22.
Sienna
I could feel the burn, and it wasn’t the good kind, the kind that told me I’d gotten off the couch and put down the Cheetos to build some muscle mass. No, this was the other kind of burn—err, well, one of the other kinds—a kind exclusive to me and my kind, the kind that told me I was about to get another passenger in my head.
Needless to say, I freaked the hell out.
“Ahh!” I shouted and dropped the dude immediately. He clunked hard on the floor, shaking the exposed, smoldering plywood beneath us. I cringed because I felt bad for him, but not as bad as I would have felt if he’d ended up ride-sharing my brain forever. “No! No! No!” I said, brushing myself off as I tried to stave off panic.
We could use some new company, Wolfe said. So very lonely in here with only the same faces to stare at.
I think you mean eat, Zack said. Faces to eat.
You still have yours, pretty boy, Eve Kappler sniped back, so clearly he hasn’t devoured it yet.
“Plus you’re all in my head,” I said, reaching my hands out to try and draw away the fire toward me to extinguish it. “How is he going to eat your face in my head?”
Oh, Wolfe can do it, Wolfe said, and I had a flash of a Cheshire smile tinged with blood, and then a brutal image of him ripping and rending someone’s face off. I jerked as it overwhelmed me, catching me unawares, and a stream of fire shot up and hit the ceiling, clinging to it and starting the timbers alight again. I stared at my accidental handiwork and felt the rage bubble inside.
Sowwy, Wolfe said, playing cute, which was irritating in its own way.
My face! Zack screamed in my head, like I hadn’t just seen what Wolfe had been imagining.
“Shut up, you don’t even have a face to get eaten anymore,” I said, trying to get the fire above me under control. I coughed, the air getting heavy with smoke again, the sound of footsteps on the ceiling above clunking past as I assumed the firemen on the ladders evacuated the floor. I ran a hand over the ceiling and sucked all the fire out of the place where I’d just accidentally hosed it. I glanced down at the man at my feet and muttered, “You should consider yourself lucky you’re not getting stuck in my brain. You see what I have to deal with? And people think I should absorb more souls? Hah,” I said, not really finding any humor in that idea.
The man at my feet stirred, and the ceiling in front of me collapsed even further, more fiery debris raining down as I yanked the guy back while retreating.
“Dammit,” I said. The fire was really going now, completely cutting me off from the windows and my escape. I glanced behind me, but the situation there wasn’t any better. If I tried to draw the fire in from above, it was entirely possible some poor firefighters were gonna get roasted alive as I pulled it; if I tried to retreat downstairs, I doubted the guy at my feet would survive the trip because he had maybe ten seconds left before I absorbed him, and there weren’t any ways I could carry him without touching him. Way to sleep nearly naked, guy.
I set my feet, determined to draw off the fire in the debris ahead. If I could get it out, I could maybe worm my way through with this guy and get him to the ground in time to save him from being absorbed. Or from dying of smoke inhalation. Or building collapse, because I had a feeling that was coming, too.
I held up my hands, said, “Gavrikov,” and I could feel the Russian’s wariness. We will try, he said, and I started to pull the flames to me—
A sizzling burst of smoke stopped me before I could even get to it; water was streaming in through the windows at high pressure, steam filling the air, giving it a damp sensation, a sudden swampy sense that somehow made the smell of the flames so much worse than they had been a minute ago. I could see the water streaming in, dousing the flames in the debris ahead, and in that moment, I saw an opening on the right hand side, a clear path right out of the building.
“Thank you, New York Fire Department,” I said, and I snatched up the guy at my feet, not wasting a second. I clutched him close and felt the burning start in my arms as I pressed my flesh to his. I zoomed out the front of the building as he started to jerk in my grip, and I backflipped into a landing, setting him down on the street a little inelegantly, but just before I started to take his soul into me.
The stream of water in the front windows stopped as soon as I was clear, moving up the building to the top as firemen piled onto their ladders and started to move away from the building. I got a feeling I knew what was coming in the next few minutes—collapse, probably, though I wasn’t experienced enough with these things to know.
I thumped down right on my butt, exhausted, and sat there with the guy I’d just saved at my feet while the paramedics came rushing over to attend him. I blinked as they rushed up, letting out a breath and expelling smoke and nastiness in a cough.
“We got a pulse,” one of the paramedics said. “Pretty weak. If it had been another minute or two …” He looked at me and nodded appreciation.
“Yeah, well, thank the firefighters for that one,” I said, my neck sagging under the weight of my head. I was exhausted, like I’d just gone through all my adrenaline and had to borrow some from a neighbor. I closed my eyes and the flash of flame and the lights blinked in the darkness. “If they hadn’t gotten their hoses going—”
“Oh, that wasn’t the fire department,” the paramedic said, and my eyes snapped open. He wasn’t even looking at me, he was tending to his patient. “They’re still charging them. Ran into a water pressure problem, I guess.”
I felt my brow furrow. If it wasn’t the FDNY, then who sent the water geysering into the front window to save …?
I found the answer a second later, as I saw the blue flashing lights in the government SUV’s grill—the kind we’d had in the agency. He was standing right there, clad in a suit, sandy blond hair catching all the colored lights, but unmistakable in its coloring even still. I caught him looking at me, though he turned his head at the last second to try and play it cool, and in that moment I knew I’d just seen my successor at the agency.
“Oh, shit,” I said, and the paramedic turned his head as Captain Frost came wandering up, his oxygen finally put aside.
“Hey,” Frost said, chucking a thumb over his shoulder, “isn’t that your ex?”
Before I could construct an answer, and apropos of the moment, the building fell down in front of me in a long, controlled destruction that sent a billowing cloud rushing over me and obstructing my vision. When it faded, I was left spitting out dust and smoke, and blinking out the remainder of the cloud from my eyes.
“Yes,” I said finally, wishing Captain Frost had kept his stupid oxygen mask on so that he couldn’t speak from his stupid mouth. I caught a glimpse of Scott Byerly through the fading haze, and he was looking at me again, but harder this time, like he didn’t care if I saw. “Yes … it is.”