I Am Titanium (Pax Black Book 1) (8 page)

The fire roaring out of her was loud, but not loud enough to drown out the sounds of people panicking. The ones who could see what was going on were trying to get away. And the ones who couldn’t see were trying to push their way in. Whistles blew. Every cop in the park must’ve been there, trying to help people escape. Or trying to arrest her.

Good luck with that.

Babies were crying.

Scarlett closed her eyes. Another wave of nausea hit her and she puked again.

The negative energy was pouring into her faster and faster, igniting her flames brighter and brighter. In a couple of minutes, she was going to be puking constantly. But that still wasn’t going to be enough. The more she puked, the more she terrified people, and the more negative energy they sent her way.

It was never going to stop. It was like being asked to swallow the East River.

A long, black whip of negative energy lashed across Akllana’chikni’pai’s face. The cut burned weakly. She wiped the back of her hand across her face and inspected the blood on it: it rippled on her hand, orange fire mingled with black smoke. A sign of her building rage. A sign of purity: the fire that burned her clean of negative energy.

She was trapped in a small
pacha
within the girl’s mind, a blank, featureless space that wasn’t even a room. The
pacha
had been all she could create; the negative energy had drained her of too much energy for anything more sophisticated.

She could sense nothing from outside. She could control nothing. She was trapped until Terkun’shuks’pai came to rescue her. How pitiful she was, the mighty warrior of the astral plane, reduced, once again, to a prisoner. And now the girl had allowed herself to become so overwhelmed with negative energy it was invading even the tiny prison Akllana’chikni’pai had been able to create.

Akllana’chikni’pai bared her teeth. Insult after insult. Injury after injury.

At least the whip of negative energy presented a target.

From within her spirit, she drew two long, slightly curved swords out of the fire in her gut. With a couple of flicks of her wrists, she turned the cutting edges toward the whip of negative energy. A second whip joined it, and a third. They appeared to confer with each other, their tips gesturing toward her and then nudging each other.

Akllana’chikni’pai beckoned with the tip of one sword. “Stop debating which one to send in, you cowards. All of you attack me together and see where that gets you.”

The three of them touched their tips together briefly. They were joined by a fourth and a fifth.

They attacked as one.

Akllana’chikni’pai flicked the tip of one of her swords contemptuously through the ends of the whips of negative energy. They had come at her directly, gathered closely together. If they had been serious about gaining position, they would have come at her from all directions.

The tips fell off and landed at her feet. They sparked, smoked briefly, and went out. The rest of the snakelike whips burst into flame at the cut ends, the fire quickly spreading down their lengths. They fell to the floor of the
pacha
and burst apart into flakes of black ash.

Akllana’chikni’pai turned and slashed a pair of tendrils that had thought to sneak up behind her. They, too, burst into flames and shortly extinguished themselves.

But more whips had come in: ten of them, twenty.

More
, she thought.
More!
She called to them.
You cannot defeat me. You cannot invade me. I am Akllana’chikni’pai, and my spirit endures!

She made a mocking salute and destroyed the dozen whips that had invaded her
pacha
in those few seconds. “You will come! And I will destroy you!”

Her taunts did not go unanswered. Dozens—no, a hundred—of the whips oozed through the walls of her
pacha
. Akllana’chikni’pai began a kind of dance, a kata she had been taught eons ago, a kind of celebration of the swords of her spirit, of the cleanness of their cuts, of the purity of their flames.

It was a ritual as old as the stars: it summoned all negative energy nearby, to be consumed by the swords, and their energy turned toward the purification of fire.

The swords flicked through the negative energy, destroying each strand as if it were nothing stronger than smoke. Akllana’chikni’pai drew on the energy thus released and used some of it to strengthen the
pacha
around her and some of it to burn through the negative energy in the girl’s spirit. She would cleanse the girl of the foulness.

It was a sacred conflagration. A pyre for the sins of humanity, for what they did to each other as much as for what they had done to her.

The
pacha
beyond the tips of her swords was a swirling, roiling mass of tentacles. Blackness was all she could see, in those few moments she could spare to look. There seemed to be no end to them, but all things came to an end, eventually.

The dance continued.

The negative energy would not defeat her. She was
fire
. She was the conflagration that purified the world.

And she would set the whole world on fire to achieve her purpose, if necessary.

Chapter 6

R
egrettably, Terkun’shuks’pai had to abandon the children for a few moments to finalize the restoration of the hospital. All those who had reacted to the emergency no longer remembered it. All damage was gone. All was as it should have been, save that Pax and Scarlett were now in the park, and Scarlett was threatening to burn down the city.

The girl’s body burned with a fire so hot it must have been painful for any nearby humans to look at. She rested at the bottom of a slight depression in the ground, which smoked at the edges and was pooled with the molten detritus of the burnt earth beneath her. The depression was rapidly becoming a pit as she burned her way downward. Her mouth stretched painfully wide and emitted a steady stream of heat and fire, which she aimed upward.

She seemed vaguely aware of his, or rather the boy’s, presence. Her mouth closed briefly upon the stream of fire. “Kill me,” she begged.

Whether she was trying to save Pax and the people in the park, whether she was suffering unbearable pain, or (most likely) both, it was not, by this time, a practical solution. Akllana’chikni’pai was still inside that body with her, and to kill the girl would destroy Akllana’chikni’pai and any chance Terkun’shuks’pai had of reaching his own goals.

Briefly, Terkun’shuks’pai admired the series of errors that had led to this situation. Having done so, he perceived the simplest, most elegant of solutions and implemented it, with the full understanding that this action, too, was probably a mistake.

As the humans sometimes said, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”

Perhaps, someday, after all this was over, his intentions would be recognized.

And forgiven.

Energy flooded into Pax. A suspiciously immense amount of energy. But he didn’t have time to question where it came from. He threw up a shield that knocked the crowd back away from him as if he were parting an ocean.

Scarlett sat in a hole in the ground, burning like the sun. She was light where a girl used to be.

Automatically, he raised his hand to shield his eyes. But his eyes weren’t made of flesh, and he could look into the heart of that flame without blinking. Incredible. He lowered his hand.

Scarlett knelt on the ground with her arms in the air and her back arched. Her mouth was stretched grotesquely wide, as though her jaw were about to split open. Fire burst out of her throat, shooting straight up into the sky. Helicopters rashly circled the burst of flame, some of them, no doubt, taking footage. If she so much as twitched, they’d be toast.

Everything about this situation was wrong. Start to finish. He didn’t even know where to start.

Scarlett
.

Was there even a person inside that flaming shell now? Probably not.

Whatever she was doing, it had to stop. That’s all he really knew. Even if it meant both of them had to die: it had to end.

Pax made a throwing gesture, trying to expand the shield to cover Scarlett, but when the shield hit her, it bulged around her like a balloon trying to push around somebody’s finger. He dropped more energy into the shield and pushed harder. The shield bubble distorted even more—but didn’t surround her.

He pushed harder, and she tipped over onto the ground.

A beam of pure heat shot into the heart of Central Park.
Vaporizing
the people standing in the way, leaving behind charred bones that collapsed on the dirt in broken, shattered pieces.

Fuck
.

The bubble covered Scarlett completely, and the beam of light stopped.

The shield immediately started bulging upward as the heat built up. In a second it’d explode out from under the shield.

Pax knelt over Scarlett and pinned the sides of the shield down around her with his hands and knees, trying to trap the heat next to the ground.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.

He pulled on the unknown source of energy, gathering strength. He had to grab Scarlett and get her the fuck away from these people. He had superpowers, right? Maybe he could fly. This whole shitfest had to have some redeeming quality.

Scarlett broke through the shield.

He sealed it under her.

Heat was blasting from her almost hard enough to burst the shield. Pax channeled more energy into it. It turned almost solid blue and bulged outward as he tried to contain the heat.

The shield smashed into the bystanders and knocked them flying in showers of sparks.
Why the fuck were there even bystanders anymore?

At least some people were starting to get a clue. Women and children were being picked up and bodysurfed to the outer edges of the crowd, where the cops hustled them off to safety. The area was being blocked off by people locked together elbow-to-elbow; the flood of idiots was thinning and even starting to reverse direction.

Underneath him, Scarlett lay on the ground like she was dead. Her skin had faded a little from the bright yellow heat into a pinkish red with a few deeper areas the color of a bloody Valentine. The heat had lessened a little, but it was a fucking miracle she hadn’t burnt him to a crisp, too. He climbed off her awkwardly. It was like being on top of a nuclear bomb.

At least people were getting out of the area. And the shield was still holding.

For now.

Scarlett gasped and clenched her hands in the dirt. The earth underneath her was on fire. Dirt. On fire. If someone had told her this morning that dirt could get so hot it caught on fire, she would have laughed in their faces. Dirt on fire? Couldn’t happen.

Nevertheless. The dirt was on fire.

Yet she didn’t feel as overwhelmed by the energy inside her as she had a second ago. She still felt like a bomb ready to go off. But she wasn’t in the process of actually going off anymore. Huge difference.

She pushed herself off her side and sat up.

What wasn’t white heat was a solid, shimmering blue. Pax’s shield. But where was Pax?

She twisted around. He was behind her, looking down at her. A slightly metallic, white statue, frowning thoughtfully at her. A statue that didn’t seem to notice he was butt-ass naked.

Or that he was pretty well hung.

She suppressed a giggle and forced herself to look at his face. That look. It was so
Pax.
He was trying to figure out how to explain something to her that was going to be totally over her head no matter what he said. And she was going to smile and nod and pretend to understand, and then he was going to sigh and explain it again, this time in words she
could
understand.

“You almost destroyed the city, Scarlett,” he said.

Her skin went kind of crispy-feeling. “What?”

“I don’t know what’s happened to you and I don’t know why, but the energy in you is bursting out in flames and you have to get a hold of it before you completely destroy everything. The astral being who came along with Terry tried to help you convert and freaked out about the negative energy attacking you. It and she fought inside you and all the energy is turning into fire.”

She looked at him. She didn’t get it. Every single fucking word he’d used, she understood. Every one of them. But it just wasn’t possible.

He sighed.

“Terry said it’s because you’re good at absorbing pain and turning it into other forms of energy. There was some kind of indirect link. He thinks you did the same with the negative energy that tried to take you over.”

Pain.
That she understood. She’d been taking pain and turning it into stories for years. And ever since she could remember, she’d been taking pain and turning it into empathy. Why
not
turn it into fire?

“I turned pain into fire?” she said. Pax nodded. “Okay. I get that. But the whole city?”

“We have superpowers now,” Pax said.

She thought of him punching a hole in his mom’s chest.
Not very nice ones.

“Astral material… can pull energy out of other sources.”

Scarlett closed her eyes. It didn’t help. It wasn’t hard to understand what Pax was saying. It was
too easy.
She wanted to puke. But she’d tried that already. Hadn’t helped.

So instead she decided to do what she did best. Take someone else’s pain and make it into something else. Only not fire this time. She sat cross-legged on the burning ground and balanced her elbows on her knees. She didn’t want to see his face while she did this. Because it was going to hurt. “This whole situation is a mistake, Pax.”

“Yes,” he said. “I should have just let myself die.”

She felt the pain pour off him. She let it flood into her. Dark and cold and horrible and horrifying.
Familiar.
She could feel the darkness meshed into her being now feeding off of it, growing stronger.

“But you stopped it. How did you stop it?” she asked softly.

Sometimes you have to remind people of the good stuff, when all they could see was the bad. She was blinking fast, trying to keep tears made of fire from rolling down her cheeks. She’d fucked things up so badly. She couldn’t let him blame himself. Couldn’t.

“Terry diverted some of your energy to me,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. What a shitty thing for Terry to do, to dump this on Pax.

“He had to. I used it to reinforce the shield. And pulling energy off you dampened the feedback loop between you and negative energy, once Terry got Lana to stop fighting.”

Scarlett squinted at the shield. It didn’t
look
like it was swarming with fire or negative energy. It was blue and swirling and no one could see through it. Pax stood in the shield with her. Naked. Shaking with fear and terror. Unsure of himself. Unsure of what to do.

Scarlett looked down at her body and realized she, too, was naked. She knew what to do.

“Pax,” she whispered. “Come here.”

Pax came to her.

This is fucked up. I am fucked up,
Pax thought, but he couldn’t stop.
No! I can’t—

But the thing was, he
could.

And part of him didn’t give a shit anymore about what Scarlett, or anybody else, wanted. He was on fire. Not the same kind of fire burning up Scarlett. But the kind of fire that compelled him to shove Scarlett onto her back and push himself on top of her. She lay between his legs, and he grabbed her tits (
Tits? Did I say—)
and squeezed them so hard it was as if he wanted them to pop. Well,
he
wanted nothing of the sort, but something, some-
thing
inside, a part of him that was either new or that he never knew existed, that part was burning with a desire that wiped out everything else but—

Want. Need.

As hard as Pax tried to resist, this darker part of him was strong—too strong. With all his might, Pax tried to push back from Scarlett’s body, but—

Fire. Need. Want.

The black ash on Scarlett’s skin—that
was
her skin—cracked and fire spurted out. Pax pulled the layer of ash off her tits and threw it aside.

This is sick. Stop it. You have to stop this
, he cried out to himself to no avail.
Want. Need. Mine
.

The sickest part was that a little piece of Pax wanted the dark energy in him to win. His eyes widened with the horror of knowing this. But it was true. He’d been trapped in that fucking hospital bed for literally most of his life. He’d just stopped Scarlett from
destroying the city.
He needed this. He deserved this.

She’d asked him to, hadn’t she? He couldn’t remember.

He watched himself kissing her. He was practically chewing on her face. He didn’t know what he was doing. God. When he’d imagined himself having sex with a woman, this wasn’t how it went down. He was going at it like a fucking seventeen-year-old football player in an after-school special.