Ablaze (Indestructible Trilogy Book 2) (5 page)

“You know, Leah, I thought you knew better than to go rushing off on a whim.”

Despite the slippery rocks under my feet, I whirl around to face him. “Don’t you start,” I say, in a low voice. “You think I meant for any of this to happen? Blame Jared, not me.”

“I wasn’t blaming you, Leah.”

My foot slips, and I awkwardly jump to the next rock before I lose my balance.

“Sure,” I say. “You’re the one who signed me up in the first place, in case you’ve forgotten.”

No response. I’ve got him.

I jump again, wildly, and my feet don’t catch the next rock on time.

I’m falling.

I can’t breathe. I choke and gargle, spitting out sea water, arms flailing in instinctive revulsion. My eyes burn; I can’t see anything, but a rough hand grabs me. Another few seconds of flailing, and then there’s suddenly solid ground beneath me. I roll onto my back, gasping, and open my eyes to a squint. I’m not on the stepping stones anymore; but on the other side. The blurred outline of someone stands nearby—Nolan.

I blink furiously. He pulled me out of the water?

“Thanks,” I cough, not meeting his eyes as I get to my feet. My cloak’s sodden and heavy, but there’s a lightness I didn’t expect—
oh, no.
I’ve lost the other weapons, except the one melded to my hand.
My
weapon. It’s part of me—and apparently, even falling into the sea wasn’t enough to dislodge it from my hand. Pyros can fight with any weapon and channel our power through it, but usually only bond to one, or so I’ve heard. I slump back in relief. If I’d lost
that
weapon, I’d be screwed. I shiver, tossing the coat’s hood back and squeezing water out of my sleeves.

“It was nothing,” Nolan says flatly. “You okay to move?”

“Yeah.” My throat’s hoarse, my ears feel waterlogged, but I can’t focus on that now. “Come on. We should move.”

Nolan throws me a concerned look, but doesn’t say anything. We head down the nearest path, but I don’t want to get too close to the divide.

“Leah!”

I stop. A dark shape hovers in the sky above us. Nolan pulls me down, but there’s nothing to shelter behind.

It’s one of Jared’s engineered monsters. And it’s spotted us.

The fiend drops from the sky, bat-like wings spread wide, long tusks protruding from its jaws. I tense, dropping into a defensive stance. Claws swipe past me and I duck and stab upwards. My knife catches it in the arm, but barely breaks the skin. Dizziness from my near-drowning slows me down.

I duck another swipe, getting into position to strike. The fiend dives, headfirst this time, teeth bared. I roll underneath its claws and swing my fist, fire lighting as I punch it in the mouth.

The impact vibrates through my bones, but the fiend’s tusk breaks in two, and its face crumples inwards where I struck it.

Breathing heavily, I move back, out of the way of its stumpy legs. The fiend raises a hand to its ruined face and bellows in pain, feet stamping, sending ripples across the ground. I stumble, blood spilling from the cut on my arm again. The fight has torn it open.

Not good.
The fiend takes another swing at me, and I don’t have time to think. I duck, hitting its arm with a well-aimed left hook. It’s twice my size and too slow to catch me as I slide under its feet and slash at its ankles. Once, then twice. I come upright and kick it square in the solar plexus. The fiend’s all muscle, but I’m made of different stuff to normal humans, and my kick drives it down, gasping for breath.

I’ve forgotten about the wings. Without warning, leathery wingbeats carry it into the air. The fiend hovers out of reach, then dives at me. Fire flickers along my blade as I swipe at its outstretched hands, but not before one of its claws catches my already-injured arm. Pain turns my vision red.

No.
Through the haze, I see my dagger burning, surrounded by red flame, held high. The fiend takes flight again, claws ready for another dive. I sway on my feet but keep the dagger ready, aiming for the killing blow. As the fiend’s weight comes crashing down on me, I aim right for its heart.

The impact slams me onto my back. I feel wetness and know it’s the fiend’s blood soaking into me, but my arm’s slick with my own blood, too. The world’s slipping away, even as the fiend crumbles to rock, even as I know I’ve won.

No…

The world falls apart in pieces, and I’m gone.

CHAPTER FOUR

I’m sitting in a metal chair in what looks like a lab, though the walls are made of stone like the inside of a cave. Someone sits opposite me, smiling.

Jared. Of course.

“I do wish you would be more cooperative,” says Jared, with a melodramatic sigh. “You know there is no easy way out for you.”

“It was worth a try.” The voice comes from my own mouth, but it’s not mine. Cas.

“Worth a try.” Jared shakes his head. “To think you had the audacity to try to take your
own
life.”

“I told you, I didn’t,” says Cas, with a touch of impatience. “Don’t you think I’d have done that years ago if it wasn’t pointless? I couldn’t do a better job than you, anyway.”

My heart twists, reminding me I’m not really here. What Jared did to Cas—tortured him to test his limits as an unkillable Pyros—was just sick. If I hadn’t seen it myself through Cas’s eyes, I’d never have thought anyone would be capable of something so cruel and depraved.

But where am
I,
and how am I supposed to get out of here?

“Do I detect a hint of resentment? Cas, you alone walked away from the war unscathed. You’ll never be able to repay me for what I did for you.”

“Oh, believe me, I’d like to try.”

“We’ve been through this already,” says Jared. “So, if you didn’t try to commit suicide, then what…?” He trails off. “The girl.”

“What?”

“The girl did something. Let me see.”

Cas makes an impatient noise. “It’s stopped bleeding already.” But he bares his left arm, and my heart skitters.

A long, ropy scar cuts right through the middle of his tattoo. It’s mostly healed, but blood streaks the skin either side of it.

Shock pulses through me. I did that. Somehow, through our connection, the wound transferred over to him.

The impact jolts me awake, in my own body. I gasp, sitting up, sending crumbling rock flying every way. Dust clouds rise up and obscure everything. I make out the shape of the fiend as the dust clears. Its eyes are screwed up, and pieces of it have already broken away. But a horrible, gurgling laughter comes from its throat, and I realise with horror that it’s trying to speak.

“You Transcendents… all monsters at heart.”

Blackness clouds my vision again, and suddenly I’m somewhere else entirely. I’m in front of another fiend, one with two long, clawed hands and two sets of bat-like wings.

A knife’s in my hands, blazing like the sky above.

“Play nice,” whispers a voice. Jared. “Don’t break each other too badly, huh?”

Rage fills me, thick and burning, and—

“Leah!”

My forehead’s pressed to the ground. I look up, and Nolan’s crouching nearby.

Is the same thing happening to Cas? If he can somehow channel my pain, like the cut on my arm, maybe it is. But if I get drawn into Cas’s mind, who’s going to save him?

Don’t think about that.
I know how to remove that tattoo. When I find him, I can stop this.

I focus on that. Something I
can
do.

“You passed out,” Nolan says, unnecessarily.

“It happens.” I shudder. I don’t want to tell him the truth, but my life’s in his hands if it happens again.

Am I making a huge mistake?

Common sense tells me I am. I should at least have asked some of the others to help. But I wanted them to be safe. I can’t save both them and Cas at the same time, much as I wish I could.

“I get… visions,” I say. “Cas and I are linked, and I sometimes see through his eyes.”

“You’re joking.” Nolan stares at me.

“No,” I say. “We need to get a move on, anyway.”

I don’t relax even as we put more than a mile between us and the fiend. Nolan isn’t as fast as me, but we can far outpace regular people. We run until there’s nothing but sea on one side and empty fields on the other, with the occasional Burned Spot marking where there might have once been a village or town.

The energy blasts. They came when the fiends did, and were almost as effective at killing. Anyone within a ten-mile radius of one is vaporised.

Anyone except the Pyros, that is.

Even now, the memory of that day is seared into my mind. The first time I saw an energy blast. The same day I lost my parents, my friends—everyone in my town. The fiends took everything from me. But it’s Jared’s grinning face I see now, when I think of the evil that’s invaded the world.

“Wait up!”

I pause. I was so preoccupied in my own thoughts, Nolan’s been left behind. He hurries to catch up, looking around uneasily. Guess he thinks we might run into the fiends again.

Unless they’re attacking the others, back at the base.

No. They’ll be fine.
We’re the vulnerable ones out here.
And Cas? If there’s a way to stop the tattoos working, is there a way to sever our connection, too? Short of one of us actually dying. Jared implied it was too late. Yet he hasn’t hurt or killed Cas yet.

My mind spins with the possibilities. Even three days of rest aren’t enough to make up for the horrors I’ve been through lately. It feels like the slightest push, another trip into Cas’s memories would make me fracture like glass. Forget who I am, lose myself in the madness of memories. It almost happened when I lost my sister, before I made the decision to carry on living for her sake.

I made the same decision for the others. To fight.

I’m not about to back down now.

***

The sky never really gets dark anymore, but the sun dips out of sight beyond the horizon, turning the sea to blood-red. It seems ominous, and I think of the river of lava I saw Cas standing near. Is he on the other side with the fiends? But Jared was with him, too. Something doesn’t add up—I’ve no way to tell if the visions are happening right now, or in the past. And the urgent look Nolan’s giving me suggests we’re running out of time to make a decision. Hide out for the night? I don’t need to sleep, but he probably does, and in any case, the fiends will be swarming everywhere soon. The closer we get to the divide, the more likely it is that they’ll find us.

“Leah,” says Nolan, as we pass by a stretch of trees. “I know you’re Transcendent, but I’m not. I’m not going to be in any shape to fight anything if we keep going at this pace. Let’s head for the woods.”

I remember the last time I was in a forest with vivid clarity, and shake my head. “No way. We’d be closed in.”

“It’s not normal of them to come into forests,” he says. “Honest. It’s better than being exposed out here.”

He’s right, of course. So we veer off the path and into the woods. Trees drape a blanket of leaves over our heads, and the rustling noises of small creatures in the bushes startles me more than once. It never fails to amaze me that life goes on somehow, in places like this, even with the outside world falling apart.

“Leah.” Nolan points to a clearing ahead. The stars are just visible through gaps in the canopy above. “We could build a fire here. No one would see.”

“Fire.” I almost laugh. “We don’t actually need to build one, do we?” If we can shoot fire from our hands, surely making a campfire can’t be impossible.

Nolan shakes his head at me. “You’ve never tried to light a fire using your powers, have you?”

“What? Of course not. I haven’t had chance. I survived two years out here without knowing about it, anyway.”

“Of course you did,” says Nolan. “But I… you know what, try it.” Strangely, his mouth’s quirked up in a smile.

“Try what?”

“Lighting a fire.” He starts collecting branches and throws them in a heap in the middle of the clearing.

I approach the heap, frowning. He’s bluffing. I can blow fiends up, for crying out loud—why should lighting a fire be any different?

Still, trying to access my powers without the imminent attack of a fiend proves difficult. I can’t get in the mindset. I pull out my dagger, like that’d help, and picture flames running across the edge of the blaze. Doesn’t happen. I try again. Again.

A couple of minutes later, I’m rewarded by a sudden burst of flame, as the entire heap of brambles lights up in a flare. I drop the branches I’m holding and scoot backwards, looking up at Nolan in triumph—only to see him smirking at me. I turn my gaze back to the fire to find it’s burned itself out, and the branches are nothing more than little piles of ashes.

So much for that idea.

“Sorry. Had to see your face.”

“Quit that,” I say. Why’s he being nice to me now? Does he have to make it so difficult for me to hate him?