Pyromantic Read online

  There was a rustling noise and the soft scuff of shoes as a little girl came out from behind the box pile. She didn’t look like much—shorts, a faded Batman tank top, and flip-flops, her inky hair held back in two ponytails. Little pink heart-shaped sunglasses covered her eyes. That didn’t stop us all from going into defensive mode. Sid dropped into a crouch, knives appearing almost magically in his hands. A large fireball flared to life in front of me, and Bianca disappeared. Only June and Alistair didn’t react.

  The little girl propped her sunglasses on top of her head, both eyebrows going up with them. “Whoa there, cowpokes. A little high-strung, are we? Chill your knickers. I’ve been invited.”

  None of us twitched until June confirmed what the little girl, introduced as Ashley, said.

  “What did you think I was going to do?” Ashley asked, clearly amused.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. But we’re stuck in a warehouse with several dead bodies and you appeared out of nowhere. Not everything looks dangerous at first. You could have been wearing glamour. Better to be prepared and alive than assume you’re not a threat and get added to the human Popsicle pile.”

  Ashley turned to June. “I like her. Can we keep her?” She clasped her hands like she was praying. “Maybe we can send her up to Seattle to keep Dipshit McGee out of trouble?”

  “No one can keep that boy out of trouble,” June said absently as she drew a circle around us in chalk. She closed herself inside with us. Only Ashley was left out. “No one break this line until I say, no matter what you see or hear. Got it?”

  June pulled out a small knife and sliced into her forearm. Blood welled, dripped, and hit the ground. It felt like the temperature dropped down even lower. Each breath burned like frost coating my lungs.

  She started with the women. They pieced themselves together—arms reattaching, holes filling, bones knitting together with sickening pops. It became less pleasant from there. Once they were whole, June started questioning them one at a time. The first just started … screaming. The shrill sound felt like a physical assault. It raked at my eardrums and my heart. June did her best to calm her, but in the end she had Ashley give her a little tap, and the woman collapsed and went still. The second girl didn’t scream, but her eerie silence was almost worse. The only sound she made was this pathetic bleating noise when she sobbed. Other than that she just rocked herself and stared off into space.

  Ashley put her back down the same way. I’m no expert, but I think their traumatic deaths had torn holes in their sanity. Even their dead selves couldn’t cope. Which, by the way, was absolutely spectacular news for us. Because I’d have to go out and hunt down whatever this thing was.

  “So far all I can tell you is that they were human. Literally torn apart—probably by the were.” June’s wound had stopped bleeding. She flexed her arm, starting the flow again.

  “Are you sure?”

  “From the way they went back together and the general scene, I’m pretty sure. This was not a nice death, Alistair, and not a quick one.”

  “Is that why they’re acting like something out of a Japanese horror film?” Sid asked.

  June nodded. “Between what happened and the drugs, I think that’s a fair assessment.”

  The third girl wasn’t much different from the other two.

  “Do you think the guys will be more of the same?” Alistair asked.

  June pursed her lips in thought, her arm dripping blood onto the floor again. I wonder if she even noticed. “Probably,” she said, finally. “But I can’t be sure. Do you want me to do them both at once?”

  “If you think it’s safe.”

  “Alistair, I’m raising the dead. It’s never safe,” she said. “That’s why we have the circle. But I think I can handle it.” June flicked her hand, making a thin line of blood drops hit the floor. The room temperature dropped again and I shivered.

  The boys snapped to life, and I can honestly say it was nothing like the girls. Elias reached over and grasped Luke by the arms, hurling him into the warehouse wall. Before Luke even hit the floor, Elias was running toward us at full speed, only stopping when he smacked into June’s circle. He flew backward, skidding along the warehouse floor. Before I could blink, he’d rolled up onto his feet and was back, stopping just short of the circle. His face twisted in a snarl of rage, spittle flying from his lips. He clawed at the circle. When that didn’t work, he began throwing himself at it, over and over, testing different spots for any possible weakness.

  We were all so focused on him, no one noticed when Luke got to his feet. I didn’t spot him until he’d halved the distance between the wall and our protective bubble. He didn’t thrash against it like Elias. Instead, he opened his mouth and everything went white. Blinding. I couldn’t see anything or hear anything. The pain was excruciating. Every nerve ending hummed with electricity, shocking me down to my core.

  Then it cleared and it felt like I was floating. The world was a dream and Luke was its center. All I wanted was to be near him. If I didn’t go to him right now, I would wither and die. He was my water, my air—

  I’m not sure who broke the circle. One minute, my head was stuffed with fluffy clouds and angel song; the next I was staring at Luke’s collapsed body on the floor. Ashley stood over him, her hand out. She’d tapped the siren back into the realm of the dead, and that’s why my head had cleared. Stars and sparks, he could have killed us all.

  That’s when Sid screamed.

  I turned in time to see Bianca grab Alistair and throw a veil over him. They popped out of existence. She must have spread it out over the rest of us, too, because I could only see Sid and Elias grappling on the floor. Sid was an experienced fighter, but it doesn’t matter how many blades you have and how fast you are when the person you’re fighting is already dead. Elias was tearing into Sid with clawed hands until gashes bled from his chest, his leg, and his face. Sid stopped screaming when Elias cracked a rib and punctured his lung.

  Ashley left the safety of the veil and tried to jump in, but Elias dodged her advance, grabbed the back of her shirt, and tossed her across the warehouse. I couldn’t get a clear shot from where I was standing, and I didn’t want to throw fireballs and hit Sid. Besides, flesh wounds meant nothing to Elias. Nothing short of debilitating was going to work on him. So I did the only thing I could and hurled myself onto Elias’s back. Even with my arms around his neck, he didn’t register me as a threat. He continued to wail on Sid, who was still doing his best to defend himself, but each block was a little slower. He was losing a lot of blood, and his breath was wet and labored.

  I’m not the biggest or the strongest person around. I don’t carry weapons. But there’s a reason I don’t have a knife or spend a lot of time on my right hook. I don’t need a weapon because I am a weapon. I held Elias tight and let myself burn. No fireballs, no concentrated bursts. Just flames from the crown of my head to the tips of my boots.

  I could live a thousand years and never get used to the smell. It was all I could do to not gag. I tightened my grip. I could fall apart later, but there was no time for indulging in weakness. Elias’s skin and hair started to blister with the heat before I moved to fat, and soon muscle.

  He was so far gone that he didn’t notice right away. My nostrils filled with the stench of hot, rancid fat, and I squeezed tighter. Elias spun around and tried to grab me, but I hung on like a barnacle. I wouldn’t last two seconds if he managed to dislodge me. I was getting dizzy from the spinning before Elias figured out that what he was doing wasn’t working. He skidded to a stop and grabbed onto my arms, his claws digging into my flesh. I felt a warm wash of blood as he tightened his grip and I screamed, but I kept burning.

  It’s not the easiest thing to burn a body quickly. The average human body is 75 percent water. And I had to go deep with Elias. He wasn’t feeling pain, so a light burn wasn’t going to affect him. I needed to burn him to ash and bone, and that takes a lot of heat, somewhere between 1,100 degrees and 2,000. I’ve never st
uck a turkey thermometer in someone, so I don’t know exactly. But I’d looked it up online—I wanted to understand exactly what I was capable of doing to a person.

  It’s not the cleanest process. The soft tissue vaporizes. Skin becomes waxy, blisters, and splits. Muscles and tendons tighten around bone as they char. It’s not something even I’m usually up close and personal with. I sent fire into Elias’s entire body, but I focused on the brain in the hopes that every zombie movie ever was right: destroy the brain, destroy the zombie. Eventually he dropped to his knees. He swayed there for a minute, his grip on my arms loosening. Then he fell forward in a puff of ash.

  Despite what you think you know about cremation, people don’t actually turn into powder. Vampires, well, that’s a whole different situation, but the human skeleton doesn’t burn very well. Crematoriums have a separate machine they use to grind down the bones. So while some ash puffed up into my nose, eyes, and mouth, there was just as much leftover charred flesh and bone beneath me to cushion my fall when Elias finally disintegrated beneath me.

  I stayed on the floor for a moment and tried to breathe, thinking about the amazing shower and the gallons of mouthwash in my future. For future reference, charred werewolf ash tastes awful. Like singed hair and oily fat. I gagged.

  June had to pull me up, my arms still death-locked around what was left of Elias’s neck. She dragged me over next to Sid. He was at least breathing normally again. He’d twisted into a partial push-up and was spitting up blood to clear his lungs. We made a neat pair.

  “Try not to get blood on me, okay?” I asked.

  He reached over, his chest dragging into the ash, and smeared blood down the front of my shirt with one hand.

  “You did that on purpose,” I said.

  He nodded, then spit one more mouthful of blood onto the floor.

  “Well, you’re now covered in Elias, so we’re even.”

  “This is why we’re friends,” he said, then collapsed onto his back. He held out his fist so we could bump knuckles. “Thanks.”

  I reached over and tousled his hair, making sure to really smear the oily black ash deep into the roots. It would be a bitch to get out. “You’re welcome, hoss.”

  Sid laughed, though I could tell it was painful for him.

  We were all sitting in a rough oval, a smoldering werewolf in the middle, and not the sexy kind of smolder, either. Bianca had dropped her veil and everyone had reappeared. Ashley bandaged a dazed-looking June’s arm while Alistair pressed a folded handkerchief to a gash on her forehead. Bianca sat close by, a stunned look on her face. I’d have to clean my own wounds. Lock usually did that for me. I felt a pang of loss for my friend.

  “So that was fun,” Sid said, using the edge of his shredded shirt to wipe the blood off his face. Some of the smaller gashes were already closing.

  “What on earth happened?” I asked. “Was he rabid or something? Can werewolves get rabies?”

  “Not that I’m aware of, no.” Alistair had a grim look on his face.

  June took a cigarette out of the pack in her pocket, but her hands were shaking too hard to light it. I sparked it for her and she mumbled a thank-you.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that,” she said.

  Alistair lifted an edge of the handkerchief to check June’s wound. “Bianca, can you fetch the first-aid kit from the car? This could use a few butterfly bandages. And grab the camera. I want better definition than our phones can offer.” Bianca snapped out of her reverie and jogged out of the warehouse. The look Alistair gave June was stern. “I shouldn’t have asked you to raise two at once. I didn’t think it would be that risky.” His words took the blame, but his tone implied that she should have known, too.

  Ashley knotted the end of the makeshift bandage. “It shouldn’t have been that dangerous. June always has control. That guy … It shouldn’t have happened.” She poked Alistair in the chest. “So don’t grouch at her. You may be the boss up here, but you’re not the boss of us.” Venus would have cut her finger off for that. But Alistair merely raised one hand in surrender.

  “My apologies, mighty Harbinger. I didn’t mean any harm.”

  Ashley scowled but stopped poking him.

  “I should have had control,” June said, watching the smoke drifting up. “It was like his mind was … gone. Just gone.”

  Bianca returned, first-aid kit and camera bag in tow. She handed the kit off to Alistair, then proceeded to take pictures of everything in the warehouse. The camera was large and professional and looked comically huge in Bianca’s small hands, but she clearly knew what she was doing.

  “Has that happened before?” Sid asked, grabbing some alcohol wipes, ointment, and gauze from the kit. “The mindless revenant thing?”

  June shook her head. “When I raise people, even weres, they usually come back as themselves. It doesn’t matter if they’ve rotted down to bones, flesh re-forms—they look whole. If a piece was removed before they died and wasn’t buried with them, that’s a different thing. A severed head won’t regrow the body. It has to be, you know, together.”

  “So whatever happened to him,” I said slowly, thinking it through, “happened before he died. Whatever it was ate his brain so that there wasn’t enough for him to fully regenerate when you raised him. Is that what we’re saying?”

  June mashed her cigarette into the warehouse floor, earning another reproving glare from Alistair, who was trying to apply the butterfly bandages to her head wound.

  “Stop moving,” he snapped.

  She ignored him. “Yes, Ava, I think that’s exactly what we’re saying.”

  “You forgot something,” Sid said, tearing open an alcohol wipe from the kit so he could clean some more blood off himself. “What do weres do best?”

  I looked at the skin he was wiping clean. “They heal.”

  “Exactly.” Sid winced as the alcohol hit an open wound. “So not only did it eat his brain, it did so in such a way that either his body didn’t have time to regrow the damage, or it couldn’t.” He motioned at me to hold my arms out so he could dress the small punctures in them. They weren’t bleeding much anymore, but with what was in the warehouse, cleaning them was a good idea. It hurt like hell, but it was a good idea.

  “What could do that?” Ashley asked.

  Sid threw the wipe on the floor, his grim look highlighted by the occasional flash of Bianca’s camera. “I don’t know. Silver, maybe. But in his brain? I wouldn’t even know how that could happen.” He carefully smoothed on ointment and opened the new roll of gauze.

  “Secret experiment?” I offered. “You know, like Wolverine and the adamantium. Maybe we should bring back just his head and get someone to run tests on it.”

  “No,” Alistair said firmly. “We don’t know what happened, but it happened to the siren as well. We can’t take the risk that it might be a contaminant or a virus. Something passed by contact. I won’t jeopardize our people. Remember what I said, Ava. After Bianca is done with the photos, you’re going to have to burn the whole place down.”

  I started to protest about the loss of evidence, but he cut me off. “I said no. We burn it all. After what I’ve seen, I don’t want even the lowliest protozoa crawling out of this building alive when you’re done.”

  “Kill it with fire?” I asked, already feeling weary from Elias.

  “Exactly. Kill it with fire, then we head to the Inferno. Everyone showers. Thoroughly.”

  Sid snorted. “You don’t have to tell me twice.”

  “I’ll get someone to bring us new clothes. Everything—and I do mean everything—on your person will be bagged and burned. Whatever this thing is, I’m not bringing it into my home.”

  Sid and I both grabbed our respective jackets.

  “Yes, even your jackets. Ava, I know yours is warded. I’ll get it replaced. Ashley, what about you?”

  “My clothes are technically a projection. I’m corporeal—I can affect things on this plane—but I’m not here in the same way t
hat you are. I could snap my fingers and change my outfit if I wanted.”

  Alistair made me leave my carefully collected bag of mystery ooze in the warehouse. He wasn’t taking any chances. Once everyone was a safe distance away, I was asked to do my thing. I felt a twinge of sadness for everyone inside, that no one would really know what happened to them. But Alistair was right. So I burned everything down to ash and bone.

  I was shaky by the time I finished. Between Elias and the warehouse, I’d been burning not only hot but also for a sustained amount of time. Sid fetched me a bottle of water from the trunk of Alistair’s car, and I swallowed a few electrolyte pills. Hopefully they would hold me over until I could rest or get something to eat.

  “All right, then. Everyone is headed back to the Inferno,” Alistair said when I was done. “Ashley, are you staying with June?” June, cleaned and bandaged, looked like nothing had bothered her today, until you caught sight of the faint tremble in her hands.

  “I’ll stay for a while yet,” Ashley said. She hovered close to June but gave the necromancer her space.

  “But that’s way out of the way for Sid and me.” Not only did I not feel like going back to Boston tonight, but that drive in these clothes, smelling and feeling like they did … I shuddered.

  “I know it’s a long haul, but we need to contain this as best we can.” Alistair examined us carefully, ending with me and Sid. “June can ride with me, and we can clean her up enough to be passable, but you two…”

  “Look like a murder scene,” I said.

  “Which means you’re going to have to ride close to us the whole way home, and Bianca will have to veil you.”

  Sid rubbed a dirty hand over his face. You can only clean yourself so much with tiny wipes. “Because it isn’t difficult enough to ride a bike on a busy road where some of the drivers can’t see you, now we get to actually be invisible.”