Baptism of Fire (Playing With Hellfire Book 1)

by Jessie Thomas

  Get up… Get up, or this demon is going to kill you.

  I groaned, forcing myself up onto my elbows. Pain shot down my side and awakened in my muscles, the bruises that marked me. The incendiary sauntered forward, their face still shrouded in secret. Their hair, though. There was too much of it to belong to the arsonist. They tossed another handful of fire from one ghostly palm to the other, the movement hypnotic, releasing blue embers into the night sky.

  I finally scraped myself off the street and ran. The incendiary had plenty of time to kill me, twice over. Why didn’t they? Maybe the thrill of hunting me for sport was enough.

  The narrow road branched off from where I’d left the car smoldering, another confusing grid of abandoned lots and empty cars hidden behind rows of storefronts. A blast of sulfuric, hot air shoved into the small of my back. I ducked with a yelp, a second car to my left going up in a burst of Hellfire.

  If this incendiary got off on damaging property rather than murder, then maybe I’d live long enough to keep them preoccupied.

  When the third car went up in flames on my right, pieces of broken glass flying into my cheek and shoulder, the flare was so intense that the fire spread rapidly. It leapt from the hood to the back end of the car parallel parked in front of it, roaring as it twisted the metal with its scorching heat. If it kept going, these people would wake up tomorrow to find the whole street lined with burned-out cars.

  If only I could put it out.

  The demon hadn’t hit me. Not yet.

  I twisted around, an awkward motion that nearly made me fall right out of my flip flops. The incendiary moved toward me with an unsettling, deliberate gait. I held my hands in front of me, pushing my palms outward, hoping to find that same fire again. It was there. I knew it was. Why couldn’t I reach it?

  I shut my eyes and listened to the frantic pulse running around my ears. And inhaled, slowly, despite the danger advancing.

  Heat touched my bare skin, scorching as it rushed past. Not close enough to graze or burn. But I saw the burst of orange light across my closed eyelids, heard the whoosh of flame inches from my ear and felt the prickle of heat.

  It didn’t belong to me. Or the demon.

  Someone’s hand latched onto my wrist and I flinched. Their touch was blazing—I sensed the influx of pyromancy this time, their skin hot from the fire—but the grip on my wrist wasn’t rough. More than anything, it was urgent.

  “I admire your effort,” a deep, masculine voice said from behind me, “but we’ve gotta hustle. I just pissed ‘em off.”

  Whoever he was, unfortunately he was right. With a snarl, the incendiary extinguished the Hellfire burning its way through the cars on the street. And then it lit up their palms as they charged toward us. We took off, running further into the dark. Beside me, I felt a new rush of heat, flames illuminating a sharp jawline and highlighting the dark hair that fell across his forehead in shades of orange. Golden light brought out the warm, light brown tones of his skin. He twisted around just enough to launch the fire at the demon.

  “That’s not going to help!” I shouted, nearly out of breath. I lost both my flip flops while skidding out of the way, avoiding the Hellfire that shot between us. The embers were close enough to singe the hem of my shirt.

  “Nah, it won’t,” he agreed. When he glanced over at me, there was a crease between his dark eyebrows, a flicker of growing concern when he found the burn mark and the hole that had eaten away at the fabric. “But it’ll buy us some time.”

  With that, he lobbed another handful of fire backward in their general direction. It was a messy, careless throw, but I watched as the flames slammed right into the incendiary’s shoulder, jostling them. The hit knocked the Hellfire that they’d been aiming at us off course, spiraling away into the shadows. It collided with a dumpster, the whole thing engulfed in blue flame in a matter of seconds.

  I laughed. The irony.

  “Nice fucking shot,” I told him.

  Blue light flashed across the darkened windows ahead of us. It wasn’t until he muttered an, “Ah, fuck,” that I realized it had nothing to do with the incendiary. The light didn’t have the same flickering quality as the flames. It had a certain rhythm and purpose to it.

  I knew those lights, too.

  “Police.” Now I was definitely out of breath. Wallowing hadn’t done much to keep me in shape.

  The temperature on the street plummeted a few degrees. The incendiary was gone, vanished into the night. They’d left us with a smoking dumpster and the faint odor of sulfur for our trouble.

  “Pyro cops,” he corrected. We’d slowed down once the incendiary disappeared, but now he was trying to walk in a brisk pace toward the nearest alley. “Those are PCU lights. They don’t use sirens. I don’t know who patrols this block, but we better get our asses out of here just to be safe.”

  “Aren’t they supposed to be allies?”

  That was met with a deep, cynical laugh. “Not all of them.”

  He stopped walking once he realized we weren’t getting out of this, let out a defeated I’m-so-over-this-shit kind of sigh, and held up an arm across me like we’d just narrowly avoided a head-on collision.

  “There’s a mess all over the street,” he said. “They’re not gonna be happy about it.”

  Blue light flooded the street from both ends. I squinted against the blinding flash and used the back of my arm to block some of it from my eyes. Through the shapes dancing across my vision, I found the outline of a behemoth. The silver edge of a hubcap. A New York State license plate. Shadows moving away, disrupting the light. Even the weak city glow couldn’t find the matte black paint. That thing moved through the shadows like a ghost.

  The guy whose name I still didn’t know already had his hands up. He was breathing hard, too, the quick ebb and flow rippling under his black T-shirt.

  “Just do whatever they tell you, Nix,” he advised. “Don’t fight ‘em.”

  “I wasn’t planning on it.”

  Wait. I turned my head to stare him, eyes wide, once the casual use of my name finally hit me. But he wasn’t looking at me anymore. He was watching the shadows walking toward us. They stepped out of the light and more of their features became clearer.

  They weren’t armed.

  “Stay where you are,” an authoritative male voice ordered. “Don’t move!”

  It obviously wasn’t Detective Rashid. I craned my neck, trying to make out the other faces to see if she was among them. But the detectives in the car behind us were headed for the dumpster spewing acrid smoke into the air. I threw my hands up in front of me as the owner of the gruff voice approached.

  The guy flicked his wrist—for a second, I thought he was going to slap me across the face; the knee-jerk reaction to watching too many rogue cop dramas. A flex of his fingers and a wave of pressure I couldn’t see bowled the two of us over, forcing us onto our knees. Whatever it was, the air around us crackled with electricity. The night shimmered with something that had the same density as smoke.

  Over the growl of a running engine, there was static and the melodic chirp of radios.

  The pyro cop muttered into his. “Suspects nullified.”

  My unexpected ally groaned. “Take it easy with that shit, yeah?”

  “Got a couple of calls about some cars burned out a few streets over,” the pyro cop explained. “You know, we frown upon using personal property as target practice.”

  The guy kneeling beside me pinned the pyro cop with a hard stare. “Might want to take that complaint to the incendiary that tried to burn us to a crisp.”

  “What did you just say?”

  “You heard me,” he answered. “That’s Hellfire you’re dealing with—or not dealing with…I guess…would probably be more accurate.”

  The pyro cop huffed a derisive laugh. “Cuff them. We’re taking them back to headquarters.”

  “I’m not telling you how to do your job, but…” His grin was all sarcasm. The mischievous glint in his eyes told
me everything I needed to know about his feelings toward the PCU. He held up his arms in a mocking half-shrug.

  “Check the dumpster,” I suggested. “The cars. That residual power isn’t ours.”

  “Let’s go,” he said to whoever stood behind us. “Get them out of here. It’s already been too long. We don’t want to attract a crowd.”

  Another pyro cop wrestled my hands into handcuffs, twisting my arms when I gave a halfhearted thought to making their job more difficult for them. I didn’t have any prior experience with being arrested—though at one point I’d come dangerously close—but the metal was hot when it dug into my wrists. Almost painful. They couldn’t have been standard-issue cuffs, not with the strange tingling of energy that buzzed against my skin.

  Beside me, my nameless accomplice had the honor of being handcuffed and hauled to his feet by the friendly pyro cop. Someone else stuffed a black bag over his head. The guy groaned in response, and whatever he told them I couldn’t really decipher. I yelped when the same was done to me, the harsh blue light replaced with a claustrophobic darkness. No one here knew the meaning of gentle. There was a lot of pushing and shoving until I climbed into one of the enormous PCU vehicles.

  At least it had A/C.

  9

  Those cuffs were really starting to hurt.

  They felt like they were searing through layers of my skin, but I didn’t find any evidence of third-degree burns. Just an uncomfortable sensation and hot metal pinching my wrists. The pyro cops had forced me and the other pyromancer—who obviously knew me a lot better than I knew him—into separate cars. It had been a long, dark ride to wherever the PCU headquarters was within the city. Somewhere beyond The Raze, I was sure, but I couldn’t tell how far we’d ventured downtown. I’d been too preoccupied with the way the power winding around my hands felt familiar and trying to figure out why a perfect stranger would use my nickname.

  The bag over my head was a little much. I thought that was only a mob thing. Aside from Detective Rashid, I didn’t know anyone else who worked at the PCU. For all I knew, these cops could’ve been driving me right to the demons to get some extra cash. Jodi had assured me they were out of the incendiaries’ reach, but how far could I trust any organized agency in this city?

  Damn it.

  And in all the confusion, I didn’t even have a chance to thank the guy for saving my ass.

  The car came to a rough halt. When the doors opened, letting in the sultry night air, someone grabbed my upper arm. “Let’s go.”

  Not the asshole that my fellow pyromancer was probably trading barbs with in the other car, but a curt feminine voice. Around me, there was the sharp crescendo of more car doors closing. I couldn’t tell anything else from our surroundings, except for the distant hum of city traffic. A mix of gravel and unfinished pavement scraped against my bare feet. My flip flops were probably going to become a tourist’s Instagram story by morning, melted to the road wherever I’d lost them.

  I stubbed my toe on a rock and hissed. A few more steps and there was a full-on assault, the same prickling static that bound my wrists hit me from all sides. I couldn’t tell exactly if it was pain or an uncomfortable pressure, a strange hush against my nerve endings. A slight resistance. It poked at a memory, some familiarity I couldn’t place under the circumstances.

  My feet went from unforgiving gravel to some kind of wood flooring. The air was blissfully cool again. I picked up on a hum of fans and an exceptionally loud A/C unit. The pyro cop’s bruising grip on my upper arm didn’t relent as we kept a brisk pace through the room. There were footfalls of heavy boots and an exchange of voices, the drone of radio static somewhere else.

  “Nowak,” someone called.

  We all stopped.

  “What is it?” That was the gruff pyro cop’s slightly irritated tone.

  “They traced the residuals left at the scene,” another feminine voice, huskier in quality, said. “It’s incendiary.”

  “Told you,” my fellow pyromancer gloated.

  The gruff pyro cop—Nowak—swore. “Rashid’s going to be on my ass for this. Couldn’t have done anything about it anyway. There wasn’t a demon left to detain if we did that sort of thing.”

  A flicker of relief blossomed in the pit of stomach where the anxiety usually tied it in thorny knots. So, we weren’t being sold off for demon money after all.

  “What do you want to do with them?” the pyro cop bruising my arm asked.

  “Hold them for now,” Nowak ordered. “I gotta get over there and see what I can do for damage control. Cops are probably checking out those cars, looking for someone to blame.”

  The pyro cop’s grip loosened a little. “What else is new?” She sighed. “All right, you heard him. Down to the Pit.”

  That sounded rather unpleasant.

  “I know Detective Rashid,” I said, as if it would spare us from a place that had earned enough notoriety to be capitalized. “She can vouch for us.”

  Well, for me, but I figured this was my way of saying thanks.

  “We’ll get her down here,” she said. “But this is all protocol. I can’t break house rules until you’re cleared. Watch your step.”

  It was considerate of her to at least warn me about the stairs. We descended underground—I could tell because the air changed again and clearly the A/C units didn’t circulate much down here. Anyone with a basement in Perdition Falls could tell you that they were insufferable hot boxes.

  The Pit seemed to be an apt name.

  The floor was warm under my toes. It smelled like a basement. A mix of a stale, musty odor and the chalky scent of new construction. Once the bag was lifted off my head, I could breathe better and see the Pit in all its glory. I blew the stray hair out of my face that had been mussed by the velvet cloth.

  The room was a pit, all right—dingy lighting and a concrete floors that I shuddered to walk on with bare feet. Half of the space had a few holding cells not much different than what you’d find in a police station. They looked new and had a shine to them. I wouldn’t exactly call them inviting. The walls had been left unfinished, new drywall put up but unpainted. Boxes and stacks of chairs were pushed into a corner, so obviously this place was an afterthought. It made sense that they kept rowdy, misbehaving pyromancers down here to sweat for their crimes.

  The pyro cops removed our handcuffs, which was a sweet relief. They shoved the two of us into the same holding cell and the bolt sliding home had an eerie, metallic echo of finality that I didn’t like. I thought I saw a shimmer, a faint red glow when the door locked.

  I blinked and it was gone.

  “Sit tight. We’ll be back with Detective Rashid.”

  My new cellmate slumped down onto one of the benches and dragged a hand over his face. “Well. That happened.”

  “This is ridiculous. What’s with the secrecy?” I asked. “Overkill, much?”

  “Security measure,” he said. “Never been detained by them before, but they probably do it to every pyro they catch. If word got out about this place, it’d go up in flames like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Hell, I bet someone’s already tried it. Less people who know, the better.”

  Like everything else in this city, then.

  I paced in front of the door. “Detective Rashid will get us out of here.”

  “Yeah. Don’t doubt it,” he answered. “Wouldn’t touch anything, though. They’ve got this place warded like Fort fucking Knox. Might be the only thing keeping it fire resistant.”

  Sighing, I moved away from the bars and settled down on the bench opposite him, folding my legs to keep off the grungy floor. Not that it would help at all, because I could already see the collection of dirt and dust and whatever else on the bottoms of my feet.

  Just when I was starting to think I couldn’t be more of a mess than I was an hour ago, I was barefoot in a jail cell.

  Rock bottom had another layer.

  “They what?” The term meant nothing to me. I wanted to chalk it up to good o
ld brain fog, but there were still parts of the city that were foreign.

  “Wards,” he said. “Protection. Keeps pyros locked in or incendiaries out.”

  “Right.”

  This goddamn city, I swear.

  I tugged the hair tie loose, freeing my hair from its mangled braid. “Can’t we just…I don’t know…break them?”

  “Wouldn’t try it,” he advised. “I don’t fuck with that stuff. Takes some serious skill to do that, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, there’s consequences.”

  “Just figured I’d ask.” I sighed. “Listen, I’m sorry about all this. And thank you for jumping in when you did. You didn’t have to, you know. I would’ve learned the hard way. I just…I thought I could get the whole pyromancy thing to work. And it obviously did not work the way I wanted it to. I’m new at this.”

  Combing my fingers through my hair, I tried to work out some of the tangles and ignore the throbbing pain in my side.

  A sly grin worked its way onto the corner his mouth. “I could tell.”

  There was something heart-wrenching and familiar about his smile. I couldn’t place it.

  I tossed up my hands. “Don’t mind me. I haven’t been making the greatest decisions lately.”

  “Takes serious guts to stare down an incendiary. You did that.”

  “It was stupid.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” he said with an indifferent shrug of one shoulder. “But there’s some bravery in that, too.”

  He leaned forward, elbows pressed to his knees. His biceps strained under the short sleeves of his black T-shirt, though the rest of him appeared fairly lean. Broad shoulders and a toned build, not a wall of pure bulging muscle like some of the people I’d encountered in the department. There was a gentle swell to his cheeks and a softness in his dark eyes, all disarming warmth. He regarded me with a thoughtful stare, a quiet amusement.

  “I’m just sorry I dragged you into it.”

  “You didn’t drag me into anything, Nix.” His grin deepened slowly when I lifted my head. The fond look in his eyes was rather charming. “I know it’s been a while.” His eyes narrowed. “You really don’t remember me?”