Sapphire Flames

Never again. Runa Etterson wasn’t coming with me to interrogate any more leads. I had minutes, maybe seconds, to squeeze answers out of him.

I ran.

Conway glanced over his shoulder and sped up. He was nearly to the corner. I had to get to him before her poison finished him off.

He stumbled, clutched at the wall, and pulled himself up. I was almost to him.

A tall, lean man in an expensive black suit rounded the corner and stalked toward us. He moved with grace, not like a dancer but like a swordsman, swift and supple, and carried himself with complete assurance as if he owned the whole building and his mere presence was an honor to behold. His longish brown hair had fallen over one side of his face.

Conway lunged to the left, trying to avoid him.

The man’s hand snapped out. He caught the AME’s shoulder, steadying him, pulled a long, narrow dagger out of his jacket, and stabbed Silas Conway in the heart.

It was a breathtaking strike. Smooth, fast, flawless. My magic sparked, as if acknowledging the beauty of it. He didn’t even aim. He did it all in a single offhanded motion, as if he had taken his car keys out of his pocket and tossed them to a friend. This wasn’t expertise, this was mastery, born of pure muscle memory and superior reflexes.

The man raised his head. Alessandro Sagredo looked at me over Conway’s shoulder, smiled, and smoothly withdrew his knife from the AME’s chest.

My brain short-circuited. I tried to stop, but I was sprinting on a polished concrete floor, and the laws of physics conspired against me. I slid. The floor squeaked under my boots, and I skidded past the two men at full speed. Alessandro tilted his head and watched me slowly come to a stop.

How was this possible? Alessandro Sagredo was a playboy. He took pictures in the Caribbean with his shirt off. He surfed in Fiji and shopped in London. He didn’t stab random government workers in the heart with surgical precision.

Alessandro was looking at me. Right at me. Like I was the only thing in the world. A hot, predatory fire played in his amber eyes. He looked at me like I was a delicious steak and he was a hungry wolf.

Say something smart, say something smart . . . “Hey!” Oh my God.

Without saying a word, Alessandro stepped over Conway’s body and walked toward me. I should have turned around and run the other way, or at least raised my knife. Instead, I just stood there, like a complete idiot.

Alessandro reached over and offered me his bent arm. I rested my fingers on his forearm. The muscle under the suit’s fabric felt like steel. Alessandro moved, and we strolled around the corner.

I was hallucinating. I had to be.

“I . . .”

“Shh,” he said in a slightly accented voice. “Just keep walking. Building security will be here soon, and we need to not be here.”

He had killed Conway. It didn’t bother him. It didn’t disturb him any more than swatting a fly. Alessandro had stabbed a human being in the heart before. Many, many, many times before.

I’d made a serious error in judgment.

“I like your knife,” he said. “You might want to put it away though, before someone gets excited.”

I slid the blade back into its sheath in my coat. Wait. He’d shushed me. Like I was five. He told me to put my knife away and I did. And now I was letting him walk me away.

What the hell am I doing?

“Why are we walking?”

He glanced at me, his tawny eyes amused. “Because I’ve just knifed someone. Security will want to ask me a lot of boring questions. I hate boring questions. And there will be paperwork. I hate that too.”

Oh yeah, well, in that case. “You killed Conway.”

“Yes, I did.”

I stopped. He stopped too and looked at me.

“Alessandro, what are you doing here?”

“Trying to get you to walk faster?”

My brain finally regained the ability to form complete sentences. “Why did you kill Conway? He was a lead in my investigation and now he’s dead.”

“He was a very bad man. You were chasing him with a knife.”

“I needed to ask him some questions.”

He smiled like a wolf baring its fangs in a dark forest. “Were you going to stab him if he didn’t answer?”

“I don’t need to stab people to get answers.”

He sighed. “Collect your friend and go home, Catalina. There are no answers for you here.”

What?

Runa rounded the corner at full speed, saw us, and froze.

“I’m so sorry,” Alessandro said. “I have to leave now. Go home, stay safe, and forget all about this.”

Ahead the elevator chimed.

“I’ll see you around.” Alessandro raised his hand. Somehow there was a gun in it. I didn’t see him draw one. The gun barked, spitting bullets, the window to our right shattered, and Alessandro jumped out of it.

The elevator doors slid open, and guards in grey uniforms poured out, guns drawn.

“Put your hands up!” the leading guard roared.

I put my hands on my head and let them handcuff me.

Ten minutes after the building security apprehended me, the Houston PD House Response Unit arrived at the scene in a blaze of glory. They released Fullerton, who was clearly a neutral third party, detained Runa and me, and asked us questions for forty-five minutes. The way they concentrated on the description of the mysterious male who stabbed Conway made me think Alessandro had tampered with the hallway cameras. After the third round of the same questions, I dug my heels in, gave them the name of our attorney, and pointed out that my client was traumatized by having her family reanimated and that she had enemies powerful enough to corrupt an AME and that I could see at least three spots from which one could line up a long-range shot and snipe her. After that I answered every question with “Are we free to go?” They gave up and released us. I grabbed Runa and all but shoved her into the elevator.

The moment the elevator doors closed, Runa spun toward me. “You lied to me!”

“Not here,” I warned her. “When we get out of the elevator, walk next to me. Stop when I stop and if I tell you to run, run.”

Runa’s face hardened. “You think they’ll try to kill me.”

“Yes.”

“I hope they try.”

Right. Runa’s emotions had clubbed her rational thinking over the head, dumped its body on the side of the road, and took my friend for a joy ride. Just what we needed.

Client. Not friend; client. Friends were for other people. You wanted your friends to like you, and when I wanted someone to like me, the chances of my magic leaking out and enthralling them was much higher. I’d spent twenty-one years avoiding making friends. It was irresponsible to start now.

I did like Runa. I liked her when I first met her, and I wished I could be more like her, funny and charming and comfortable in her skin. Seeing her now broke my heart. I wanted to fix all the shitty things for her, and I had to watch myself very carefully. Besides, she didn’t need a friend right now; she needed a professional investigator.

The elevator opened. I took a second to scan the lobby. No visible threats. I walked out and headed for the door, my head held high. Next to me Runa marched like she was daring someone to block her way.

We exited the building, and I accelerated, almost breaking into a jog. The space between my shoulder blades itched, as if someone was aiming at me through a rifle scope.

Get to the car, get to the car . . .

I popped the locks, and we jumped into the Element. I started the engine, reversed out of the parking spot, and sped out onto the street.

“Alessandro was in that building. I saw him, Catalina, with my eyes.”

“I had no idea he would be there.” I concentrated on driving. The car shot down the road. Nobody followed us.

“What was he doing there?”

“Killing our suspect.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Call Bern.”

The sound of my phone dialing came from the car’s speakers and Bern picked up. “Yes.”

“You were right.” I took a turn a little too fast and accelerated up the access road, shifting to the left to enter the highway ramp. “It’s House warfare. We’re coming back to the warehouse. Lock us down.”

“On it,” Bern said. “Are you coming in hot?”

“Not that I can see.” I merged into the traffic.

“Is my brother awake?” Runa asked.

“No,” Bern said. “I’ll call if there is any change.”

“I need everything you can dig up on AME Silas Conway. In particular, sudden large payments to his accounts in the last month or so and where they came from.”

“What did he do?”

“He tried to prevent us from viewing the bodies, and when the Scroll rep showed up, he reanimated the corpses of Runa’s mother and sister and tried to kill us with them. The cops are digging into Conway’s past as we speak.”

“Are you okay?” my cousin asked.

“Yes. Fullerton got the samples, but Conway died before I could question him.”

“What happened?”

“Alessandro Sagredo.”

The phone fell silent.

“I’m sorry, say again?”

“Alessandro Sagredo happened. He showed up in the Harris County IFS and stabbed my suspect in the heart. He did it as if he had a lot of practice. Then he told me to collect my friend, go home, and not to worry my pretty little head about it.”