Burn (Elemental Series Book 4)

by Rose Wulf

  “Teleported?” Dean repeated, for a moment letting his incredulity hold his focus. “I thought you explained everything to her months ago?”

  Blake inclined his head and tucked his hands into his pockets. “I did,” he said, “but she’s pretty uncomfortable with it all. I don’t think most of what I told her has really sunk in.”

  Dean shook his head and let himself slump against the wall beside the counter. “At least she didn’t call me out in front of everyone, then.”

  “Yeah,” Blake agreed. Silence stretched between them for a second before he added, “Listen, I’m sorry about earlier. You were right. I was out of line. Whatever’s going on between the two of you is none of my business.”

  Dean opened his mouth to insist there wasn’t anything, but he swallowed the words before he could say them. There might not officially be anything going on between him and Arianna, but he couldn’t deny that there was something. They weren’t just flirting for the hell of it. If they were, she never would have opened up to him. Not to mention he’d known a lot of burn victims, and while he never liked seeing someone being rushed to the hospital—let alone knowing he’d been too late to save them—this was the first time he’d risked exposure. When he’d decided to take the job, his parents had made it explicitly clear that he needed to maintain his secret, even around his team and even when there were people trapped in a burning building.

  Tonight, though, he hadn’t even hesitated.

  Reining that thought in for later reflection, Dean sighed and offered, “I’m sorry, too. It’s possible I overreacted.”

  Blake’s lips twitched and he said, “Maybe, but you usually overreact.”

  Dean rolled his eyes even as Blake started toward the living room, where he assumed Brooke was, and let himself fall in line behind his brother. He was undoubtedly on the verge of facing a barrage of questions. It would greatly help his explanations if he could focus on the moment. But all he could really think about was how long a night lay ahead of him.

  ****

  “You started with the house?” Jacob repeated, a lecture building in his voice. “Have you not been paying attention?”

  Eric ground his teeth and held his brother’s glare defiantly. “I’ve been paying more attention than you!” He took a deep breath and began counting off on his fingers as he added, “You said we needed to throw them off—well, as you so graciously pointed out, we’ve never started with the house before. You said to target Dean and his new lady friend—it was her house, so that’s covered. What more do you want exactly?”

  Jacob leaned back in the old-fashioned armchair, schooled his expression into neutral, and asked, “And what do you have planned for the sequel?”

  Arms crossing over his chest, Eric replied, “I’ll figure it out. Believe it or not, I do have an imagination.”

  “Threatening notes and house burning,” Jacob summarized dully. “Yes, I can see that. Very creative.”

  “Who the hell are you to mock me?” Eric cried, shooting to his feet with shaking fists. “They were good enough ideas for you!”

  “That’s exactly the problem,” Jacob continued, speaking as though Eric weren’t yelling in his face. “We’ve done that before. As you just pointed out, we need to throw them off-balance. That means doing something new, not simply doing things out of order.”

  “Jacob is right,” Victor interrupted, turning his chair from the window in order to face them. His dark eyes were tired and hard at the same time. Eric recognized the look easily. It was his decisive face. “We need to try something entirely new.”

  Eric swallowed and forcibly lowered his voice as he turned his attention to his father. “Then what do you suggest?”

  Victor looked away, jaw tight, and said, “What we need is to plan. Planning takes time, so while we work on our coup de gras, we must make it seem like we’re continuing to focus on attacking them.” He met Eric’s gaze again and added firmly, “That is your job, Eric. You are in charge of assuring them that our tactics remain the same. Keep them on their toes, keep them on edge, and whether or not they’re expecting something, they’ll be unprepared for our final move.”

  Knowing an order when it was presented to him, Eric inclined his head. “If you say so, Father.”

  ****

  The sky was on fire. Clouds burst with red and orange flames, the blaze overwhelming the once-blue sky. It was raining ash and the heat, even down on the ground, was unbearable. Indescribable. Arianna was sweating more than she had in years. Her whole body was tired, as if exhausted by the inferno overhead. Just working up the energy to wipe the sweat from her eyes seemed like too much.

  Had it always been like this? No, surely it hadn’t. But then when had this happened? When had the world become this way? And why did she feel as though something were wrong?

  Arianna looked around again, trying to see if she could spot whatever was unsettling her. It was hard to focus past the heat. Ash was consistently dripping onto her skin and sending renewed sparks of fire and pain through her body. But all around her the city seemed normal. People were walking around on the sidewalk, hurrying to their cars, and her neighbor was leisurely strolling down the street with their dog on a leash. It all seemed perfectly ordinary. Familiar. As if no one else had noticed that the sky was burning—that the world was burning.

  A rushing, roaring sound behind her startled Arianna into turning around, and her eyes widened as she watched her apartment go up in flames. All at once the building went from not burning to completely engulfed—windows blown out and walls scorched as the flames within tried to rejoin the bonfire in the sky. Another, more intense, wave of heat slammed into her and Arianna stumbled back. She could barely even open her eyes now. The hot air was drying them out too quickly. There was no way this was right. And why weren’t any of the other houses burning?

  “Run, Ari,” Gianni suddenly whispered in her ear.

  “Gianni?” Arianna called, shock overriding the nauseating heat for a blissful moment. She spun on her heel, hoping to catch a glimpse of her brother, but no one was there. Car horns blared. Aggravated, oft ignored dogs barked at anything that moved on the other side of their fences. Ash continued to fall, thicker now.

  “You have to get out,” Gianni’s voice insisted. It seemed like he was still just behind her. She could almost feel his breath as he whispered his instruction. “Get out now, Arianna. Hurry.”

  Arianna turned again, increasingly desperate to find the source of the voice. “Gianni?” she called again. “Where are you? What do you mean?”

  His voice was more distant—harder to distinguish—when he called to her again. “Hurry, Ari. Get out of here.”

  “Wait!” Arianna cried, reaching toward the burning sky as if she could catch her invisible brother. Her hand caught ash, and even as the ash ignited in her fist, her eyes landed on the black burn on her wrist. Where Eric had shot her with lightning. Then the flame leapt from her hand, arching toward her as if alive. Alive and furious.

  Arianna sucked in a breath and shot up, her chest heaving. She threw the lightweight blanket off her, desperate to cool down, and shifted until her feet were on the floor. A nightmare. Of course that had been a nightmare. It wasn’t raining ash. She wasn’t burning. But I did… She looked down, to the wrist she knew Eric had grabbed, and confusion trickled in when she realized there wasn’t a wound to be seen. Not even a fading redness. How was that possible? Come to think of it, where was she?

  She lifted her gaze and, now that the immediate terror of the nightmare had begun to recede, found herself sitting on an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar bedroom. She took a deep breath and slowly turned her head, taking in the otherwise empty space. Before she could really process more than the deep red of the bedding, her heart leapt back into her throat as the door swung open.

  And she was staring—with startled eyes—into Dean’s concerned, slightly darkened, blue gaze.

  “Dean…?” she asked. Even to her own ears she sounded as c
onfused, relieved, and flustered as she felt.

  He visibly deflated, released the doorknob, and strode toward her. “Ari,” he grunted a moment before he pulled her into his arms. He wound an arm around her waist as his other hand tangled in her hair, supporting the back of her head, and she found herself pressed wholly into him. “Fuck,” he groaned on an exhale. “I’m sorry.”

  She didn’t need to ask to know what he was apologizing for. Clearly he thought it was his fault Eric had attacked her and practically set her on fire. At least that accounts for the dream. Without thought she slid her arms around his torso and softly replied, “It wasn’t your fault.” But she was glad he was there, no matter what his motivation was. She hadn’t realized how tense and anxious she felt until her body started to relax in his arms.

  “Like hell it wasn’t,” he grumbled, his lips brushing the shell of her ear. A chill dragged down her spine and a very different feeling crept in. A feeling she suspected that hit him, too, because the arm around her waist tightened as he pulled her head back and then his lips were over hers.

  All at once the tension fled from her body and she had to tighten her grip of his shirt to keep from collapsing completely. His tongue swept past her lips, pulling a faint moan from her throat, and a new kind of heat flared low in her belly. She rolled her tongue over his and his chest rumbled with a nearly-silent growl that vibrated straight through her.

  “Really?” The completely unexpected interruption came from Angela, but Arianna didn’t fully process that until after Dean had released her lips and allowed her to try and catch her breath. On the heels of that realization came a flood of embarrassment almost strong enough to squelch the desire still burning in her blood.

  Dean’s hold relaxed, slightly, but he made no move to actually let her go. He swallowed heavily, undoubtedly still catching his own breath, and managed, “What happened to knocking first?”

  “The door was open,” Angela returned plainly. She didn’t pause long enough for Dean to comment before adding, “Anyway, now that she’s awake, she should probably eat something. I’m gonna go wash my eyes out with bleach now.”

  Arianna pulled in another breath, unable to see more than a portion of Angela before the younger girl was gone again, and let her head drop to Dean’s shoulder. She couldn’t decide if she was more humiliated by the fact that they’d been caught behaving like teenagers or the fact that having been caught wasn’t enough—it seemed—to keep her from wanting to continue.

  Neither spoke for several long seconds, even after Angela’s footsteps had faded away, but Arianna found the silence wasn’t at all awkward. She was disturbingly comfortable, in fact, if she ignored the lust still smoldering in her blood. And it was somewhere in that stretch of time, with Dean’s arms still wrapped around her and his campfire-reminiscent scent filling her lungs, that she finally registered the gnawing pit in her stomach. Angela had been right. She was starving. She felt like she hadn’t eaten in over a day.

  “What time is it?” It hadn’t really occurred to her to ask, but now that she’d said it, she realized she was becoming increasingly curious. Surely she’d been unconscious for a little while—and that reminded her of a few other questions she officially intended to ask—but it still seemed awfully bright outside for the hour it must have been.

  Dean shifted and replied, “Uh, almost one. Hungry?”

  “One?” she repeated dumbly. Were all the lights on in the house, then? A frustrated sigh escaped her. She knew she shouldn’t eat at one o’clock in the morning. She would have to wait. “Ugh, no, I should wait until morning.”

  “Why would—?” he started, but he cut himself off and a chuckle rumbled up in his chest before he pressed his lips to her temple and added, “One o’clock in the afternoon, Ari. You should eat.”

  Arianna sputtered, too thrown off by what he’d said to be able to linger on the tenderness of his gesture, and pulled back enough to meet his stare. “What? That’s impossible.” She paused, registering the idiocy of what she’d just said, and corrected herself. “Never mind. Yes, I’m starving, please tell me you have food. And also, there are some things I think you should tell me while I eat. Like how I’m not in ICU.”

  Dean’s jaw tightened for a second, but not with resignation—it was guilt that darkened his eyes now. He inclined his head, swooped in for a frustratingly brief kiss, and stepped away to take her hand as he said, “I’ll tell you everything, but first let’s find you some food.”

  She followed him downstairs, silently grateful for the guide, and in no time Christopher whipped up a hearty lunch. Ordinarily she’d have felt bad about eating so much food in the middle of the day, but by the time she sat at the table she could hardly think around the gnawing pit in her stomach. So she thanked her host profusely and dug in while Dean, who’d claimed a seat at her side with a cup of coffee, took the opportunity to fill her in on the details she now officially needed to know.

  Arianna wasn’t too surprised to learn that Dean’s brothers each controlled an element of their own. She’d already theorized as much. What left her—at least temporarily—speechless was the part about his sister’s (and mother’s) healing abilities. She could see for herself how effective they were, but even living the results first-hand didn’t make it much easier to wrap her head around.

  And once that conversation was over, she’d quickly realized she needed to figure out what to tell people when they asked why she hadn’t been caught in the fire. Her car had certainly been in the driveway, and no one else could corroborate an alibi. My car. “What happened to my car?”

  Dean lifted an eyebrow at her for a moment before his expression returned to normal and he replied, “Mostly water damage. Nothing that can’t be fixed.”

  Relief rushed out of her in a heavy exhale and she smiled. “Thank goodness.”

  “How long have you had her?” Dean asked curiously as he fingered the handle of his coffee cup.

  Arianna’s eyes returned to her mostly-demolished plate of food as the memory of that day washed over her. She’d been fourteen when she’d come home from school to find the veritable shell of a 1964 Mustang in their garage.

  “Your brother’s offered to help,” her father had said, “but this is your responsibility, Ari. You get this car road-worthy, get your driver’s license, keep your grades up, and she’s all yours. But if you don’t keep your grades up we’re selling her as soon as she’s fixed.”

  It was a challenge she had whole-heartedly embraced. She’d spent countless hours in that garage, many of them alongside her brother. They’d poured blood, sweat, and tears into that car. But more importantly, she and her brother had formed an unshakable bond while they’d worked. It was like they weren’t three years apart. Weren’t even siblings who bickered over stupid things. They were the closest of friends. And now that Gianni was gone that car was the only real link she still had to him. There certainly wasn’t a gravesite she could visit, since her mother had had his body shipped to Italy.

  Pulling in a breath, Arianna shook the memory away and replied, “It’ll be ten years in January.”

  Faintly incredulous amusement in his voice, Dean said, “You’d have been, what, fourteen? No way you were driving back then.”

  “Of course not,” she returned, meeting his grin with one of her own. “I had to rebuild her first.”

  “Right,” he joked, “of course. How did I miss that?”

  Arianna shook her head at him, holding back her laughter, and instead popped the last bite of her meal into her mouth. Once she’d chased it down with her iced tea, she finally forced herself to ask the more important question. “What am I supposed to tell people?”

  Dean sighed and pushed his empty cup away before replying, “Georgia’s already told the police she remembered you saying something about meeting up with an old friend after work.” He paused, frowning, and added, “It’s not a perfect story, but I’m thinking someone could believe you were riding around in your friend’s rental car,
and maybe ended up staying the night in a hotel out of town.”

  He was right. It was kind of a crappy story. But she supposed it wasn’t terrible considering how long he hadn’t had to think up a better one. There was still a rather large hole, though, so she asked, “What about my phone? I’m pretty sure I dropped it in the backyard after Eric electrocuted me.” The punk bastard.

  “They found it,” Dean acknowledged with another incline of his head. “Georgia told police that you’d been tearing the house apart looking for it right before she’d left. Says she figures you must have dropped it, quote, cloud watching or something.”

  Arianna barely managed not to snort. Georgia would say that. But she shook her head and dismissed the ridiculous idea. At least she’d given them something to go with other than the truth. She could always elaborate on her “cloud watching” if it came up.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve got someone who’d be willing to play along if the police wanted to double-check your story?” Dean asked carefully. It was clear from his tone he suspected the answer was no, and she didn’t take offense at that. She knew exactly why he was making that assumption. She really didn’t have many friends. Fortunately, the few decent contacts she did have—outside of town—all prided themselves on their acting abilities.

  Smiling, Arianna replied, “Actually, I might. But I’d need to make a couple of calls.”

  Dean tugged his phone from his pocket and dropped it between them on the table. “Have at it, then.”

  Chapter Nine

  Dean paused and flexed his hands around the steering wheel. It was Thursday afternoon. Slightly more than twenty-four hours since Arianna had woken up in his old room, properly healed and understandably confused. He’d done everything he could to help her, but, given the story they were running with, he was severely limited. She’d contacted an old acting friend after lunch and organized her out-of-town story with almost disturbing ease, but then it had been time to have her “come home.” He hadn’t heard from her since. Not that he was taking it personally. She didn’t exactly have a phone. Which was a whole other problem. Dean really didn’t think it was such a great idea to have her running around town with no means of calling for help. For that matter, he wasn’t even sure how she was travelling, since her car was temporarily out of commission.