city of dragons 03 - fire magic by val st crowe

“Stop right there,” I said.
    He kept going.
    I blew out more fire. This time, the flames licked the back of Darrell’s neck.
    He cried out. He turned to look at me, fists clenching and unclenching.
    “I don’t want to hurt you,” I said.
    “God damn it,” he muttered. He looked back at Brian. “This isn’t over. You got that?” And then he stalked past the pool, the glass from the broken lights crunching under his feet.
    We all watched him disappear around the building.
    Connor climbed out of the pool, sopping wet. “Thanks, Penny.”
    I smiled at him. “What are friends for?”

 
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER ELEVEN
     
    I was sweeping up shattered glass outside the pool the next morning when Lachlan showed up in a pissed-off mood.
    Okay, I wasn’t actually doing the sweeping myself exactly. I was using magic to control two brooms and two dustpans. Still, I wasn’t sure it was really less exertion that way. Using magic took it out of me just as much as actually sweeping. But it was easier on my muscles, anyway.
    “Fucking bastards!” I heard Lachlan yelling. “Penny, where are you?”
    “Out back,” I yelled. “Can you not swear so loudly in front of my customers?”
    He came out the back door. “There were no customers anywhere.”
    “People heard you on the moon,” I said. “What’s wrong?”
    He looked around the pool at the sweeping brooms. “What happened here?”
    “Trust me, you don’t want to know.”
    “Did you kill someone else?’
    “No,” I said. “Connor has this friend who has an abusive boyfriend, and I told Connor that his friend could stay here, and then the boyfriend showed up last night—”
    “Jesus, Penny, you should have called me.”
    “I handled it,” I said. “Connor and I did.”
    “But should you be handling things like that?” he said.
    “Look, just because you think it’s horrible that I fight magical creatures when I have to doesn’t mean that—”
    “I meant that it could be dangerous,” he said. “And I would think you’d be trying to be careful.”
    “I am careful,” I said.
    He started to say something else. Stopped. Shook his head. “Call me if something like that happens again.”
    “It was the middle of the night. You would have been asleep. And it would have messed up your ability to do your job if you hadn’t gotten your beauty rest.”
    “Yeah, well, that’s not going to be a problem anymore.” He went over to one of the chairs by the pool and threw himself down in it.
    “What?”
    “I’m on suspension,” he said.
    I made the brooms stop sweeping and came over to sit next to him. “Suspension.”
    “You are too, as a matter of fact.”
    “Me? They can’t suspend me. They don’t even pay me.”
    “Well, that’s only because you refused compensation,” said Lachlan. “But you’ll find that you’re locked out of the computer network if you try to log on.”
    My jaw dropped. “That’s horrible.”
    “Yeah, they took my keys and my badge and my gun and they kicked me out of the station.”
    “But why?”
    “Because of the shit with Alastair,” he said. “Because they suspect us of murdering him.”
    “You are kidding me,” I said. “They can’t suspend you over that.”
    “They can and they did,” he said. “It’s with pay, if that means anything. But they said that if I was a murder suspect, I wouldn’t be able to do my job properly.”
    “Lachlan, this is insane.”
    “I know. And I think that if they’re suspending me, it’s not just because we’re suspects. It’s because we’re the number one suspects in the case.”
    “But he was killed by a slayer.”
    “Apparently not. They must know something that we don’t know. They must have some reason to be pretty convinced that it’s us.”
    “But it’s not us.”
    “You know that. I do too. But that doesn’t mean that they’re just going to take our word.”
    “Well, we have to prove our innocence, then,” I said.
    “Yeah, I was kind of