White Hot

“How long have you worked for Rogan?” Cornelius asked.

The wall, apparently, was paper thin, because he hadn’t raised his voice, but I heard him clearly.

“A long time,” Melosa said. “You might say I’m one of the original employees he hired after separating from the military.”

“In your experience, does he often become infatuated?”

Where was he going with that?

Melosa cleared her throat. “I’m not at liberty to discuss my employer’s personal life. And even if I was, I wouldn’t. The major has earned my loyalty. I would take a bullet with his name on it. He is entitled to his privacy and I’ll safeguard it, so I suggest you choose a different line of questioning.”

Well, she’d shut him down fast.

Ferika returned, accompanied by a younger woman carrying a black dress. “Put this on.”

I stripped and slid into it as she watched. It was surprisingly heavy. Ferika’s helper zipped the back, held out her hand, and helped me step back onto the platform. I looked into the mirror and held still.

The silhouette was timeless: two thin straps supporting a sweetheart cleavage that left my neck and most of my chest bare, close fitted waist, and a skirt gracefully falling into a train, not long enough to become cumbersome and allowing me to move fast if I had to. The fabric of the dress, black silk tulle, would’ve been completely sheer if it wasn’t for the thousands of black sequins embroidered into it. The complicated pattern curved around and over my breasts, lined my ribs and hugged my hips, finally fracturing into individual whorls just below mid-thigh. They slid down the sheer tulle skirt like tongues of black flame, melting into nothing near the hem. The dress didn’t look embroidered; it looked chiseled out of obsidian, like some fantasy bodice of a Valkyrie. It looked like armor.

“How much is it?”

“Fifteen thousand.”

“I can’t afford it.”

“I know,” Ferika said. “You can rent it for one night for ten percent of the cost. The shoes and clutch will be complimentary.”

Fifteen hundred dollars for one night and I wouldn’t even own it. Technically this was a necessary expense and I would bill Cornelius for it, but just because I had the ability to bill things didn’t give me the license to be careless with my client’s money.

The look on Rogan’s face when he saw it would be worth it.

“Shoes,” Ferika said.

The assistant placed a pair of black pumps in front of me. I stepped into them. They fit perfectly.

“Hair.”

The assistant moved behind me, released my hair from the ponytail, rolled it into a crown around my head, and expertly pinned it in place.

Ferika held out her hand. I took it and stepped off the raised platform, and she led me out into the open space.

Cornelius blinked. Melosa’s eyebrows crept up.

“It’s fifteen hundred for a night,” I said. “Yes, no?”

“Yes,” Cornelius and Melosa said in one voice.

It was Friday evening. I sat in my office, trying to get some peace and quiet while staring at the pictures of magical heavyweights likely to be at Baranovsky’s party. Augustine had emailed them to me segregated into two helpful categories: will kill you and can kill you. This was going to be one hell of a soiree.

The doorbell chimed. I tapped my laptop to bring the view of the front camera. Bug’s face greeted me. He stuck his tongue out, crossed his eyes, and waved his laptop at me.

I got up and opened the door. “What, you’re not going to ask me if you can enter my territory?”

“Pardon me, Your Divine Princess Majesty.” Bug executed a surprisingly elegant bow with a hand flourish and began backing away, bowing. “Pardon this lowly wretch, pardon . . .”

“Get into my office,” I growled.

“What the hell, Nevada? No, I’m not going to ask permission.” Bug came in and landed in my client chair. “Nice digs.”

“Thanks,” I sat in my chair. “What’s up?”

He opened his laptop, tapped a key, and pushed it toward me across the table. “Any of these assholes look familiar?”

I stared at the row of faces, all men ranging from about fifteen to sixty. “Ice mages?”

“Mhm.”

I scrutinized them one by one. “No.”

Bug sighed and took his laptop back. “Are you sure of what you saw?”

“Yes. I’d recognize the smile for sure. He showed me his teeth before icing the road.” I showed him Augustine’s list. “He isn’t on there either.”

“Shit,” Bug said, his face sour. “It’s that thing again. We’ve been dealing with it since Pierce. You think you have a lead and then poof”—he made a puffing motion with his fingers—“it melts into nothing and all you have is frustration and the fart noise your face makes when you hit your desk with it.”

Fart . . . what? “We’ll find him. As long as we keep investigating, he’ll show himself sooner or later.”

Bug looked behind him, leaning to get the better view of the hallway. “Got something else to show you.”

He came around the desk, leaned on it next to me, and tapped his laptop. The security video from last night’s shooting came on, complete with Leon’s awesome voice-over.

I grimaced. “Yeah, I know. My cousin got excited. Look, he is fifteen. He thinks he’s immortal.”

“No.” Bug’s face was completely serious for once. “Watch.”

The recording zoomed in on an older mercenary. “I’m a veteran badass,” Leon’s voice said. “I’ve seen bad shit. I’ve done bad shit. I’ve survived five months in a jungle eating pinecones and killing terrorists with a pair of old chopsticks . . .”

“Where was he while this was happening?” Bug asked.

“In the Hut of Evil. I mean, in the computer room.”

“. . . Oh shit, my head just exploded.”

The camera panned to the right to a woman crouching by the oak.

“I’m death. I’m a ghost. I’ll find you. You can run, you can hide, you can beg, but none of it will help you. I’ll come for you in the darkness like a lithe panther with velvet paws and steel claws and . . . wait, brains, wait, where are you going?”

I sighed.

“Oh no, look—my feet are twitching. That’s so undignified.”

Maybe there was something wrong with Leon. I should give him more work to do. That would keep him from being bored and trying to get guns. “Whatever it is you want me to notice, I don’t see it,” I told Bug.

“How does he know who will die next?” Bug asked. “He pans the camera to them in the exact sequence they are killed.”

That couldn’t be right. I rewound the recording. Older male mercenary, an athletic female mercenary, bodybuilder mercenary, thin mercenary, a large female mercenary . . . Five targets in the precise order they were killed. In each case the camera panned to the victim and Leon started his narration before the shot ever rang out.

Oh crap. I put my hand over my mouth.

“If your mother called out the shots, it would make sense,” Bug said. “But two of these were popped by our guys. At first I thought he was a precog.” He rewound the video to just after the first female mercenary died. “Look, you see here he swings the shot to the left first?”

I followed the camera as it tilted to the left, focusing for a second on the lamppost as if Leon was waiting for something. The camera tilted up, catching a glimpse of the window in the building across the street and moved to the bodybuilder mercenary.

“He didn’t do it in any of the other cases, so I went to talk to our guys.” Bug typed on the laptop. The image of the street filled the screen.

“We had a guy here.” He tapped the window with his finger.

“Is that the window in the video?”

He nodded. “The skinny guy that got killed after the bigger dude is here.” Bug pointed at the spot by a warehouse, shielded from the view by the low stone wall. “The guy in that window didn’t have a direct shot at the thin guy. So for shits and giggles, we put a dummy in the spot where the skinny guy was.” He clicked a key and the screen showed the street from a different angle with a mannequin crouching by the wall, a canvas bag on his head.