Burn for Me (Hidden Legacy #1)(52)

“Work first.”

“Fuck!” Bug spun on his foot. “What?”

“Adam Pierce. Find him.”

He held up a finger. “To take the edge off. One. One!”

I passed the vial to Mad Rogan, keeping the Taser on Bug. He’d made a lunge at me before. “Please give him one pill.”

Mad Rogan opened the jar. A pill rose in the air. Wow. The man’s control was crazy.

The pill floated to Bug. He snatched it out of the air, yanked a knife from the sheath on his belt, put the pill on the table, and sliced a third off. His fingers trembled. He swiped the smaller section of the pill off the desk and slid it in his mouth. Bug froze, standing on his toes, his hands straight down, as if he’d been about to take flight. The shaking stopped. He became completely and utterly still.

Mad Rogan glanced at me.

“Equzol,” I told him.

Equzol was a military drug designed to level you out. If you were sleepy, it would keep you awake; if you were hyper, it would calm you down. When you took it, the world became clear. You saw everything, were aware of everything, reacted fast, but nothing freaked you out. It was issued to snipers and convoy drivers. They would take it to keep from overcorrecting or giving in to fatigue, and once it wore off, they’d sleep for twenty hours straight. It was a classified substance, but my mother still had connections.

Bug opened his eyes. The strange, jittery hysteria was still there, but it receded, curling down for a rest deep inside him.

“They’re quiet,” he said softly and smiled.

I nodded at the jar. “Adam Pierce.”

Bug slid into his seat and pulled up the sleeves of his dark, grimy, long-sleeved shirt. Dozens of tiny dots marked his forearms, each a tiny individual tattoo blending together into an arcane design. His hands flew over half a dozen keyboards as if he’d been a virtuoso pianist. Tranquil sounds of trance music filled the space. The screens scrolled too fast to follow, the images flickering. He was tapping into the security cameras on the streets. I’d seen him do it before, and he was expert at it.

Mad Rogan’s face had hardened into a cold, determined expression. His eyes turned merciless.

“What is it?” I asked quietly.

“He’s a swarmer,” he ground through his teeth.

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“How long has he been one?”

“Yes.”

“Three years. He was bound to a swarm two years into his enlistment, and he’s been out of the Air Force for one.”

Mad Rogan stared at Bug. “He should be dead. Their life expectancy after the binding is eighteen months.”

“Bug is special.”

Swarmers were surveillance specialists. They were bound by magic to what they themselves described as swarms. Swarms had no physical manifestation. They lived somehow inside the swarmer’s psyche, letting him or her split his attention over hundreds of independent tasks, like a river splitting into narrow streams. Swarmers processed information at a superhuman speed. Most of them had the binding done in the military, and most of them didn’t live two years past that. Those who volunteered for the procedure were either terminally ill or tempted by a huge bonus payable to their families. Bug somehow survived. It might have been his deprivation chamber, or maybe he was just better suited for it than most, but he lived, got out of Air Force, and hid here, away from everyone.

Mad Rogan locked his teeth. It made his jaw look even more square.

“Does it bother you?” I asked.

“It bothers me that they do this to soldiers, squeeze everything they can out of them, and then discard them like garbage. People know this goes on and nobody gives a shit. Acceptable losses.” He said the word like it burned his mouth.

So some part of the dragon was human after all.

My cell phone beeped. Unlisted number. Again. I answered it.

“Yes?”

“Hello, Snow,” Adam Pierce purred into my ear.

I fought an urge to scream into the phone. “Hi, Adam.” I put him on speaker. “Did you decide to turn yourself in?”

Mad Rogan went from icy anger to predatory alertness in a blink.

“Depends. Are we still in lust? I mean in love. Funny how I keep making that mistake.”

“Depends,” I said. “Do you want to meet so we can talk about it?”

“Not right now,” Adam said. “I’m busy tonight. Maybe later.”

“Found him,” Bug pressed a key on the keyboard.

The screen flickered and showed the same image from different angles. Adam Pierce stood on the corner of a busy street, holding a phone to his ear. Faded jeans hugged his ass and long legs. He wore his trademark black leather jacket and black boots. A tall building ten floors high rose in front of him, its dusky, smoke-colored glass crossed by stripes of bright yellow. To the left, another building, a tall, narrow tower, offered silvery windows to the rays of the evening sun.

“Were you looking for me?” Adam asked. “So sweet.”

“You sure you don’t want to meet?”

“Yeah. Turn the TV on. I’ve got something to show you.”

The phone went dead. On the screen Adam tossed a cell phone onto the street, shrugged off his jacket, revealing bare, muscled back, and let the jacket fall to the ground. His face was plastered over every local news broadcast at least once a day and here he was, in broad daylight, taking his clothes off in public. Somebody would recognize him and call the cops for sure. Damn it.