Burn for Me (Hidden Legacy #1)(101)

“Ms. Baylor would like to renegotiate her contract.”

Augustine pivoted to me. “Now?”

“Now,” Rogan said. “She would like one word added to provision seven. It should read MII may NOT compel Baylor Investigative Agency to assist, etc.”

“Why would I do this? This is against my best interest.” Augustine frowned. “What’s going on here?”

“You will do this because the wind is blowing south,” Mad Rogan said. “No matter where in downtown Adam starts his party, this building will be hit by his fire, and you know it. Your House will lose millions. One word, Augustine. Consider the stakes.”

Augustine locked his jaw.

“Don’t be petty,” Mad Rogan said.

“Fine.” Augustine swiped a tablet from the nearest desk. His long fingers danced on it. He showed me the tablet. It read, “Addendum One,” listed the paragraph, and showed the correction. Augustine pressed his thumb to the screen, signed it, and held the tablet out. “Fingerprint.”

I added mine to his. The screen flashed.

“Done,” Augustine said.

“You’re on,” Mad Rogan told me.

I took a deep breath. Augustine watched me like a hawk.

Mad Rogan walked me to the circle. “Take your shoes off,” he murmured.

I took off my tennis shoes and slid the socks off. He held my hand and helped me step into the circle.

“Relax,” Mad Rogan said. “Let yourself interact with it.”

I stood in the circle. It felt strange, as if I’d somehow been balancing on the surface of elastic liquid. I had the odd feeling that if I jumped, it would bounce me up like a trampoline. Trouble was, I had no idea how to jump.

Mr. Emmens nodded to me. “Before we get started, I’ve been warned that answering a direct question about the location of the object may kill me. I want to tell you where it is, but if you force me to disclose the exact location, I will die before I can help you and you will never find it in time. I don’t mind giving up my life for the city. It is the duty of my family. I ask you only not to waste my life. I don’t want to die answering the wrong question.”

“I understand.” My magic filled the circle like a dense vapor. The surface of the “liquid” was placid under me. Somehow the two had to interact.

“We’re wasting time,” Augustine said.

“Do you feel the circle?” Mad Rogan asked, walking behind me.

“Yes.”

Slowly, he circled the chalk line and stopped on the left of me. “Do you feel your magic filling it?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what Pierce plans to do?”

“He wants to burn the city down.” Where was he going with this?

“The artifact made Emmens into a Prime.” Mad Rogan’s voice was cold. “It will make Adam Pierce a god of fire. He can melt steel now. It melts at 2,750 degrees Fahrenheit. The artifact will double that. A house fire never burns higher than 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit. Adam Pierce will burn at five times that, maybe hotter. At 2,192 degrees, concrete will lose its structural integrity and turn into calcium oxide, a white powder. At 2,750 degrees, stainless steel within the buildings will melt. The downtown will be a nightmare of molten metal, crumbling concrete, flames, and noxious, poisonous gasses. It will become hell on earth. Thousands of people will die.”

I swallowed. Anxiety rose inside me.

“Pierce just crossed Dreyfus Street,” one of the people at the terminal announced. “The cameras have gone out. We lost him again.”

He was staying off the main roads to avoid Lenora’s roadblocks. Even with traffic, it would take him only twenty minutes to get downtown.

“The problem with ‘thousands’ of people,” Mad Rogan said, “is that it’s not personal.”

He took Augustine’s tablet and tapped it. The big flat-screen on the wall flared into life. A silver van was parked in front of an elaborate, ultramodern building—2 Houston Center, corner of MacKinnley and Fanin streets. It was a really distinctive building, all black glass, right in the middle of downtown.

Mad Rogan handed the tablet back to Augustine and raised his phone. “Bernard?”

“Yes?” my cousin’s voice answered through the phone.

“I need you to step out of the car and face the building.”

No. My body went ice cold.

The passenger door of the van opened. Bern exited the van and turned to the building. The camera zoomed up on his face.

Everything else disappeared. All I saw were Bern’s serious blue eyes, wide open on the screen.

Adam was less than twenty minutes away. Bern would die. And Mad Rogan knew it. He knew it, and he’d parked him there.

I heard my own voice. “Get out of there. Get out of there!”

“He can’t hear you.” Mad Rogan put away the phone.

“You bastard!”

My magic punched into the circle, smashing it. A cloud of chalk dust shot up from the circle’s boundary. Augustine dropped his tablet. The circle bounced back, and power flooded me.

“There it is,” Mad Rogan murmured. “It’s not fear or anger. It’s the protective impulse.”

“He’s nineteen years old!” My magic raged and my voice matched it.