The firebug glared at me. Her hands twitched.
I pinned her down with my stare. “Try me.”
The woman looked into my eyes. All the fight went out of her. She swallowed and shook her head.
A wise decision, but she gave up kind of quick.
“This is done.” I indicated the house around us with Sarrat’s point. “This criminal enterprise is finished. Your gang is finished. If I see you again, I’ll kill you. Leave here, take nothing.” I pointed at the firebug. “You stay.”
The shorter trafficker looked at Lantern Jaw. “Are we just …”
“Yeah.” Lantern Jaw skirted around Jace’s body and headed to the door.
“What about Dewane?” the shorter guy said.
“Fuck Dewane.” Lantern Jaw went out the door.
The shorter guy blinked, thought about it, then grabbed Dewane’s arm, strained, and got him upright. They struggled past me. At the doorway, the shorter man bared his teeth at me.
“This isn’t fucking over. We’ll come for you.”
“Fort Kure, on the beach. You can’t miss it. Get the whole gang, get your friends, their friends, and people they know. Bring everybody. Save us all some time.”
They staggered outside.
I went to the cage with the little boy. It was locked with a simple padlock. I looked at the firebug. She grabbed the lock. Her fingers shook so it took her three tries to get it open. I took the little boy out of the cage. He was so thin, he weighed almost nothing. His fingers were bruised and there was a burn on his right forearm, where someone had put out a cigarette. He stared at me with big, dark eyes. I hugged him gently, and he clung to me, as if afraid I would disappear.
“Are there more?”
The firebug nodded.
THERE WERE three more in cages in the basement. Two boys and a girl, none over the age of six. The girl and the oldest boy knew their addresses, the two younger kids only knew their first and last names, but it was enough to go on.
We put two boys onto Thomas’ horse. I settled the little girl on to Cuddles and lifted the smallest boy into the saddle in front of her.
“Hold on to him, kiddo.”
She nodded. She was short and dark-haired, with round cheeks and dark brown eyes, but something about her reminded me of Julie. Maybe it was the way she hugged the little boy. Like she had decided that this was her job and was determined to do it.
The firebug waited for me on the lawn. I surveyed the house and the three vehicles in the driveway. “Torch it.”
She did a doubletake. “There are money and weapons in there…”
“I know.”
She raised her hands. Magic swirled inside her, slow and sluggish. Moments crawled by. Her power was moving now, a ghostly outline of a pinwheel of flames forming between her fingers. She strained, spinning it more and more tightly with her hands, winding it into an invisible ball until it glowed with nearly white light. She held it there for as long as she could, trying to build it up, but it broke free. The fireball ignited to life, streaked to the house, and smashed into the front window.
Thunder pealed, the sound of magic bursting from containment of the spell. Glass exploded, and flames surged in the living room.
The firebug waved her arms around. Now her earlier hesitation made sense. She needed a lot of time to get her power going, while I only needed a fraction of a second to swing my sword.
Twin flame jets erupted from the woman’s hands and washed over the house and the cars.
Pre-Shift, this would have gone down completely differently. There would have been a formal investigation and warrants issued by the court. There would be due process, a trial, and public outrage. Now it was just me.
It wasn’t that cops were inept or corrupt. It was that they were stretched thin, and the power difference between them and the magically juiced-up criminals was often too vast. We lived in an unsafe age where one individual could overpower thousands if their magic was strong enough. My father was the living example of how that setup could go catastrophically wrong. Given a choice, I would take the pre-Shift system over ours any day.
The house was fully engulfed now, and the firebug was breathing hard and sweating.
“Stay here until it burns itself out.”
“You’re letting me go?” she asked.
I nodded. “If I find out that this neighborhood burned down because you took off, I’ll find you.”
I started down the street, leading Cuddles on. Thomas gave the firebug the kind of look that would haunt one’s nightmares and followed me, guiding his horse. We rounded the corner. Thomas drew even with me. The line of his mouth was straight and hard, like he was trying to keep his words in.
“Share,” I told him. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”
“They are traffickers. Slavers.”
“Yes.”
“You could’ve killed them all.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you? They sold Darin. God alone knows what’s happening to my son. Do you know how many kids they stole?”
“Many.” The cages were grimy and worn, likely used for years.
“Why did you let them go?”
“Your brother said Red Horn Nation has about 50 members.”
“Yes.”
“What’s the most important thing to a gang after money?”
He gave me a blank look.
“Reputation,” I said. “Street cred. They run on fear and pride. If I killed them all, it might take them awhile to figure out who did it. If I only left one alive, the rest might not believe what happened. They would want to verify and probably shut that survivor up to buy themselves time to think things over and plan their response. I don’t want them to think. I want them to react. “
Thomas blinked at me.
“Very shortly, five people will be explaining to the Red Horn’s big boss that I came into their house and squished them like the cockroaches they are. I killed their underboss, slapped them around, made them give up the name of their client, took their merchandise, and set their house on fire. Five people is too many to shut up. They will be making a lot of noise, so if the Red Horn wants to hold on to the tattered shreds of its reputation, they’re going to retaliate and fast, before this news spreads. I told them exactly where to find me. They will get every warm body they have down to Fort Kure tonight.”
“You want them to attack you?”
“I want them to attack my husband specifically, but yes.”
“You’re talking about 50 people! Maybe more than 50!”
“Well, they are one less since Jace is dead, so I softened them up for him.”
He stared. I winked at him. If the Red Horn thought I was scary, I couldn’t wait for them to meet Curran.
“You’re crazy,” he said.
“When my oldest kid was thirteen, her best friend sold her out to a group of sea demons. The demons tied her to a cross, and she watched as they devoured her birth mother’s corpse. When my son was a little over a year old, someone sent a group of assassins to kidnap him. They wanted to eat him so they could grow their power.”
Thomas was clearly having a rough time coming to terms with the words coming out of my mouth.
“Of all the human filth, I hate human traffickers the most. Wilmington is too small for both of us. It’s either Red Horn or me, and I just finished painting my second living room. I’m not leaving. Do you know how hard it is to make a straight edge along the trim? They used to have painter’s tape just for that pre-Shift.”