Playing with Fire (9 page)

“You’re gonna have to do better than that,” one of the gunmen called, his voice gruff and distant. But not distant enough. “Shoot inside the buildings.”

She fought the urge to shoot him in the head instead.

“I’m trying,” she said, her teeth clenched so tight the words were more of a blur than a statement. She didn’t want to hit the buildings. That’s where the people were.

The sound of a gunshot and a whir of air above her head got her going again. She shot faster, more randomly, looking for easily flammable targets that didn’t require her to stop in the streets. As long as she could stay to the alleyways, keep running, she might be able to do this.

But by the time she’d gone only a few blocks, the first person ran into the street, and it no longer mattered what she did.

Fire and panic spread fast.

Her instructions were to keep going, but it became difficult once people joined the rush to the streets. The first building she’d hit finally caught fire with a roar, and shouts about terrorism and the apocalypse filled the air. Each person’s cry pushed her that much closer to the edge, that much closer to running away.

This was wrong. It was wrong to endanger all these innocent lives to save her own skin.

But survival, the instinct that had saved her so many times before, was strong. She shot at scaffolding, hanging high and empty, next. It caught almost instantaneously, lighting up the whole street.

Fiona’s first thought was to evade a woman running out of a school administration building. She clutched a young child to her chest, and their combined wails filled the air. Fiona’s second thought was that she couldn’t take one more step. Exhausted, shaking, her vision blurred with hot, stinging tears, she fell to the ground.

Another shot rang out, and Fiona thought for a moment that it was all over. But she twisted her head and realized it wasn’t a gun. A car had crashed about half a block away, wrapped around a streetlight. The driver emerged from the wreckage bloodied and dazed. Fiona wanted to get up to help him—to help all these people, but someone had spotted her and screamed.

“It’s that woman. She did it. She’s got fire coming out of her hands!”

Fiona looked at her hands, seeing them as if for the first time. She’d been aware of her growing sense of power, but each now held a ball of light and heat bigger than she’d ever had before.

It was the overuse of her powers—it had to be. Instead of running out of firepower or energy, her body was generating more, transforming her from a simple freak to an out-and-out devil capable of turning the planet into a living hell.

A man watched her from the side of the street, crouched on the sidewalk. His tense posture and steely resolve made it clear he wanted to tackle her or restrain her—do something that would put an end to the terror taking over the lives of all those poor people, numbering into the hundreds by now. She almost wished he would.

But he was either too scared or too weak, watching Fiona with an intense hatred. And fear.

Fear of what she could do. Fear of who she was.

I caused that
.

Fiona had seen a lot of loathing and disgust in her day, often combined, and often when she was with a man who was supposedly on her side. And most of it was her fault—she knew that now. But none of those times compared to this, this place where abject terror met something darker, where people truly believed she would cause harm merely for the satisfaction it afforded her.

Choking on a sob, Fiona whirled around, looking for a place to hide. She could no longer see or hear Patrick’s guards among the wreckage, and her only thought was of hiding herself before she could harm anyone else.

The best she could do was a small courtyard between two office buildings. There was a fountain there, as well as a patch of grass and a wrought iron gate that she closed behind her using her feet.

She tried shoving her hands into the fountain to extinguish them, but the water bubbled all around her, growing so hot she had to pull her hands back out. She glanced at them and cringed. The water hadn’t worked—the balls of light still hovered, glowing strong.

A squeak of terror drew her attention to a corner of the courtyard. A young couple huddled against the brick, shrinking back in a futile effort to make themselves inconspicuous. They were in their late teens, both with the faces of people whose worst days had formerly been the result of a failed test or bad breakup. It was at once achingly romantic and devastating.

“You can go,” Fiona said urgently, nodding toward the gate. It was the only way in or out. “I won’t hurt you, I swear.”

They trembled harder, like puppies about to be kicked.

“I’m serious. It’s not what you think—I’m not a bad person.”

The man shifted a little, and Fiona thought he was going to whisk his poor girlfriend out of there, but whatever courage he’d managed to muster turned quickly into something else.

“You’re one of them, aren’t you? The Corrupted? General Eagle was right. You’re real.”

She didn’t know how to answer—and that moment of hesitation was her undoing. She was about to urge him one more time to clear out of the way when she was interrupted by the shriek of an electronic bullhorn turning on.

She looked up, startled by the familiar sound of Patrick’s voice calling through the air, “Fireball, please. You don’t have to do this. Let those hostages go.”

It was followed by the unmistakable sound of an eagle’s cry.

Fiona dropped her hands, cringing when a ray shot into the street. She could hear the gasps of whatever crowd had gathered beyond the trees and gate.

And she finally understood what Patrick was after.

“This is General Eagle. We know who you are. We know what kind of evil you’re capable of. But what you—and the rest of the world—don’t know is the good that I can do. You will exit that courtyard and surrender. That is my eagle’s cry.”

She almost laughed out loud, circumstances notwithstanding. Eagles: noble, quintessentially American, hunters of fish.

All those public appearances. All those speeches. A careful plan to turn everyday people against the unknown. Patrick wanted to be a hero.

And for that to happen, he needed a villain. The Fireball—she—fit the bill in so many ways.

And without Ian, there wasn’t a single person in the world who would defend her.

Chapter Twelve

Ian heard the commotion in the street and lifted his head. It hurt, and everything around him spun in dizzying circles with such force he felt he was spiraling into a deep hole.

Still, he brought his head up. He would keep moving, no matter what it cost him.

Wincing, he tested his range of mobility. His neck still moved, and so did his shoulders. A searing pain along the bottom of his rib cage felt like the scream of broken bones rather than the bruising seepage of internal injuries.

Whatever idiot had been put on guard had jumped out of the car at the sound of a news helicopter cruising overhead, mumbling something about near-dead hostages not being worth his time.

Ha. He wasn’t even close to dead yet. Head wounds bled a lot, and the beating in the basement had taken its toll, but he was still breathing. Still moving.

He had to find Fiona.

A wave of nausea overcame him as he pushed open the door. He tried placing his weight on his right ankle. The fire that ripped up his leg confirmed he had shattered a bone in the crash. Lucky for him there was a piece of splintered wood nearby, and it was long enough to work as a makeshift crutch.

He glanced at the rubble and debris, squinting to make out the details. That was when he noticed the sky. It had grown darker, a combination of dusk and clouds heavy with the promise of a storm, but for shafts of light that suddenly appeared from every direction. The heavily acrid smell of smoke hit his nose.

Fire. Sirens. Helicopters buzzing overhead with their spotlights on high.

It looked like a scene from a Godzilla movie after the monster had razed the town, and all of the attention was directed about a mile down the road.

That had to be where Fiona was.

But how was he supposed to get there?

…

At the sound of an official voice, pompous and calling Fiona by name, the two teenagers gathered strength and moved toward the exit.

“No,” she commanded, her voice shaky. Her hesitancy didn’t matter much in terms of reducing her authority over them. The fireballs hovering over each hand were doing all the talking. “You guys should stay put. Please,” she added, but it was too little, too late.

They shrank away, and the girl wailed. It was loud enough for the crowd outside to hear, and the tone of their cries went from bad to worse.

“I’m not going to hurt you guys, I swear. I just need a minute to think.”

They huddled closer to one another, eyes and ears closed against her. Fiona gave up and sat on the rim of the fountain. It obviously wasn’t helping her case any to keep the poor couple trapped with her, but the second she gave them up, she had no way to ensure the authorities wouldn’t rush in and arrest her on the spot.

Or kill her.

Escape was impossible. The brick wall behind her was at least eight feet tall, and behind it, she’d heard the muffled shouts of men and their guns being settled into position.

She couldn’t die. Not like this. Not like some trapped animal, while Ian bled out somewhere nearby.

“The police have put down their weapons, Fireball, and they’re willing to send in a specialist. We can help you control these powers. We can help you to stop taking innocent lives. We can stop one more person from dying.”

It was a show. It was all a puppet show, and Patrick General Eagle Shit for Brains Veller was the puppet master. There was no mistaking who he meant by that last bit. As long as he had Ian, he had all the power.

“I’m really sorry, you guys,” Fiona said one more time, rising to her feet and taking a deep breath. She concentrated on what was probably happening to Ian right now, and the fear brought her heat level down so much that the balls of energy in her hands came to a fizzling halt. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

She had no idea what to expect when she walked out of the garden gates, but it certainly wasn’t the flash of a thousand bulbs, followed by a flying tackle from the side by someone in a fireproof suit.

Cuffs were immediately slapped onto her wrists, followed shortly by the same leather gloves that Patrick had used before, the duct tape residue still sticky on her skin. She was pushed up against a car and held there, the metal warming underneath her and against her wrists.

“She’s hot. She’s really hot,” one of the nearby officials kept repeating, loosening his collar and checking for damages. “Is she going to blow?”

“Don’t worry,” Patrick said, pushing roughly against her. “I can handle it from here.”

She angled her head to get a better look at her foe. He’d changed into some sort of ridiculous eagle mask that covered the top half of his face, giving him wee beady eyes and elongating his nose into a beak. She would have laughed if it hadn’t been so overwhelmingly distressing.

“And so we meet again, Fireball,” he boomed, loud enough for everyone to hear.

“You’re an idiot,” Fiona muttered. “You won’t get away with this. No one is going to buy you as a hero, Patrick. Not once they get to know you.”

“This is only the start, Fiona. You have no idea how many people like you are out there. All of them full of incredible powers and no idea what to do with them. Good thing I have a plan for each and every one. Let’s get you booked and locked away, shall we?”

“Stop.”

Fiona was lifted away from the car by Patrick’s vise-like grip on the back of her neck, little more than a rag doll in his arms. But she didn’t care. She knew that voice.

“You have the wrong person.” Ian stood there, slouched there, actually, barely recognizable and dripping blood. He’d never looked so wonderful.

“Ian! You’re alive!”

“Arrest that man,” Patrick ordered. “He’s her accomplice.”

Apparently, Patrick’s word had become law, because no sooner had Fiona cried out than handcuffs were slapped on Ian, and he, too, was pressed to the ground, bodily injuries and all.

She struggled against her bonds, frantic to run to Ian’s side, but Patrick had her firm. This was it, then.

Without Ian, she had no other options, no other hope. It was the end.

As Patrick pushed her toward a van, where the back was lined with heat-shielding silver insulation, another car pulled up. Though it couldn’t move very fast through the crowd of people, it pushed and nudged until it stopped alongside the van. Even Patrick paused to watch.

The door opened to reveal a severe woman in a pinstriped pantsuit. Without a word, she looked them over. They must have been found lacking, because the next words out of her mouth were a curse and a sigh.

“Stop acting like children, all of you,” she muttered. Louder, and as Patrick opened his mouth to demand an explanation, she added, “And freeze.”

Inexplicably, Fiona complied.

Before she knew what was happening, her world went dark and still. She couldn’t see or hear, and no amount of force could move her arms even a fraction of an inch.

She was stuck.

…

Ian picked himself off the ground with painstaking care, each movement like the stab of a knife. For a moment, everything had been darkness and chaos. A dozen armed SWAT members formed an arc around the outside of the garden gate, each one behind a blast shield and decked out in body armor.

In the midst of it all had been Fiona, streaked and dirty, cuffed and manhandled by a man in a bird hat. It hadn’t made a whole lot of sense, but Ian knew one thing.

She was in trouble. And now she wasn’t moving.

No one was.

“What’s going on?” Ian blinked a few times, better able to survey the scene now that everyone seemed to be held in a moment of suspended animation, limbs half-raised, mouths half-twisted into grotesque expressions. “Am I dead?”

“No, Mr. Jones. But you are in an awful lot of trouble.”

He turned toward the familiar voice, recognizing the dark suit and cold exterior at once. “Agent Harding?”

The woman in question strode forward, taking them all in at a glance. Behind her, the figure of a man bent behind the open passenger door, suspended in the act of exiting her car. The worn sandal that hovered just above the ground would have been recognizable anywhere. “Is that—Neil?”

She smiled. “In the thirteen times you have contacted my offices in the past two years, Mr. Jones, how is it that you failed to mention you have the ability to resist Converted powers?” With imperturbable efficiency, she slipped a key into his handcuffs and freed him.

He groaned, sinking to the ground. He wasn’t just immune to Fiona—he was immune to everyone.
Holy shit
.

“Would you believe me if I said I didn’t know until today?”

“Yes. I would. I’m finding a lot of things about you to be astonishingly honest.”

He looked up, surprised. Her face was just as bland, just as unreadable, but he knew she was on his side. “I guess I could say the same of you.”

She shrugged. “My powers don’t officially exist. Officially. You understand.”

He did. The ability to freeze the scene of a crime would be of infinite value to a government official. And apparently, totally unusable against him.

“So what now?” He had no idea how long they had before everyone started moving again.

“Now you just sit for a minute. You look like hell.”

He complied, watching her move around the scene, that same cool competence marking all her movements. Her first task was to cuff Patrick and topple him over so he hit the ground like a felled tree. Then she freed Fiona from her leather cuffs, taking care to place her on the ground in a gentle slump.

Ian’s heart soared. She was going to be okay.

Agent Harding pulled a gun from the holster of one of the policemen standing nearby and looked back at Ian. “You ready?”

“Wait,” he called. “What made you finally believe me about General Eagle?”

She relaxed a little. “Your friend back there is very convincing. We’ve been following your research for years, Mr. Jones, and we’d just about duplicated your results with the chemical tracking. Who do you think has been anonymously funding you all this time?”

Pride swelled in his chest. They
had
been listening. He
did
matter. “But?”

“But we were missing one key step. When your lab burned down, we were afraid we’d never find it. Mr. Grantham there offered it to us in trade.”

“In trade for what?”

“A chance to do the first test run on a charred fish carcass in what was once your basement.”

“My fish?”

She nodded. “Mr. Grantham asked us to pull up the files on a one Patrick Veller. Seems you were right about him, he
is
listed in the database. It appears General Eagle here took the conversion serum about midway through the project. His ability? Fish. Dead anytime he draws within a few hundred feet.”

Ian broke out in a wide grin, wincing as his cheeks moved past the point of his pain tolerance. “Neil found a way to get proof. Isotope signatures in the fish carcass.”

“Indeed. You should have seen how disappointed he was when it turned out your girlfriend was innocent. You’ve got a very loyal friend there, Mr. Jones. If you ask me, that’s better than any superpower.”

Before he had a chance to respond, she waved her hand, and the entire scene came back to life. There was a lot to see and process, but Ian only had eyes for the woman, blinking, bewildered, and uncomprehending, as she moved across the pavement.

So he crawled. It was slow progress, and it was difficult to avoid the insane thrashing of Patrick’s bound arms. Still, he crawled.

By the time he reached her, Fiona was crying—sobbing, actually, understanding beginning to dawn as she took in her unbound hands and authoritative voice of Agent Harding.

“You,” Fiona said softly, cradling his head in her lap. Her hands ran over his face and body, skin touching skin. Exploring. Reveling in the simple sensation of human touch. “You saved me.”

“Not me,” Ian replied. He looked up to find Neil standing over the pair of them. He smiled. “Him. Neil’s the real hero of the day.”

“Squealy Nealy?” Fiona’s face screwed up into a frown.

“Hellz yeah, Fireball.” Neil grinned. “I’m your white fucking knight. No—don’t get up. You can thank me later.”

“But you don’t even like me.” She looked back and forth between them.

“No, but he does like me,” Ian said. “And Neil would do anything to protect the things that matter to me. Including you.”

Fiona’s lips parted in surprise. Ian reached out and traced those lips, using his free hand to wave Neil away. His friend obeyed, grumbling half-hearted obscenities as he went.

“I owe you an apology, Fiona,” Ian said softly. Each word hurt, but he could stop them no more than he could prevent the overwhelming urge to pull her closer, to protect and cherish and keep her by his side for as long as possible.

“Don’t, Ian. Just rest. It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not okay.” He shook his head. “I’ve already waited too long to say this. Back in high school, I was spineless and weak, and I didn’t stand up for you when you needed it most.”

The words—words he’d composed in his head a thousand times—grew in momentum, strengthening him as he went.

“The nickname was my fault. When we kissed, when I didn’t…” Even now, it was hard to talk about without feeling the shame of that first encounter. “I was so overwhelmed by girls back then—by you specifically—and Neil was my best friend.
Is
my best friend. It was wrong to tell Neil about what we did, and I should have stopped the rumors before they got out of hand. But I was young and stupid and unsure of myself—traits I’ve been trying my whole life to overcome. I’m not you, Fiona. I’m not strong.”

“Oh, Ian,” Fiona whispered.

He wasn’t finished. “You didn’t deserve to be treated like that. Not then, and not now. I should have rescued you. I should have fought every rumor, stilled every whisper until the whole world stopped. I hope someday you can forgive me for failing you.”

“It wasn’t all your fault, you know.” Fiona’s eyes glistened and she stroked his brow. “Oh, I blamed you—for years, I blamed you. It was so much easier to cast you in the role of villain than to take responsibility for my own poor judgment. Poor Fiona, always the victim. Poor Fiona, always cast aside. That wasn’t me being strong. That was me being blind to my faults.”