Sapphire Flames (Hidden Legacy 4)

Mom came over and sat next to me.

“I destroyed the house,” I told her.

“Don’t be ridiculous. You tried to save a child. We all went along with it. Nobody could have anticipated this.”

My cell rang. I looked at it. Nevada.

“Hello?”

“Hi! How’s everything?”

Next to me, Mom shook her head, her eyes really big.

“Everything is great,” I lied. “We’re doing great. The warehouse is great.”

“Umm, Catalina?”

Another chunk of the roof collapsed. “We’re having a thunderstorm.” It was good her magic didn’t work over the phone.

“Okay,” Nevada said. She wasn’t buying a word of what I was selling. “I have big news.”

“Oh good. Mom is here. I’ll put you on speaker.” I pushed the icon. “Go.”

“I’m pregnant!”

I raised my voice. “Hey everybody, Nevada is pregnant.”

Everybody made cheering noises.

“Catalina,” Nevada said. “I can hear water running. I can tell by the sound that you’re outside. If it’s raining, why are all of you outside in the storm?”

“Love you, got to go.” I hung up.

A van pulled up to the curb. Shadow dashed toward it, barking. The windows rolled down and four heads stuck out, one human and blond, and the other three belonging to boxer dogs.

Cornelius stared at the warehouse. “What did I miss?”

I’d laugh, but again, no strength left.

Mom and I looked at the warehouse some more.

“Sorry,” I said.

“It will be okay,” Mom said. “It was time to let it go, anyway.”

Runa looked at her phone and jerked it to her ear, her eyes wild. “No! Don’t do it, please don’t do it!”

Oh, what the hell now?

Runa hurled the phone to the ground, then dived down, grabbed it, turned, and ran to us.

Mom and I looked at her. Arabella dropped what she was doing and sprinted over to us.

“It’s Ragnar.” Tears wet Runa’s eyes. “He just walked into Diatheke.”

“Why?” The word fell out of me.

“He said that he was done surviving. He couldn’t let them hurt anybody else.” Desperation skewed her face. “I need a car. A fast one.”

“I’ve got you,” Arabella said.

“I’m coming with you,” I said.

“Can I talk to you for a second?” Arabella looked at everyone around us. “Can we have some privacy?”

“I’ll meet you at your car.” Runa spun on her foot and walked away.

Arabella crouched by me. “You’re in charge and if you order me, I’ll take you. But you’re tapped out. You can’t even stand. My car sits four. I’ll take Runa, Leon, and Mom.”

She was right. I hated it but she was right. Every second counted, and they needed to pack as much firepower as they could into four seats.

“Go,” I said. “I’ll come with the second wave.”

She hugged me and took off at a run. Mom followed her.

My phone rang again. Alessandro. Alive. Oh my God, he was alive. Relief drowned me.

“Are you okay?” I whispered.

“Yes,” he said. “Are you?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t get Benedict.” Frustration sharpened his voice. “I’ll be at the warehouse in half an hour.”

“I won’t be here. Ragnar just attacked Diatheke. We’re going to get him.”

“What the hell is he doing?” Alessandro snarled.

“Trying to kill everyone by himself.”

“I’ll get him. I’m closer.”

“Don’t! It’s suicide.”

He growled something fast in Italian and hung up.

Ten minutes later I strapped myself into the safety harness inside Heart’s APC. Next to me Bug fiddled with a tablet, his hand flying over the onscreen keyboard.

The APC rumbled and lurched forward. All around me Heart’s soldiers rode, their faces relaxed.

Bug thrust the tablet in front of me. On it, Alessandro walked into Diatheke.

What the hell was he doing? My heart squeezed itself into a tight, painful ball in my chest. Please, please let it be okay. Let it all be okay.

The sound of gunfire emanated from the building on the tablet, tearing the silence. Everyone looked at us.

“That’s all I got,” Bug said.

The doors of Diatheke were gone. Glass shards littered the sidewalk. The metal grate hung crumpled to one side. Heart’s people streamed into the building past me. I wanted to run, but walking was the best I could manage, and the two bodyguards Heart assigned to me refused to move faster.

Bodies sprawled in the lobby, two men and a woman. Black fuzz sheathed the corpses. Runa or Ragnar had been through here.

A soldier waited by the elevator. He swiped a bloody keycard and the doors swung open. “Your mother and sister are on the top floor,” he said. “Leon is sweeping the building with a team.”

We stepped into the cabin and the elevator carried us up. I couldn’t even worry anymore. I was just numb.

The elevator opened to the aftermath of a slaughter. Bodies lay on the expensive carpet, some slashed, some shot, others sprouting the same black fuzz from downstairs. The door to Benedict’s office had exploded and broken shards protruded from the walls. Inside, the butchery continued. Blood soaked the carpet. Corpses stared with unseeing eyes as we passed. Priceless art lay discarded like trash, ripped from the walls.

We turned into the Ottoman room. The massive rug had disappeared. The remnants of an arcane circle smoked, etched into the floor. To the right, my mother slumped in a chair, Arabella kneeling by her. To the left, Runa wrapped her arms around a sobbing Ragnar. Blood drenched him from head to toe, dripping from his hair and clothes.

A heap of clothes smoked slightly in the center of the circle. I had seen this before. Someone had used an arcane circle to teleport out. Unless the teleporting mage was a Prime, teleporting killed almost as many people as it transported safely. It was a desperate last resort, it required a high-caliber teleport mage, and it couldn’t transport anything inorganic. When someone teleported a human, clothes, breast implants, and pacemakers stayed behind.

Mom saw me.

“Is anybody hurt?”

“No,” she said. “This wasn’t us. The place was like this when we got here. The boy and Alessandro turned this place into a graveyard.”

Panic punched me. “Where is he?”

Mom shook her head.

What does that mean?

“Is he dead?” Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God . . .

“He saved me,” Ragnar said through his sobs.

“Where is he?” I barked.

“They teleported him.” Arabella stood up. “They contained Ragnar and were going to take him to the lab, and then Alessandro showed up and murdered everyone in the damn building. When he broke into this room, the teleport mage panicked and teleported herself and Alessandro out.”

The teleport circle took forever to set up and it corresponded to a marker at the destination. You couldn’t just change the arrival point on the fly.

I turned to Ragnar. “Were they going to teleport you?”

“Yes.”

The teleporter had to point to the lab. If Alessandro survived, he would arrive naked, dazed, and without weapons. He had already taken on a building full of killers. He had to be near his limit.

We had no time. We had to find the lab now.

If they tried to magic warp him . . .

I shoved that thought aside. “Ragnar, did they say where the lab was?”

“No. I’m sorry, this is all my fault . . .”

I tuned him out, scouring my memories. There had to be something, something I heard, something I saw, something that would point me in the direction of that damn lab.

Going to Linus was out of the question. He told me to wait. I didn’t wait. I would have to answer for that. There was no way to predict how he would react.

Benedict would know. Benedict—

It hit me like a freight train. I spun to Arabella. “I need you to drive me.”

She didn’t ask where. She jumped to her feet and followed me to the elevator.

“You are out of your mind,” Arabella said.

The Shenandoah State Correctional Facility, nicknamed the Spa, rose in front of us. About an hour and a half north of Houston, the Spa knew it was a prison, but it really wanted to be a luxury resort. Wrapped in a picturesque stone wall ten feet high, it was built in the style of the Spanish masonry star forts, a four-story-high pentagon with bastions at the corners of the walls. A luxurious park occupied the space between the wall and the citadel, complete with a track, a driving range, and a tennis court. As we drove past the guard at the gate to the main parking lot, elderly people on the track waved at us.

When the Texas magical elite chose to serve time, they did it at the Spa. The residents were predominantly older, not necessarily nonviolent, but shrewd enough to recognize that spending a few months at the Spa for their transgressions was much more pleasant than pitching a fit and being shipped off to the Ice Box in Alaska or the Iron Locker in Kansas. This was the place our grandmother chose to pay her debt to society.

Arabella parked. “She’s not going to help you. Even if she wanted to, she’s locked up here. What do you think she can do?”