by H G Lynch
A tiny crooked smile tilted his lips. “Would anyone care to tell me what exactly I missed?” he asked, apparently as amused as ever.
At that, Ember threw herself into Reid’s arms, burying her head in his chest as she cried.
***
“Oh, God, Reid!” Ember choked, showering his face and neck with kisses, her small hands clasping her so tightly that if he’d been human, he would’ve bruised.
He wasn’t sure what had happened while he’d been unconscious, but he could guess by the wreckage and the professor’s dead body. The details didn’t really matter; what mattered was that they were all okay, and the professor was not. His cuts and burns had finally healed, and each breath was no longer a burning agony. He’d never felt such pain in his life before, hadn’t thought he ever would, and he would be damned if it would ever happen again. Next time Ember said to believe her, he was going to listen. He hated fighting with her, and in trying to exert his freedom without her, he’d gotten them all into seriously deep shit. So, never again. He’d let Ember put a leash on him if that’s what it took, but he’d never put his friends, or his beloved Ember in so much danger again.
Ember’s quivering voice and the tremors that were wracking her entire small body were enough to make his heart ache, and he wrapped his arms around her, holding her close. “Hey, hey, relax. I’m alive. I’m okay,” he murmured in her ear, stroking her hair soothingly. She was crying uncontrollably, shaking so hard it had to be painful on her muscles, but she clung to him desperately.
Abruptly, she pulled back and looked at him, searching his face frantically, pushing his hair back and running her little fingers over his skin to make sure he was whole and unscathed. He could tell bloodlust was working a hole in her, her eyes were glinting and her fangs were cutting her lip, but she didn’t seem to care, if she even noticed. Her face was bloody, her hair matted and tangled, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. Her cheeks were wet and her pyjama top was soaked and dirty. Her pyjama bottoms were even worse. And she didn’t seem to notice any of that either. All of her attention was on him, on running her hands over every inch of skin she could, ensuring he really was undamaged. He wondered how long it would be before she stopped checking him over for lingering wounds after this. Probably days.
He hugged her tightly to him, wanting to banish that haunted, disturbed look from her eyes. He looked over her shoulder at Ricky and Sherry, glad to see they were both uninjured, aside from some blood on Ricky’s hands and a smear of red on Sherry’s arm.
“So, who wants to get out of here?” He managed a weak smile.
Ricky nodded. “I’m all for it. Assuming you’re strong enough to snap a few necks. I’m guessing there’s a crap-load of guards on the way out of here.”
Sherry, for once, didn’t seem opposed to the idea of lethal violence; her face was set in a tough, cold expression that he’d never seen on her before. It was…odd. Discomforting, slightly. Sherry was holding it together nicely while Ember completely broke down. But then again, Ember had not only seen him tortured tonight, but every night for the past week. He was surprised she was still sane enough to from coherent sentences, which she did a second later…
“I’ve got an idea,” she said abruptly, wiping her eyes.
Ah. Okay, her temporary breakdown was apparently over. The girl was tough as nails, tougher than any girl should’ve had to be. It was part of what he adored about her. Her eyes had taken on a dangerous glint, and an excited tingle ran through him. Whenever Ember got that look in her eyes, it meant she was planning carnage.
Everyone looked at her expectantly and she smirked, a lethal little smile. Her eyes went to the big metal table, where a concoction of chemicals sat in various beakers and bowls. Reid didn’t quite understand, but obviously Sherry and Ricky did; their faces showed identically wide-eyed expressions of shock and…amusement.
Ember turned to him, grinning, and said one word; “ANFO,” she said it with a gleeful conviction, and he felt his own eyes widen, a slow grin spreading across his mouth. In-fucking-credible. Sometimes, he was sure he had the most dangerous girlfriend on the planet; this was one of those times.
Chapter Twenty Two
“Okay, everyone get ready to run.” Ember stood in the doorway of the lab, holding open the heavy steel door. She’d dragged the professor’s body over and used his thumb and a half-dozen attempted number codes to finally get the door unlocked. Reid and Ricky had taken care of the eight guards in the hallway, and were hanging about just down the corridor with Sherry, waiting for Ember to spark a flame.
Her heart was pounding against her ribs, and adrenalin sang in her veins, anticipation and excitement and anxiety all clawing in her chest. She grinned shamelessly. She was going to enjoy watching this place burn to the ground.
She was just about to set the explosives on fire when she spotted something glinting on the table: Her necklace. With a gasp, she started toward it, wedging the professor’s body against the door to hold it open while she grabbed her necklace off the metal table. Quickly, she clasped it back on, and the sapphire pendant settled against her collarbones reassuringly. She touched it lightly as she turned and stalked back to the door. She kicked aside the professor’s limp corpse and grabbed hold of the door again.
“Ember, uh, I think it’s time you lit up. I can hear more guards on their way,” Ricky called down the hall, sounding uneasy.
Ember just flashed a smirk at him, then let her mind-limb absorb some of the heat from around her. It wouldn’t take much.
Once her palms were tingling, she directed a bolt of fire toward the explosives, and ran. The door slammed closed behind her before the fire even reached the ANFO. Which was what she’d hoped for. It gave her time to get out of the way before everything went boom.
Supremely glad for her extra vampire speed boost, she bolted down the hall toward her friends, and they rounded the corner at the end of the corridor just as the steel door blew out of the wall with an outrageous clang of metal. It was deafening, and the heat of an inferno blasted down the hall after them.
They ran at superhuman speeds, with Ricky carrying Sherry in faery form. She was tucked into his shirt pocket, clinging on with tiny fingers as he ran so fast he blurred to even Ember’s eyes. Reid grabbed Ember’s hand and pulled her along, and she wondered at how he could still be so damn fast after all he’d been through tonight.
The hallways they ran along were narrow, with tiled floors and stone walls that weren’t even painted. Depressing, to say the least. They ran without any sense of direction, not a clue where they were going aside from away from the fire. Soon though, they came up against a dozen or so armed guards running toward them, obviously looking for the source of the noise —there was no way in hell they hadn’t heard the explosion. People had probably heard it two miles away.
“Ah, shit,” Reid muttered.
Ember snickered, shooting him a glance. “Yeah, that about sums it up,” she replied dryly, and she saw his lips quirk up.
He rolled his eyes.
Ricky took a step back toward them, and put one protective hand to his pocket, where Sherry was stashed. “Uh, guys?” Ricky said shakily, eyeing the bunch of snarling armed guards inching carefully toward them nervously. Ember and Reid exchanged a meaningful glance and a smirk, and Ember nodded once.
Drawing up all the heat she could —which was a hell of a lot with an inferno burning just a few halls away — she brought a huge flame to life on each of her hands. Several of the guards visibly gawked, and a few turned to run, but didn’t get anywhere with a half dozen more guards behind them, crowding forward in the narrow hallway.
“Anyone feel like barbeque?” She smirked dangerously the guards, and heard Reid chuckle behind her.
Ricky shot her a look that said he thought she was crazy. She was, so it didn’t let it bother her.
Then the guards decided to charge, unsheathing knives and stakes, and everything got very cramped and very hot. Charred bodies dropped to
the stone floor and other oncoming guards tripped over them. Reid was happily snapping necks and sucking blood. He needed the energy the extra blood gave him so she didn’t blame him. Ricky was taking down anyone who got too close, but mostly he stayed back to keep Sherry safe in his pocket.
It didn’t take long to dispatch most of the guards, and a couple of them came to their senses and surrendered. Ember considered killing them too, just to be safe, but then she settled for simply knocking their heads together. They slumped to the ground, unconscious, and she stepped past them.
“Come on, let’s go!” She started running again. The heat was intense, and must’ve been damn painful for her friends; they didn’t have her resistance to the heat. Looking behind her, Ember could see the flicker of the fire chasing them down the hall now, the gold and amber flames like burning snakes. They ran down random hallways and up a metal staircase, bursting out of the open steel door at the top into a wide, marble-floored lobby. Other doors and hallways were set into the wall seemingly randomly, and a few of them were marked with hazard signs. The door they’d come out of had one of those signs. A set of spiralling stone steps led up from the back of the lobby, and dozens of guards were spilling down the staircase like a swarm of black ants.
“Oh, crap,” Ember squeaked as an arrow shot past her face, barely missing her nose. Then there was another almighty bang, and the whole building trembled. A few guards lost their balance and toppled down the steps as a huge crack split up the middle of the stone staircase.
“Come on!” Reid yelled, taking hold of Ember’s wrist and dragging her toward the large, carved wooden double doors at the front of the lobby. Ricky was hot on their heels, and Ember heard the shouts and clatter of feet as the guards undoubtedly rushed after them.
They burst out of the wooden doors and didn’t pause, leaping down the set of icy concrete steps and thudding onto packed snow. They were in the middle of a massive clearing, surrounded by trees on all sides. There wasn’t even a pathway through the forest, not a single break in the trees to tell them which way to go from there.
The guards were pouring out of the doors, shouting and screaming and shooting arrows, throwing knives and stakes that were too close to hitting the mark. There was no way in hell they were going to let her and her friends escape. They’d chase them down if they had to. And Ember was sooooo fed up of these bastards. High above the concrete steps, the slate-tiled, sloping roof was sagging, the tell-tale orange glow of the flames eating away at the structure.
Reid was already pulling toward the edge of the trees, but she dug her feet into the snow. It didn’t slow him down, but he did notice her resistance, and glanced back at her with confusion.
“What’re you stopping for? Come on!” He yanked on her arm, but she shook her head, staying where she was.
“No, wait. They’re not going to just leave us alone after this! They’ll just come after us! And I, for one, do not want that. So, I say, let’s give them a reason not to mess with us again.”
Reid looked past her briefly, to the swarm of guards. Other people, mostly in white coats, were spilling out of the burning building now, too. They ran in all directions, into the trees, and disappeared. When Reid looked back to her, there was a glint in his eyes, and he smiled a little.
“You’re nuts, you know that?” he stated with amusement.
Ember nodded. “I know that. I’m also logical and very dangerous.” She grinned.
There were a lot more guards now, probably nearly eighty, all crowding on the concrete steps and standing in the snow in front of the burning building. Arrows were whizzing past Ember and Reid, and Ricky came running back to them. “What the hell are you waiting for? Move it!” he yelled, looking rapidly between the two of them with wide eyes. Then he noticed their expressions and groaned, running a hand backwards through his already-tousled hair. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he grumbled.
Ember just shrugged. “You want them forming a hit squad and chasing after us all the way back to Acorn Hills? Didn’t think so.” With that, Ember turned back to face the mass of angry people throwing weapons at them, and started sucking up heat from the blazing fire inside the building. She could feel the amount of power she was gathering, and it was insane. More than she’d used even when she’d melted solid rock in the side of a mountain. This was the kind of power her lightning-fire came from, but it didn’t scare her anymore. She could, and would control it.
Dozens of the guards were charging at them, knives raised or stakes held like little javelins over their shoulders. Reid and Ricky darted around, taking out anyone they could. Sherry was hovering up high, pelting the guards with mini orbs of stinging ice that distracted them for long enough to let the boys get in some good punches. The building kept letting out belches of smoke, and the fire roared as it crumbled the roof in, charring the walls and eating the building from the inside out. Ember had to admire the beauty of it, of the fire. The golden flames tossed out crimson sparks like violent rubies and shadowy smoke that curled around the stars in the sky like a constricting hand. The light from the flames looked like the glow of hell itself, smearing the sky scarlet.
Then someone tackled her to the ground and pain shot up her arm as she whacked her elbow. The person who’d tackled her was a big, meaty woman with a flare of red hair that matched the flames soaring up in the building behind her. The woman was screaming something, but Ember wasn’t really listening. She was more focused on the stake the woman was holding to her chest. Ember tried to buck the woman off, clawed at her face and punched her ribs, but the woman stayed on top of her. Then Ember saw the woman’s eyes properly in the bright flash of light from another explosion bursting from the building’s destroyed roof. Her eyes were pure black, no whites at all. It was creepy. And it meant this woman had obviously been another of The Society’s experiments. That explained her supernatural strength. Damn.
The woman, realising Ember wasn’t listening to her mad raving, screamed and raised the stake high over her head, ready to plunge it down into Ember’s chest. But, before she could start to lower her arms, her hands…vanished. They were torn away, taking the stake with them, and leaving bloody, shredded stumps of wrists. She screamed in agony and rolled off Ember, pulling her arms down to gape in horror at the gushing, disgusting mess that had been her hands. Ember gagged and jumped to her feet, whirling around and nearly running right into Reid, who arched a brow at her.
“You should really pay more attention to the screaming psychos running around, instead of admiring the fire, you crazy little pyromaniac,” he said, grinning, fangs glinting.
Looking around, Ember saw that there were still at least fifty guards crawling about, and Ricky was having to fight three at once. Sherry was trying her best to avoid being captured in, of all things, a magical butterfly net. How the hell did these people come up with these things?
“Just give me a second,” she told Reid, who nodded sharply before running off to help Ricky. While they held back most of the attackers, Ember had the chance to finish absorbing heat from the fire. The power sizzled inside her, the heat spreading through every nerve and every cell, her skin was crawling with warm tingles. Her chest felt like it would explode from the pressure of all the power.
Closing her eyes, she focused all that energy and heat into her chest, her heart pounding and lungs working hard not to collapse under the pressure. She was sure her ribs would crack in a minute. Then, everything slowed down, and she peeled her eyes open. All the guards were moving in slow motion, Reid and Ricky were fighting at normal human speed, Sherry’s wings fluttered lazily, and the flames soaring out of the roof of The Society’s building shimmered like ribbons under water. Smoke churned out, thick as oil. The bare, clacking branches on the trees waved eerily in the howling wind. Loose snowflakes dusted across the ground in slow-spinning twisters. It was all very weird. But Ember knew what she had to do.
She yelled to her friends, “Run! Now!”
Reid responded immediately, a
nd grabbed Ricky, pulling him away from a chunky guy with a stake.
Once they were at the edge of the trees, and Sherry was fluttering high, high above the ground where she couldn’t be touched, Ember let out the tremendous heat inside her in one, nuclear explosion. The heat travelled out in an impossibly strong shockwave, pounding out of her with so much force that she flew backward and skidded across the snowy ground as she landed. She felt a rib crack, and agony blistered through her as a small bone in one of her wrists snapped. The shockwave of incredible heat was a fast-moving, deadly ring of blazing fire, and no matter how fast the guards ran to escape it, it caught up to them. The ring of flames collided with every single body and threw them backward. Some people, who weren’t instantly killed by the impact of the burning shockwave, were most certainly killed as they crashed into the stone walls and concrete steps of the crumbling building.
In the end, once the shockwave of lightning-fire dissipated into the forest —leaving charred burns on some of the trees and melting some of the snow — there wasn’t a single guard left standing. The Society was just a pile of ash and charred rock.
Reid and Ricky ran back into the clearing, and Sherry floated down to the ground, growing to full size again. They all looked down at her with expressions that ranged from awe to shock to serious concern. She grinned up at them tiredly. “Now, you’ve got to admit, that was hot.” She laughed a little, then winced as her cracked rib protested. It hurt like a bitch, and so did the broken bone in her wrist.
All of her friends laughed helplessly at her comment, even as Ricky knelt beside her and took her wrist gently in his fingers to examine it. He had to let go a moment later because his hands were shaking from his laughter. Reid was collapsed in the snow, clutching his sides as he doubled up, gasping through his laughter. Sherry was giggling and crying at once, her hand on Ember’s shoulder.