leave. I did it because my magic would take away his free will and chain him to me. I didn’t want that for him. I wanted him to have a long, happy life with whoever he chose. I had to let him go.

  The more I looked at his Instagram over the years, the less happy he seemed. Now I knew—the Instagram Alessandro was bullshit. He had created a fantasy and held it up to the world like a shield. This Alessandro, the one in front of me staring at the laptop with the single-minde
d focus of a predator; this was the real man. Knowing this should have freed me, but I only wanted him more.

  My phone chimed. An Instagram alert for Alessandro’s account. On my phone Alessandro surfed, a crystal blue wave curling around him. His wet hair flared around his face. Muscle corded his body under bronze skin. I looked at the tag and held the phone out to him. “Maui, really?”

  “Mhm. I’m currently in Hawaii. Did you see his hand when he reached over her?” He paused the recording just before Sigourney’s killer turned off the PC.

  “I did. I digitally enhanced it.” I hadn’t mentioned it, because I wanted to know if he would notice it too.

  He glanced at me. All the flirting had evaporated. His eyes were clear and cold. He had seen his target.

  Alessandro the killer. And if I let my mind wander, it would drift off into imagining the glide of his fingertips against my skin, the warm heat of his lips on mine, the power of his arms around me . . . It would construct impossible scenarios where somehow he fell in love with me and stopped being an assassin and we lived happily ever after.

  I was morally bankrupt.

  He must’ve seen it in my face because humor sparked in his eyes.

  “Can I see the enhanced image? Or will you make me beg?”

  “It’s the second file on the drive. You know, you don’t have to pretend to flirt with me. I said I would work with you and I meant it.”

  He smiled at me. It wasn’t his dazzling bachelor-of-the-year grin, it was a simple quick smile. “I never pretend with you. Tease you, maybe. Flirt, yes. But never that.”

  I wished he hadn’t said that to me. Not helping, Alessandro. Not even a little bit.

  “These fingers have claws,” he told me.

  “And the knuckles of the hand are abnormally large and oddly shaped. If this was a normal person, he or she would have advanced arthritis. Doesn’t seem like a desirable trait in an assassin.”

  He frowned. “If this is arthritis, he wouldn’t be able to open a door. No, I think this is reinforcement to account for the additional finger weight and length of the claws.”

  “Yes. The distal phalanges are wider and longer as well. The whole hand appears stronger.”

  He leaned back from the laptop. “The warped can’t do magic by definition.”

  “Yet here we are. It looks like she had a massive stroke with catastrophic bleeding. Is this a carnifex mage?”

  “A butcher? It’s possible, but they typically target the heart. It’s a guaranteed kill. Going for the brain is a lot harder. You would really have to know what you were doing.”

  I shook my head. “He couldn’t go for the heart. He needed her breathing so she could die of smoke inhalation.”

  His fingers tapped the keyboard. A carousel of portraits appeared, each on its own card, listing name and power. Benedict’s handsome face looked at me with glacier eyes. The card said “Kurt Weber, Ratiocissor, Prime.”

  Alessandro swiped across the track pad, and the ring of portraits turned, presenting us with the next face, a Hispanic woman in her late fifties. “Alba Gonzales, Telekinetic, Prime.” The following card showed a black man in his mid-twenties. “Kendrell Cooper, Aerokinetic, Prime.”

  How many Primes did Diatheke have? If they were a House, they would be unstoppable.

  Alessandro kept swiping, the faces moving too fast for me to register them. He hardly looked at the screen. He must’ve memorized them and was now going through them just to reassure himself.

  I counted eighteen cards. The last one said “Average” so they weren’t all Primes. Still. That many killers under one roof would give anyone pause.

  Finally, Alessandro straightened. “There are no butchers in their roster.”

  “How complete are your records?”

  “Complete enough.” He locked his jaw.

  “Maybe he’s a recent hire?”

  Alessandro shook his head. “Etterson was an experienced assassin. They wouldn’t send a rookie after her.”

  He stared at the laptop, his expression dark. How did he get those files? More importantly, why? This went beyond any due diligence one would do to research his competitors. It would have taken months, possibly years to compile this database. Alessandro was hunting Diatheke.

  “My turn to ask questions,” I said.

  He smiled. “Go.”

  “Are you trying to take out a competitor? Is there another assassin firm pulling your strings?”

  “I don’t work for a firm. I’m here to kill Sigourney’s murderer.”

  I raised my eyebrows and nodded at his laptop. “And so you threw this together on the fly?”

  “Fair enough.” Alessandro leaned back against the table and crossed his arms. “Benedict has been on my radar for a while. I need to ask him some questions on an unrelated matter. It has nothing to do with House Etterson.”

  “How important are those questions to you?”

  “If it’s a choice between the Etterson contract and his life, I’ll kill him. I can find my answers in another way.”

  “How did Sigourney hire you, what are the terms of your contract, what do you know about Halle?”

  “She hired me through an intermediary. She was in the business, and she was aware of my particular job requirements.”

  “Which are?”

  “Privileged.”

  “Alessandro, she’d been out of the game for almost ten years. How did she even know about you? You would’ve been in your teens when she quit. Have you been doing this since you were fifteen?”

  His face shut down. “I have a certain reputation.”

  “What kind of reputation?”

  “The kind people like Sigourney make a point to note.”

  What the hell did that mean?

  “The intermediary arranged a call,” he continued, “during which Sigourney told me that her old firm was coming after her. She indicated they had pressured her to come out of retirement for a high-profile job, which she declined. She didn’t tell me who the target was, said we would discuss it in person. She didn’t think Diatheke would move on her immediately. She expected them to come back with a higher offer, which she also intended to reject.”

  “Clearly she was wrong.”

  “Yes.”

  I thought out loud. “For them to insist that she come out of retirement after so many years means the target was someone she had access to and they didn’t.”

  “Or they didn’t want it traced to them.”

  “Did she say why she wouldn’t do it?”

  Alessandro grimaced. “She said that if she didn’t kill him, she would be in danger. If she did kill him, her entire family would be done. I got the feeling that she wasn’t sure she could complete the job. It was a no-win situation. One way or the other, someone would die.”

  “So a dangerous, high-profile target. Male. Someone she knew.” We would have to go through Sigourney’s files again.

  “Someone who scared her,” Alessandro added.

  “I don’t understand why Diatheke let her walk into their building and take out the money. They knew they were going to kill her.” That had to be some conversation.

  “Two separate things. She earned the money, and if they didn’t pay her, nobody else would work with them. The greatest sin in this business is to withhold money earned.” His voice dripped with disgust. “They have no problem killing a parent in front of their kids or blowing up a car full of charity workers; but if they don’t get paid, they lose their shit.”

  For a hired killer, he had a lot of disdain for the profession. And he didn’t say we. He said they.

  He made sense though. It probably wasn’t the best idea to cheat an assassin out of their paycheck.

  “She didn’t think her children would be in danger.”

  “Normally, they wouldn’t be.” Alessandro shrugged.

  “Professional courtesy?” I couldn’t quite keep the skepticism out of my voice.

  “There’s no such thing. If you must eliminat
e an assassin and things go sour, leaking the fact that they were a hired killer douses the heat. Nobody extends sympathy to murderers. But if a minor is killed, there is an elevated risk of public outcry and pressure to solve it. Halle should’ve been safe.”

  “It has to be her magic,” I said. What else was there? Halle was too dangerous to sell or contain.

  Alessandro met my gaze. “They bothered with this elaborate ruse because they need her alive. Catalina, we’ll find her. I promise you. We’ll get her back.”

  He said it like he meant every word.

  “Thank you for leveling with me.” I moved to the door.

  He got there ahead of me and leaned on the door frame. “Leaving so soon?”

  “Things to do.”

  “What if I asked you to stay? What if I said, ‘Don’t go, Catalina. I’ll be lonely without you.’”

  If he actually said that and was serious, I might move into this room with him. “I have to go.”

  “Stay,” he said. “We can compare notes on murderers. It will be fun.”

  His voice pulled me in, and for a second, I didn’t know which one of us was the siren.

  “No. I have to go.” If I kept repeating it, I might actually believe it. “I have to look through Sigourney’s files and make dinner.”

  “Or you could bring your laptop over here. We could order Chinese takeout and wash it down with some bad American wine.”

  His eyes were so warm and inviting. It would be so easy just to stay here with him.

  “I’ll tell you funny stories,” he offered.

  I would give anything to spend an evening here, figuring out what made him laugh. “I have to go.”

  He gave me a resigned smile and invited me to exit with an elegant sweep of his hand.

  I had to leave. I said I would. I insisted on it. I walked through the doorway.

  “If you think of anything else,” I said.

  “I know where you live.”

  I was going to say text me. A sudden thought hit me like a bolt of lightning. “Alessandro, one last thing. Stay out of my room.”