Fire & Heist Read online

  “I checked!” Liam said. If Charles is the most responsible one, then Liam is the least. Mom used to say he’d forget his head if it wasn’t attached. In response, he once bought some plastic heads from a wig shop and left them around the house where she could find them.

  “Obviously not well enough.”

  “She’d left!” Liam cried. “Movie started at seven-fifteen, ninety-minute run time, plus previews. After that, she’d planned to be out back at the grill.” He’d taken notes on my plan? I didn’t think anyone was even listening when I told them about it, especially Liam, who rarely took anything I said seriously. Or anything anyone said seriously. No one had even said our traditional “Bye, have fun storming the castle” when Gabriela had swung by to pick me up. “Everyone left, exactly as they were supposed to. I did the sweep, came in to disable the cams, exactly as planned.” Liam was the family’s expert on all things with wires. He loved fiddling with anything electrical or explosive. As a little kid, he was constantly accidentally blowing up the TV. You know, as one does.

  Still dangling, I felt my head begin to ache. “Guys, I can tell we all have a lot to talk about, but would you mind helping me down first?” I crunched myself up to grab the arms of the chandelier. My sweaty fingertips touched the metal, then slipped, and I swung back down. Ow. Also, the smoke alarm was still beeping loud enough to echo inside my skull.

  “You should have seen her come home,” Liam said, poking Charles in the shoulder. “If you were in position, how did she get by you? Tell me that.” He poked again. Poke, poke, poke.

  Charles caught his finger.

  “Ow.”

  Charles let go. “Tuck needed help with the window,” he said, his voice reasonable, as if of course nothing could ever be his fault. In Charles’s case, age also came with a large dose of superiority. As the oldest brother, he was the crew leader for all their schemes.

  Tuck kicked the glass shards from the vase toward the center of the room, into one pile. “You didn’t need to break it. Three more minutes and I would have had it melted,” he muttered. Tuck was always convinced he could conquer any task with just a few minutes of effort. After that, he usually lost interest. But he was the best of the three of them with flame—that was due to natural talent, though, not practice. He wouldn’t have had any problem incinerating that chopstick.

  “You couldn’t maintain the heat,” Charles said.

  “You didn’t give me a chance.” Muttering again. He was going through a mumbling stage, Mom had said. Dad was always hollering at him to speak up.

  “You had chances,” Charles said. “This wasn’t amateur hour. We needed perfection. Everyone had to be on their game. If you couldn’t perform, then I had to replace you.”

  “Seems like the only one off their game was you, Charles,” Liam pointed out. “You left your post. You let her slip past you. You broke the window, instead of letting Tuck melt the glass, which was probably what alerted her.”

  Charles, in addition to being the oldest, was also the strongest, due to the amount of loving attention he paid to his biceps. He used that strength to loom menacingly as he argued. “I was not the one who—”

  I cut into their argument again. “Hello? Up here?”

  They ignored me, again. Instead, they kept hurling accusations at one another until they were standing nose to nose in the middle of the fallen statues and broken glass. Smoke was beginning to curl out of the corners of Liam’s mouth, and Charles’s hands had curled into fists. Tuck just looked like he wanted to hide under a table.

  Brothers can be such idiots.

  Stretching my arms out, I began to swing. The chandelier creaked but swayed with me. I reached my arms toward the railing, as if I were a trapeze artist preparing to leap to the next trapeze. My fingertips grazed the wood. I swung back, then forward. The chandelier creaked louder. I heard the plaster in the ceiling crack and had the fleeting thought that this was a bad idea—then my hands grabbed onto the railing as, simultaneously, the ceiling gave way. I clung to the railing as the chandelier dropped. A foot down, the wires caught it.

  All three brothers looked up.

  I scrambled over the railing. The chandelier now hung by its wires only, like a loose tooth. The ceiling around it was cracked.

  All three of them, in exactly the same tone of voice, said, “Sky!”

  And I took that as my cue to leave.

  Scurrying down the hall, I hurried to the security room. It occurred to me that even though my idiot brothers had failed to steal the piano, they had succeeded in shutting off all our security systems—which meant we were vulnerable to any non-idiot thief who decided to visit us tonight. It also meant that since it was my brothers’ work, I might be able to figure out how they’d done it. If they’d shut it off in the software, it could be a relatively simple fix. I knew the codes too. If Liam had rigged something with the hardware…that could be trickier. Regardless of what my brothers did in the foyer, it was the height of stupidity to leave the entire security system down. Stepping over the spilled lo mein, I walked into the security room.

  My father was already there, on his back, underneath the desk. The screens still showed static.

  “Hand me the electrical tape,” he said without any kind of preamble.

  I located the roll of tape on the table, next to the pens, and handed it to him. I should have guessed he’d be here. Dad was security obsessed. It was kind of unavoidable, given who and what we were.

  He took it, grunted thanks, and said, “Let me guess: you got yourself down without any help and came straight here to reset the security system, rather than staying with your brothers to clean.”

  I hesitated for a moment, wondering what was the correct answer. Since the only options were the truth and an obvious lie, I opted for truth. “Yes?”

  He waved the tape at me, scolding with it. “Don’t question. Answer. You need to learn to speak with conviction. No crew will ever follow your lead if you don’t project confidence. Try again.”

  “Yes, Dad. I swung myself off the chandelier and then ran here.”

  “You broke the chandelier.”

  It wasn’t a question, but I figured it was safer to answer anyway. “Yes.”

  He snorted, either in amusement or disapproval. I voted disapproval. He hadn’t laughed in weeks, not since Mom had left. “And you left your brothers with the mess.”

  There was only one answer to that too. “Yes.”

  “Hit the reset,” Dad said.

  I flipped a red switch off, then on. The computers whirred as they rebooted. I pushed the power buttons on all the screens. One after another, they blinked back on. Very nice. My brothers might have their specialties, but Dad is good at everything. In fact, I’d yet to find anything he wasn’t great at. He set an impossible bar for all of us, which explained many of my brothers’ issues. Not me, of course. I have no issues. Except for a broken heart, I amended.

  “Check the phone.”

  I lifted up the receiver. No dial tone. “Not yet.”

  Grunting, Dad fiddled with more wires. His body was blocking my view. Squatting, I tried to get a better look at what he was doing. “You’re blocking the light,” he complained.

  “Teach me?” I asked.

  “You don’t need to know this.”

  In addition to protecting the house, Dad liked to protect me. It drove me crazy when he refused to tell me things that my brothers clearly knew, supposedly for my safety. I didn’t know if it was because I was the youngest or because I hadn’t led my first heist yet or what. For our kind, leading your first heist is a major milestone, even better than learning to talk, walk, or do long division. “If I’d known how to do this, I wouldn’t have needed to dangle from the ceiling, and the chandelier wouldn’t be broken,” I pointed out.

  He considered that for a moment, then waved me under. I sc
ooted underneath the table with my father. Lying on my back, I looked up at the rat’s nest of wires. It was the closest I’d been to my father in probably years. We aren’t a physically affectionate family. My mother used to hug me about once a year, usually on my birthday, and I couldn’t remember the last time my father hugged me. He smelled like smoke. Not cigarette smoke, but forest fire smoke. Pine smoke, the kind that makes you think of winter, even though it’s spring. I always loved that smell. Made me feel safe.

  Dad pointed out the different wires, explaining the pitfalls in trying to bypass a security system. Liam had cut them in a certain order, one that wouldn’t trip the redundant alarms in place to prevent someone from disabling the system by cutting them. But with an unfamiliar system, you’d be better off hacking the software. You never knew when someone might rig their hardware to a bomb. Cut the wrong wire, and boom. He worked quickly, stripping the wires and twisting them together. “Later tonight, I’ll replace all the wires, but this temporary fix will get the system operational again.”

  “What if someone gets in while we’re restoring the system?” I asked.

  His hands stopped moving. There were shadows on his face, but I thought I saw his cheek twitch. A smile? A frown? I couldn’t tell. At last, he said in his gruff voice, “I don’t say this often enough, but I am proud of you, Sky.”

  I felt a rush of warmth, and now it was my cheek that twitched. Just a little dust in my eye. “You’re using a spell,” I guessed. Spells cost gold, both to purchase and to use; we prefer to rely on human security systems, but I knew my father kept a few on hand.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Then you knew I had come home.”

  He smiled, a very rare sight. I stared at his lips, curled within his beard. “Yes, of course,” he said again.

  “But you didn’t warn them.”

  “This was their test.”

  I was tempted to smile too, but then I thought of the mess in the foyer with the statues, the vase, and the chandelier. At least the statues hadn’t fallen on top of my brothers. “They’re angry with me.”

  “They’re angry with themselves,” he corrected.

  “And me.”

  “And you.”

  I sighed, then wondered if this new proud-of-me dad would be open to an actual conversation. “They’re always angry these days. Everyone is.”

  Dad resumed work on the wires. His big hands were quick with the delicate strands. He shifted from one computer to the next. “It is a difficult time.”

  I took a deep breath. “Can you tell me—”

  “No,” he cut me off. “It’s better if you don’t know.”

  “Like the security system? Dad…the more I know, the safer I am.”

  He now looked sad. “That is very much untrue. And the older you get, the more you will understand how very much untrue that is. There are many things that I wish I could unlearn about the world. Keep your innocence as long as possible, Sky. It’s a precious thing.”

  “I’m not a baby anymore,” I said. “And she—”

  “Enough.”

  Charles might be able to imbue a name with disapproval, but Dad is the master at filling a single word with a wealth of meaning. That word had sadness, anger, and everything else lumped into it. I changed tactics. “Why were Charles, Liam, and Tuck trying to steal the piano? It’s too recognizable to be pawnable. If they wanted it just for the gold, it would have been easier to dismantle it in the room then head out the window.”

  “That was the test. Entire piano.”

  “Why?” I asked. “When exactly is that situation going to come up?” As far as I knew, not many people owned gold grand pianos.

  His hands quit moving. “They needed a distraction from tomorrow.”

  “What’s—” I stopped myself. How could I have forgotten? Tomorrow. Mom’s birthday. “Oh.” It wasn’t quite an answer. I didn’t see how stealing Mom’s piano today could make tomorrow easier, but it clearly made sense for my father, and he just as clearly didn’t want to talk about it. But I had one more question that I wanted to ask, one I hadn’t dared ask since the day she disappeared. Today, though, he was proud of me, so perhaps I could dare…“Do you think she’s still alive?”

  “Yes.”

  I exhaled. He hadn’t ever implied that she wasn’t, but I’d been secretly worrying. No one had told me much when it happened. Mom had been off on a mission that was supposed to dramatically increase our wealth—you know, the usual. But then something had gone wrong. Or more accurately, she had done something wrong. And she hadn’t come back. And just like that, the whole family was disgraced.

  I couldn’t help thinking: If she was still alive, why hadn’t she come back or sent word or made contact of any kind? Didn’t she care about us? “Does she need help?” I asked.

  “No.”

  I wished I could force him to tell me. Surely the truth couldn’t be as bad as all the various scenarios I’d conjured up, most of which involved my mother dead, hurt, trapped, or subjected to horrible science experiments in some human supremacist’s illegal laboratory. Whatever she’d done, we could fix it together, couldn’t we? Like the security system. We just needed to know which wires to mend. We were a formidable family. I’d always been told if we stuck together, there was nothing we couldn’t do. And now I wasn’t even supposed to ask questions.

  I thought of Ryan and how I’d thought we were a formidable team too, through thick and thin and all of that. I’d counted on us being together forever. Even used to daydream about our wedding day—the whole stupid wedding dream, complete with a marshmallow-fluff dress and a bouquet that matched the table arrangements, as if this was anything I’d normally care about. Emma and Emily, my best girl friends (or former best girl friends), had already dubbed themselves my co–maids of honor. All Ryan and I had to do was stick together another few years. Instead, we’d quit just shy of eight months. Well, sixteen years, really, but less than one of them spent on kissing terms.

  I’d known Ryan since we were both in diapers. Not that I remember that. But I’ve seen pictures. I’d had pigtails. He’d had an adorable potbelly. Our families used to summer together in the California Stronghold, one of the wyvern-run states. The two of us learned how to swim together, and how to evade doing chores. I remember holing up for hours and hours in secret hideaways that we’d find on the beach, creating elaborate games and practicing breathing fire. We even had a secret alcove on his family’s estate here in Aspen, tucked behind the gardens at the top of a cliff. It had a view of the mountains and a lake. That was where I’d first kissed him, age six, a peck full on the lips. He’d wiped it off.

  When I was eight years old, I decided I was going to marry him. I was careful not to tell him, of course, since everyone knows boys can’t be trusted with secrets like that. I did inform my parents, in case they wanted to make arrangements. They weren’t interested. Our kind likes to do arranged marriages, mainly to make sure the genetic pool stays strong enough to keep the were-dragon traits but not so inbred that we end up born with scales instead of human skin. Since Ryan is only half were-dragon—his mother is human—and I’m full, I thought it would make sense for everyone if he married me.

  Mom hated when I used the word “were-dragon” to describe us. “We’re wyverns,” she used to say. “Be proud of it. You can trace your heritage back generations, to before our family’s exile from Home.” But ever since I first heard about werewolves, I’ve loved the word were-dragon. It describes us nicely, plus it has a neat double-meaning with the word “were.” Our ancestors were dragons. And now we’re were-dragons—humans capable of turning dragon.

  Or dragons capable of turning human.

  Semantics.

  Of course, the fact is that no wyvern had transformed into a dragon since Sir Francis Drake sank the Spanish Armada with his dragonfire in the 1500s. Our shapeshi
fting skill was lost generations ago. But all of us had training in the useful art of breathing fire. And we were all pretty much fire resistant, which is an awesome plus when it comes to fresh-baked cookies. No need to wait for them to cool. Or use oven mitts. Just go straight for the still-in-the-oven cookies. And no worrying about scalding the roof of your mouth either. We’re rated up to about 2,000° F. In other words, we can toast a marshmallow on a finger, but a blowtorch would hurt us. (Average propane torches burn at 3,600° F, and oxygen-fed torches routinely reach up to a searing 5,000° F. You get to know these fun facts when you’re born with literal firepower.)

  We also, as I mentioned, all really love gold. And that was what made it so odd that Dad had chosen the piano as my brothers’ target. Dad may have wanted to smash it, but he wouldn’t want that much gold to leave the property. “What were they going to do with the piano once they stole it?”

  “What would you have done with it?” Dad asked.

  I wouldn’t have tried to steal it in the first place. There were lots of other more portable valuables around our property. Plus that was Mom’s piano. But Dad wasn’t looking for that answer. “Stripped the keys and turned them into necklaces to wear on special occasions.”

  “I will give you a necklace. Six ounces, gold,” Dad said in a decisive voice. “You deserve it for your work today.”

  I thought of the chandelier. He hadn’t seen the ceiling yet. Plus I knew he liked those statues, and several of them were most likely damaged. The vase was certainly beyond salvaging (though it wasn’t gold so he might not care). “I made a mess.”

  He sighed. “Your mother made a mess. We are simply doing the best we can with the pieces that she left behind.” He pushed himself out from under the desk and stood up. Around us, the screens were now showing different views of the house, including the foyer. Tuck was sweeping the broken glass into a trash can, and Charles and Liam were pushing the Sir Francis Drake statue back up onto his pedestal. Charles had taken off his shirt, because he likes his muscles the way a toddler likes his teddy bear.