“Here!” he cried triumphantly, grabbing the edge of the threadbare carpet and yanking it up with a flourish. “She’s under—”
He cut off, the carpet falling from his fingers. He’d lifted the rug expecting to find a trap door to a basement, or even a storm cellar. Somewhere a girl could hide. But there was no door or hidden panel beneath the carpet. Just the dusty floor and a neat ponytail of long, brown, gently curling hair held together by a pink hair tie before the strands ended in a jagged, uneven fringe where it had been chopped off the base. That was as far as the mage’s observations got before he smelled something burning.
His head jerked up just in time to see the markings on the surrounding whiteboards singe themselves into the plastic. The spell he’d seen painted on the crown molding was smoking too, the letters and symbols burning into the wood as magic flared in the air.
“Go!” the mage shouted, dropping his pendant as he turned and charged for the door. “Get out now! It’s going to—”
The blast cut him off, echoing through the desert like cannon fire as the ugly house exploded.
Across the empty street, a young woman stepped out from behind the ruins of the failed subdivision’s unfinished pool shed. The hot wind from the growing house fire whipped the ragged ends of her chopped off hair straight into her eyes. She pushed them back with purple-paint-smudged fingers, scowling at the tell-tale wetness that came away as well.
“Don’t cry,” she whispered angrily, scrubbing her eyes again. “Don’t you dare cry.”
She was still working on that when the fire reached the house’s furnace. The second explosion was even louder than the first, blowing out the building’s entire northern face and sending a corner of the ugly house’s roof flying straight into the men’s fancy car.
The sight of one of Bixby’s expensive cars crushed under a smoldering hunk of support beams and clay shingles was enough to make her feel a little better. She watched it burn for a few more satisfying seconds, and then she turned her back on the inferno that had been her childhood home and ran across the empty lots to the failed subdivision’s lone dumpster, and the dilapidated sedan she’d hidden behind it.
The old car was so over-packed, it took her several seconds to clear enough space to squeeze her body into the driver’s seat. Even the dash was piled with bags and boxes, and she couldn’t see out her back window at all. But while the rest of the car looked like a promotional shot for an episode of Magical Hoarders, the passenger seat was empty except for a glittering ball the size of a large grapefruit.
At first sight, the ball appeared to be made of solid gold. On closer inspection, however, it became clear that the sphere was actually glass: hollow, ancient, paper-thin glass gilded on the inside with a gold leaf pattern so dense, it looked like a solid, shimmering wall. The combination of glass and gold leaf was as fragile as it was beautiful, and it was protected accordingly by a nest of tissue paper that was itself tucked inside a towel-lined basket and lashed to the passenger seat by both the seatbelt and a half-dozen strips of duct tape. But for all the care the girl had clearly put into packing the delicate golden orb, the glare she shot it was anything but gentle.
“You’d better be worth it,” she grumbled, scrubbing again at the tears that refused to stop coming as she started the car.
It took three tries before the old engine actually caught, and longer still before the dashboard booted up. For once, though, the car’s age worked in her favor. It was too old to have integrated augmented reality, which meant she could still drive it manually whether the computer was up or not. Good thing, too, because she’d already made it all the way to the end of the subdivision by the time the screen above the gearbox finally flickered to life.
“Destination?” the hollow voice of the GPS wheezed.
“Detroit Free Zone,” the girl replied, wincing at the blinding glare of the burning house in her side mirror. “Fast.”
That last command was pure wishful thinking, but the computer did its best. “Calculating fastest route,” it announced sedately.
The girl okayed the first suggested route as soon as it came up, tapping her fingers anxiously on the steering wheel as the auto-drive took over, rolling them out of the crumbling subdivision and onto the dark highway just in time to avoid being seen by the flashing emergency vehicles coming over the horizon from the other direction.
And back in the subdivision, unseen in the dark and the smoke, a pigeon flew out of a nearby juniper bush. It was a common city pigeon, completely out of place in the desert, but it flew like it owned the smoky sky, riding the hot updraft from the roaring fire to the top of the smoke pillar before circling back around to follow the girl’s fleeing car into the night.
Chapter 1
“Get up.”
Julius woke with a jump, toppling off the slick modern couch. He landed face down on hard white carpet, smacking his knee painfully on the corner of his sister’s abstract coffee table in the process. When he reached down to clutch his smarting joint, his sister kicked his hand away again with the pointed toe of her black leather flats.
“I have to be at the hospital in thirty minutes,” she continued as she marched across the room to yank open the hanging blinds. “That means you need to be out of here in ten. Now get moving.”
Julius rolled over and sat up, squinting against the bright ray of sunlight she’d sent stabbing across her ultra-fashionable, ultra-expensive apartment. “Good morning to you, too,” he said, furtively rubbing his injured knee, which was still throbbing.
“Try afternoon,” Jessica snapped. “Honestly, Julius, it’s nearly five. Is this when you got up at home?” She turned with a huff, walking over to the marble breakfast bar that separated her immaculately white kitchen from the other immaculately white parts of her apartment’s open floorplan. “No wonder Mother kicked you out.”
Mother had kicked him out for a whole host of reasons, but Julius didn’t feel like giving his sister any more ammunition, so he spent the energy he would have used explaining himself on standing up instead. “Where’s your bathroom?”
She stabbed one perfectly manicured nail at the hall, and he shuffled as directed, though it still took him three tries before he found the right door. The others led into beautifully furnished bedrooms, none of which looked to be in use.
Julius sighed. Two guest bedrooms, and she’d still made him sleep on the couch. But then, Jessica had always been very conscious of where she stood in the pecking order, which was usually directly on top of Julius’s head. The only reason she’d let him sleep here at all was because he was her brother, and the consequences for not helping family were dire. In any case, it wasn’t like he was in a position to complain. When you found yourself shoved off a private plane into a strange airport at dawn with nothing but the clothes on your back, you took what you could get.
He found the bathroom and showered as fast as he could only to get right back into the same faded T-shirt and jeans he’d slept in, because what else was there to wear? He didn’t even have a toothbrush, and he wasn’t about to risk Jessica’s wrath by using hers. In the end, he had to settle for mostly clean, raking his shaggy black hair into some semblance of order with his fingers and wishing he’d had a chance to get it trimmed before his life had gone down the drain. Of course, if he’d had any advanced warning of last night’s personal armageddon, he wouldn’t have wasted it on a haircut.