The Phoenix Illusion, Page 2

  2

  Working for SPI, you saw some strange…stuff. This took the cake—and any ice cream that came with it.

  Regor was the goblin capital.

  On Rake’s home world.

  Those of us who’d heard Rake say what the building was and where it’d come from were wearing variations of his disbelieving stare. I started to cough at the smoke in the air. Apparently, I’d also had my mouth hanging open.

  Rake’s dark eyes were intent and moving rapidly over the structure. I felt his magic reaching out, toward the engulfed house, scanning the interior…

  There was a stab of panic in my gut. “Is anyone—”

  “No.” He listened and hesitated. “No. There’s no one. It was being renovated. My parents are living at our country house.”

  Thank God.

  Kenji had his phone out. Weirdness at this level needed to be called in, especially when said weirdness was happening mere blocks from our worldwide headquarters.

  Kenji poked at his phone’s screen and swore. “Does anyone’s phone work?”

  Mine was in my purse, and I’d left that in the booth. Several of my coworkers had theirs in various pockets. All the screens were dark.

  Dead phones, no electricity, a funky glow in the sky, and a house from another world on fire.

  “Cendi, can you get through?” Kylie asked.

  Cendi Tremont was a seriously gifted telepath. She could she talk mind-to-mind to anyone in a fifty-mile radius. For SPI agents, if she knew you were in a meeting, she could telepathically send a text to your phone. And she was an absolute blast on our SPI girls’ nights out.

  Cendi stepped back into Full Moon’s doorway, bowed her head, and stood motionless for a few moments. She glanced back at us and gave a thumbs-up.

  At least something was working.

  “Who?” Kylie asked.

  “Ms. Sagadraco and Mr. Moreau,” Cendi said.

  SPI’s boss lady herself and her right-hand man now knew what was happening. Cendi didn’t play around.

  “I also own the empty lot,” Rake told us.

  Ian swore, Kylie added to it, and I couldn’t have agreed more with their word choices.

  A very large and public situation had just turned from a literal and metaphorical three-alarm fire into an impending catastrophe.

  Rake’s house from Rake’s world burning on Rake’s lot. Accident? Random celestial convergence? Nope and nope.

  The firemen and police might not know this wasn’t an accident, at least not yet, but we did.

  And they would. Soon.

  New York’s law enforcement community frowned on arson, regardless of the cause. We didn’t have much time before someone official started asking unanswerable questions.

  Like why there was a building burning on a vacant lot.

  The firefighters had responded to a report of a building on fire. They came, they saw a building burning. Their job was to make the building not burn anymore, not ask who put a building on a lot that had been vacant hours, or maybe minutes, before. They had one job—at least for now—and they were doing it.

  When the fire was out and cooled enough to get in there, they were gonna have a lot of questions.

  Police were moving onlookers closest to the blaze to a safe distance. There was an outer perimeter where a couple hundred people were straining to get a look at what would have been trending on local Twitter feeds by now, that is if anyone’s phones had been working. I scanned the crowd and was glad to see a lot of disappointed tweeters. At least something good was coming from the power outage.

  Nothing brought out rubberneckers like traffic accidents and fires. Used to be, folks would just stand there and watch. Now they whipped out their phones and started recording. Smartphones were SPI’s bane. In the old days, when someone said they saw a werewhatever, it was their word against a world that wondered where they’d stashed their tinfoil hat. Now, it was merely a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Contrary to what you might believe, there were very few supernaturals who couldn’t be photographed. That made our job infinitely more difficult. That didn’t even take into account what would happen if the supernatural who was being photographed or filmed was the human-eating variety. The result was usually the meal-to-be documenting their own deaths. SPI’s cleanup team scooped up a lot of phones in addition to hosing down sidewalks—all under a sight-obscuring cloaking spell, of course.

  Ian leaned in close. “Was this a portal?”

  I continued to stare and shook my head. “Not by any definition I’ve ever heard of.”

  I’d recently added portal detection to my skill set. Though a “set” indicated you had more than one to begin with. I didn’t. A portal was like a door you could walk through. In theory, distance didn’t matter. The house had come from another world, so unless houses on Rake’s world had legs, it hadn’t stepped through anything. I had no clue what had happened here.

  An officer approached us. “The fire may spread. You’ll need to move back.”

  He was an elf. His ears were glamoured, but I could see the pointed tips.

  “Elf,” I told Rake quietly without moving my lips. There were non-SPI humans now sharing the sidewalk with us.

  The elven officer’s eyes widened when he spotted Rake. He recognized him even with the glamour that hid his goblin features. Probably every supernatural in the tristate area knew what Rake’s human guise looked like. Most of all, they knew who and what he was, and respected (and sometimes feared) both.

  Rake stepped forward and began speaking quickly to the elf, but careful to keep his voice down. Ian was right behind him. I stayed put. They were doing their thing; I was going to do mine. As a former NYPD homicide detective, Ian was still well known to those in the ranks. I couldn’t hear what they were saying to the elf cop, but I didn’t need to.

  Moments later, Rake quickly crossed to where Kylie and I were. “We’re going to speak with the fire chief. Ian knows him.”

  I nodded. “Good. I’ll have a look around from here.”

  I knew what Rake meant, and he knew what I was talking about.

  SPI had people in all levels of the NYPD, NYFD, and throughout the local government and beyond. They ran interference when supernatural events leaked out into the mortal world. Unfortunately, that happened more often than we would’ve liked. This wasn’t a little leak; it was a conflagration probably visible from the International Space Station. Getting a publicly acceptable story in place now would save SPI a lot of trouble later.

  I’d stayed put because I could do the most good scanning the crowd for what no one else would be able to see.

  Our arsonist.

  I tried to look around without being obvious about it, which was easier said than done.

  In my opinion, someone wouldn’t pull a building in from another world, then torch it, without staying around to watch. Even if they didn’t need to be physically present to do whatever it was they’d done, they wouldn’t be able to resist being here to see their work properly appreciated.

  This was Rake’s house on Rake’s lot, within throwing distance of SPI HQ and our favorite watering hole. The house and location choice weren’t an accident or coincidence. It was personal, a smack in our collective face.

  Whoever was responsible for this was here. Watching the fire.

  And probably watching us.

  I briefly closed my eyes to try to block out the ordered chaos of the scene from the police, firefighters, and onlookers, and focus on what was intended to be less obvious. Onlookers or even a firefighter or police officer who was watching us.

  When I slowly opened my eyes again, I saw I wasn’t the only one.

  I spotted several police officers scanning the crowd for anyone who was enjoying the blaze more than they should. Two of the officers were humans and the third a supernatural, another elf to be exact.

  Rake was speaking with a man who I assumed was the fire chief. Ian
was with him, but seemed to be doing the same thing as me—scanning the crowd for suspicious-looking characters.

  My eyes were drawn up toward the night sky. Earlier, it had been cloudy with a funky kind of flashy lightning, almost like strobe lights. No rain had come of it. Now it was clear—at least of clouds.

  Light the color of flame still flowed in waves in the sky above the burning building. The closest comparison I could draw was northern lights, except these were gold rather than the usual green. Northern lights didn’t appear this far south; and if they did, they sure as heck wouldn’t be doing their thing in the small patch of sky directly above a burning building.

  I went back to scanning the crowd. Despite my seer skill, my actual eyes were only human. It was night, there was a building on fire, it was smoky, and there were enough flashing red and blue lights to induce the mother of all migraines, so it was next to impossible to see anyone acting suspiciously unless they were standing less than ten feet away.

  Since I wasn’t getting anywhere with my eyes, I opened my seer’s senses. Over the years, I’d developed a knack for knowing when magic was in use or had recently been used. I started over, scanning the crowd beginning with those standing closest to our SPI group and working my way around.

  Within seconds, I got my first clue that I was on to something: a rotten-egg stink. It was faint, but you couldn’t miss it. The firemen battling the blaze might think it was something burning inside the building, but this went a couple steps beyond sulfur. This was brimstone. I’d had an unpleasant up-close experience getting a snoot full of the stuff. Up close as in a trip to an anteroom of Hell. That stench was imprinted in my nasal passages forever.

  There had been a breeze when we’d walked from SPI to the Full Moon a couple of hours ago. Now there was wind. Yeah, a large fire made its own wind, but this was different.

  When you weren’t physically in Hell, a brimstone stink meant black magic had been recently worked. It didn’t necessarily mean demonic work, but it was definitely the hallmark of black magic. The stink that clung to the practitioner who had worked it was more of a slimy sensation that imprinted on the emotions rather than any of the five senses. Otherwise normal people who were psychically sensitive would be able to detect a black magic practitioner and be repulsed by them on a subconscious level, instinctively wanting to put as much distance between themselves and that person as possible.

  That precise sensation was coming from someone directly across from where we were standing, on the other side of the fire, and behind the barricades that mirrored our own. The source had positioned himself as close to the fire as he could get—and as far away as possible from me and my friends.

  “Yeah, that’s not a coincidence,” I murmured.

  “What?” Kenji asked.

  “I may have just found our house-moving arsonist.” I kept my voice soft and my body still. I also tried to keep my thoughts neutral and quiet. To do anything else would be like sending up a psychic flare telling this guy exactly where I was. And yes, I could tell this practitioner was male. I tentatively reached out just a little more. He was also a goblin.

  A really angry goblin, as in a seething rage.

  It didn’t feel like a supernatural arsonist enjoying his work.

  That wasn’t a distinction I’d ever been able to make before. Male or female I could determine with about 90 percent accuracy. It was the goblin part that was new—and confusing. If I didn’t know and could see that Rake was talking to the fire chief, I’d almost swear that he was…

  I shook my head to clear it. The smoke must be getting to me.

  I didn’t want to risk alerting our mystery goblin, but I needed to get an actual look at this guy.

  “I’ll be right back,” I murmured.

  “Do you think that’s a good…”

  I didn’t stick around to hear the rest. I knew what Kenji was saying and thinking. No, it wasn’t a good idea. It was a bad idea, not to mention risky, but my psychic hook was set, not in the practitioner himself, but in his aura. I had no intention of reeling him in. I was going to take up the line, so to speak, ever so gently, as I went to him. Or at least toward him. All I needed was to get a good look. We had psychic sketch artists at SPI who could take it from there. A quick mind link would be all it’d take for them to see what I’d seen, and voilà, instant mug shot.

  I crossed the street and moved through the crowd toward Rake, maintaining the most tenuous of psychic contacts with the suspect as I went.

  “Mac!”

  I jumped, my concentration broken. It was only Ian, a shout to get my attention, but the spike of adrenaline had done its damage.

  Psychically speaking, I was standing there as buck naked as the day I’d been born.

  Oh crap.

  The goblin’s blow came like a punch to the side of my head, and the next thing I knew, I was falling in a sickening spin as the whole world went sideways, then dark.

  *

  I awoke to the acute realization that landing on concrete hurts. A lot.

  Ian was picking me up off the sidewalk, so I must have only been out a few seconds.

  Yay me.

  In the sky, the golden northern lights continued to flow and swirl, which did extremely unpleasant things to my head and stomach.

  I knew what was coming up next, or at least what wanted to. I clenched my jaw, clutched my stomach, and firmly told the contents of my stomach to stay.

  Ian had been around me long enough to know it, too. He held me up, but made sure my head was facing down and away from him. When nothing happened, I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed. Throwing up would have made me feel infinitely better, but I really didn’t want to do it in public. I dimly wondered if I could make it to the Full Moon’s ladies’ room in time. At least I thought that was what I was thinking. Everything was still kinda whirly.

  Then I saw something that instantly cleared my head.

  Across the street, four firemen in those silver fire suits with respirators and air tanks were about to go into the building.

  I squirmed out of Ian’s arms to get a clearer view. “What the—” I froze. “Ian, Rake said there’s no one in there. They’re risking their lives for nothing. We have to stop them.”

  I glanced over to where Rake had been standing with the fire chief.

  Rake’s eyes had gone wide with disbelief, his face pale. Not because of seeing the firemen preparing to go in, but because of what he was now sensing.

  Oh no. There was someone alive in there.

  Rake’s expression hardened, his lips narrowed with grim determination. He didn’t need to say “I’m going in.” His expression and stance said it loud and clear.

  Yelling for Rake to stop wouldn’t work, and it’d only draw attention to what he was about to do.

  Rake moved quickly, darting behind a firetruck.

  When he came out, I was the only one who could see him. Rake had cloaked and shielded himself—from view and from the fire—and had run right into that burning building.

  I grabbed Ian’s arm. “Rake ran in!”

  Ian spat his go-to word for when an already bad situation just went completely and hopelessly sideways.

  Normally, seeing your boyfriend run into a burning building would be cause for concern, if not panic.

  My boyfriend wasn’t normal.

  He’d once jumped into a swirling pit of molten brimstone to save me, swimming in it as if it was a heated swimming pool, albeit one with a vortex at the center draining straight into Hell itself.

  The barricades and the police standing in front of them kept me from getting any closer.

  Ian and I just stood there. It wasn’t like either one of us could run in there after him. Mortals melted, or were at least highly flammable.

  Rake would come out when he’d done what he’d gone in to do.

  3

  Minutes that felt like an eternity later, Rake came out with a body
over his shoulder. The firefighters were right behind him.

  Everyone could see him now.

  Rake had dropped his cloaking spell, but he was still glamoured as a human—as was the man over his shoulder.

  I could tell he was a goblin.

  The firefighters had gone in with respirators. Rake had gone in with naked lungs protected by magic, so he had to make a show of being at least mildly affected. Rule number one of being a supernatural trying to blend in with humans—don’t be impervious to things that would kill a mortal.

  Rake stumbled, going down on one knee, his face twisted in pain.

  He wasn’t acting.

  I pushed past the police at the barricade and ran toward him. I dimly heard Ian shouting as he ran interference behind me.

  Two of the firemen had taken the goblin from Rake and hustled them both over to the EMTs. When I got to him, Rake had an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose and was coughing. One look in his eyes confirmed he wasn’t faking.

  He was hurt—and he was afraid, not of anything he’d seen, but of what had happened.

  Or rather, had not happened.

  I’d only seen that type of fear from Rake once before. He couldn’t talk and tell me, but I knew.

  His magic had failed. Something or someone had interfered with his magic.

  I had questions, but I couldn’t ask any of them until we weren’t surrounded by firefighters and the EMTs who didn’t work for SPI, and while Rake was wheezing and hacking his lungs up.

  He’d had enough magic to glamour himself and the man he’d carried out of the burning building. Glamours were small magic. Keeping the flames from a fully engulfed building from burning both of them to death had taken every last bit of strength Rake had.

  The goblin was older than Rake, how much older I didn’t know. It was difficult to tell with goblins. He was unconscious, but breathing.

  Rake lifted the oxygen mask. “Keep us…together,” he rasped, indicating the goblin.

  “I’ll take care of it.” I pushed the mask back over his face. “Now shut up and breathe.”

  I knew what he meant. Rake wanted the first face the man saw to be his, preferably his true goblin face, not the human glamour. If I’d been taken from a Renaissance-level world and plopped down in the middle of Manhattan with flashing emergency lights and skyscrapers soaring overhead, the shock would probably kill me. This poor guy needed to at least see a friendly face when he woke up. Fortunately, his clothing was dark and nondescript, so he didn’t look like he’d just come from a Renfaire or costume party.