Scorch (17 page)

Flames tore free of her skin, escaping into
the trees, doing the fighting for Kira. Every few seconds, when her
body had had too much, another explosion ripped away, shooting into
the world around her. But for the first time, Kira felt like maybe
she was running out. Like the cloud was getting thicker, hiding
more and more of the sun. Her endless reserves were emptying with
each surge that wracked her body.

And then another fire joined hers, flames
that were purer, were protecting her—were fighting the darkness for
her. And they were winning. They were pushing it back. They were
untainted.

They were Luke's.

"Kira, Kira, Kira," she heard. Her senses
were returning.

Fingers covered hers, pushing against her
heart, forging their own pathway through. Luke. He was saving her.
He was fighting the battle she didn’t know how to win.

"Luke," she blinked, fighting the desire to
reach up and bite his skin, to sink her teeth through his flesh and
taste, and taste…

But it was Luke. Her best friend. Her
protector. Her rock. Not her food. No matter how good he
smelled.

And the thought was so absurd, that the Kira
still conscious, still fighting, gave up and started laughing
instead.

"Kira?"

But she couldn’t stop, the giggles wove their
way around her limbs, shaking her just enough to dislodge the black
oil Luke's flames couldn't find, just enough to make it break apart
and disappear.

"Okay, you're really freaking me out. We have
to go."

Kira blinked again, making out his face
against the blue sky, against the red flames silhouetting his
features. His eyes were bulging, afraid, desperate. His skin was
covered in ash, speckled with black smudges. And then another smell
sifted through her nostrils. Smoke. And a heck of a lot of it.

Kira stopped laughing and sat up, slightly
dizzy but almost like herself.

The trees were burning.

Kira spun, looking for her mom, who was
standing above her holding her hand over her mouth, trapping the
sobs that Kira hadn’t heard before. And it hit her that the fear in
her mother's eyes wasn't from the vampires, it was from her, for
her.

Unable to process anymore, Kira looked behind
her mother to the house. It was on fire. It was cackling, burning.
The dried wood had already turned black, charring in the heat, and
gray flames billowed into the sky.

Her house. Her home.

Kira stood up, running toward the door. There
were so many things she hadn't looked at. What if she and Luke had
missed something? What if there were more clues, more trinkets left
behind, waiting for her to find them?

Luke caught her around the waist.

"Kira, we have to go! We have to get out of
here."

"But, the house, I have to—"

"There's nothing you can do," he said,
speaking urgently, trying not to yell, "I have the research, we
have to go."

"But—"

Kira was silenced by a loud boom that shook
the earth beneath their feet. The tree, the one resting on her
house, had fallen through, splitting it down the middle.

It was gone.

A pile of rubble.

Kira screamed, but didn’t protest when Luke
tugged on her hand, running toward a spot in the woods that hadn't
caught fire yet.

"Where do we go?" He yelled over the sound of
more branches falling to the ground. Her mother had come alive.

"Follow me," she called back to him, pushing
through the forest, trying to beat the fire that was hot on their
tails.

And hot, oh man was it hot. Hot enough to
burn, even if they were conduits. The smolder on her backside was
immense, like a furnace had opened behind her. The sting of the
heat was unlike anything Kira had felt, but she wondered if maybe
if was hurting her more than the others, scorching her in a way it
didn’t with them.

They jumped through a small stream, and Kira
relished the cool droplets that splashed onto her cheeks.

"We're almost there," her mother called back,
nearly falling as she turned around to meet Kira's eyes, checking
to make sure her daughter was still with them, but in what sense
Kira wasn't sure.

And then she saw the clearing up ahead, the
bright silver of their car. All three of them sped up, closing the
gap quickly, until finally they were all sitting in leather seats,
silent except for deep and heavy breathing.

Kira's mother reached for the phone she had
left in the car and quickly dialed a number.

"Hello… Yes, I think I need to report a fire…
yes, there's a lot of smoke coming through the trees… I don't know
what else it could be… I'm driving through the mountains, maybe an
hour east of the airport… yes, on that main road… you see it? On
the satellite feed?… great, thank you… yes, you too. Have a
wonderful day."

She hung up.

More silence.

No one even knew where to begin.

Kira stretched her fingers, bringing her
flames just close enough to the surface that she could see the glow
under her palms. It was still there. Deep inside, the sun was still
there.

She sighed, leaning her head back against the
seat to stare at the smoke leaking over the trees and onto the
road.

Ominous. That was the only word that came to
mind.

"Maybe we should, you know, leave? With the
fire and everything, it doesn’t seem safe," Kira said while keeping
her gaze on the forest. She couldn't see the actual fire yet.

Her mom started the car, slipping away from
the curb and making a u-turn on the empty street. They were headed
back to the airport.

"So," Kira said quietly, not sure how to
finish it. All she knew was she needed a distraction, something to
keep the image of her broken home from taking over.

"So," Luke said, taking a deep breath and
rubbing his hands against his face, "so you really are turning into
a vampire?"

"Yeah," she said quietly, ignoring her
mother's concerned gaze, "I think I am."

"Then," he said and reached into his pocket,
"we have some reading to do."

"You found something?" Her mom gasped,
perking up ever so slightly.

"We did," Kira said and squeezed her
fingers.

Luke tapped her head with the bundle of
pages, scratching her skin, but Kira didn’t take them. Instead, she
reclined her seat until it was almost flat and pressed her fingers
into her temples. Her head was pounding.

"Can you just read it to us?" She asked.

Luke looked down at her with a smirk, his
eyebrow raised.

"Come on, that way my mom can hear."

Kira closed her eyes, not waiting for another
sarcastic reaction. But she heard him shift on the leather seats,
getting comfortable. Then came the sandpaper like sound of
shuffling pages.

"Dear Diary," Luke began, "I think my best
friend is trying to kill me."

"Luke," she said wryly, not amused. Except,
dang it, a smirk started to pull at her lip.

"Okay, okay." He coughed, getting back into
the right mindset, and started to hum a little while he scanned for
something interesting.

And hum.

And hum.

"Luke," Kira said, trying to lighten her
annoyed tone, "a vital part of reading something out loud is, you
know, actually reading it out loud."

He sighed. "I'm looking for something new.
Right now, he's just talking about the missing pages from that
text, the ones we got from your grandfather. It's all Protector and
scientific—about the madness, the loss of control—but there's
nothing about angels or any of that."

"Humph." Kira crossed her arms, thinking.

"I'd like to hear it…" Her mother said from
the front, keeping her attention on the road.

"Oh, right," Luke said, suddenly alert. He
sat up and started reading quoted passages from the text. Kira
tuned it out. She'd heard it all before. The Protectors thought
their biggest fear was her losing control, her fire turning deadly
to humans, her oncoming madness. They didn't even know the half of
it—that the madness was the least of their concern. It was what
would come after. The killing. The biting. The blood.

Kira rubbed at the spot between her eyes.
Better not to think about it, not when there was still some hope
left.

"Oo, this is interesting," Kira perked up
while Luke held the paper to her face, "it says 'madness=falling?'"
The scribble was unquoted, unsourced. Just a moment of pure thought
from her father. She liked that he used the symbol instead of
writing the word equal—it was quick and efficient, getting right to
the point.

"What do you think he meant?"

"Well, madness for the Protectors was the
moment the fire consumed the mixed-breed conduits. When their
flames exploded out of them, burning entire villages to the ground,
only stopping once they died. At least, that's what the academics
thought."

"But falling is completely different," Kira
said, thinking out loud, "it's like something takes over inside of
me, I can't even feel my fire anymore, there's just this darkness,
this smoke that blocks everything else out."

"Maybe to you, but that's not what it looked
like to us," her mother said softly. Kira heard her breath
shake.

"That's genius Mrs. D!" Luke exclaimed,
shuffling in his seat excitedly. "The madness and the falling,
they're the same thing. You practically just burned a forest down,
and to us it looked like you were exploding with fire, totally out
of control. The madness, get it? But inside, you were really
changing, falling."

"That makes sense! It felt like maybe the sun
was leaving me, like my powers had run out, but in reality they
were being pushed out. The vampire was forcing out the sun, trying
to make the change complete." Kira shuddered. How close had she
just come to completely crossing over? "But how does this help
us?"

Luke bit his lip, and looked back down at the
papers. "Not sure yet. But we learned something, which is a
start."

"Madness," Luke muttered under his breath as
he skimmed, "control…fire…burning…killed…" Kira didn’t like where
this was going. "Here, look at this," Luke said and held the pages
above her head again.

But what about the healing? Her father had
scrawled. Does it go away or is that the key? Will it save her?

All questions, no answers.

"What do you think?"

Kira shrugged. "I don't know, it's not
something I really keep track of. Although," Kira thought back to
the fight outside of Sonnyville. Her broken back. Her useless
limbs. It had taken a while to heal herself, so long that her
mother would have died if not for Pavia. At the time, Kira thought
it was just the degree of the injury, but that had never stopped
her before.

She thought back further, back to her first
visit to Sonnyville. A vampire had flipped their car over, mangled
it into pieces and Kira had managed to not only save herself, but
also Luke, his sister Vanessa and that girl Casey, who Kira refused
to acknowledge as his ex-girlfriend. They all would've died, would
have been ripped apart by the car.

In comparison, a broken back seemed
miniscule.

Kira looked up, meeting her mother's eyes in
the rearview mirror. They quickly flicked back to the road, trying
to mask the worry.

"Give me your arm," she said to Luke, looking
for a scrape. She flipped his hand over, running her eyes along his
forearms until—aha, there we go, a nice red cut scarred his
elbow.

Shifting in her seat, Kira placed her hand
over the spot, letting her mind go blank so she could focus on his
skin. Seal shut, she thought and pictured the red wound lightening
to pink until it disappeared entirely. Her head began to ache, a
dull feeling at the crown of her neck.

A few minutes later, when she couldn't
concentrate anymore, Kira pulled her hand back. The cut was
gone.

Luke looked up, his mind already spinning in
circles of what it could mean, of how she could heal herself. But
Kira had a different thought entirely: tough. It had been too
difficult. Her healing used to come as second nature, without a
thought.

"It's going away," she said quietly.

"What are you talking about, going away? It
is gone," Luke said, twisting his elbow around to look at the newly
repaired spot.

"No, my healing, it's going away. It's
getting harder."

His arm dropped. His heart followed. Kira
felt the echo in her mind and closed the bond, tightly shutting
it.

Nodding toward the paper, Kira asked, "What
else does it say? My father's research?"

"Not much." Luke handed her the pages,
letting Kira do the reading.

The words were small, the letters straight
and slightly slanted to the left. It read like a stream of
consciousness, like thoughts pouring from his head. More about the
madness, the Protectors, their beliefs. Of course that's what he
would write down, Kira thought, all of the Punisher culture was in
his head, ingrained in his very being.

She flipped over the last page. Nothing new.
Nothing she hadn't heard before.

Angels.

Kira stopped, her mind caught by the word she
had skimmed over. Backtracking, Kira reread the line.

"The story of the two angels…" She murmured.
Searching the page for more information. What story? What angels?
But there was nothing, no other mention.

"What'd you say?" Luke asked, looking over
her shoulder.

"The story of the two angels," Kira repeated,
just as perplexed as before.

"What story?"

Kira rolled her eyes. "I don’t know."

Her mother sucked in a breath. Kira head
snapped toward the steering wheel. "I do," her mother said and a
smile slowly spread across her face, "I know it."

"Go Mom!" Kira reached up for the high five
and received a resounding slap.

"Sliding in for the win," Luke cheered from
the back seat.