The Pyromancer of Renley House

The Neighborhood

By the time the first snow fell over Bensonhurst, Pietra had already burned four men that month.

Not that anyone would ever know because Lawrence hated messy endings.

Pietra's flames climbed where she told them to climb and stopped where she told them to stop.

One in the back room of a horse betting parlor on Bay Parkway. Another time it was in a black sedan idling too long outside the butcher shop on 18th Avenue.

The most important target was a warehouse that the Thermal Regulation Bureau managed. People still talked, of course.

The community always talked when something grand happened too close to home.

When it would happen, they lowered their voices in corner stores and bakeries, near steaming trays of rice balls and sesame loaves, and blamed it on the electrical layer, things like faulty wiring or freak chemical reactions.

Nobody in Bensonhurst wanted to say pyromancy. The word carried a lot of weight, all involving government raids, vanished children, and apartment buildings gone black with soot after someone lost control.

But the neighborhood children had no such caution.

They gathered on the stoop of the brownstone on Eighty-First Street in their puffy coats, mittens and knit hats, peering through the iron railings while Blaze prowled between them like a little king.

He looked like a normal cat until he didn’t. His fur rippled in low orange tongues, ember-bright along the spine, and his eyes burned the color of a furnace door cracked open.

In the cold, steam curled around him in strange shimmering ribbons. He left no scorch marks on the stone unless he wanted to.

The children adored him.

“Blaze, do the tail thing!” one little girl demanded, cheeks pink with cold.

Blaze lashed his tail once and sent a harmless spray of sparks into the air.

They shrieked with delight.

From the stoop above them, Pietra leaned against the iron railing, dark coat open despite the weather, gloves tucked into one pocket.

Snow landed in her red hair and vanished in tiny hisses before it could melt. Her face, all sharp planes and steady dark eyes, was the kind strangers tended to remember later with a shiver.

“Not too close,” she warned as the smallest boy reached for the firecat’s back.

Her voice was low and calm, but every child obeyed immediately.

That was the thing about Pietra. The adults feared her and the children respected her.

Inside the brownstone, someone shouted.

The front door opened hard enough to rattle the brass knocker.

Lawrence Renley stood there in a charcoal coat with snow dusting his shoulders and anger already bright in his face.

He had a burner phone in one hand and the look of a man trying not to put it through the nearest wall.