‘She is a little,’ Hanlon conceded.
‘See? This is why Hanlon is my favourite,’ I told Maktel with a wink.
I pulled my daggers out of Hunter’s prostrate form and went hunting for trouble.
Chapter Twenty-Six
To release Hanlon and Maktel, I needed to find the key, and that meant finding whoever was stupid enough to keep it on their person. I was pretty sure I knew who that was.
I nudged Hunter’s corpse further aside so the door wouldn’t snag on his feet, then slunk out.
‘Be careful,’ Hanlon murmured as I went.
I appreciated the sentiment, but I fully intended to ignore it. Safety wasn’t the main thing on my mind. As a cop, the “flight” part of “fight or flight” got trained out of me. And I was in full fight mode. My senses were heightened, focusing on what I could hear and see.
I shut the door behind me, reducing the chances of someone stumbling on Hunter’s corpse and meting out mistaken justice on Hanlon and Maktel. With the ogres as safe as they could be, I padded down the corridor, boot soles whisper-quiet on concrete.
The place smelled like dust, the musty air catching in my throat and making me want to cough – an urge I suppressed.No need to warn my captors that I was coming for them. The lit corridor only led to one thing: stairs. We must be in a basement.
I took the stairs carefully, looking around for security cameras that might be monitored, but I saw none.
On the next level I cleared the rooms I encountered, but most were visibly unused. I’d guess that we were in an abandoned office building. There were a handful of old broken wheelie chairs abandoned in a sad little chair graveyard. The lights were still blazing though, making it easy to clear the vast empty spaces I encountered. At the end of one open area was a door, under which more light shone. The door was open an inch, and voices bled through. Bingo.
‘—told you Hunter was a bad addition.’ Beeks. I recognised the growl with the accompanying chip on both shoulders. ‘Too hot-headed. He kicked down the damned door when I could have finessed my way into Drummond’s place in my sleep. Everything went smoothly with Marlow. It only got fucked up when we added in Hunter.’
‘And I told you to keep your mouth shut until we were done.’ Barnaby Kerr Junior. Petulant and posh, like someone had wrapped insecurity in cologne and handed it a trust fund.
I slid up to the partially open door, breathed through the ache in my ribs, the throb in my head and the pain in my neck, and pushed just enough to peer through a slightly widened gap. A storage room with boarded windows and four strip lights flickering overhead. Two men sat at one cheap folding table.
Beeks looked the same as he had in interview, only now he’d swapped the righteous “citizen activist” look for the feral gleam of a man who wanted to see someone beg. Barnaby Kerr Junior wore a tailored jacket he hadn’t earned a day of, and his beard was trimmed and cared for, like he’d slipped out of the hobo act now that he was done trying to fit in.
Between them lay various things that would help a Common jury condemn them: taser cartridges, more magic-cancelling cuffs, and a plugged-in freezer which I suspected might well hold the head of Thrain Olofsson.
I stepped into the doorway, intention gathered and ready. ‘I’m obliged to give you a chance to surrender. This is your moment. Take it or the only way you leave here is in a hearse.’
Both men spun. Beeks’s hand lifted. His pupils blew wide as he focused on me, using his own magic – the IR. At his side a copper lighter flickered to life. Like most wizards, he probably had an element he was most attuned to, as well as having the IR. The lighter suggested he smoked or was attuned to fire.
‘Fireball,’ Beeks barked. Not a smoker then.
In an instant the small flame burning at the lighter’s head grew and roared towards me. I pictured a wall of solid air around me and threw my hand up to release it.
Air condensed in front of me in a curved pane of pressure. When the fire blossomed, it hit my barrier and rolled over it like a wave over a rock. Heat licked my hair; one of the strip lights kicked and popped, then steadied, buzzing.
‘Aww,’ I said. ‘You warmed me up. Thanks!’ I made a show of rolling my head from one side to the other. Cursed myself for my sass when my neck screamed in agony. There was getting limber for the fight that was coming, and then there was straining your existing injuries.
‘Kill her!’ Junior squeaked, scrambling back. Nope, he had never been our killer, but the mastermind. He was throwing orders but keeping far from the action. That made me dislike him even more. Of the two men, I’d bet Kerr had the keys. He’d want to be the big man, even though he never intended to get close to the two deadly ogres. If they hadn’t been knocked unconscious in the car wreck, they would have made mincemeat of their captors.
Kerr scrabbled backward, his balance off, and I was nothing if not an opportunist. I summoned the air again and flicked two fingers at him, and a gust of wind sent him sprawling.
‘We’re going to have a little chat,’ I said. ‘I heard you talking about Marlow, Beeks. You killed him. What was so important that you needed a tête-à-tête before you ended his life?’
Kerr’s lip curled. ‘We didn’t—’
‘Flamewheel!’ Beeks spat. Evidently he had snapped the word at the same time he thought about spinning fire like a Catherine wheel. His imagination lacked artistry but scored points for enthusiasm; a disc of spinning flame roared off his palm.
This wasn’t my first fight with someone with flames at their beck and call.
Imagining the oxygen around his flame winking out of existence, I cupped the air and tugged. The flame thinned until an elegant ribbon of heat twisted up into nothing at all as I pulled its breath away. Fire’s a hungry thing. Deny it oxygen and it dies sulky and quick.
