Her words chill something inside me. I tighten my grip on my knife, worried I might vomit. Dr. Gruen lifts her hand.
A cloud of smoke appears on the horizon. It makes me think of volcanoes erupting. Atom bombs being set off. The smoke billows in clouds so thick and dark they look solid.
“What?” I frown at the sky. Black tendrils reach across the blue, fading with the wind.
Dr. Gruen turns on her heel, brushing her hands together. “I couldn’t just leave it there,” she explains.
“That was Brunesfield?” My voice cracks. It’s a trick. She’s playing with my emotions. Trying to throw me off guard. Brunesfield isn’t gone. All those girls can’t be—
Oh God. Ben.
Something inside me snaps clean off. I pounce, slashing. The knife feels like an extension of my arm. I cut through the air, and the blade slides cleanly into its mark.
Dr. Gruen rears back, her hand flying to her shoulder. Blood oozes through her fingers. I’ve never enjoyed violence before, but the sight of Dr. Gruen’s blood fills me with a horrible, animal glee.
She deserves this. I’m going to make her pay.
“What did you do?” Dr. Gruen gasps. She takes her hand away from her shoulder, revealing the mangled skin below her ripped shirt. I lunge hungrily, but Gruen sidesteps and stumbles on an overturned chair.
“I’m going to kill you,” I say, tightening my grip on the knife. I no longer feel the burn on my leg. I feel powerful. Dangerous. Fear flashes through Dr. Gruen’s eyes. Then it hardens. Turns to anger. She opens her hand, and flames dance up from the floor.
The fire spreads quickly across the tiny house. I leap aside, and it explodes against the back wall. Paint bubbles and pops. The wood buckles. A chunk of flaming ceiling drops to the floor and explodes in a shower of sparks and wood.
Jessica finally lifts her head, her eyes darkening. A wave of fire ripples across the floor, heading straight for Dr. Gruen. Gruen’s eyes grow black, but Jessica’s flames reach her before she can do anything. They dance around her feet, and climb into the air, surrounding her in a cage of flickering sparks.
The fire leaps to the ceiling, and flares through the cabin. Something shifts above us, and another chunk of wood crashes to the floor. I drop my knife, and leap backward. A flaming beam swings from the ceiling, and smacks into Jessica’s back. She drops to the ground like a rock.
“No!” I scream. The smoke makes my eyes water. Dim shadows move around me, and I think I hear the sound of Dr. Gruen’s heels clacking against the wood. Suddenly the flames flare, growing higher. Hotter. I look around, but the fire surrounds us. We’re trapped.
“Best of luck, Miss Davis,” Dr. Gruen calls, gingerly stepping out of the wreckage. I hear a sound like a helicopter’s propellers, and Dr. Gruen calls to someone I can’t see, “Wait for the fire to die down, and then bring me the little girl. Leave the other one for the wolves.”
I drop to my knees. Every part of my body aches and burns. Moaning, I drag myself across the floor, to where Jessica lies pinned beneath a burning wooden beam.
Soot coats her face. I release a sound that’s halfway between a sob and a gasp, and her eyes flicker open. She finds my face, but her gaze is cloudy, and she can’t quite focus.
“Jessica,” I whisper. A flame sputters, and wood rains down on us. Sparks hit my face and arms. I cringe away, but it’s no use. The fire’s everywhere.
Jessica groans and eases her arm out from beneath the wooden beam. I take her hand. Heat presses in on us. It crawls down my throat.
“Get up,” I whisper, my voice a croak. Flames climb the walls and spread across the floor. “The house is going to fall down. We have to run.”
I prop my free hand against the wooden beam trapping Jessica’s body but, no matter how hard I push, it doesn’t budge. A sob escapes my lips. I try again, but my arms give way, and I collapse onto Jessica’s chest.
I’m so tired. My eyelids droop, but I force them open. I have to stay conscious. We have to move. More blackened bits fall from the ceiling. I imagine pushing myself to my feet. Hauling the burning beam off Jessica’s chest. But the commands never quite make it to my arms and legs. I lie there, paralyzed.
I feel fingers on my skin. They gently push the hair from my forehead.
“Tell me a story, Angela,” Jessica whispers. Flames crackle and scream around us. I squeeze Jessica’s hand, trying not to notice how weak it is. How she doesn’t squeeze back.
“Once upon a time,” I say, “there was a wolf who wore a necklace made of children’s teeth.”
My father’s stories echo through my head. I tell of monsters that gamble away their souls at the racetrack, and serpents who live in shower drains. I tell the stories long after Jessica has stopped moving and breathing, until the smoke chokes my lungs and clouds my head, and I can no longer speak.
Epilogue
I open my eyes.
The sun hangs high in the sky above me. I squint and shy away from its light. For a long moment, I don’t move. I worry that if I flex my fingers or toes I’ll learn that I don’t have any feeling in them. That I’ve lost them.
Or maybe I’m already dead. Maybe this is hell.
I don’t feel dead. Heat rushes through my veins, spreading into my hands and down my legs. I stretch my fingers. I wiggle my toes. With a groan, I push myself up to my elbows.
The cabin lies in pieces around me. Shredded wood and broken glass blanket the snow. I groan and push a blackened piece of wall off my legs, glancing around frantically, searching for her, afraid of what I already know. She’s dead, and they took her body, I’m on my own.
I push aside more pieces of wood and broken furniture until I locate a singed coat that’s two sizes too large for me, and a pair of rubber boots that might be for gardening. My canvas slip-ons have melted onto my feet. I cringe and peel the layers of fabric away quickly, like a Band-Aid, leaving strips of raw red skin behind.
Time blips. I don’t remember walking away from the ruined cabin, but all of a sudden I’m wandering through the woods in my too-large boots, and slipping on the snow, and grabbing tree branches to steady myself. My breath forms icy clouds, but the cold seems to stop at my skin. Strange.
The highway’s closer than I expected. I’ve only been walking for a few minutes when I stumble onto a stretch of black asphalt. I wrap my arms around my chest. I wait.
A spot appears on the horizon. A truck.
I stick out my thumb. The truck rumbles to the side of the road and pulls to a stop in front of me. A man leans his head out the window. He has a face like a basset hound, covered in a layer of white scruff. I tug the coat tighter around my shoulders, praying the driver won’t recognize my juvie uniform.
“Okay, miss?” he drawls. “You look like you could use a hospital.”
I frown. I don’t feel like I need a hospital. I wonder, for the first time, how long I spent lying in the snow under the ruins of that little log house, how I survived the cold. It felt like hours but it could have been days. Weeks.
“Yeah. I could use a ride,” I say. The man nods and throws open the passenger door. I hurry to the other side of the truck and scramble inside.
I slam my door shut, catching my reflection in the side mirror.
Burns cover my face, leaving my skin raw and puckered. I stare at myself, certain there’s something wrong with my eyesight, or with the mirror. But no. This is real. One of my eyebrows has vanished, and the remaining flesh looks shiny, like it’s been polished. Black scorch marks stain my lips and cheekbones. I touch them with the tips of my fingers. Fascinated. The fire ate everything beautiful and familiar. I look like a stranger.
Black tendrils reach out from my pupils and spread over the whites of my eyes, like oil through water. I hold my breath. The air around me vibrates. The paint along the edges of the mirror starts to bubble.
“Where to?” the driver asks. His words are a switch. The black fades from my eyes. The air goes still. I stare at my horrible reflectio
n for a long moment, not sure I trust myself to speak.
“Miss?” the driver says.
Paper crinkles beneath the waistband of my scrubs. Cara’s newspaper article. I slip it out from my waistband and unfold it. It’s blackened along the edges, but the article’s still readable. I scan the type until I find the name of the hospital where Jessica’s mother was left. Underhill Medical Center. I run a finger beneath the words.
Revenge missions have to start somewhere. This place is as good as any other.
“There’s a hospital upstate,” I say. “Underhill Medical Center. Do you know where that is?”
The driver squints down at the clipping. Then, “That’s up north a bit. You have family near there or something?”
“Or something,” I say.
The driver nods. “No problem.” He flashes me a kind smile.
The truck pulls away from the side of the road. I exhale and look back at my reflection. I study every whirl of my melted skin, the black scorches on my lips, my newly singed hair. Dr. Gruen made me into a monster, I think as the truck picks up speed. Just like the ones in my father’s stories.
So maybe it’s time to become one.
Acknowledgments
Thank you thank you thank you thank you to Mandy Hubbard, agent of my dreams, for finding Burning such a wonderful home, for glittery Christmas cards, and for the perfect gif at the perfect time, as well as a hundred other things that are much harder to put into words. If I could put a gif in these acknowledgments, it’d be that one of Dawson ugly crying. So picture that when you read this.
Thank you to Mary Kate Castellani for understanding why monsters are more interesting than heroes, and for loving Angela as much as I do. You’ve been a dream to work with. Big ole, sloppy, heartfelt thanks go to the rest of the Bloomsbury team, all of whom worked tirelessly to get this book out into the world. Publishing people are angels with books instead of wings. Or maybe the books are like their wings? Sorry, that’s a weird metaphor but Mary Kate didn’t edit this part so what do you expect?
Thanks to my mom, who called me after she finished and read her favorite lines over the phone. And my dad, who never reads anything but who read this book, and Ron, who talks about these characters like they’re real people. Thank you to the rest of my family, who fight over the ARCs I send home. You make me feel like a rock star instead of a weirdo author who sometimes forgets to put pants on. (I’m definitely wearing pants now. Wait . . . )
And last, thank you to whoever is reading these acknowledgments right now. It takes a special reader to make it this far into a book. I used to go to the library and turn right to the acknowledgments and think about how cool it must be to be a writer. And now that I am a writer, I still read the acknowledgments of my favorite books simply because I never want them to end. Whichever you are, thank you. Seriously.
Copyright © 2016 by Danielle Rollins
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
First published in the United States of America in April 2016
by Bloomsbury Children’s Books
E-book edition published in April 2016
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rollins, Danielle
Burning / by Danielle Rollins.
pages cm
Summary: After three years in juvenile detention, Angela is just months shy of release, but then ten-year-old Jessica arrives in shackles and is placed in segregation, and while no one knows what she did to end up there, creepy things begin to happen and it becomes clear that Jessica and her possible supernatural powers are more dangerous than anyone expected.
ISBN 978-1-61963-738-2 (hardcover) • ISBN 978-1-61963-739-9 (e-book)
[1. Juvenile detention homes—Fiction. 2. Supernatural—Fiction. 3. Horror stories.] I. Title.
PZ7.1.R666Bu 2016 [Fic]—dc23 2015012107
Book design by Amanda Bartlett
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