Chapter 4: Old Buildings Burn

The sedan did not stop.

It did not slow. The driver wrenched the wheel hard to the right, and the world swung sideways in a blur of streetlamps and shuttered shopfronts. Elara slammed against the door. The folder jammed into her ribs. Somewhere behind them, tires screamed on wet stone.

"Hold on," the driver said calmly.

It was the calmest thing anyone had ever said to her while a car was trying to kill her.

The sedan shot into a narrow service lane between two buildings, so tight that Elara could have touched the brick on either side if she had dared to roll down the window. Trash bins flew past in a clatter. A cat leaped from a ledge. In the mirror, the black SUV swung around the corner after them, headlights filling the back window with white fire.

"They're following," Elara breathed.

"They are meant to."

"What?"

"A moment, Miss Quinn."

He killed the headlights.

The lane plunged into darkness. Elara's heart leaped into her throat. The sedan drifted for a heartbeat, two, three, in complete silence, the engine murmuring like a held breath. Then the driver turned the wheel, left, left again, through a gap in a hedge she had not even seen, and the car rolled out onto a quiet cobbled street behind a shuttered market.

He turned the headlights back on. He eased the speed down to a polite crawl.

Behind them, at the far end of the lane, the SUV's lights flashed past the opening and kept going, hunting a car that was no longer there.

Elara stared at the empty rear window.

"How," she said at last, "did you do that?"

"I drove for the Calloways for eleven years." He glanced at her in the mirror. A tiny flicker of something crossed his weathered face, close to satisfaction. "And before that I drove in places that were less polite. My name is Tobias Lang. It is a pleasure to meet you properly."

She had no breath left to answer.

Her phone was still clutched in her hand. It had started shaking again, a stream of notifications she couldn't read. She forced her thumb to move, pulled up Odette's name, and pressed call.

It rang.

It kept ringing.

Pick up, she thought. Pick up, Odette, please.

Odette was seventy-one. She slept with the phone on her pillow. She had once answered a call from Elara at three in the morning, in the middle of a thunderstorm, to talk her through the grief of a failed accord. She always, always answered.

The call went to voicemail.

Elara hung up and called again.

"Mr. Lang," she said, and her voice shook. "How far is Rue de Vaugirard?"

"Eight minutes."

"Can you do it in five?"

Tobias Lang did not answer. He simply pressed his foot to the floor.

The first thing she smelled was smoke.

Elara had lowered the window a hand's width, hoping for air, and it came pouring in on the wind, thin and acrid and sweet. Her stomach clenched.

She leaned forward.

Ahead, on the corner of Rue de Vaugirard, a single orange glow pulsed above the rooftops. A column of black smoke twisted up from the old brick building, the one with the florist's blue awning on the ground floor and Odette's studio on the top.

The car had barely stopped before she was out.

"Miss Quinn!" Tobias Lang shouted. "Wait!"

She did not wait.

She ran.

The street was nearly empty at that hour, the cobblestones slick with rain, and the front door of the building stood open, hanging on a broken hinge. Smoke rolled out in thick gray waves. The florist's window had shattered. Inside, buckets of peonies and roses floated in black water, their petals scorched and drifting.

Elara pulled the collar of her coat over her nose and plunged through the door.

The heat hit her like a wall.

Her eyes streamed. Her lungs seized. But in the middle of the roaring dark, her nose did the thing it had always done, the thing she had no power to turn off. It read.

Smoke. Burning wood. Scorched wax, from the candle shop next door. The sharp green wound of crushed stems.

And beneath it all, something else.

Sweet. Cloying. Chemical.

Kerosene, yes. But that wasn't all. Under the kerosene lay a faint, syrupy note, like burnt sugar and old plastic, a smell that had no business in a flower shop.

Elara stopped dead on the staircase.

She knew that smell.

She had smelled it once before. She had been ten years old, standing in the back seat of a parked car at the edge of a burning field, watching orange flame lick the sky above her mother's atelier. Someone had pulled her out of the car and carried her away. She remembered the blanket, rough and gray. She remembered the sound of sirens. She remembered the smell, sweet and thick and wrong, curling out of the dark.

They had told her it was an accident. Faulty wiring. A tragedy, they said. No one's fault.

It's not possible, she thought. It's a coincidence. It's just smoke. It's just my head.

But her gift did not lie.

She took the stairs two at a time.

The door to the studio was jammed.

Elara threw her shoulder against it, once, twice. The old wood groaned. On the third try, it gave, and she stumbled into a room full of smoke and shadow.

"Odette!"

No answer.

The studio was a landscape of glass. Shelves of amber bottles, crystalline flasks, rows and rows of tiny labeled vials, each one a year of Odette's life. The shelves were glowing now, the glass cracking in the heat, a chorus of small sharp sounds like frost breaking on a pond.

"Odette! Odette, where are you?"

She dropped to her knees, pulled her coat over her mouth, and crawled.

The floor was warm. The air near the ground was thinner, and she dragged in a ragged breath that tasted of ash and lavender. Somewhere ahead, past the workbench, she heard a faint, dry cough.

"Odette!"

She found her at the foot of the narrow bed behind the screen, curled on the floor in her nightgown with a wet cloth pressed to her face, one thin hand still clutching a small enamel box.

The old woman's eyes opened. They were red-rimmed and streaming, but they found Elara's face and focused, sharp as ever.

"Ma petite," she rasped. "You're late."

Elara laughed, a wet, broken sound, and gathered her up in her arms.

Odette weighed almost nothing. Her bones were like a bird's. Elara hauled her upright, half carrying, half dragging her across the burning studio, past the shelves of exploding glass, toward the door and the stairs.

The ceiling above them groaned.

"Faster," Odette whispered. "Don't look back. Never look back at a fire, Elara. It remembers faces."

A flaming beam came down behind them with a roar.

They tumbled down the staircase together in a tangle of limbs and smoke. At the bottom, a pair of strong hands caught them. Tobias Lang had wrapped a wet scarf around his mouth, and without a word he lifted Odette off her feet and carried her out into the night.

The cold air hit Elara like a blessing.

She collapsed onto the wet cobblestones, coughing, her lungs on fire, her eyes streaming. The sirens were close now. Blue lights washed over the brick. Behind them, the studio window burst outward in a rain of glittering glass.

All those years. All those vials. Gone.

Odette sat on the curb in Tobias's coat, her thin white hair wild, the little enamel box pressed to her chest. She was alive. She was breathing. Elara pressed her forehead against the old woman's shoulder and wept, quietly, helplessly, for the first time that night.

"It's all right," Odette murmured, stroking her hair. "It's all right, ma petite. It's only glass."

"It wasn't an accident," Elara whispered. "The smell. Odette, it's the same smell as—"

Odette's hand stilled on her hair.

"I know," the old woman said, very quietly. "I smelled it too."

Elara drew back, staring.

Odette's eyes were wet and ancient and terribly clear. She opened her mouth to speak.

Then the first police car skidded to a stop at the curb.

Two officers climbed out. Behind them, a third car pulled in, then a fourth. A man in a dark coat stepped from the last vehicle, a tall man with a clipboard and a face as flat and cold as a shut door.

He walked straight up to Elara, flipped open a badge, and looked down at her.

"Elara Hart?"

She stood slowly. Her knees shook.

"A formal complaint was lodged forty minutes ago by Julian Hart, CEO of Hart Maison," the detective said. "It alleges theft of confidential company documents. And three minutes ago, a neighbor reported seeing a woman matching your description running into this building seconds before the fire began."

Elara went very still.

At her side, Tobias Lang straightened, his jaw set. Behind him, Odette made a small, sharp sound.

The detective unclipped a pair of handcuffs from his belt.

"Mrs. Hart," he said, "you're under arrest for arson and grand theft."