There wasn’t time to ponder their skill sets, though. Grace Aroya was back on her feet and mad as hell. She pushed her hands out in front of her and Eleri watched as a wall of fire sprung up between them.
Her startled gasp made her suck in fumes and high heat. She could feel her lungs sear and she could feel her own power blink out at the surprise. Shit. She couldn’t see Grace.
She was shaking her head, backing up as the heat licked out at her when Donovan rushed up beside her, but skidded to a stop. The heat was too great.
Eleri took a deep breath, but the temperature in the house was getting too high. Someone had to get the family out. She turned and yelled at them. “Get out. Out the back door.”
“We’ll burn!” the father screamed at her, though if he was angry or just pissing his pants, Eleri couldn’t tell.
“You’ll die if you stay. GO!” She screamed it back at him, but her scream was one filled with rage. Anger at him for holding his kids in place while he babbled in hysterics. Anger that he wasn’t pushing forward. Her only consolation was that he had no clue.
It was Wade and Donovan, no longer able to get to Grace Aroya, who began tugging at the family members, pulling them toward the door, toward safety. It was Bethany and the daughters who started moving even as their home blazed around them.
Eleri tried again to take a breath and re-focus, find Grace Aroya in all this hellhole of a mess. But even as she felt things start to shift inside her, she felt a flurry of air beside her.
Dana.
Massive pot in one hand, tablet in the other, Dana looked at her device while she made an epically strong move with one arm. She threw the water where she knew Grace Aroya to be, even though she couldn’t see her.
Dana herself was wet. She must have run into the kitchen and doused herself—which would have meant running through the fire first. Eleri didn’t see any damage, though she was sure Dana had to have it.
A roar of anger came from Grace Aroya as she came into view only briefly. Then she winked out again. Her voice hit the air with a burst of rage though. “Stay back! Do not come get me!”
Had Eleri been anyone other than herself, had she not had her training, had she not been ready to fight this slip of a monster, she would not have moved forward. But she and Dana headed where they’d last seen her.
Dana was wet.
Eleri was not. But she used her anger to push the fire aside, her own voice welling up with rage.
The screen on Dana’s tablet cracked from the heat, and as she took a few more steps forward the picture blinked out. Eleri could see Grace Aroya again, but Dana couldn’t—she was advancing blind.
Then, she flew backward.
Her hands clawed at her neck, but there was nothing there.
Out of nowhere, a soaked Christina came at Grace from the side. With expert moves, she slid one arm under the girl’s chin and up the other side, taking advantage of having a superior height.
“You will not!” She yelled it into the ear of the young woman she now had in strangle hold.
“You can’t stop me!” she managed to scrape out.
“Turn it off, Grace.” Eleri yelled while Dana still clawed at her throat. She was already turning blue. There wasn’t time to fight Grace Aroya to save Dana, so Eleri dove for the other agent, reaching up to her throat.
Dana had stumbled to the floor, her only focus on finding air. Her hands raked down her collar bones, one over the other, but caught on nothing. She tapped, flat handed on her chest, almost pointing at herself. She couldn’t get air. Eleri’s own hands reached for Dana’s throat but found nothing.
Looking up at Christina, frantic, Eleri yelled, “Kill her!”
“Stay back! You can’t get me!” Grace Aroya yelled again. The very sound of her voice, scraped as it was, indicated that Christina had not yet found the right hold on the hellcat.
Christina adjusted and yanked backward.
Eleri looked up, shocked to see that Christina fought empty space.
Eleri’s eyes darted, searching the room to find the back door open, the family out, Donovan and Wade out with them. They’d probably all suffered burns. The family would tend each other, but who would tend her friends?
It was a thought that blinked in and out of existence too rapidly to hold.
Eleri was running her hands all over Dana, trying to find anything she could do to help, but there was nothing physical on there.
The chokehold was taking too long. But as she glanced around again, Eleri saw that the fire had stopped advancing. Christina’s hold changed, indicating she was supporting more weight as Grace Aroya started to fade.
But Dana was still choking.
With a deep breath and a gathering of power, Eleri let fly. She screamed at Dana, as though that might break the strangle hold. She pushed the woman to the floor and tipped her head back as though her airway was simply closed and needed to be opened. She tried mouth to mouth, as though she could force air the other way when Dana couldn’t get it herself.
But the airway was closed. Nothing opened it.
Christina leaned forward, yelling at Eleri as the invisible weight she held slumped in her arms.
Dana’s eyes met Eleri’s and she grabbed at Eleri’s arm, her grip death tight. With one last contraction of her lungs that yielded nothing, her eyes rolled back and she slumped to the ground.
She was out, but she wasn’t dead yet. Eleri looked around frantically, finally running into the kitchen. She grabbed a sharp knife that was too big for the job and the thermometer she found as she scrambled through the dish drainer.
She opened the plastic container, dumping the thermometer as she jumped or leapt over still burning furniture. She stayed low when she didn’t have to clear something as the smoke was becoming overwhelming. Windows were opening, letting some of it out, but she paid no attention.
Sawing at the closed end of the thermometer casing she worked until she hacked it off, never looking at her friend. Dana lay still. Eleri didn’t have to check to know that.
Once it was cut through, she had a semblance of a tube, oddly shaped but good enough. She clutched it in one hand and knelt beside Dana’s unmoving form. She rubbed her fingers along the front of Dana’s throat, finding the Adam’s apple, moving down and about a centimeter to one side. Then, with no fanfare or skill, she pushed the knife through her friend’s skin, feeling the sharp kitchen blade pierce epidermis and then the rings of cartilage of the trachea. Success!
She pulled the knife out, bloody and used. The area was now a mess and it was harder to see. She felt her way around, found the spot opposite her cut and plunged the knife in again. With no touch to orient herself, Eleri simply rotated the blade and made a crosswise cut joining—she hoped—the two side cuts she’d made.
Running bloody fingers across the thermometer tube she located the cut end by touch and pushed the other, smooth end through the hole she’d made.
Dana did not suck in air through the jagged and amateur tracheotomy Eleri had just performed. Eleri didn’t sit back on her knees though. She’d been leaning low, but now she had to sit up enough to push on Dana’s chest. She counted.
Not “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen, which worked for rhythm, but “Staying Alive” by the Bee Gees. That was what Dana needed. Eleri couldn’t sing it. She could barely breathe in the air that was now too black to even see Christina through.
So she sang in her head as she began compressions on Dana’s chest.
43
Donovan raced back into the house trying not to breathe. The smoke was real enough this time. The fire raged on, blistering his skin more than it already was, but he had to get to Eleri.
“She won’t leave!” Christina cried it as she hauled the limp form of Grace Aroya out of the house. The girl looked smaller than she had before, when she’d been in a murderous rage.
Donovan—fully human and upright now—wore only pants. He and Wade had gotten the family out of the house and bolted for the w
oods. Pants were the only thing they spared the time for and hardly that. They’d made forward progress, running back toward the burning house while they zipped and snapped.
His arms bore welts and blisters, as did his hands. No one escaped that house uninjured. Except maybe Grace Aroya. Though he knew she was a kid, though he knew it made him small, he wished her the most severe injuries of all.
Wade—ever the physicist—started them opening doors and windows. “Relieving pressure on the system,” he said. He yelled at the family to stay back.
Donovan should have been tending their wounds, being the only physician in attendance, but he couldn’t do it until he knew that Eleri and Dana were safe. Eleri mostly. He was man enough to admit that he was more than attached and that he was frantic that Christina and even Grace Aroya were out, but his partner wasn’t.
Christina was pulling the limp girl unceremoniously down the stairs, with his nose clogged he couldn’t smell if she was alive or dead. The roar and wail of the flames drove him forward into the house.
Wade pushed past Christina, coming up after him. There were two people inside to bring out. Christina grabbed Wade as he bolted past her and yelled over the roar of the fire, “I’ve got you. But stay low. It will look and feel clear for you, but it isn’t.”
Already over the threshold and feeling the blistering heat pick at wounds he already had and working to make new ones, Donovan was amazed to watch the air and fire clear. He breathed in a clean feeling, and he could see Eleri across the room, working on Dana. Blood was everywhere and Eleri was performing CPR.
Wade pulled him down to the floor, reminding him of Christina’s words. Together, they raced to the two women and Donovan grabbed at Eleri, pulling her off Dana.
“No, I can’t stop. She’s not breathing!” Eleri scrambled against him.
“The fire—” he was telling her, but she interrupted.
“Is gone!” She scrambled to get back to her post, but Wade was already hooking his hands under Dana’s arms and pulling her backward as he headed for the door.
“It’s not.” Donovan dragged her though she fought. It was the one and only time he could think he’d ever used his superior physical strength against her. Then again, she could do that black-eye thing and lay him flat probably, so he kept talking. “Christina overrode us so we could see. It’s still on fire. Listen.”
He could hear the crackle of the flames, but it didn’t matter, Eleri was bolting for the door, knowing Wade had Dana. Probably she’d figured out for herself that they couldn’t save Dana if they didn’t get her out.
He grabbed at her shirt, missing and getting only the waistband on her pants. “Stay low. The smoke.”
She ducked and chicken walked out the back door, screaming as her sleeve caught on fire from a source she couldn’t see. Still, she grabbed his hand and pulled him through the small opening. Eleri bolted, dragging him behind her as his bare feet stumbled across the deck. He was pretty sure they fell down the short staircase and onto the grass.
Only then did he feel the pain. It flared out across his skin, his scalp, the bottoms of his feet. As he sucked in what he now knew to be clean air, he felt his lungs sear from the smoke he’d been breathing.
Eleri grabbed him and they rolled in the grass. Eleri even hit him on the head once and when he frowned at her for it she said in the raspiest voice he’d heard, “something was burning and stuck in your hair.”
He didn’t know why but he laughed at her.
And laughed more and told himself the tears running down his face were from the smoke.
They were okay.
He looked around, first spotting the skin on his arms and noticing his right arm was red and blistered to the point of not being recognizable. As he looked at it, it began to hurt, almost to the point of making him scream out. But he clamped his teeth and pushed it back. Only then did he feel that the pain was only around the edges of the burn. He’d seared all the nerve endings, the skin was burned dead. It meant third degree. A skin graft. It meant . . .
He didn’t dwell, he just looked farther.
People littered the lawn, many of them in firefighting gear. One of them tried to put an oxygen mask on his face and Donovan pushed the hand away.
Then he realized he probably needed it. Trying to speak through the flow of oxygen, he explained that he was an agent and needed the paramedic to follow him around. Only his voice didn’t work. It had quit on him, ravaged by fire and smoke, the same as the rest of him. He tapped his chest, looking pointedly at the young woman trying to treat him. “I’m an agent.”
Nothing. No sound. He breathed in, his eyes scanning through the throngs as he spotted another paramedic doing the same to Eleri. She pulled out her badge and flipped it open, getting instant recognition. But he was only in pants. He started patting his butt, surprisingly happy to discover he’d left the wallet in them. Of course he had, he and Wade hadn’t stopped to put things neatly away. He flipped the badge open and motioned, now making the paramedic follow him around.
Except the first step killed him.
His leg collapsed underneath him at the pain shooting up his leg. He spotted Eleri who was looking at him and then back at Dana.
Dana was flat on the ground with three people in jumpsuits working frantically over her. All Donovan could see was her feet and a shock of curls spread on the grass, but at least she was being taken care of.
Eleri was following a group out through a chunk of the back fence that had been cut to let them all escape the backyard without having to pass close to the burning house. Ironically, the board Eleri had moved remained on the other side of the yard.
Heavy hoses were dragged into the back yard as Dana was loaded onto a stretcher and two firefighters stripped their jackets to help Wade put his arms over their shoulders. They lifted him away, obviously in pain. Donovan quickly found himself on a stretcher then in the back of ambulance.
With nothing he could do—Eleri and Wade and Christina were safe, he couldn’t tell about Dana—he dozed. When his head jerked up, he found he was in an ER bay with Eleri sitting beside him staring at him.
She had pieces of her clothing cut away. Bandages adorned various parts of her body, with her skin showing in other spots. Mostly it was clean, though the rags of her shirt were not. She smiled at him. “Welcome back.”
Blinking a few times through a thicker than normal haze, he squinted at her before looking at himself. His right arm was bandaged from above his elbow to his wrist. He spotted smaller squares of gauze all around his torso, held in place with a long section of tube gauze. He remembered it well from his ER rotation in med school. Never expected to be wearing it himself, and certainly not this much of it.
He found a bandage around his head—held in place by a thin strip of tube gauze. His arm wore a sleeve of the stuff. At least his bare feet had been given actual socks, though the lower part of his left pant leg was cut away and a larger bandage was held in place by yet another sleeve of tube gauze. He should have bought stock in the stuff.
“Wade?” he asked.
“Looks a little better than you.” She rasped out, then smiled and leaned back, yanking the curtain open between the bays. The reveal showed the other man reclined on a bed with a drink in a dinky plastic cup with a straw.
“Christina?” This time he felt the small tears and burns in his throat as he spoke. As he watched Eleri pushed a button.
“She went to get some vending machine food. She’s been sitting with Wade.” Eleri whispered as she motioned to the empty chair by his bed. “We’re all together.”
All. That was only four.
“I fell asleep?” He asked as a nurse showed up and Eleri ordered him a drink, then stood and walked a few steps, clearly exhausted.
“They bandaged your arm and you screamed. They sedated you.” She looked grim.
“Not very manly of me.” He lamented even as her eyebrows already rose.
“Nope. Horrible indecent of you to run into
a burning building to save your friends.” Her sarcasm was as dry as her throat sounded. “Even though some of the firefighters had already arrived.”
He hadn’t seen them.
“You sustained the only third degree burn of any of us.” She sat back down, looking more somber. “Scream away.”
He didn’t. He did something worse. He asked, “Dana?”
There was a long pause before Eleri just shook her head.
Wade closed his eyes. Christina arrived then, pushing through the curtains that kept their little group closed off from the rest of the ER, if only visually.
One of the doctors came in then and explained what they’d found, what Donovan’s options were.
“My foot?” Donovan asked. When he’d stepped on it, it had screamed in pain, his leg collapsing underneath him. “How burned is it?”
“Shockingly little.” The doctor said while looking at the chart, and for the first time he realized what an obnoxious physician he must have been. Good thing he’d worked with dead people. The woman continued on. “You had a shard of glass wedged in the sole of your foot. That’s what you stepped on. We removed it, cleaned it, you have deep sutures as well as surface sutures.”
“Monocryl? Four-point-oh?” He asked, making her finally glance up at him.
She caught on and started talking shop, at which point she was very animated. Until he asked about his friends and then asked if they could leave.
“You have a third degree burn over a portion of your arm.” She intoned cautiously.
“How much?” He bantered back and forth with her. Though he never convinced her that he could care for it at home—it would eventually need skin graft surgery, with eventually being preferably soon—he at least convinced her that he knew what he was talking about.
The NightShade Forensic Files: Echo and Ember (Book 4) Page 29