“Knock it off!” he shouted.
The men kept charging.
The wall jerked out from behind her, dropping her head on the ground. Big waves of fire whipped around her face like they were trying to choke her. She screamed and tried to scrape them off—then realized they were her hair.
She grabbed it all in a hank and flipped it up into a bun. It wouldn’t stay, so she grabbed a pointy stick and jabbed it in.
The stick burst into flame, and her hair just got all over the place again.
Why did everything have to be so damn hard?
The sphere was dimming. In a few seconds, it was going to pop or explode or disappear or something, like a soap bubble. And then the men who kept charging at them would run into Pax. Or worse, her.
Scarlett looked down at herself.
Her belly button was almost white-hot in the center. Flakes of ash crumbled off the side and drifted upward with the heat. Flakes of ash were everywhere. Flakes of burnt grass. Flakes of burnt Scarlett.
The ground was black just from being too close to her.
She had to get control of herself again.
But how?
A horrible little voice in her head whispered that when Pax’s bubble burst, she should start shooting fire at the people attacking them. They were threatening Pax. They deserved whatever she did to them.
Hotter. She should be hotter.
She tried to ignore the voice. She’d been ignoring it her whole life. Everybody has those urges. That didn’t mean you had to follow them.
Not a problem.
But hotter would be good.
She could burn them up before they could say wow, that’s fucking hot. They’d look like hot dogs that’d been on the grill too long. They’d smell like burnt meat.
She could taste them.
The black tentacles pushed farther into her, and fire drooled down the side of her mouth and splashed on her knees.
Scarlett curled up around the burning hole in her belly button and started to cry.
Pax felt the bubble burst deep in his chest.
It twanged the same way a bubble of mucous rising out of his lungs would have, if he still had lungs and could still get pneumonia.
But it still left him feeling dizzy and weak. And numb. He couldn’t feel his legs.
He didn’t feel like a superhero anymore. Right now he was paper.
His legs bent and dropped him to the ground. He caught himself on his hands and knees. His lungs were burning. He couldn’t feel his heartbeat. It reminded him of being back in his old body. Good times.
The heat was blasting out from behind him, turning the grass on either side of his hands from bright green to shriveled brown in seconds. Scarlett was getting hotter. Pax dug his hands into the dirt. Get up, Pax. You have to fix this. Get up!
But he couldn’t. He didn’t have the energy.
After a few moments of fucking power, he was, once again, too weak.
The edge of the grass caught on fire.
Pax coughed. Someone grabbed his shoulder and pulled him to his feet. Suddenly he was staring at the beet-red face of an Irish cop whose white shirt was smudged with ash. The guy opened his mouth to start shouting at Pax. Beads of sweat hatched out of the cop’s forehead, ran down his cheeks, and dried before they hit his chin.
“Run,” whispered Pax.
He was being swung through the air and pitched onto greener, cooler grass.
The cops must be trying to save him from Scarlett. It was almost funny enough to make him laugh.
Pax rolled with the fall and dragged himself back up on his feet. His energy must be regenerating—but not very quickly. He had to find another source, and fast.
People had already crowded between him and Scarlett. The Irish cop was shouting and trying to direct people away from the area, but nobody was listening. People in business suits and skirts. Joggers with and without big-wheeled strollers. Hipsters dragging bicycles and wearing black-framed glasses. Senior citizens. Japanese tourists. Everybody was taking pictures of Scarlett on their iPhones.
Everyone gasped and swore at the same time, and the people in the center tried to take a step back at the same time as the people outside the circle pushed inward and stood on tiptoe with their phones over their heads, trying to see what was going on.
Sirens were going off; cops were rushing in and shoving people back. Fire trucks were closing in.
Pax staggered forward, grabbing onto the shoulders of a couple of senior citizens in front of him to keep from falling down again. They both turned around to look at him. They were wearing matching sunglasses and “World’s Best Grandparents” sweatshirts.
“Move,” he said. “Run.”
The man shoved Pax’s hands off their shoulders and turned back to face the action.
Gotta love New York.
Pax grabbed their shoulders again and shoved them to the side. “Get out of the way! I’ve got work to do.”
The man whimpered while his wife gave Pax a dirty look from behind her sunglasses.
“The fuck is wrong with you people?” he demanded, pushing his way forward again.
A burst of flame shot up into the sky.
Everyone’s faces turned skyward for a second. The flame, shaped like a weather balloon, rose up about a couple of hundred meters and disappeared into the deep blue sky, leaving a short trail of black smoke. The wind caught it and carried it out toward Queens.
Scarlett was getting worse.
The crowd pressed tighter.
Scarlett knelt on her hands and knees and panted.
Another blast of heat was building up in her gut like a stomach full of bad seafood. She burped. It tasted like rotten eggs mixed with matches. A six-year-old kid wearing a Batman shirt screamed, “Mom, that lady stinks!”
Scarlett moaned, “Lady… I can’t hold onto this much longer. Get—”burrrrp“—your kid out of here as fast as you can.”
Her stomach heaved, and she had to swallow back burning acid. She was gonna hurl again. She sat back on her feet and looked upward. She didn’t know what would happen if she puked downward. Probably the heat would blast all over the place and kill everyone.
Just kill him. Put him out of his misery. He’s just going to grow up to be a waste of space anyway.
She balled up her fists on her thighs and waited for the next wave of vomit.
Her face itched. When she scratched it, a black mask made of ash fell into her hands. For a second it looked back at her with blank eyes. Then it fell apart like melting snow.
Don’t hurt anyone. Don’t hurt anyone.
It was coming. It was coming.
She threw her head back and puked fire.
It blasted straight up, almost hitting one of the helicopters circling above her.
Hey, yeah, that suspected terrorist in Central Park? Right here.
The fire roaring out of her was loud, but not loud enough to drown out the sounds of people panicking. The ones who could see what was going on were trying to get away. And the ones who couldn’t see were trying to push their way in. Whistles blew. Every cop in the park must’ve been there, trying to help people escape. Or trying to arrest her.
Good luck with that.
Babies were crying.
Scarlett closed her eyes. Another wave of nausea hit her and she puked again.
The negative energy was pouring into her faster and faster, igniting her flames brighter and brighter. In a couple of minutes, she was going to be puking constantly. But that still wasn’t going to be enough. The more she puked, the more she terrified people, and the more negative energy they sent her way.
It was never going to stop. It was like being asked to swallow the East River.
A long, black whip of negative energy lashed across Akllana’chikni’pai’s face. The cut burned weakly. She wiped the back of her hand across her face and inspected the blood on it: it rippled on her hand, orange fire mingled with black smoke. A sign of her building rage. A sign of purity: the fire that burned her clean of negative energy.
She was trapped in a small pacha within the girl’s mind, a blank, featureless space that wasn’t even a room. The pacha had been all she could create; the negative energy had drained her of too much energy for anything more sophisticated.
She could sense nothing from outside. She could control nothing. She was trapped until Terkun’shuks’pai came to rescue her. How pitiful she was, the mighty warrior of the astral plane, reduced, once again, to a prisoner. And now the girl had allowed herself to become so overwhelmed with negative energy it was invading even the tiny prison Akllana’chikni’pai had been able to create.
Akllana’chikni’pai bared her teeth. Insult after insult. Injury after injury.
At least the whip of negative energy presented a target.
From within her spirit, she drew two long, slightly curved swords out of the fire in her gut. With a couple of flicks of her wrists, she turned the cutting edges toward the whip of negative energy. A second whip joined it, and a third. They appeared to confer with each other, their tips gesturing toward her and then nudging each other.
Akllana’chikni’pai beckoned with the tip of one sword. “Stop debating which one to send in, you cowards. All of you attack me together and see where that gets you.”
The three of them touched their tips together briefly. They were joined by a fourth and a fifth.
They attacked as one.
Akllana’chikni’pai flicked the tip of one of her swords contemptuously through the ends of the whips of negative energy. They had come at her directly, gathered closely together. If they had been serious about gaining position, they would have come at her from all directions.
The tips fell off and landed at her feet. They sparked, smoked briefly, and went out. The rest of the snakelike whips burst into flame at the cut ends, the fire quickly spreading down their lengths. They fell to the floor of the pacha and burst apart into flakes of black ash.
Akllana’chikni’pai turned and slashed a pair of tendrils that had thought to sneak up behind her. They, too, burst into flames and shortly extinguished themselves.
But more whips had come in: ten of them, twenty.
More, she thought. More! She called to them. You cannot defeat me. You cannot invade me. I am Akllana’chikni’pai, and my spirit endures!
She made a mocking salute and destroyed the dozen whips that had invaded her pacha in those few seconds. “You will come! And I will destroy you!”
Her taunts did not go unanswered. Dozens—no, a hundred—of the whips oozed through the walls of her pacha. Akllana’chikni’pai began a kind of dance, a kata she had been taught eons ago, a kind of celebration of the swords of her spirit, of the cleanness of their cuts, of the purity of their flames.
It was a ritual as old as the stars: it summoned all negative energy nearby, to be consumed by the swords, and their energy turned toward the purification of fire.
The swords flicked through the negative energy, destroying each strand as if it were nothing stronger than smoke. Akllana’chikni’pai drew on the energy thus released and used some of it to strengthen the pacha around her and some of it to burn through the negative energy in the girl’s spirit. She would cleanse the girl of the foulness.
It was a sacred conflagration. A pyre for the sins of humanity, for what they did to each other as much as for what they had done to her.
The pacha beyond the tips of her swords was a swirling, roiling mass of tentacles. Blackness was all she could see, in those few moments she could spare to look. There seemed to be no end to them, but all things came to an end, eventually.
The dance continued.
The negative energy would not defeat her. She was fire. She was the conflagration that purified the world.
And she would set the whole world on fire to achieve her purpose, if necessary.
Chapter 6
Regrettably, Terkun’shuks’pai had to abandon the children for a few moments to finalize the restoration of the hospital. All those who had reacted to the emergency no longer remembered it. All damage was gone. All was as it should have been, save that Pax and Scarlett were now in the park, and Scarlett was threatening to burn down the city.
The girl’s body burned with a fire so hot it must have been painful for any nearby humans to look at. She rested at the bottom of a slight depression in the ground, which smoked at the edges and was pooled with the molten detritus of the burnt earth beneath her. The depression was rapidly becoming a pit as she burned her way downward. Her mouth stretched painfully wide and emitted a steady stream of heat and fire, which she aimed upward.
She seemed vaguely aware of his, or rather the boy’s, presence. Her mouth closed briefly upon the stream of fire. “Kill me,” she begged.
Whether she was trying to save Pax and the people in the park, whether she was suffering unbearable pain, or (most likely) both, it was not, by this time, a practical solution. Akllana’chikni’pai was still inside that body with her, and to kill the girl would destroy Akllana’chikni’pai and any chance Terkun’shuks’pai had of reaching his own goals.
Briefly, Terkun’shuks’pai admired the series of errors that had led to this situation. Having done so, he perceived the simplest, most elegant of solutions and implemented it, with the full understanding that this action, too, was probably a mistake.
As the humans sometimes said, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”
Perhaps, someday, after all this was over, his intentions would be recognized.
And forgiven.
Energy flooded into Pax. A suspiciously immense amount of energy. But he didn’t have time to question where it came from. He threw up a shield that knocked the crowd back away from him as if he were parting an ocean.
Scarlett sat in a hole in the ground, burning like the sun. She was light where a girl used to be.
Automatically, he raised his hand to shield his eyes. But his eyes weren’t made of flesh, and he could look into the heart of that flame without blinking. Incredible. He lowered his hand.
Scarlett knelt on the ground with her arms in the air and her back arched. Her mouth was stretched grotesquely wide, as though her jaw were about to split open. Fire burst out of her throat, shooting straight up into the sky. Helicopters rashly circled the burst of flame, some of them, no doubt, taking footage. If she so much as twitched, they’d be toast.
Everything about this situation was wrong. Start to finish. He didn’t even know where to start.
Scarlett.
Was there even a person inside that flaming shell now? Probably not.
Whatever she was doing, it had to stop. That’s all he really knew. Even if it meant both of them had to die: it had to end.
Pax made a throwing gesture, trying to expand the shield to cover Scarlett, but when the shield hit her, it bulged around her like a balloon trying to push around somebody’s finger. He dropped more energy into the shield and pushed harder. The shield bubble distorted even more—but didn’t surround her.
He pushed harder, and she tipped over onto the ground.
A beam of pure heat shot into the heart of Central Park. Vaporizing the people standing in the way, leaving behind charred bones that collapsed on the dirt in broken, shattered pieces.
Fuck.
The bubble covered Scarlett completely, and the beam of light stopped.
The shield immediately started bulging upward as the heat built up. In a second it’d explode out from under the shield.
Pax knelt over Scarlett and pinned the sides of the s
hield down around her with his hands and knees, trying to trap the heat next to the ground. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
He pulled on the unknown source of energy, gathering strength. He had to grab Scarlett and get her the fuck away from these people. He had superpowers, right? Maybe he could fly. This whole shitfest had to have some redeeming quality.
Scarlett broke through the shield.
He sealed it under her.
Heat was blasting from her almost hard enough to burst the shield. Pax channeled more energy into it. It turned almost solid blue and bulged outward as he tried to contain the heat.
The shield smashed into the bystanders and knocked them flying in showers of sparks. Why the fuck were there even bystanders anymore?
At least some people were starting to get a clue. Women and children were being picked up and bodysurfed to the outer edges of the crowd, where the cops hustled them off to safety. The area was being blocked off by people locked together elbow-to-elbow; the flood of idiots was thinning and even starting to reverse direction.
Underneath him, Scarlett lay on the ground like she was dead. Her skin had faded a little from the bright yellow heat into a pinkish red with a few deeper areas the color of a bloody Valentine. The heat had lessened a little, but it was a fucking miracle she hadn’t burnt him to a crisp, too. He climbed off her awkwardly. It was like being on top of a nuclear bomb.
I Am Titanium (Pax Black Book 1) Page 7