Alex didn’t like being tricked by magicians. It always struck him as a form of dishonesty about the nature of reality. Maybe that was why he didn’t like magic tricks — and magic, real magic, simply didn’t exist. He’d always felt that reality was better than magical; it was wondrous. That was part of the reason he never tired of painting the beauty of the world.
But why would Jax try to trick him? What reason would she have for doing such a thing? What was there for her to gain?
The fifty thousand acres came to mind.
He couldn’t stop wondering if it could be some kind of trick to con him out of the inheritance. That much land was worth a fortune.
She claimed to have watched through a mirror as someone had gone into the gallery and defaced his paintings, but wouldn’t it make more sense that it had been done by someone working with her? It seemed like a lot of money for a con, but if she was really after the land, the cost of the paintings would be a pittance in comparison to what they stood to gain if they could somehow trick him out of a fortune likely to be worth millions.
Such a motive easily made more sense than that she had come from some distant world, that she was a different kind of human, a sorceress with magical abilities. Who was she kidding? A sorceress. What kind of fool did she take him for? Did she really expect him to believe her?
But he did.
Against everything, he did. He couldn’t explain why, but he believed her. There was something about her that struck him as not only sincere but desperate.
Either she had to be the best con artist ever born, or she really was a different kind of human from a different world. He couldn’t imagine how it could be anything other than a trick or the truth. It came down to one of those two choices, and that was what was driving him crazy.
If she really was telling him the truth, then maybe his father, who had died in a car accident, had really been murdered and his mother’s brain damage wasn’t anything natural, like a stroke, as the doctors had thought. If Jax really was telling the truth, that meant that there really was something going on, something deadly serious.
But instead of telling her that he believed her, or at least listening respectfully, he’d chased her away. He desperately wished he hadn’t done that, but he hadn’t been able to help himself.
Maybe he’d just been afraid of being a sucker, of being the dupe of a beautiful woman. Wasn’t that how con artists worked? Use a beautiful woman to lull a guy into believing anything, doing anything?
But he did believe her.
Right then, more than anything, lacking Jax, Alex decided that he needed to talk to Ben. His grandfather, strange as he could sometimes be, seemed like the right person to help unravel what had become a tight knot of doubts.
Alex smiled at the thought of explaining that it wasn’t the seven in twenty-seven, but the nine, a number powered by threes, that was really what was important. His grandfather would be astounded. His grandfather would take such talk seriously. His grandfather might even be able to put it all into some kind of context that made sense.
As Alex turned onto Atlantic Street, headed home, he saw a red glow in the sky. Within a few blocks it became clear that it was a fire. A house in the distance was burning. A red glow lit billowing black smoke.
He soon realized that the blaze was in the direction of his house. Alex gripped the steering wheel tighter and tighter the closer he got to home. Could someone from this other world already be trying to cause him trouble, maybe even kill him? He sped up, suddenly eager to get home, hoping that it wasn’t his house that was burning — there were valuable paintings there. Valuable to him, anyway.
When he spotted flashing lights in the rearview mirror he pulled over. An ambulance raced past. He suddenly felt guilty worrying about mere paintings and hoped no one was hurt in a fire. He couldn’t imagine the horror of being burned.
His heart in his throat, Alex pulled around the corner, accelerating up the street, past houses with lights all on and people standing out in their yards looking toward the blaze.
With a jolt, he realized that it was his grandfather’s house that was burning.
Alex slammed on the brakes as he pulled to the side of the street and parked crookedly at the curb. Cars with onlookers had parked to watch.
Fire trucks crowded the street, all parked at cockeyed angles. Amber lights on the fire trucks strobed the night. A police car, blue lights flashing, was parked crossways, blocking traffic.
Alex set the brake and leaped out. He ran with all his strength toward his grandfather’s house. His vision narrowed down until all he saw was the familiar home engulfed in a terrifying glow of yellow and orange flames. He didn’t even see all the firefighters in heavy yellow coats and helmets striped with reflective tape. Panic powered his legs as he ran.
An arm suddenly hooked him around the middle, spinning him around, stopping him cold. He pushed at the arms that came around and encircled him.
“Let me go! It’s my grandfather’s house! Let me go!”
“Hold on there,” a big cop said. “You can’t get any closer.”
“I have to! We have to get him out!”
Two firemen stepped in around him.
“He’s already out, son,” the older man said.
Alex stared at him. “He is?” He looked around as the cop finally released him. “Where is he?”
The senior fireman put an arm around Alex’s shoulders and walked him toward one of the two ambulances. All the flashing lights up and down the street made the scene seem surreal, otherworldly. One red-and-white ambulance was parked, all its doors closed. The back doors of the other were spread wide. Paramedics stood around, not looking at all in a hurry.
Even at a distance the heat was so intense that it hurt the side of Alex’s face. Acrid smoke burned his throat. Hoses snaked all over the street. Streamers of water arced off into the furnace of flame. It was easy to see that there was shortly going to be nothing left of his grandfather’s house.
As they got closer, Alex saw a gurney with the slight form of what might have been a body entirely covered in a gray blanket. Two paramedics stood over it on the far side.
“I’m sorry,” the man holding Alex’s shoulders said as they approached. “He was long gone when we got in there.”
Alex stood staring at the gurney. He ran the words through his mind again, and then again. They didn’t seem real.
“He’s dead? Ben is dead?”
“I’m afraid so. From the looks of it, the fire started downstairs in a workshop. That’s where we found the gentleman. One of my men looked in the basement door and spotted him reflected in a mirror. He was on the floor not far to the side. There wasn’t much left of him by then but we were at least able to use the hoses to cool the doorway enough to manage to recover his remains. I’m sorry, son.”
“I’m his only family,” Alex said in a distant voice, somehow feeling that it all couldn’t be real. “The only family left. I always told him to be careful with torches and soldering irons down there.”
“It very well may be that he passed on from a heart attack or stroke and then something hot left unattended started the fire. I’ve seen it happen that way with older people.”
“But he was burned?”
“I’m afraid so, but it’s very possible that it was after he was already gone. We don’t know yet.”
“Ben,” Alex said in a tearful voice as he knelt beside the remains covered in a gray blanket, “please don’t leave me like this. I need you so much right now.”
It felt like the world was falling in on him.
Some of the rafters gave way and the entire roof came crashing down. Huge flames roared up into the air. Columns of sparks and billowing smoke lifted into the night sky.