Burns Like Fire (Dangerous Creatures #1) (12 page)

"Come back here!" Bitch case worker yelled as Cindy launched herself up the stairs.

Like there was a chance of that happening.

She burst through the door leading to the first level of the house. She looked around wildly for the direction of the front door. Escape was her top priority.

Jack's pained scream made her stop and she froze in her tracks, breathing heavily.

Jack wasn't the only one screaming. Bitch case worker was down there really giving Steve and the collector a piece of her mind.

Cindy didn't even know what the woman was saying. Adrenaline was making it hard for her to think, otherwise she might not have turned around and ran back down the stair.

"We'll handle this here! Go upstairs and catch her before she gets away!" Bitch case worker screamed at the collector as he put Jack's hands behind his back and put shackles on him. Jack was face down on the concrete floor, and he wasn't moving.

She'd never wanted to hurt anyone with her powers, but after what happened with Stephanie and Stacy, she'd made a deal with herself that she could justify it in times like these.

Cindy whistled, getting the collector and bitch case worker’s attention, who both looked up at her just in time to face a fireball.

Chapter Fifteen

Jack woke up to the sound of panicked shrieking, and it was hot in the room. Too hot, and his ears were ringing.

He'd thought he was just feeling a jolt of pain in his arm from where the collector had broken it. Then the man had punched him hard in the eye hard enough to knock Jack out.

Strong motherfucker.

He groaned and shifted, and the heat in his arm, which was twisted behind his back, flared up so badly it felt like liquid fire under his skin.

It turned out that wasn't the case at all. There was a small flame right next to his body. It looked like a clipboard and several sheets of paper were quickly burning.

"What the hell?" Jack groaned and looked around some more. One of the case workers, the male, was lying down on the concrete floor, and he wasn't moving. The fact that his chest was peacefully rising and falling indicated that he'd fainted. The scent of burning metal and plastic filled Jack’s nostrils.

He noticed the collector’s needle-gun on the floor, destroyed. It was smoking and black in some places, and the sedative was oozing out of the broken glass. Another small fire was about ten feet away from him, and it took him a second to realize it was the case worker's phone. There was also the smell of burning hair all around him.

Cindy had done this. She'd actually tried to fight back, and now she was really going to get in trouble. Stupid, stupid, stupid! She was supposed to run for her life!

Jack tried to move, but he ended up hissing through the pain in his arm, and he called out through clenched teeth. "Cindy? Cindy!"

"I'm here! Jack! I'm up here!"

He hadn't expected a reply, and her call shocked him, but she was coming. He could hear her feet clumsily rushing down the stairs to get to him.

Her body was still surrounded by flames, her red hair almost vanishing within them. She looked like a phoenix; a goddess. She was so damned beautiful and exotic, that he forgot all about the pain in his arm as he stared at her.

She fell to her knees in front of him, reached out to touch him, and then stopped herself, as if noticing for herself for the first time that she was still on fire. "Shit!"

Cindy yanked her hands back, and Jack watched, fascinated, as the flames around her vanished, as if all the air in the room had been sucked out.

She smiled weakly at him, but he could see that her body was trembling. "Hopefully I didn't melt the key."

"The key?" Jack asked, and hissed again when Cindy leaned over him and unlocked the cuffs around his wrists.

Cindy winced and helped him with his arm. It was a pain in the ass getting it curled around to his front where he could hold onto it.

She'd gone up against a collector. That bothered him too much.

"You fought the collector? You won?" he asked.

Cindy reached out and gently touched his face, her fingers tracing over his quickly swelling eye. "I heard what they were doing to you. I couldn't just leave you down here."

"You should have. Cindy, do you know what happens to paranormals who fight against the collectors? He would've been within his rights to do whatever he wanted to you. He could've killed you." Jack paused for a second, a question quickly forming in his mind. "Where is he? Is he dead?"

"I didn't kill him! He's upstairs!" Cindy said, and the way her voice cracked told him exactly how close she was to crying.

Cindy was definitely not a fighter, in spite of her powers.

"I wasn't accusing you. Wasn't trying to, anyway, but what did you do to them?"

Cindy ran her hands through her hair, which made it look even wilder than before. "The collector's knocked out upstairs, bitch case worker got away, though. We need to get out of here."

Jack tried to think of anything Cindy could do with her power over fire that would allow her to harmlessly render a man, a collector no less, unconscious, and nothing came to mind.

"What did you do to him?"

"Nothing, it wasn't even me," Cindy said.

"It was me."

Jack looked back to the door, and he was shocked to hell at the sight of Jessica, standing there in the doorway, hand on her hip and staring right at Cindy and Jack.

"When did you get here?" Jack asked, and with only a minimal amount of struggling and Cindy pulling on his good arm, he got to his feet.

"You know her?" Cindy asked, staying close to Jack and holding her arms around his waist, as if he needed help standing.

He didn't correct her to stand on his own because he liked the way she held him. He did, however, take one step forward and angle his body so that he was in front of Cindy a little. Jessica was still a hunter, like him, and with her here, things were a little more complicated.

"That's Jessica," Jack said, watching the other woman carefully, noting every twitch of her hand, and the way she shifted her weight from one leg to the other.

She clearly didn't want to be here right now.

Cindy paused, clearly recalling who Jessica was. "But...you never said she was a paranormal!"

Jack frowned. "She's not."

"This really isn't the time to be having this conversation. We need to get out of here, right now," Jessica said.

Jack couldn't look away from her, though. She looked as normal as ever in her black heels and grey skirt. Her long hair was pulled back tightly behind her head in a ponytail. There was nothing paranormal about her. However, he'd once said the same thing about Cindy.

"How did she handle the collector?" Jack asked.

Right about then, the case worker still in the room with them groaned, shifted, and then looked up at them with wide and frightened eyes. Some of the hair on the man's head was burned away, his glasses were missing and his clothing was charred in some places.

The poor guy looked ready to scream. Or start running. This obviously wasn't what he'd signed on for.

Jessica's hand shot out, and a blast of cold blue ice flew from her fingertips, like a snowball, and it struck the guy right in the face with such force that he fell backwards and even skidded across the floor on the trail of ice that had suddenly appeared beneath him. He didn't move, but his chest continued to rise and fall, so he was alive. He was knocked out. He'd likely stay unconscious for a while.

Jack slowly turned his eyes away from the man on the floor to his ex-girlfriend. Her hand was blue and glassy from what she'd just done. A tiny bit of steam even wafted from her ice blue fingers in the warm room. As her hand and fingers moved and flexed as if there was nothing out of the ordinary, the blue slowly vanished, replaced with her regular pink skin.

"You're a paranormal," Jack said, and it wasn't a question. Cindy was right.

"Don't look at me like that, Jack," Jessica said, and she looked away from him, as if embarrassed. Or ashamed. Jack remembered how ashamed Cindy had been when she'd confessed what she was to him, so he wanted to be delicate about this.

"Does Ethan know?"

"He's my brother. Of course he knows. Can we get out of here already?"

Fuck. Jack put his good arm around Cindy's waist and started moving toward the door. The three of them made it up the stairs quickly, and then Jack realized that his right knee was hurting more than he initially thought.

He pushed past it. He wasn't about to let any pain show.

"Wait," Jack said, pulling Cindy back to his room. Jessica followed them.

"What the hell are you doing?" she demanded.

Jack took his phone, but only so he could erase the messages on it before ditching it later on. His computer though...

He looked at Cindy. "Can you overheat it?"

"What do you mean?" Cindy asked.

"I've got pictures of us on the hard drive. Old emails, that sort of thing. You need to burn it. If we're getting out of here then it'll be easier for us to slip by if they think we're traveling separately."

Cindy's eyes widened, but then she looked at his computer, and Jack watched, fascinated as she held out her hand, and her skin brightened, right before the smell of burning metal and plastic hit the air. The machine started to smoke next, but it didn't actually catch fire.

"Don't want to burn the house down around us," Cindy explained, and winced at Jack.

He opened one of his drawers, moved around several articles of clothing, and then yanked out his emergency envelope, and his wallet. He was going to have to leave his truck behind. He didn't want anyone searching for it on the road.

"I know you didn't do it," Jack finally said, the words coming out of his mouth easier than he thought they would.

"My car's parked out back," Jessica said. "I'll drive you out of here. I'll drop you off wherever you want me to, and you're going to be on your own after that."

The way she had trouble meeting Jack’s eyes when she said that...fuck, she was really struggling with this.

He wasn't going to accuse her of anything. She didn't even have to be doing this. She didn't owe him a thing, and she was putting herself in danger just by being here, never mind offering him and Cindy a lift in her car.

He wanted to turn down the offer, but because Cindy was with him, he didn't.

"We don't have far to go. There's a storage unit about twenty minutes away. Drop us off there and I'll take care of the rest," he said, and the three of them quickly got out of the house and into the back seat of Jessica's car, just as the sound of sirens in the distance became noticeable. He and Cindy ducked their head low in the back as Jessica drove them out of there.

Chapter Sixteen

"Jesus Christ, Cindy, what happened to you?"

Cindy coughed as she looked up at the door. She must've dozed off somehow, though she wasn't sure how that had happened, considering the pain.

Jamie stood in the doorway, and one second later he was down on his knees helping her up.

She was already pushing against him. She tried to fight him off, but he caught her wrists before she could hit him. "Don't touch me. Don't touch me!" Cindy yelled, crying out her words as the pain in her womb intensified.

Jamie didn't yell at her or shake her. He just continued to hold onto her, restraining her. It didn't hurt, but she couldn't stop herself from panicking.

"Cindy, Cindy, look at me. Breathe and look at me," Jamie said. "I'm not going to hurt you, okay? Fuck, you're bleeding. You need a doctor."

Bleeding? Cindy looked down and she only noticed the thick and wet sensation between her legs just as her eyes landed on the bright patch of blood that soaked her jeans.

Cindy wailed, and she all but collapsed against Jamie's chest.

Jamie held her. Petting her hair and rocking her. "I got you. You're okay now. Cindy, who did this to you?"

She told him. She told him how Stacy and Stephanie had attacked her, and the despair that washed over Jamie's eyes told her well enough that he didn't condone this. She wasn't sure why she thought he'd been apart of it. Her panic had taken over her mind, she supposed.

"I'll get you to a doctor," Jamie said, and with almost no effort at all, he lifted her into his arms. She never thought he was so strong. He wasn't exactly bursting with muscles.

She still struggled. "No. Put me down."

Jamie was already out the door and quickly rushing down the stairs with her. "Don't be stubborn, seriously. You need a doctor. They won't know what we are so long as you can keep your fire away."

Considering how hard Cindy had tried to free herself from that room, and how much she'd wanted to fight back against Stephanie and Stacy with no success at all, Cindy didn't think keeping her fire away was going to be an issue.

Stress, it seemed, wasn't always helpful when she wanted to control her powers.

Jamie was the only one of the two of them who might get a few odd looks. His dishwasher blond hair was littered with patches of white, and it was naturally spiky, thanks to the electric currents rushing through his skin. The small hairs on Cindy's arms were standing straight up just from touching him.

Cindy finally managed to get Jamie to stop before he could get to his beat up old jeep, and she explained why Stacy had attacked her as she had.

"I need to get to Jack. Jamie, please, I need to get to him and stop them. They'll kill him."

Jamie's face went whiter than the patches of hair on his head. "Jesus Christ, Cindy, a hunter? You can't even worry about that right now. You said you're pregnant. You're bleeding. You need to see a doctor."

"Jamie,
look
at me. The baby's gone," Cindy said, and she immediately let out a few choked sobs before she could compose herself. By telling him this, she was taking the same risk she took with her roommates, worried that he would react the same way they did.

"Jamie, please,
please
," she begged.

Jamie let out a hard breath. "All right," he said, and he put her in the passenger side of the jeep before he climbed into the driver's side and turned on the ignition. "I'll take you right to the house, but if there looks like any trouble then you're staying in the jeep, and I'm calling an ambulance and the cops when we get there."

That was more than what Cindy could've hoped for. Calling for an ambulance was one thing, but involving the police was something else entirely. He was risking his own freedom by doing that, especially if either Stephanie or Stacy was still around and decided to out him for what he was.

Cindy gave him the directions and he drove quickly. The sun was just setting, turning the sky into a mix of purples, pinks, and even a bright, flickering orange.

She didn't understand that the flickering orange was actually coming from Jack's house until they turned the corner and drove over the hill.

Cindy gasped at the sight. There were already red fire trucks at the scene, trying to stop the blazing inferno. It looked like the fire was just eating the house alive like a cruel predator.

"Jesus Christ. Hey! Cindy!" Jamie cried, but Cindy was out of the jeep before he could stop her.

She wasn't fast enough to outrun him, however, and he grabbed onto her, wrapping his arms around her middle and holding on tight while Cindy completely lost her mind. She screamed for Jack. She could smell burning hair and flesh even with the scent of burning fuel and wood. People were dying in there, or already dead.

Stephanie and Stacy had killed Jack.

Jamie continued to hold her, tried to get her to calm down, but even when she stopped screaming and struggling, she was still sobbing loudly. Jamie was speaking to her, but it took her brain a while to figure out what he was saying.

"We have to get out of here. I'm sorry, but we have to go," Jamie said, and only then did Cindy notice that she was drawing a lot attention.

Of the many fire fighters and police officers who were already at the scene, there were one or two of them who were able to take their eyes away from the blazing fire to get a look at the woman who was screaming, and the man with strange hair who was holding her.

Two men in blue uniforms signaled to their friends and started jogging over.

"Shit," Jamie said. "Shit, Cindy, we have to get out of here right now."

The men coming weren't collectors, and they weren't hunters, but even regular police officers were required to turn in any paranormals that they found. They might even think she was responsible for the fire when they found out she was a pyro, although letting them know what she was so they could take her away for experimentation – and quite possibly death - suddenly didn’t seem so bad. She wouldn't have to run anymore, at least.

"Just leave me alone," Cindy said.

"
Are you crazy?"
Jamie hissed, tugging on her body, but Cindy was dead weight now, and she didn't want to move. She slumped down to knees and wasn't about to get up. She wanted to curl into a ball and just stop existing.

Her baby was dead and so was Jack. Let the worst of it come.

"You there! Hey! Take your hands off of the girl," said one of the men in blue. He held his hand out to Jamie, and he kept his other hand on his gun, but he didn't draw it. The same went for his partner.

Jamie's hands were no longer on Cindy. They were up in the air as he'd been ordered..

"She's a friend of mine. I'm not hurting her," Jamie said.

"Yeah, well, just back up anyway. She clearly doesn't want you touching her," the second officer said..

"Get out of here, Jamie," Cindy said, staying on her knees, gripping the grass in her fingers. The green blades were slowly browning, and then turning black as smoke wafted from the burning grass between her fingers.

"Cindy," Jamie said, a clear warning in his voice, and she wondered if he could see the tiny fire she was trying to start.

"I said stop talking to her!" The officer snapped. "Miss? Are you all right? Do you know the people who lived here?"

She looked up into the face of the police officer. "Is anyone alive? Did anyone make it out?"

Both men looked at each other, and then at her. There was pity in their eyes, and the sort of awkward confusion on their faces that came when someone didn't know how to tell another person bad news.

The fires inside of her roared to life, reaching out higher and hotter than even the fire that had killed Jack and his family.

She very nearly burned the two cops, who jumped back and away from her.

"What the fuck!"  one of them screamed.

The guns game out.

Before they could even aim, Jamie lifted his hands towards them, bolts of lightning shooting out of his fingers and striking the two officers in the chest.

Their eyes widened and teeth clenched together as the electricity ran through their bodies. Their knees buckled and then they went down. Cindy watched the entire thing with a feeling of being very far away.

Then Jamie was in front of her again, kneeling down, his face inches from hers. "Cindy, I'm sorry, okay, but I know you don't want to do this. You don't want to die. So I'm getting you out of here before more cops see us, all right?"

He was asking for her permission, but he didn't wait for her to give an answer before he shocked her too. It was the strangest, most painful thing she'd ever felt in her life. She was paralyzed and in pain, but then everything was black, and she was only vaguely aware of being hoisted into Jamie's arms as he started to run away with her, back to his vehicle. That was all she knew.