I lunged forward and fell to my knees. Grandma Frida lay on her stomach. I flipped her, grabbed her by her arms, and pulled her across the floor. Mad Rogan congealed from the smoke, picked my grandmother off the floor, and headed for the exit.
The smoke ate at the inside of my mouth. It felt like someone filled my throat with crushed glass, and it was cutting into me. My head swam. I stumbled after Rogan, trying to find the exit. Suddenly the smoke ended and I shambled into fresh air. My lungs felt like they were on fire. I bent over and coughed. It hurt like hell.
Mad Rogan lowered my grandmother to the ground. Mom dropped by her. We couldn’t lose her. Not yet.
“Grandma,” I croaked.
“We’ve got a pulse, but it’s weak.” My mother pulled my grandmother’s mouth open and began doing CPR.
Please don’t die. Please don’t die, Grandma.
My mother began chest compressions. Tears rolled down my cheeks. Grandma Frida was always there for us. She was always . . . What would we do . . .
A fire truck rolled into the street.
Grandma coughed. A word came out, creaky, like an old door. “Penelope.”
Oh God. Oh thank you. Relief washed over me like a cold shower. I exhaled.
“Mom?” Mother asked.
“Get off of me.”
My stomach constricted. I crouched, trying to get a hold of myself. Mad Rogan’s shoes came into view. Mad Rogan. The man who told me I would regret it if I walked away from him and who now conveniently showed up to be the hero. The fear and nausea boiled together into anger inside me. We almost lost Grandma Frida. Someone came into our house, someone chained our doors shut, and then someone tried to kill her. Someone did this, and I would make them pay. The fury drove me up. I stared into Rogan’s eyes. Something broke inside of me like a chain falling apart. My magic shot out, savage and raging like an invisible thundercloud, and locked onto Mad Rogan.
He strained, his teeth gritted. I felt him fighting me, but my anger was whipping my magic into a frenzy. I had questions. He would answer them, damn it.
I spoke and heard my own voice, inhuman and terrible. “Did you order someone to hurt my grandmother?”
His will fought mine, steel-hard and unyielding, but I was too angry. He refused to bend, so I chained him in place and squeezed.
He unlocked his jaws. The answer was a growl. “No.”
Truth.
I compelled him to answer. I had no idea how I was doing it, but I would do it some more. “Did you order someone to set this fire?”
“No.”
Truth.
“Did you set it yourself?”
“No.”
Truth.
My hold was slipping. He was too strong. It was like trying to twist a railway tie into a knot. “Do you know who did?”
“No.”
Truth.
I released him. He moved. His strong fingers fastened on my wrist, sending an electric shiver of alarm through me. His face was terrifying. His voice was suffused with quiet, barely contained aggression. “Don’t do that again.”
I should’ve been scared, but my grandmother had almost died and I was too furious and too tired to care. “Don’t like when the shoe is on the other foot? Let go of me.”
He opened his fingers.
There were only two people in my life right now who could have done something like this arson, and I had just eliminated one. Parents and sisters is something you do when you are five. They’re pulling you down and you’re letting them. No. Adam couldn’t be this stupid, could he? Did that bastard actually try to kill off my family?
Paramedics loaded my grandmother into an ambulance. It must’ve come while I’d been interrogating Mad Rogan. The first responders tried to keep the oxygen mask on my grandmother’s face. She wasn’t having it. My mother walked over to me.
“The last thing she remembers is getting the lug wrench. There is blood on the back of her head.”
“Someone hit her.” I would make them pay.
“Looks that way. I’m going to ride with her to the hospital.”
“I’m good,” I told her. “Go.”
She gave Mad Rogan an evil eye and climbed into the ambulance.
A fireman emerged from the workshop. The smoke had mostly dissipated. The fireman nodded at the inside of the warehouse. “Looks like someone left a lit cigarette near a can of gasoline. Ought to be more careful.”
“Thank you, we will.” I turned away from him to hide my expression. Unfortunately that put me face-to-face with Mad Rogan. An unspoken question hung in the air as the fireman walked away.
“My grandmother doesn’t smoke,” I said quietly. “All gasoline is stored in the metal cage. All munitions are stored in the other cage. Before I left for lunch, the warehouse had no chains on its doors.”
An SUV pulled up. Two men in dark pants and dark polo shirts exited. One was in his forties, dark-skinned, his short hair barely touched with grey. He was carrying a large, dark suitcase. The other man looked Latino and was about ten years younger. They moved like soldiers. I’d been around enough of them to recognize the walk, the unhurried but efficient stride of people who had a definite objective and had to get to it. They halted a few feet away.
“These are mine,” Mad Rogan said. “They’re arson specialists. If you give them permission, they will examine your warehouse.”
I nodded. I still didn’t trust him, but he had nothing to do with the arson.
“Go ahead,” he said.
The two guys went inside the warehouse.
I was suddenly so tired. My eyes were burning. My throat still hurt.
Mad Rogan raised his hand. A bottle of water landed into it. He handed it to me. “Rinse your mouth and eyes. Don’t swallow.”
I opened the bottle, gulped, swished the water inside my mouth, and spat. The scratching subsided.
The younger of the men reappeared in the warehouse door and nodded to us. We started toward him.
“Thank you for saving my grandmother,” I said.
“You’re no good to me if you’re burying a relative instead of looking for Pierce. I did it for a completely selfish reason,” he said.
Lie.
We walked inside. The older of the men was kneeling by the melted gasoline container. Soot covered the concrete floor. The suitcase lay open in front of him. Inside, vials and test tubes rested in a protective cushioning of foam.
Mad Rogan took in the canvas-covered vehicles. His eyebrows rose. “Is that a tank?”
“Technically that’s a gun on tracks. Mobile field artillery. That’s a tank in the corner. His name is Romeo.”
Mad Rogan shook his head in disbelief.
We reached the older man. He held up a test tube so I could see it, then used a small wire tool to scrape some of the soot off the floor. He lowered the tool into the test tube and shook it. A small clump of soot fell into the glass. The man added a few drops of a clear solution in a plastic bottle. The soot turned blue, then slowly changed color to pale purple.
“They used a party buster,” the older man said. “It’s a military-grade, slow-burning, smoke-producing compound. They mixed about four gallons of it with half a gallon of gasoline and lit it up. The woman who was loaded into the ambulance, where was she when you found her?”
“On the floor, facedown,” I said.
“She’s lucky,” the younger man said. “Floor was the safest place, plus the high ceiling helped. This stuff is designed to clear personnel from buildings without doing structural damage. You stay too long in it, you die.”
“Whoever did this knew what he was doing,” the older man said. “Party buster is expensive and hard to get without a clearance. Most civilian arson inspectors don’t test for it, and it dissipates quickly. Mixing it like that will make the incident look just like a normal gasoline fire. One more thing. I talked to the firemen. They say a cigarette was the point of origin. I’ve been doing this a while and I’m telling you now, a lit cigarette may have been here, but it wasn’t what started the fire. The container melted from the back and top down. Someone put a strong heat source against the back of it. Like a blowtorch.”