Rogue Descendant (Nikki Glass) - By Jenna Black Page 0,38

have been able to stop Konstantin before he killed innocents. Maybe instead of giving Jamaal a hard time about his obsessive practicing with Sita, I should be practicing my own powers just as obsessively. I’d practiced throwing and shooting because I understood exactly how that worked, but I hadn’t done a whole lot with the hunting because it was hard to figure out how to train for something I didn’t understand. Maybe if I’d put some serious time and effort into it . . .

Frightening how easy it was for me to find reasons to blame myself, even when I knew that was exactly what Konstantin wanted and that I was playing into his hands.

For a while, I was too busy wallowing to notice the incongruity in last night’s fire. But when my mind kept circling back to my failed hunts, something jumped out at me.

The article said the fire had started around ten last night. That was when I’d been dreaming about hedge mazes and directing Steph toward what was presumably Konstantin’s location. My powers had cut out the moment the rain set in, but we’d been way across the city from my condo when that had happened.

I unfolded my D.C. metro area map. Steph said we’d been in Maryland when I’d directed her to get off the Beltway, and while I’d had her make quite a few turns as I homed in on the “signal,” we’d been traveling in a northwesterly direction at the time my supernatural radar went silent. My condo was northeast of that location, and quite a distance away.

It didn’t necessarily mean anything. I couldn’t be certain my powers were actually leading me to Konstantin, and even if they were, he probably hired a third party to set the fire for him. He wasn’t the type to do his own dirty work if he didn’t have to. But that line of thought reminded me of my doubts about Konstantin being the culprit. He had always struck me as coldly calculating, cruel, and dangerous, but not crazy.

No, an attack that left three innocent civilians dead pointed more to a mind like Emma’s, dangerously unhinged. Maybe Cyrus and I were both wrong about her. Maybe having Erin killed hadn’t been the end all, be all of her revenge.

I’d been having a hard enough time tracking down Konstantin when I’d been sure he was behind the fires. Now I had another viable suspect, one who was just as much under the Olympians’ protection. And yet, whoever the firebug was, I was going to have to catch them, and catch them soon. Before more innocents died.

I gave myself a few hours to get over the initial shock and horror of what had happened, locking myself in my suite and turning off my phone. If I didn’t pull myself together before I talked to anyone, I was going to say something I would later regret. Either that, or I’d burst into tears, which was almost as bad. I didn’t know what whoever it was had planned for the next attack, but I was sure the other shoe would drop soon, and it would be worse even than the condo fire. If I was going to stop it from happening, I had to keep my emotions as under control as humanly possible.

Hours of sitting alone in my room and brooding didn’t do much to improve how I felt, and I eventually decided no Zen-like state of calm was going to descend on me out of the ether. I didn’t have time to sit around anymore anyway.

I didn’t like my chances of hunting down Konstantin in the next handful of days, especially not with the rain cutting off the moonlight. That meant my best chance of preventing another attack was through diplomacy. Whether the person behind the attack was Emma or Konstantin, they were both Olympians, and that meant they answered to Cyrus, at least in theory. I’d already seen evidence that Cyrus was not the nice guy he pretended to be, but I believed he genuinely wanted to avoid a war between the Olympians and Anderson’s Liberi. Maybe he could be persuaded to put a leash on whoever was behind the fires.

It was a long shot, particularly if it really was Konstantin who was behind them. No matter what terms he and Cyrus had come to in order to effect their peaceful regime change, I didn’t think there was a chance in hell Konstantin would take orders from his son. Maybe