Fire Starter (The Sentinels) Read online

  Duffy stood and opened a back door. He led me down a small corridor, opened another door and gestured me inside. I walked in, and only once inside did I realize how small the place was. It was a tiny outdoor space, a pace wide and two paces long. Yellowing weeds wilted in the cracks between paving stones. The door clicked shut behind Duffy.

  “Why are we meeting in a place the size of a closet?” I asked.

  “When someone is scared, they smell different.” Duffy’s looming menace was magnified by his proximity. “I like to be able to detect how scared my opponent is, so I keep them close.” His grin made me hope he was joking and fear he was not.

  His talk of smell and the bulk of his shoulders put a thought into my head. “You can’t transform into anything, can you?”

  “Would you have come and confronted me like this if I could?”

  “Yes.” If Duffy wanted me dead he could have asked his men to kill me. He didn’t need to transform into a beast and rip me to shreds. I was great at coming up with comforting thoughts in difficult moments. Way to go me. My stench of terror was surely overcoming Duffy’s senses.

  “I’m human,” Duffy said. “I’m sure I could find someone supernatural for you to talk to if you really want.”

  “I’m good.”

  “So, what do you want with me?”

  “You sent the guy, Williams, to kill the Colliers.”

  “Kill, no.” Duffy rolled his shoulders. “You are the one who did the killing. Williams was sent to scare some sense into John Collier.”

  I didn’t believe that. “And if that failed. If John Collier intended to push ahead with his plans to publish?”

  “That wasn’t going to happen.”

  “If it did. Would Williams have killed them?” Williams hadn’t hesitated in attacking me that night and I was just a bystander in the wrong place. What would have happened if Alex or Jo had woken up and seen Williams?

  Duffy smirked. “Did you come here to have your conscience eased? If that’s the case, I have bad news for you. You killed John and Alice Collier, no one else.”

  “Why didn’t you arrest me that night? You are a policeman.”

  “I didn’t know exactly what had happened. I thought you were simply a witness who had stumbled across something you shouldn’t have. Others in the force would want to interview you and you were being too talkative so I called Flavini,” he said. “After I talked to Williams and heard what you did, I became more interested in you.”

  “So you helped me out with a job and a place to live?”

  He nodded.

  “And sending me into that apartment block to meet Williams. That was to help me too?”

  “The backlash after the Collier fire was dying down slower than I would have hoped. Journalists and politicians continued to ask questions. So I decided to do something. Sometimes I send two loose ends colliding together.” He slapped his palms together. “Often, at least one gets tied up.”

  So Duffy expected either me or Williams to die and he didn’t care which. His reasoning sounded convoluted. “It was a test,” I said.

  “Huh.”

  “You wanted to know what I was capable of. If Williams killed me, then I wasn’t worth worrying about. If I killed Williams...”

  “And did you?”

  I almost asked him what he meant before quickly realizing he was asking if I killed Williams. I shook my head. “I let him go again.” Duffy mustn’t have heard back from Williams about what happened.

  Suddenly, Duffy didn’t seem so intimidating. I realized that despite of appearances, he was cautious of me, maybe even slightly afraid. Humans who dealt with supernaturals could never be fully at their ease. Duffy gave orders to Williams, and was able to get Flavini to do him a favors, but he didn’t know what I was capable of.

  Neither did I. Was that what I was, I wondered, a supernatural? I guessed I had to be. I couldn’t transform, but fire had exploded out of my hands. The consequences of what I had done meant I would never use magic again. Duffy didn’t have to know that though.

  I had planned to threaten Duffy with publishing John Collier’s article. But I had just realized that wasn’t my best strategy.

  I laughed out loud.

  Duffy took a half step back. “What’s so funny?”

  “I just realized something. I still think like a normal human.”

  “Huh.”

  “You know what a dead man’s switch is?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ve placed John Collier’s article in several hidden online locations, but if I don’t enter a password to my account every day, then dozens of tweets, Facebook messages and emails will be sent to journalists and the like with links to that article.” Jo had emailed it to me that morning and I had spent the last few hours setting up my dead man’s switch.

  “You came here to blackmail me?” Duffy leaned closer and I instinctively shrank back. He could loom with the best of them.

  But I had figured out that, like the proverbial spider, he was more scared of me than I was of him. I laughed straight in his face. “Yes. Thinking like a human, you see.”

  Duffy leaned back, and I held in my sigh of relief. “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I’m capable of. I’ve chased off your pet wolf twice now, and I set a building on fire from fifty paces away.”

  “Maybe I can’t personally harm you, but I can ring a few people who could make a good fist of it.”

  “Perhaps you could. But there’s an easier way. Our interests align.”

  “They do?”

  “I can make the article disappear.” I figured I’d be able to persuade Alex and Jo to delete it. “Then, once you have Williams arrested for the fire and for the murder of John and Alice Collier, all the loose ends will be tied up.”

  Duffy smiled. “So you are arranging for him to take the fall for you. I didn’t suspect you were so cold blooded.”

  I smiled back, trying to project steely confidence. “What do you say?” Williams had gone to threaten the Colliers and he had tried to kill me twice. If he didn’t deserve imprisonment for the Colliers’ deaths, he wasn’t exactly an innocent.

  “It’s hard to imprison someone like Williams,” Duffy said.

  “I’m sure it can be done.” In a world of supernaturals, special prisons had to exist.

  “Okay.” Duffy held out his hand.

  “After this, we’re even,” I said. “I stay out of your way and you stay out of mine.” That meant, as far as I was concerned, that I could keep the room in Fenster Street and the job in Transkey without owing him any favors.

  I waited until Duffy nodded before I shook his hand. His grip crushed my hand but I didn’t let my smile falter. It didn’t do to show weakness to a man like Duffy.

  I hoped never to have to deal with him again, but Lusteer could be a small place and Duffy was a big man.

  Chapter 13

  Tuesday 18:50

  I knocked on Room 217. I was inside Gorlam’s, once again with a staff badge attached to my T-shirt.

  “Come in.” It was Alex’s voice.

  I opened the door and entered. Both of the Collier children were on their beds. Jo was sitting cross-legged with an open laptop on her lap and Alex was lying down with a thick book in his hand. When he saw it was me, Alex put down the book and sat up. “What do you want?”

  “Would you check breaking news on the Lusteer Gazette website?” I asked Jo.

  She nodded. A few clicks later, her eyes widened as she opened up the front page. She leaned the laptop toward Alex so they could both read. The main news story of the day was about a man named Sammy Williams being arrested for arson and murder.

  After several moments of silence, Alex looked up at me. “This your doing?”

  I shook my head. “No. I talked to Duffy about the article Jo told me about, but he already knew and was already investigating the culprit. He gave me a heads-up after the arrest.”

  “This Sammy Williams definitely di
d it? He murdered our parents?” Alex asked.

  “He did.” I glanced away. I knew I should tell them the truth, but I was too weak. I couldn’t look them in the eyes and tell them I had killed their parents.

  “Thanks,” Jo said.

  I felt a twist in my chest. A simple word of appreciation shouldn’t be able to hurt.

  “There’s more,” Alex said, watching me carefully. “That’s not all you came to tell us.”

  “No.” I admitted. “I also hacked into Gorlam’s systems and modified their records. I can help you get out of here.”

  “You told us not to escape,” Alex said.

  “I said you’d be caught if you tried on your own. I used to stay here and I know the procedures like the back of my hand. I can help you do it right.”

  “Where would we go?” Jo asked.

  “I have just been given ownership, of sorts, of a large attic room. You can stay there for the short term.” I shrugged. “For a longer term if it works out.”

  Alex leaned forward. “You are trying to adopt us?”

  I laughed. “Who’d let me adopt? I can barely take care of myself. This attic room I mentioned has a hole in the roof and is overrun with vermin. It’s basically a total mess. I need some help getting it into a livable state. I guess you could say I need some slave labor. And if you need a place to stay...”

  “Why would you help us?” Alex asked. “We are nothing to you.”

  Giving them a satisfactory explanation for that was tricky. I couldn’t tell them the truth, which was that I was doing it out of guilt. And Alex was the untrusting type, so I had to give him a reason he would accept. “It’s her fault.” I pointed at Jo.

  “My fault?” Jo said. “What did I do?

  “I spent several years here and I know what Gorlam’s does to the bright and the innocent. And having met Jo, I don’t want her to have to go through that.” Alex was cautious, but I figured he’d have a blindspot where Jo was concerned. He loved her, and thus could easily understand others wanting to help her.

  “So it’s all about Jo,” Alex said. “What about me?”

  “You’re tough,” I said. “You’ll be fine. But I figured the two of you would want to stay together.” They had surely worried they’d be fostered out to different families and separated. I was offering them an escape and a way to ensure they stayed together.

  I was doing it for them, but also for myself. Helping them was the only way to deal with my guilt.

  “Why should we trust you?” Alex asked. “We only just met you.”

  “If you don’t like the living arrangements, you can leave at any time. And you’ll still have escaped the orphanage.”

  Alex and Jo looked at each other, and I could see that they were going to agree.

  It didn’t change what I had done, but it was a step toward redemption.

  I figured I could live with that.

  THE END

  * * *

  Next up, book 1 in the series, Fire Sorcerer.

  Rune’s magic kills innocent people. It’s also the only way to save those he loves. Either way, he’s damned.

  Continue Rune’s story by buying on Amazon here or turn the page to read the first few chapters.

  Fire Sorcerer – Chapter 1

  Monday 20:35

  The unasked questions hung over our dinner like a bad smell.

  We hadn’t bothered to pull out the table, instead spreading two pizza boxes between us. I lay sprawled across the floor, and Alex sat cross-legged opposite, shooting me occasional glares. Jo sat perched on the corner of her bed a few yards away. We took turns selecting cold pizza slices. The Texas barbecue pizza was warmer than the pepperoni one, and the smell of barbecue sauce wafted through the room.

  “How about a board game after dinner?” Jo suggested. Fourteen, with perpetually tangled gray-brown hair, she disliked conflict, and the tension between Alex and me had made her noticeably uncomfortable.

  Alex was a year older than his sister and had recently started overusing hair gel. He snorted. “So you can beat us again?”

  I smiled at that. She did beat us embarrassingly often. We didn’t have a full set of any one game, forcing us to mix and match and improvise. Alex and I would argue over the rules, and Jo would just figure out strategies to take advantage of whichever rules we finally decided on.

  “What about if we play some soccer?” I nodded toward the yellow indoor soccer ball in the corner. “Just the three of us. Jo in goals, and Alex and I can go one on one.”

  “Great idea, Rune.” Jo stood and moved toward the window. “I’ll close the shutters.”

  The single large attic room was our living room, kitchen, indoor soccer arena, bedroom, games room, and artist studio—a non-adult zone where fun always took priority over worry about breakages.

  “It’s too late.” Alex chewed on a mouthful of pizza, his shoulders hunched over. “There’ll be complaints.”

  I knew that Alex couldn’t give a fig about complaints. He clearly didn’t want the atmosphere to thaw, preferring to stay angry.

  Jo’s hand paused at the window shutter, then she sighed and went to her bed and threw herself on it. She clicked open her laptop.

  I went over to my side of the room. “I’ve got some improvements on my motherboards to do.”

  “Yeah, go work on your art.” Alex put as much derision into the word art as he could.

  I ignored his attempt to start a fight and plugged in the soldering iron. We lived on the attic floor of an old building, number 102 Fenster Street, affectionately known as Ten-two. The ownership of the building was unclear, and enterprising squatters had taken over the running of it. Alex, Jo and I had lived there for ten months, good months—the best of my short life, at least. I was the breadwinner and technically the parent, but decisions usually evolved out of arguments between Alex and me.

  When we’d first moved in, the place had barely been habitable. The roof needed to be fixed. Then we’d battled quarrelsome rodents who felt they’d resided long enough to earn squatter’s rights. Eventually, we turned the space into something uniquely our own. In the process we’d created one of the strangest rooms one could imagine.

  Alex, Jo and I had wildly different tastes, and we’d quickly given up on the idea of comprise regarding decoration, instead dividing the room into sections.

  The front of the room was dominated by two large sloped windows, and below them we’d built small shelving for food and other common items.

  The back was given to me. A small desk sat at the foot of my bed, and on the walls hung a jigsaw of modified computer motherboards.

  A peek into the artwork of our future robot overlords, Jo had once declared. Alex called it trash glued to a wall, but he couldn’t talk. His wall, on the opposite side of the door, was decorated with neon slogans and bar names, clearly all stolen. I insisted that the signs be switched off.

  Jo’s bed was to the left of the door. Above her bed hung posters of inspirational figures from history along with some of their quotations, which had been lovingly formed out of letters cut out of old magazines. It was impossible not to love a teen girl whose idols were Mahatma Gandhi, Theodore Roosevelt, and Steve Jobs rather than the latest pop boy band.

  I took an old motherboard from under my bed, put it on the desk, sat down and got to work. I blew the dust off, then touched the nib of the soldering iron to the bottom of the uglier components and pulled them off. In their place I added a few resistors and capacitors. I held it up to the light, then studied the other motherboards above my desk before deciding I needed to cut off the top left corner.

  A yawn struggled its way up my throat, telling me to save that work for another night. “Ready for lights out?” I asked.

  Alex’s reply was to switch on his bedside lamp. He was reading Atlas Shrugged. More evidence, if any was needed, that there was something wrong with the boy. I didn’t read much, but if I did, it would be proper books like Harry Potter or Hunger Games, not philosophical
garbage.

  “Go ahead.” Jo put her laptop aside.

  I clicked off the lights, undressed and climbed under the covers.

  “Fat tights, Rune,” Jo said.

  Jo came up with a new phrase each night, never failing to put a smile on my lips with her choice. “Fat tights, Jo.”

  “Fat tights, Alex,” Jo said.

  Silence.

  “Fat tights, Alex,” Jo repeated, a pleading note in her voice.

  Alex sighed. “Fat tights, Jo.”

  I expelled a breath. I wasn’t sure why it should be so important for Alex to reply, but it was. Alex and I made most of the noise around the place, but Jo was the glue that kept us together.

  I turned onto my side toward the wall, tucked the blanket under my arm and closed my eyes.

  Usually once a yawn tells me I’m tired, I can nod off the moment my head hits the pillow, but this time sleep wouldn’t come. I tossed back and forth, grumbling to myself. Even now, with Alex reading quietly on the other side of the room, I could feel the tension between us. Beelzebub.

  I threw off my blanket, put my pants back on and got up. “Ask your damn questions.” I clicked the main lights back on.

  “Huh?” Alex placed his book face down on the bed.

  “Come on. You want to ask me something. I can feel it.” I suspected I knew what it would be about, and I hoped I wouldn’t have to lie too much.

  Alex rolled off his bed and into a standing position. “What’s the point if you won’t ever tell us anything new?”

  “How many times do I have to say it? I don’t know anything.”

  Alex snorted. “Right.”

  “Hear him out, Alex,” Jo said. “Rune said he’d answer questions.”

  “Fine,” Alex said. “Let’s start out by talking about what Red White and True has been saying.”

  “Red White and Who?” I asked, genuinely confused.

  “Come on, everyone’s talking about it,” Alex said. “Don’t pretend you haven’t heard anything.”