Diamond Fire (Hidden Legacy, #3.5)(22)

Leon’s eyebrows crept up.

“Are you sure?” Rivera asked.

I wasn’t sure, but sooner or later I had to try it. It had to work. My sister’s life depended on it.

“Yes. It’s plausible that we would talk to all of the employees after the breakin.”

“If Catalina says she can do it, she can do it,” Leon said.

“Okay,” Rivera said.

I turned to Valentina. “Please call in your employees. Let them know that there has been a burglary and they will be interviewed. Meanwhile, I need you to replace all of the fondant with an identical product. If Jeremy is in on it, he will not taste the fondant, because he knows it’s lethal, so he’ll have no way of knowing it was switched.”

“Ahem,” Runa said. “Or you could let me purify the fondant for you, no need to replace or dispose of anything.”

“But will it be safe?” Valentina asked.

The smile vanished from Runa’s face. Suddenly her expression turned cold and harsh. “Let me introduce myself again. Runa Etterson of House Etterson, Prime Venenata. I have walked into a house filled with sarin and after I was done, the family hiding upstairs in the safe room, walked out and made coffee for me in their kitchen. Mad Rogan trusts my House with the safety of the people who are most precious to him. If I say the fondant is safe to use, it’s safe to use. Stand back please.”

Runa pulled out chalk and began drawing an arcane circle on the floor.





Chapter 6




I sat in the small office on the other side of the building. Normally this room was used to meet with clients and go over menus and cake books. Today there would be questions about cakes, but they would have a different flavor.

Rivera took his job as chief of security very seriously. He and two of his guys wouldn’t budge from their position behind me. Runa perched on the chair, flipping through a photo album filled with beautiful cakes, on the off chance Jeremy tried to poison me.

Leon leaned on the table next to me. “Are you okay?” he asked quietly.

“Yeah.” I would have to use my magic with finesse. The few times I’d actively used it required power. Finesse was entirely different.

When I was born, the nurse who helped deliver me picked me up out of the crib by my mother’s side and ran. They caught her before she made it off the floor, and when they took me away from her, she screamed and cried. In twenty years of nursing, she had never done anything like that. That woman lost her career because I was born with the kind of magic that made people love me.

She was the first but not the last. Over the years, there had been others. A dentist who examined my teeth tried to hide me in his office and then claimed that I ran away. I was two years old. The preschool teacher loaded me into her car and tried to run my mother over when she attempted to stop her. When we would go shopping, strangers would follow me as I rode in the cart and employees would try to give me things for free.

Other babies and toddlers were encouraged to be cute. I was taught to never draw attention to myself, not to smile at strangers, and not to make friends. If I liked another child, they would abandon everything to play with me. But soon playing wouldn’t be enough. They would follow me, mesmerized, and then they would want a piece of me, a piece of my dress, a lock of my hair, some skin, maybe a finger. Once it started, I didn’t know how to stop it. Only my family and my primary doctor were immune.

I was homeschooled until high school, when it became clear that I could control my power well enough to keep it from leaking. I had practiced controlling my magic since the moment I understood that I ruined lives. My talent was extremely rare, but I studied similar magics, I practiced arcane circles, and I read all about magic theory, but theory, by definition, wasn’t practice.

I had experimented before on my sisters, because they were immune, and I had no way of knowing if anything I learned would actually work. Rivera shouldn’t have bothered with the lecture. I needed him and his guys here. He knew what I could do. If I failed to control my power and besotted Jeremy snapped, they would pull him off me.

The door swung open and Jeremy Wagner walked in. Just like in his pictures, which I had reviewed when we vetted him, Jeremy was a tall, dark-haired Caucasian man in his midtwenties. He had one of those generic faces, neither ugly nor handsome, but overall pleasant. There was something soft and sheepish about his demeanor. He seemed like a timid man who knew he was timid and decided to use it to his advantage.

He should have been nervous, concerned at the very least, possibly defensive. Most people would have their guard up. Instead he looked slightly sleepy. It might have been because he’d spent the night breaking into the bakery, but his pictures confirmed that he always looked that way.

“Please sit down,” I said.

“Hi.” He sat and gave me a smile. Even the way he smiled at me reinforced the sheepishness, as if he were trying to say, “Boy, I’m a mess, but aren’t I cute?”

“You are here because someone broke into the shop last night.”

“Oh yeah? Did they take anything?”

When my magic was evaluated by a panel of Primes, the Keeper of Records, who registered the members of every House in Houston, had to come up with a name for my brand of power. He called me Siren. Most people thought of sirens as mermaids, but in the original myths, they had feathers and wings. I had wings too. Mesmerizing, beautiful wings that glittered with magic. Nobody ever saw them, except me, but when I opened them, people focused on me and forgot about everything else.