Burn for Me: A Hidden Legacy Novel by Ilona Andrews Read Free Book Online Page B

regarded the towers of glass and stone. He stood motionless, as if overwhelmed by the sheer size of the buildings.
    Moments dragged by, towing a convoy of minutes.
    “ Oh come on, ” the male voice said.
    Rogan leaned back. The wind stirred his long, dark hair.
    “ Let it rip, ” the first woman murmured.
    The video blurred for a moment. I held my breath.
    Nothing.
    “ And? ” the male voice asked. “ You told me he was some sort— ”
    The white tower on the right slid to the side like a cut tree.
    This couldn’t have been happening. Nobody could cut through a building.
    Cracks streamed up the tower. On the left, thin puffs of grey dust shot out of the office complex windows. The building held together for one long, torturous second. The front of it sagged and plunged down, tons of bricks and stucco plunging, like the waters of Niagara Falls. Thunder pealed as thousands of tons of rock, steel, and concrete crashed onto the street.
    Oh my God. My insides went cold. The sheer power. A human being couldn’t contain that much power.
    Offscreen, people screamed. Their cries had no words, only the raw, primal sounds of intense human terror.
    The tower collapsed. Dense smoke, churning with grey and black dust, billowed like a tsunami from both buildings, clashing in the middle of the street right over Mad Rogan. Six feet on both sides of him the blast waves broke, rolling back as if bouncing from an invisible wall. Debris crashed into the barrier and ricocheted into the street. He stood enveloped in a funnel of clear, calm air.
    Wind swirled Rogan’s dark hair. He turned his hands palms up.
    The recording blurred. To the left and right, the buildings adjacent to the rubble, a red tower and a brown apartment high-rise, fractured and fell. The sound was deafening.
    “ Stop him! ” the man screamed.
    “ He can’t be stopped, ” the original woman howled over the roar of the falling buildings. “ He can’t hear us or see us! We have to wait it out! ”
    Mad Rogan’s feet left the ground. He rose two feet above the pavement.
    “ It’s not me, ” the levitator screamed. “ It’s not me, I can’t reach him! ”
    The recording blurred.
    The camera trembled. The heavy truck parked on the left slid toward it.
    “ Jesus Chri— ” a man yelled.
    The recording stopped midword.
    Bern and I stared at the dark screen. I sat, shell-shocked, not sure what to do next. I’ve studied many Primes. I’ve never seen one who could do that. This was inhuman.
    “I think we should reconsider getting involved,” Bern said.
    “It’s too late,” I told him. My voice sounded dull. “I took the job.”
    We looked at the screen some more.
    “We can’t tell Mom,” I said.
    “Oh no, no, we really can’t.” Bern clicked the video off and went to erase the browser history.
    “Leon?” I guessed.
    “Mhm. He likes to snoop, and he’ll blow our cover.”
    The video disappeared, but my dread didn’t.
    “What kind of magic was that?”
    “The consensus is, he’s an inorganic telekinetic.”
    “Telekinetics move things. They don’t cut buildings in half.”
    “He does,” Bern said.
    “What’s Mad Rogan doing now?” I asked.
    “He left the military four years and eight months ago. Nobody has seen him since. By all indications, he became a shut-in. The chatter on the House groupie forums says he was horribly disfigured in the war.”
    “Yes, and he’s waiting for just the right woman to come and love him as he is.”
    Bern gave me a small smile. Primes, like any celebrities, had their admirers, especially the young, handsome, male, unmarried Primes. They spawned a whole subculture on Instagram, Tumblr, and Vine. They even had their own social network—Herald. Most of the content consisted of photos of Primes, fanart and fanfiction, often with a romantic bend, and wild speculation about who was going to marry whom and what sorts of powers their kids could possibly have. Usually powers carried over from generation to