Burn for Me

“I do,” Mad Rogan said. “I must deliver you to your loving mother’s arms, or she might shoot me.”

She might shoot both of us anyway. It was almost eight o’clock. It took Mad Rogan’s people over an hour to pull us out, and the police detained us for questioning for another hour. We lied. Waiting to be cut out had given us a long time to get our story straight. Neither Mad Rogan nor I was associated with Adam Pierce in any way, so we both claimed to be in the building on business. The explosion had nearly obliterated the bodies, and when I asked Mad Rogan about the fact that bullets from a gun registered to me were in the bodies and in the wreck of the lobby, he told me he would take care of it. So I didn’t mention shooting anyone, he didn’t mention slapping anyone with the door, and I learned one crucial difference between a normal person like me and a Prime. When cops called Mad Rogan “sir,” they meant it. He told them what happened and nobody doubted it. I had never been treated with deference by the police before. Today I was, simply because he was there. I wasn’t sure what to think about that.

Mad Rogan’s people had locked the jeweled ornament in a small metal case and taken it to his vault. I hadn’t fought him on it. If Adam and whoever was working with him decided they wanted it back, Mad Rogan’s private army was much better equipped to fight them off. I’d taken several pictures of it and emailed them to Bern.

The door swung open. I braced myself.

I had examined my reflection in the Range Rover’s side mirror, and I knew exactly what I looked like. The shallow knife scratch at my hairline had bled all over my face. The blood smears had combined with rock dust, black, oily soot from the explosion, and fire-retardant foam, which had dripped all over me when Mad Rogan’s people had finally pulled us out of the hole. My hair had turned into a frizzy mess, and the foam cemented it together. To top it all off, the lasagna on my pants had ripened and now emitted an odor usually emanating from day-old roadkill. I was bloody, filthy, and soot-stained, and Mad Rogan didn’t look any better.

My mother stared at me, then at Mad Rogan, then at me again.

I raised my hand. “Hi, Mom.”

“Inside,” my mother ordered. “You too.”

“He doesn’t need to come inside,” I said. I didn’t want Mad Rogan anywhere near my family.

“He’s covered in blood. At the very least, he can wash it off.”

“I’m sure he has a very nice shower at his house,” I said.

“Actually, I would be very grateful for a chance to clean up.” Mad Rogan touched his forehead. His fingers came away bloody and stained with soot. Suddenly he looked young and disarming, like one of my cousins when they were in trouble. “And a bite of food if you could spare some.” If he laid it on any thicker, he’d be ready to audition for Oliver. My mother couldn’t possibly buy this.

“You don’t even have any clean clothes.” I was grasping at straws.

“I do,” Mad Rogan said. “I always carry a change of clothes in my car.”

“Inside,” Mother said.

I knew that tone. It meant the argument was over.

I walked in. Mad Rogan got a duffel out of the Range Rover and followed me. Mother closed the door behind us. I led him through the office into the hallway. He surveyed the warehouse from left to right, starting with the media room and the kitchen; the girls’ bedrooms built on top of each other, Catalina’s painted pure white on the outside, Arabella’s charcoal and covered with her attempts at graffiti, mostly involving her name; Grandmother’s rooms, the guest suite; my bedroom and bathroom above the storage room in the corner, Mother’s suite, the boys’ rooms; and finally, the Hut of Evil. Mad Rogan’s eyes widened.

“If you harm anybody in my family, I swear I will murder you,” I told him.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

I led him to the guest suite.

It took three shampoos and a lot of scrubbing, but when I left my room, I was clean. The air smelled of bacon and pancakes. Suddenly I realized I was starving.

I walked into the kitchen and found Mad Rogan in it. He sat at the table, dressed in a blue Henley shirt and jeans, sipping coffee out of a mug with a little grey kitten on it. His dark hair was combed back from his face. His jaw was once again clean shaven. I am a polite, nonthreatening kind of dragon with excellent manners. Horns are hidden, tail is tucked away, fangs covered. I would never do anything cruel, like stab a man with a knife about ten times to get him to answer a question.

Somehow this new, on-his-best-behavior version was scarier than witnessing him calmly breaking a man with his bare hands. After what we’d been through, I would’ve expected him to hole up somewhere dark, eating raw meat, chain-smoking, guzzling some sort of ridiculously tough drink, like whiskey or kerosene or something, and thinking grim thoughts about life and death. But no, here he was, charming and untroubled, sipping coffee.

Mad Rogan saw me and smiled.

And my mind went right into the gutter.

How was it that he was sitting in my kitchen?

My mother turned away from the stove and held out a plate of pancakes. I took it from her and set it on the table next to a platter of bacon. Mad Rogan pushed the second mug of coffee toward me. It had an orange kitten on it.

Grandma Frida strode into the kitchen, followed by Lina and Arabella. “I smell bacon! Penelope, did you know there is a handsome man in our kitchen?”

Oh Lord, here we go.

My mother made some sort of noise halfway between a cough and a grunt.

“Well,” Grandma Frida said, “introduce us, somebody.”

“Grandma, Mad Rogan. Mad Rogan, Grandma,” I squeezed out.

Arabella’s eyes got really big. She grabbed her phone and started texting. “Leon’s going to pee himself.”

“Quit it,” Lina growled and sat in the chair next to me. Grandma took a chair next to Rogan.

“How are you feeling?” he asked her.

“Fine, thank you.” She gave him a big smile.

I passed a plate to Rogan and sat across from him.

Leon ran into the kitchen and stopped, his gaze fixed on Mad Rogan. Bern bumped into him, nudging him into the room. “If you’re not getting bacon, get out of the way.”

Arabella grabbed three pieces of bacon from the plate. “Mine!”

“Bacon hog,” Lina told her.

“Settle down, there is more bacon.” Mom pulled another broiling pan full of bacon out of the oven. I grabbed a pancake, wrapped bacon in it, and bit. It was fluffy and delicious, and for no apparent reason it made me want to cry.