“Not at all,” he purred. “Just assuring you that I’m going to figure out what’s going on behind that pretty face.”
A connection clicked in my brain. Swirling shadows hiding simple clear facts. “Can you tell me who bailed out Manners on the drug bust?” I said.
Fagin let go of me. “Sure. Good thinking.” He brought up the sheet, and ran his finger down the lines. “Some woman named Grace Hartley. No priors. She put up her house as collateral. Fifteen-fifteen Bonaventure Drive, here in town.”
“Thank you,” I said. My BlackBerry shrilled on my hip and I looked at the incoming call. It was Bryson. “David, no. For the last time, no. Pie does not count as a fruit. Stay on your diet.”
“Wilder, what are you jabbering about?” Bryson said.
I sighed and wheeled away from Fagin. “This better be something earth-shattering.”
“Close to it. There’s another fire.”
My heart leapt up into my ears, the blood roaring. “Give me the address.”
“Warehouse in Waterfront, the old wrecks behind the port of Nocturne City. Just drive down Cannery … you’ll see the smoke.”
I jabbed the call off. “Shit.”
Fagin perked up like a dog sensing blood. “Something come up?”
I pointed at him. “I need your car. Cannery Street. Fast as you can.”
Seven
The Mustang was lightning on wheels, never mind what reasons Fagin had for keeping a car like that. We sped down the waterfront to the port, following the plume of black smoke that echoed the Corley fire down to the sick flutter in my stomach.
Fagin laid a sideways stop next to the cordon the fire department had set up across Cannery, black tracks springing to life behind us on the pavement. He waggled his eyebrows at me like I was supposed to wave pom-poms at the effort.
“I see Hutch,” I said, “but where’s Starsky?”
“For your information, Starsky and Hutch drove a Torino.” Fagin grinned, and hopped out of the car, a skinny jackrabbit on springs.
I followed, catching the slouchy rotund figure of Chief Egan beyond the cordon.
“If it isn’t the freak squad,” he greeted us. “What did I do to deserve this?”
I jerked my thumb at Fagin. He was irritating, sure, but he had his uses. “You got yourself a big-ass explosion. I’m just tagging along.”
“Warehouse full of hazardous material?” Fagin said.
“Not the first time a firebug has picked that as a spot to test out a new incendiary device.”
“No,” said Egan. He rubbed a hand over his thinning hair, bald pate shiny with sweat. “No, this warehouse and the other two on the block were all owned by a fellow named Brad Morgan. This one,” he swept his arm to indicate the blazing warehouse, “was a community center for underprivileged kids or some crap.”
“The Brad Morgan?” I asked. “The news anchor?”
“Yeah, why? You know him?”
“Shit, Egan, I watch the news same as everyone else.” Everyone in Nocturne City could put a face to Brad Morgan. He was dark-eyed, hero-chinned, and dulcet-toned. Perfect gravitas, perfect hair.
“He’s big into charity work,” said Fagin. “Does the pledge drive every year for the community centers around the city. I see those ads fifty fucking times a night when I’m trying to get baseball scores.”
“Tell me about it,” Egan grumbled. “The wife gave two hundred dollars last year. ‘It’s a tax write-off, Charlie.’ ”
“Was anyone inside?” I cut through Egan’s screed.
He lifted one shoulder. “School just let out about twenty minutes ago. Most of the kids are back there behind the tape—can’t get a straight story out of ’em about any of their friends being inside.”
I looked in the direction of his chubby finger. A cluster of elementary school-age children were standing behind the tape, corralled by three patrol officers, several of the children’s anxious faces streaky with tears.
“Somebody should call Brad Morgan and get him down here,” Fagin said. “Chief, you want to take care of that? It’s your scene.”
Egan nodded and backed away, pulling a cell phone. Distracted from the freak squad, at least for the moment. “Smooth,” I told Fagin. Before he could answer me, one of the children began to holler, trying to rush the cordon. A uniform lunged and held him back, chubby legs kicking.
“Hey, hey.” I jogged over. “What’s the problem, kid? It’s dangerous in here.”
“Mister Nick!” the kid hiccupped. “Mister Nick is inside!”
Oh, Hex me. “And Mister Nick is?”
“He’s our counselor. You gotta get him out!”
The kid resumed kicking, and the officer holding him grunted, “That’s enough, kid!”
“Shut up,” I told the officer, because a sound had come to me over the blatting of ladder trucks and the clamor of the onlookers behind the cordon. It was high and thin like a mosquito in my ear. Screaming.
I would be the only one who could hear it Fagin looked at me askance as I skidded to a stop next to him and Egan. “There’s somebody in there.”
Egan’s face sagged. “Ah, fuck.”
“Get back in there and get him out!” I demanded.
“Much as I wish we could, there’s no way in hell my crew is going back in,” said Egan. “It’s so hot in there it would melt the skin off of your little bones, Lieutenant. And in big boxy old places like this, there’s always the chance of flashover. I’m not risking my men.”
I grabbed him by the shoulder of his scratchy fire-chief shirt. “Someone is alive in there, asshole!”
“And he’s as good as dead, has been since we got here!” Egan yelled back, his face going florid. “Now, I’m not turning one dead body into five!”
The screaming wavered, bent by the force of the heat rolling out from the burning warehouse.
I snarled at Egan, “Fine.” Turning, I made a run for the closest truck.
Fagin followed me, planting himself in my way when I grabbed an oxygen tank and mask, and a heavy protective jacket and fireproof gloves. “The Hex do you think you’re doing?”
I shrugged into the jacket and snapped the mask over my face. “Going in there.” The words echoed loud in my ears.
“Oh no, you’re not,” said Fagin. He put out his arms to stop me and I growled, fangs sprouting with no urging from me.
“I can hear him screaming, Will.”
He made no more moves to stop me as I ran toward the blaze. The heat closed over me like a diving bell, sweat breaking on all of my exposed skin and curling my hair like straw around my face.
I cut right, around the worst of the blaze bursting through the shattered windows at the front of the warehouse, following the thin, pitiful sound of Nick’s voice.
There was an alley between the warehouse and the one next door, filled to my ankles with dirty brown water from the firefighters’ hoses. I sloshed through as ash fell around me like nuclear snow, catching in my hair and eyelashes and sticking to my cheeks.
The air here was thick and visible, and it stung my eyes, causing tears to sprout and mingle with the sweat. I could smell the overwhelming stench of a thousand burning things, even through the cool scentless oxygen flowing up my nostrils from the tank.
I turned the corner and saw a fire escape, smoke roiling out of the window at the top. But no flames, and no heat.
The screams were much closer now.
I took the steps up the fire escape two at a time, the warm metal shuddering under my weight. The window at the top was shattered, jagged glass mouths snapping at me.
My foot broke away the mullions on the tall old-fashioned casement, and I stepped into the smoke, yelling, “Nick! Where are you?”
“Help me!” he screamed. “I’m in the office!”
Great That could be anywhere.
I couldn’t breathe, even with the mask, and I dropped down to a crouch, where the air was marginally clearer. I still couldn’t see more than an arm sp
an in front of my face, and punctuated the fact by running into a soot-covered desk.
“Fuck.” That smarted.
“Where are you?” Nick screeched. “I can’t get out!”
“I’m coming!” I hollered, getting down on my hands and knees and feeling along the wall until I got to a door. It wasn’t any hotter than the rest of the wall, so I opened it.
The corridor in front of me was like the nightmares I had about the night I got the bite. Smoke curled down from the ceiling, long white fingers exploring the contours of my body. Far away, orange flames leapt and the entire corridor was stifling and dreamlike, my vision blurring.
Peripherally, in my animal brain, I realized it was from a lack of oxygen, and took a deep hit off the mask.
I crawled again, past smoldering doors and overturned pieces of furniture, toward the orange haze at the end of my vision. I could feel the bone-melting heat of the fire, and the sound of it, the snapping roar, began to overtake the sound of my own rushing blood in my ears.
“Nick!” I bellowed.
“In here!” he shouted. “The door’s stuck!” I batted aside the smoke and saw a door in front of me. I also saw the problem—the door was wreathed in flames and a large piece of burning timber had fallen across, barring it shut.
“Shit,” I muttered. “Nick!”
“Yeah?”
“You’re trapped by debris … I’m going to try and move it, but do not open the door. You understand me?” I knew enough from the arson investigation class we all took at the academy to know that a bubble of oxygen suddenly exposed to an inferno would equal bad news for everyone.
“Why not?” His voice notched up into hysteria. “I want out of here!”
“Me, too, dude, but that’s not going to happen unless you stay calm and do as I say.” The fire spit hot air and sparks at me as it ate through the electrical wiring in the wall, the hissing and the smell of burnt elements making me gag.
The roof beam that had fallen in was still burning, white and ashy and far too hot to touch.
I slipped my arms from the fire-retardant jacket, keeping it around me like a cape, and stripped off my suit coat with a sigh, leaving me in a white tuxedo blouse soaked with sweat. Farewell, wardrobe.
Exerting my were strength, I ripped the Valentino down the back seam, using the two halves to pad my hands underneath the gloves. I tugged on the beam, my shoulder screaming at me.
I felt the flames licking at my exposed skin, above the neck of my protective gear, as the beam shifted with a groan. It fell away, smashing through the rough wood beneath and allowing a gout of flame from the floors below.
“Is it shifted?” Nick’s voice was shrouded in wet hacking coughs.
“Yeah,” I panted. How the Hex we were going to get out of here was another question. The flames had eaten away the walls around me, and they were spreading fast. Could we get back to the fire escape in time?
“I’m coming out!” Nick said.
“No,” I growled. “Don’t open the—”
I caught just a flash of Nick’s face as the cheap particleboard door swung back. Young, tan, floppy black hair left over from college, terror and soot trailing down his hawkish features.
Then, with a great slap of air, the fire was sucked inward, blossoming all across the ceiling and down the wall and over the assemble-it-yourself Target furniture that made up the office.
Bright paintings of families and outer space and dinosaurs curled up and disintegrated under the flames.
Whump. I was on the ground, the flashover blowing a furnace into my face, and the screaming had started again.
Nick writhed on his stomach, flames coursing along his back and neck and even in his hair, which popped as it burned away.
“Shit,” I panted. “Shit, shit, shit.”
I shucked my protective coat and threw it over Nick, tamping some flames out but not all of them. “It hurts,” he sobbed. “Oh, Jesus, it hurts …”
“I know,” I said. “But right now we got bigger problems.” Like the orange corona that wreathed the hallway, a gauntlet made of heat between us and the way out.
“Can you stand up?” I asked Nick. He just sobbed, the scent of overcooked meat in the air, even with the smoke. Okay, that was a resounding No.
I grabbed Nick by the belt and his collar and started to drag him, feeling heat on my own back. Bad enough with the fire gear—now I felt as if my sweat had started to sizzle, like my back was a frying pan. The metal snap on my bra dug into me like a branding iron.
Nick was deadweight, and the beast in me commanded me to leave him, abandon him as the weakest of the pack, and run before I burned.
I ordered my monster to be silent, and put my back into dragging Nick down the hallway. There was a groan from above and I snapped my head up, eyes full of ash, to see the roof beams at the crux of the warehouse tremble as the fire roiled over them, not hot and urgent and consuming, but nearly gentle, like fingers in a caress.
“You so owe me,” I informed Nick. Would we make it before the roof came down on us?
I hoped so. Prayed a little, as I dragged Nick and myself through the fire, toward the broken window, the smoke replaced now by pure shimmering heat.
Nick wrapped his fingers around my wrist. “Don’t leave me,” he wheezed.
“I’m not,” I managed. The heat was stealing air from me, moisture. Soon I’d pass out, and cause some poor morgue newbie to vomit when he showed up to collect my charbroiled corpse.
The roof beams groaned again, and a piece of half-melted sheet metal crashed to the floor in front of us.
“That’s it,” I said to Nick. “We gotta run for it.” Not that he could respond to me. I wasn’t even sure if he was breathing, but that I was going to find out outside, with paramedics, not here, in this version of my own private hell.
I gave one last heave, and reached the window with Nick’s body. I ducked through the glass, putting one foot on the fire escape. It showed me the error of my ways by giving a screech and giving way from the brick, clattering into the alley below.
Well. Wasn’t that just fan-fucking-tastic.
Nick moaned feebly and I looked at the ground twenty feet below. “You so better live through this,” I told Nick, and then wrapped my arms around him in a lifesaving hold. I slid my butt across the sill and leaned out, into open space, feeling the cool air sting my skin like plunging a burn into ice water.
I let gravity take me, me and Nick’s deadweight, downward to meet the earth.
We fell split-second quick, and the ground rushed up at me like a hammer. I felt two ribs crack on impact, something separate in my shoulder, my neck whipsawing like a carnival ride. Nick’s body flopped off of me like I was a trampoline, landing in the water. I gasped, the pain taking any words I may have had and smashing them. But it was all right. I’d heal. Nick wouldn’t have been so lucky.
“Luna?” Fagin’s voice cut through my long, blurry tunnel, staring straight up at the smoke-clouded sky. “Oh, jeez,” he breathed. “Hey! Get the medics back here!”
Fagin fell to his knees beside me. “Luna, can you hear me?”
I coughed and then grimaced, because every breath stabs you anew when ribs are broken. It hurt so bad I couldn’t see straight, could just see Fagin’s narrow face as he checked my pulse and my pupils and then grabbed my hand between his two bony palms. I Pathed a spark from him, barely a flicker, but it spread warmth in my gut and straightened me out enough to rasp a few words. “I’m fine. Check Nick.”
Fagin withdrew and after a moment floated back into my line of sight. “Doesn’t look good, doll. I’m gonna give him CPR. You don’t move. That was one hell of a hit.”
Paramedics came running, got both Nick and me onto backboards, carried us clear of the fire with the staccato code they use amongst themselves to keep from their charges how bad things might really be. Someone jabbed me with a fat syringe full of painkiller, and I stopped feeling much of anything.
I heard a f
ew snatches of radio talk as they bundled Nick into an ambulance, me beside him. “Smoke inhalation … third-degree burns … cardiac arrest …”
Fagin hopped the tailgate of the ambulance just before the doors slammed. “I’m riding with her,” he told the paramedic when she opened her mouth to object.
She shrugged at him, and, as we pulled away, leaned over me to start an IV. “Lights-out, Officer.”
“I’m a lieutenant,” I slurred, but the morphine took hold, and I don’t remember anything else between the blackout in the ambulance and the rude awakening in a hospital bed.
Eight
The pain was ten times worse when I woke up. Weres heal fast, but we also shake off painkillers like end-stage junkies. “Fuck me,” I groaned, throwing a hand over my eyes to block the fluorescent lights.
“How you feeling, slugger?” Fagin said. He was sitting in the chair next to my bed, reading a magazine.
“Like hammered crap,” I said.
“Well, you’ll be gratified to know nothing is broken except the ribs. Doc says you can go home once you’re walking again.”
I felt around for my clothes, or what was left of them, folded neatly at the foot of my bed. I was dressed up in one of those oh-so-charming paper gowns with no ties in the back.
“It’s a good look on you,” Fagin said, nodding to my state of undress.
“Get out and let me change,” I snarled.
He stood up, long and lazy. “You in that big of a hurry to go home? Stick around. I hear the pudding is to die for.”
“I’m not going home,” I said. “I’m going back to work.”
Fagin tilted his head. “After what you just did? They’re gonna put you on psych leave, doll.”
“Trust me, the department has seen worse,” I said. “And in case you missed it, someone is setting things on fire in my city, and now people are being hurt.”
“No doubt,” said Fagin. “But don’t you think you should, I don’t know, rest for twenty-four hours?”
“In twenty-four hours I’ll look like none of this ever happened,” I said, throwing back my blankets and standing gingerly. Ice raced up and down my spine and neck.
Witch Craft Page 6
