Rogue Descendant (Nikki Glass) - By Jenna Black Page 0,11

if none of what had happened had gotten to me, I resumed my run. I doubt I managed more than a couple hundred yards before I gave it up as a lost cause.

THREE

The phone call came at three thirty Saturday morning, startling me out of a deep sleep. For a moment after I opened my eyes, I just lay there and hoped the annoying ringing sound would go away, but of course it didn’t. I sat up, groping for the phone and staring blearily at the illuminated numbers on my clock. I’d had a land line installed in my room, but I rarely used it. I picked up the receiver and crossed my fingers it would be a wrong number.

“Hello?” I croaked.

“Don’t panic,” Steph’s voice answered, and it sounded like she’d been crying recently. “I’m all right. No one is hurt.”

Well, that woke me up in a hurry. I yanked the chain on the bedside lamp, blinding myself with the glare, and rubbed at the crust on my eyes.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, panicking despite Steph’s orders not to. Anything bad enough for her to call me at this hour was going to suck even if no one was hurt.

Steph sniffled. “It’s our house.” Steph lived alone, so I could only assume that by “our” house, she meant the house we’d grown up in. My throat tightened. “There was a fire . . .” Her voice faded into more sniffles.

My own eyes burned with sympathetic tears as something cold and hard sank to the pit of my stomach. “How bad?”

Steph’s more of a crier than I am, and it took her a while to get her tears under control enough to talk. “The worst,” she finally said. “It’s gone. Everything’s . . . gone.”

I tried to absorb the enormity of what had happened, but I couldn’t quite wrap my brain around it. Maybe I wasn’t fully capable of it. Until I’d moved in with the Glasses at the age of eleven, the concept of a “home” had been alien to me. Homes were just temporary way stations, interchangeable places to sleep. I’d resided in more houses and apartments than I could count. The Glasses’ house meant more to me than all the rest of them put together, but I knew instinctively that it didn’t mean as much to me as it did to Steph and her parents. After my childhood, I just didn’t let myself grow attached to places the way normal people did.

That didn’t mean I didn’t feel the loss.

I’d spent the happiest years of my life in that house, after I’d finally come to accept that the Glasses were going to keep me no matter how badly I acted out. It was warm and beautiful, decorated with exquisite taste while still managing to look comfortable and inviting. It was the Glasses’ history, Steph’s childhood, and my safe haven, all rolled into one. I was going to miss it, but my adoptive family was going to grieve for it. And I was already grieving for them.

“What happened?” I asked. I wanted to say something comforting and sympathetic to Steph, but I knew better. Steph would expect me to be as devastated and heartsick as she was about the loss of our childhood home. Comforting her when I was supposed to be equally upset would make me sound aloof and distant. I was heartsick, but not for reasons she’d understand.

“They don’t know yet,” Steph said. “The fire’s out, but they won’t be able to investigate until daylight.”

I hoped like hell it had been a freak accident of some sort, but I couldn’t help wondering . . . Emma wasn’t allowed to hurt me or my family because of the treaty between the Olympians and Anderson. But I doubted that protection applied to our property. What also gave me pause was the fact that this wasn’t the first fire that had affected me in recent weeks. Earlier this month, the office building I was renting space in had had a fire, one that destroyed my office. It hadn’t started in my office, and the fire investigator had determined that some idiot had left his space heater on by accident. Maybe it was completely unrelated, but it seemed like quite the coincidence.

“Have you called your folks yet?” I asked.

The Glasses were on an around-the-world cruise and had been gone for two and a half months already. They still had three more weeks left, and I hated the idea of spoiling it for them