Burns Like Fire (Dangerous Creatures #1) (2 page)

Chapter Two

Cindy groaned as she surfaced out of the foggy dream she'd had. A dream that left her with a nasty headache and a sore face. She couldn't even remember falling asleep, and she didn't want to open her eyes or move either. It was still dark. When did she take a nap? Had she missed her dinner date with Jamie?

What a weird dream. Very weird
and
scary with all the struggling in the dark, the sense of claustrophobia, and being unable to move. At the same time she was kind of glad for it because in her dream Jack had been alive. Her chest felt a little lighter just thinking about it.

He'd been alive. He's also been angry with her. Angry enough to attack her. That was the scary part. The fact that in her dream he'd been a hunter, and he'd hunted her.

Cindy shivered. She believed the dead could communicate through dreams, and if there was something of Jack in that dream, well, she couldn't blame him for his actions.

Too bad she couldn’t tell him that now, or say she was sorry.

Cindy tried to stretch her hands above her head, but something hard and metal was there, like a door or a ceiling, and she punched her fists into it.

"Ow!" Cindy yanked her hands back to her chest and her eyes snapped open, but there was nothing but pitch black all around.

Even in her apartment with the curtains closed, she should've been able to see
something
.

There were heavy metal bracelets around her wrists that hadn’t been there before.

Cindy tried to pull her hands apart, but she couldn't separate them more than the width of her chest. Her breathing picked up, and her heart beat a fast and dull drumming sound in her ears as every tiny clue clicked into place.

She tried to tilt and turn her body, only to be met with cold, metal walls all around her. It was like she was trapped in a fridge with the light burnt out.

This wasn't supposed to happen to her. It happened to other paranormals who were careless or open with their powers, but it wasn't ever supposed to happen to her.

Some paranormals called these boxes coffins, because now that she was inside, she was as good as dead.

Cindy banged her shackled wrists against the metal walls. She twisted back and forth, slamming her body against every surface. The banging was loud, and the noise was louder still when she screamed, but nothing gave. She couldn't even summon a flame to see with.

Nowhere to move. No windows.
No air
!

Cindy’s heart rate and breathing spiked. It felt like she wasn’t breathing at all as the sense of claustrophobia from her dream sucker punched her a hundred times worse than what she’d felt before. Not a dream. Not even close to being a dream. It was real. It was all real.

Terror gripped her heart and squeezed it nearly to the point of popping, and the mind numbing panic worsened as she screamed and kicked and punched around all sides of her until her feet and fists were aching.

She couldn't think and couldn't breathe. The box could be underwater and she wouldn't even know it. She could die in here!

The top of the box opened without warning. Bright light streamed inside and blinded her. She had to close her eyes and turn away from it, covering her face as the pain in her head flared.

"Will you
cut that out
already?" demanded a voice that Cindy never thought she would hear again.

"Oh my God," Cindy panted, lowering her hands from her face. Now that she could see again, could look up and out of the box and know for certain she wasn't being held underwater, or even underground, her lungs were able to open and close once more. She could breathe.

Better than that, Jack was above her, holding the metal door of the box open and staring down at her. Her heart fluttered at the sight of him.

"It's you."

She would've reached out to touch him, to make sure he was real and solid, if her arms had the strength. This wasn't joy. It was stronger than that because it was like someone had taken a needle and injected her with liquid happiness. "Jack?"

Jack's hands reached in to grab her, yanking her out of the hunter's box by her arms. It hurt a lot as his strong fingers squeezed too tight on the soft flesh of her upper arms, but she didn't mind since she was at least out of that damned coffin.

She was still wearing her dress from the night before, but her heels were gone. The cement floor was cold on her bare feet, but her entire focus was fixated in on Jack's face like a homing signal was calling her to him, his hands, his body. She needed to drink in every part of him. No dream could be this detailed. She could see the bags under his eyes, that he hadn't shaved in a couple of days and needed to comb his blond hair. Or at least give it a wash.

"You...you're alive," she said.

Jack's mouth thinned. His blue eyes were frosty, and his face was solemn as he reached into the tan leather duster he wore and pulled out a set of folded papers.

With a snap, he opened them and shoved them in front of her face. The logo of the hunters was sealed in gold on the top corner. A hawk in flight.

"Do you know what this is?"

"I...yes," she said, and then stared back up into Jack's face. His blue eyes were no longer cold, but incredibly, frighteningly, angry.

The brain-cell-killing panic from before slowly started to creep back under her skin, making Cindy shiver. Her dream hadn't been a dream. Jack had attacked her, he’d put her under with the hunter’s drug of choice, and then he stuck her inside a metal box.

Maybe it was obvious, but her brain was having trouble processing everything and she asked anyway. "So, you became a hunter after all?"

Jack tucked what was essentially written permission from a judge for him to hunt and capture paranormals—and do whatever he wanted to them until they were collected—back into his inside pocket. Did he keep his badge in there, too?

He actually sneered down at her. Cindy never thought she would see such an ugly expression on his boyishly handsome face. In fact, he looked ten years older than when she'd last see him.

"So long as we're here, you're not going to speak to me unless absolutely necessary," he said as he grabbed her by the arm and yanked her along.

"
Ow!
Jack! What are you doing?" Cindy yelled at his too-tight grip on her sensitive flesh.

Jack squeezed even tighter. "I said
don't speak
. You don't get to say anything to me."

"I didn't do anything! I never hurt anyone! You know me!"

"
Shut up!
" Jack yelled, and he shoved her. It was so harsh and unexpected that Cindy couldn't even brace herself for it, and her back and skull hit a concrete wall.

It hurt. A lot. Jack was strong. He always had been. Cindy yelled out from the pain as she slid down to the floor, clutching her throbbing head. She wasn't bleeding, but she couldn't stop her breathing from picking up either.

She panted for air like she was back inside of that box as she shook her head.

This couldn't be real. This wasn't her Jack, the Jack who got offended when a man didn't so much as open the door for a woman, or help another guy get his car started when he was stuck on the highway. He would never do this to her.

Cindy had to brush her hair out of her face. It was all over the place now, and a dull, painful ache started up at the back of her head that got stronger and stronger. Jack was staring down at her, his bright blue eyes wide and his mouth slightly parted.

Whatever that expression was vanished fast as he kneeled down and grabbed the steel chains that were holding her wrists so close together. There were metal loops in the concrete wall, and he began shackling her in place.

"Don't speak to me again," he said softly.

"Jack, if this is about your father or Aidan and Liam, then I'm so sorry. You have to—" Cindy's body slammed back into the concrete wall when Jack's palm came down hard on the side of her face.

She was absolutely still. She didn't move, and she made sure to keep her eyes down so as to not look at him and provoke another hard slap.

"I said
don't speak to me!
You don't get to talk to me about that! And you for damn sure don't get to talk about my family or say their names! Do you understand?"

She dipped her head in a tiny nod, but that wasn't enough as Jack grabbed her shoulders. She squeaked as he forced her to look at him

Cindy's heart raced. Blood rushed into her ears, and her cheek, and the sound of her breathing seemed so loud all of a sudden as she stared into Jack's hateful gaze.

"Do you understand?" Jack asked, his voice calm again. His hands trembled on her shoulders.

Cindy nodded quickly this time. Her body was shaking now, too, just like Jack's hands, but that couldn't be helped. Her eyes burned like she was about to cry. She hoped just hoped to hold it in until he was gone.

Jack pressed his lips together in a firm line. Those were the same lips that had kissed her tenderly all over her body. The back of her hand, her mouth, her cheek, her back, and even between her legs,
everywhere
. The same mouth that had comforted her when she cried in his arms and told him what she was.

Jack got to his feet and stared down at her. He looked so tall and imposing, and his fists were clenched. "Don't bother trying to burn your way out of here. I made sure those chains were designed specifically for your kind. You won't be able to produce a flame while you're in them."

He didn't say anything else. She really thought he would have more to tell her. To her shock, he just turned around and moved to the only door that was in the room she was in.

"Wait! What are you going to do to me?" she asked.

The hunter's box was still in the room, and she was terrified to go back into it. Into that cramped and black nothingness where she was blind and deaf and suffocating.

And what if Jack came back with all sorts of weird and sharp torture devices? Hunters were pretty much allowed to do whatever they wanted to their captives so long as they were alive in time for delivery, but even the hunters who killed their captives were barely held accountable since the hunters always claimed their catch had been fighting back.

Self defense only applied to real humans. Not paranormals who defended against them.

Cindy had never been taken by a hunter before. She'd been lucky, and never had to experience a fight for her life, or a narrow escape before the collectors could come.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. It especially wasn't supposed to happen with Jack. She was supposed to be braver against her attackers, and smart enough to be able to talk her way to freedom. She could barely speak at all. She couldn't think, and her lungs were having a difficult time drawing in oxygen.

There was nothing brave about the way she huddled on the floor.

Jack looked over his shoulder at her, one hand on the door handle. "I'm calling you in. Some people will be here to pick you up in a couple of hours."

Cindy's heart split in two pieces and her stomach dropped into her feet. It burned all the way down, and a harsh chill spidered up her spine that had nothing to do with the cold concrete on which she sat.

"You...you can't do that! They'll put me in a cage! They'll poke holes in me. They'll kill me!
Jack!
" Cindy yelled.

Jack's stare was cold again. If he really did love her as much as he once claimed to, then there was none of that love left inside of him. Not for her.

"It could be worse," he said. "I could pour gasoline on you and set you on fire, like you did to my father and brothers. Would you survive that as a pyro? Or would you burn?"

Cindy snapped her mouth shut. He knew perfectly well she could still burn. The really scary thing about the question was that he looked angry enough to actually do something like that.

Jack kept right on glaring at her. His body was trembling with the energy of his hatred for her, but then he shook his head in disgust right before he opened the door and left, slamming it behind him. A heavy lock slid into place. The sound echoed in her new prison, and it was almost as bad as the look that had been on his face. It all seemed so final.

"I'm sorry," Cindy said, and then she started to cry.

Chapter Three

“What do you mean you can’t come today?” Jack snapped, clutching the phone so tightly the glass might crack any second. He paced in a wide circle as he listened to the woman on the other end, then paused and gripped his hair in a tight fist. “
No!
That’s too far away! I need a Collector here for a pick up,
now
.”

The secretary on the other end of the line, some woman who Jack imagined was hideously ugly with rat whiskers, just spouted the same thing she’d already told him. “A large team was already sent out on an emergency dispatch. There's no one left until they get back, and they won’t be available for another three days. Two at best, so unless you can meet another team in Barhaven then there's nothing I can do.”

Barhaven was nearly a ten hour drive outside of Lincoln Peak. It pissed Jack off to no end that this woman thought it was remotely a good idea to travel that long by car with a pyro, regardless of whether she was shackled and boxed or not. There would be too many opportunities for her to escape.

“What can be more of an emergency than a class four?” Jack snapped.

“A class six,” the woman replied, and he could practically envision the little smile on her face.

A class six
. A pack of werewolves near a populated area, with at least one member of that pack wanted for murder. That would certainly require an all-hands-on-deck sort of team, and put a damper in Jack’s plans.
Fuck
.

“Oh,” Jack replied.

The voice on the other end suddenly became a little more helpful. “Look, I’ll make sure to call my boss about this right away. Someone might come back sooner and they can be sent to retrieve the paranormal. Head Office doesn't want to overlook anything, especially a class four.”

“I don’t exactly have proper a holding cell here,” Jack said. "I never keep my catches overnight."

He'd always been too scared for that sort of thing. After waking up to his house burning down around him, he'd become somewhat paranoid about sleeping while a dangerous individual was nearby.

Cindy would need a bed and a toilet at the least, and those things weren’t in his basement. Would he have to provide her with a shower in that time? Extra clothes?

“How are you holding her?” asked the secretary.

“Spelled chains to a concrete wall. There’s nothing she can use to break free.”
For now.

“Is she isolated?”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “It’s an area of my basement that I sealed off. It's all concrete, and there’s a box down there.”

“Is she inside of it right now?”

“No, she’s chained to the
wall
,” Jack replied through his teeth.

“Then she should be fine. You might want to put her into the box anyway and leave her until pick up. You wouldn’t even have to go down there and check on her.”

In the box for two or three days straight? “It's a standard box. There’s no bathroom in there,” Jack thought that should have been obvious. Very few hunters could afford anything bigger, and those that could almost never bothered with them.

“If you’re worried about clean up then you can let her out from time to time and she can use a bucket. Or you can keep her inside and let the handlers clean up the box after she's picked up. They'll decontaminate it before they return it to you."

That was an option? "Just leave her in there to piss and shit herself for three days? Are you serious?"

"I told you, you wouldn't have to clean it up. A lot of hunters use this method to lower the chances for escape."

Had his father or brothers ever used that method? He was pretty sure they hadn't. He'd never been interested in the family trade before the fire, but he was fairly certain something like that would've come up in the conversations they'd had over the years. It seemed so inhumane.

"If you don’t want to use the box then put a bucket in the cell, leave enough water for hydration, and you won’t have to check on her again until a proper team arrives to collect her and give you a check.”

“I’m going to have to feed her, you know.”
Stupid
, he thought, but he left that unsaid.

“Well, that’s your decision to make if you want to keep her fed. Though, I don't think you would be compensated for the cost of food.”

“Yeah, great, so I'll just starve her to save three days worth of food supplies.”

“Three days without food is hardly starvation,” the woman replied, her voice becoming stiff again. “It wouldn’t kill the subject, just bring about some discomfort. So long as you keep her hydrated regularly with water then there's no real physical harm.”

“Is that what happens in the labs?” Jack asked. There was a pamphlet that he’d read through about some of the programs the paranormals went into. He hadn’t seen anything like that mentioned, but he also hadn’t spoken to many secretaries, and so far he’d only caught maybe five paranormals to be picked up by the collectors.

What Head Office did with them after they were brought in depended on what they were accused of. If a paranormal was found guilty of murder, then there was almost always an instant decision for euthanasia. Paranormals accused of rape, torture and kidnapping might get away from the needle if their powers were unique enough that the lab rats wanted to study them.

Everyone else was put into cages. Some were studied. Some weren't. Jack had even heard of paranormals being brought in to work for Head Office itself, but that was rare, and it depended on the power and if the people in charge thought they could be of use.

The shackles that kept Cindy bound were made by the spells of a paranormal, after all. Though, Jack had no idea where that person was now. Maybe put down, or placed back into a cage. He didn't know, but he didn't want Cindy to be euthanized.

The only reason why Jack hadn't yet filled out that section of Cindy's paperwork – that she was accused of killing three hunters – was because he wasn't sure which would be a better punishment for her. Death, or a life inside the labs with the scientists and Handlers.

“What happens in Head Office is dependent on the subject and her power,” replied the secretary. “Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Marilla?”

She was trying to get rid of him. Well, he didn't really want to talk to her anymore anyway. “No, thank you,” he said, feeling anything but thankful as he hung up the phone and tossed it on the nearest counter.

Jack ran his hands through his hair several times. Two days, most likely three, of keeping Cindy under the same roof as him, inside of his house.

He imagined her escaping her chains somehow and burning the whole place down while he was sleeping.

The palms of his hands started to sweat a little. The scars on his back and across the rest of his body burned at the thought of inescapable fire all around him.

Breathe
. He had to breathe. Jack sucked in several gulps of air and waited until every muscle in his body didn't feel so damned tight. That was a little much to think about. He wasn't going to be doing a lot of sleeping while she was here.

Jack had to breathe deeply. He needed to relax. He was licensed for this. He wasn’t the one who’d done something illegal. He hadn't
killed
anyone.

So why couldn't he stop pacing? Why did every nerve in his body feel all jittery, like he was the one in a cage? If anything, he was doing Cindy a great big favor by not outing her as the pyro that had started the fire at his house two years ago. If the authorities found out about
that,
how she'd burned three of their own to a blackened crisp, then there was no going to the labs for her.

She’d be put down immediately. A needle would go into her arm, she'd fall asleep, and then never wake up.

Jack immediately stopped pacing. He closed his eyes and he took in a deep, cleansing breath. He wanted her to go to the labs, and not because he was trying to be nice by saving her life or something stupid like that. Death would be too fast and easy. The secretary was right. So what if she went without for a couple of days? It wasn’t like he was considering starving her indefinitely, and she had a little discomfort coming her way after living a good life for two years after killing his entire family..

He scratched the scars on his arms. They felt hot and tingled beneath his clothes from time to time, and now they were acting up again.

“Should’ve made sure to finish me off,” Jack muttered.

He grabbed Cindy’s phone, which he’d put on the counter. He wasn’t worried about taking out the card that would allow authorities—if any were to be called over a missing paranormal—to track the thing. If any cops showed up, then he didn't have to worry about his target escaping. He'd just show his badge and paperwork, and that would be that. Head Office damn near owned the cops in Lincoln Peak.

Jack unlocked the phone and swiped through her messages and contacts.

Contacts were empty, which meant she had all of her numbers memorized. It was very unlikely she had them written down back at her apartment, and Jack sure as hell wasn't going back there either. He'd already seen more than enough when he'd swept the place.

It was actually very smart of her. A written or digital list of contacts was an easy way for paranormals to give each other away without saying a word when someone was caught.

Someone was always caught eventually, and then, depending on what digital trail they left behind, more tended to follow.

She had very few pictures too. Just some buildings and parks and animals. He didn’t find any pictures of himself or her, or anyone else who could be identified. She'd been dressed up pretty nicely when Jack picked her up. She wasn't the type who wore tight dresses and heels on an everyday basis.

Where had she been going? Had to be a date. There were no pictures of men in the phone, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. Who else, aside from himself, would be stupid enough to go out with a paranormal?

Either the guy was a paranormal himself, or a regular person who just didn't have a clue. Whoever he was, it was unlikely had Cindy told him about what she'd done to Jack’s family.

He had to find out who she'd been about to go out with.

The last thing he looked through was her messages. She had two missed calls since he took her, and he only hesitated a moment before clicking on her voicemail.

What if it was some worried boyfriend asking where she was? It could be another man she was playing, just like she'd played him.

His stupid jealousy was for nothing, however, since there were no messages left. Whoever had been calling her always hung up immediately after voicemail started.

Had to be a paranormal calling her, then. A normal guy wouldn't think twice about hiding his voice or leaving messages in case Cindy was caught.

Just to see if the guy was dumb enough to answer his phone, Jack got his recorder and tracer ready and tried calling back.

No one answered. When voice mail picked up, it was just a robot voice asking Jack to leave a message at the tone. Too bad, Jack would've liked to bring whoever this guy was in. He'd have to give the phone to the collectors and let them take over. Whoever it was that was calling Cindy might've already dumped their phone into the trash.

Jack put the phone down, and he ran his hands through his hair again, gripping the strands tight enough to cause some pain. That jolt was enough to erase some of the simmering rage that was building within him.

He was tired, hungry, and he wanted a shower. He'd been up most of the night and it didn't look like he was going to get any sleep anytime soon.

There was something he was going to have to do first. The secretary suggested Jack leave her down there and wait it out, but he wasn’t stupid. The small room was locked, yes, but it wasn’t like he had cameras down there to watch every movement. He was going to have to make sure she didn’t try to pick at her locks, or overpower the spelled shackles somehow.

The fear of having her escape, and of setting fire to everything around him was enough to will his tired, heavy body into action.

Jack started getting everything ready.