“How is the roof still intact?” Darius asked as he filed in behind me. “And the walls?”
I reached around and tapped my back. He took hold of my belt, which was close enough. I stepped forward, heard the moan of the badly charred floor, and felt it give a little. It didn’t break. I took another step, pausing when he was forced to follow me. It held under his weight, too.
“This was a well-contained magical fire,” I said, running my hand along the wall. Black flaked away.
“Hellfire?” he asked through a tight throat. “The dog said that the mage you killed could do hellfire.”
I scowled back at him, a knee-jerk reaction, since he hadn’t shown up in the bar—at least not publically—until after Red had told me that.
My focus snapped back in front of me. “Not hellfire, no. That rumor is false. He didn’t have the power. How long were you there for that conversation?”
He didn’t respond. Then I remembered his stalking human friend, who must have followed me into the bar and kept the text messages rolling. How annoying.
“He could create fire, though,” I said. “That’s what burned away my eyebrows, in case you haven’t made the connection. It seems someone else has the same ability.”
I scuffed the ground with my toe. The carpet had been largely burned away and parts of the wooden floor beneath were blackened. In a small spot near the wall, a hole had burrowed.
“The floor should be worse off. Magical fire can easily be contained from rising, but it has to sit somewhere. There are very few who can suspend fire in midair. Very, very few, and none, that I know of, are human.” It was only a half lie.
“Those who can do hellfire can also suspend it?”
There wasn’t much Darius was scared of, but clearly hellfire was high on that short list.
“As far as I know, those who work with hellfire can only blast it, not control it. Think of an extremely powerful flamethrower with three settings—destruction, massive destruction, and total destruction. It gushes out, along with the conjurer’s power and energy, eats everything in its path, and then goes out. If that were the case here, we’d see melted walls from the blast radius.” I shook my head, noticing the fire pattern winged up in some places to form a V. “No, this is a normal kind of fire, created with magic instead of sticks and matches. This fire was kept on a tight leash.”
I traced the fire patterns in the air with my fingertip, noticing how the burn marks stopped at the same place near the ceiling on all the walls. I ducked and ran my fingers along the floor before knocking. “Heat weakened the properties of the wood, but it didn’t ignite. It was not an efficient fire.”
“What does that mean?” Darius asked, following me to the doorway of the room that had held the book. The floor in this room had been destroyed, and remnants of the framework and the ground below showed through. A picture was starting to form.
“An efficient fire is one without much smoke. It is mostly flame. You see, smoke is actually fuel for the fire, in gas form. If a fire isn’t efficient, that means it’s creating a lot of fuel in the air. Here, the floor’s smoke-damaged but mostly intact, which suggests an inefficient fire. But these walls say otherwise.”
The living room was about the same, with the right side of the room worse off. Warning shivers raced across my skin. I did not like the look of this one bit.
I worked toward the kitchen at the back of the house. “When fire is burning wood, the actual wood is not aflame. Rather, it’s the air right at the surface. There is the tiniest gap. If you see a burning log, the outside might be charred, but if you stop the fire, the middle of the log will be fine. In essence, it’s the smoke that’s burning. The heat changes the wood’s properties, which creates chemical gas, which then fuels the fire. The more heat, the faster the burn. Long story short, the massive amount of heat in this house should’ve burned the floor as badly as it did the walls. But the floor is fine in some places, and not in others. Our very tricky mage could float fire. He kept it off the ground in some places, but let it burrow in others. How? Why?”
I let out a breath as I broke out in a cold sweat.
“He controlled all this magically?” Darius asked. I felt a tug on my belt as the floor bowed under my feet. It didn’t break, though.
I touched Darius’s hand attached to my belt just to assure myself I wouldn’t fall in. “This belt better be quality, Darius.”
We edged forward another few feet, and I answered his question. “Yes. He controlled it very well, or else…” I cut myself off as a light bulb snapped on in my head. Air filled my lungs in relief. “He must’ve laid down a type of magical floor. I’ve never seen one used as fire retardant, but it could work, I suppose. The floor’s probably messed up in a couple of places because the mage didn’t root the spell.” I scratched my head. “I should’ve asked Callie about mages who don’t root spells. Usually that’s a rookie mistake. The one in the Realm wasn’t rooted, either, though that one had some power behind it. Strange.”
I rubbed my temple, thinking this through. I couldn’t do these spells on my own, but my magical encyclopedia was extensive. If it hadn’t been, I’d be dead twenty times over by now. “So he creates the magic buffer first, protecting the ceiling. The layer for the floor comes next, but that spell can’t be interrupted by walking through it, so he’d have to do this room by room. The fire seems moderately controlled, which is hard for a human to do. It would take the highest level of power. Or…” I tapped my chin in thought.
“Or?” Darius asked, a captive audience.
“Or it would take the right knowledge and a boost of power. The unicorn blood is the boost. The knowledge and sustained increase in power could come from a demon. Is our tricky mage playing host to a demon? Curious minds want to know.”