No amount of water was going to make a dent in this blaze. The building was a gonner. All anyone could do now was get out of the way and wait until the fire ran out of fuel.
I burst past the fire trucks, ambulances, and police cruisers.
“You can’t go in there,” a fireman exclaimed. “Are you insane?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” I replied, throwing him a wink over my shoulder.
I’d always had a thing for firemen.
There was no more time for pleasantries. I raced into the building.
Flames leapt toward me and died the second they met with my titanium skin. My clothes fared less well. I managed to bat out the fire before my outfit was completely incinerated.
If tomorrow’s headlines featured a scantily-clad picture of me rescuing people, A.J. would never let me hear the end of it.
I didn’t bother with doors. Instead, I barreled right through the walls until I found a group of five elderly people huddled beneath a mattress. They were all choking and drenched in sweat, but the mattress was keeping the worst of the flames at bay.
“Come on!” I pulled the everyone behind me, using my body to shield them.
It was slow going. I had to hoist one woman onto my hip like an over-large toddler. I used my other hand to yank a man along behind. The man was coughing too hard from the smoke to hold himself up.
“Stand back,” I warned the people behind me before kicking right through the brick wall.
Cold October air filled my lungs, which were screaming for oxygen. The sharp odor of burnt plastic and other lovely carcinogenic fumes made my nose sting. Thick, black smoke poured out of the building and disappeared into the night sky.
I ushered the old people out as fast as I could. As soon as they were surrounded by paramedics, I went back in.
Realizing the upper floor wouldn’t last much longer, I ran up the stairs. The steps were concrete, but the magical fire was eating them up the same way normal flames devoured wood. It took some tricky acrobatics, but I made it up to the second floor.
I screamed myself hoarse as I ran from room to room, searching for survivors. I didn’t let myself linger next to bodies that lay stiff in their beds from smoke inhalation. I raced on until I found people cowering under bedframes or crouching in their tubs.
I darted down the burning stairs and practically threw the retirees at the waiting firemen.
“Get outta there!” a fireman called up to me. “This place is about to blow!”
Just a few more…. I could save a few more people.
I sprinted out with an unconscious woman slung over my shoulder. We’d barely made it outside when every window in the building exploded. Glass shards sprayed in every direction. Blue-and-purple flames erupted out of the open windows and lit up the sky. The police and firemen dove to the ground. The cop car nearest to the building began to sag as the exterior melted right off its frame.
There was a crash as the building’s second floor collapsed.
“No!” One of the retirees reached out a trembling hand toward the building. “My wife’s still in there!”
My heart sank. No one inside could have survived this kind of heat. Except for the one who had caused it.
I caught the man around his waist before he could barge back into the building.
“Debbie!” he yelled. “Debbie, oh God. Debbie!”
The man crumpled against me, sobbing.
I’m sorry! I wanted to tell the man. I’m so, so sorry.
But being sorry wouldn’t bring the man’s wife back. So, I held him more tightly as I stared at all those burned-out windows. I couldn’t stop myself from counting them…and thinking about all those people who would never walk out the front door.
Before I knew it, I was extricating myself from the old man and going back toward the building.
“It’s too dangerous!” a fireman shouted, reaching out to stop me.
I easily slipped out of his grasp. Michael would Whisper to the firemen and cops to make sure no one tried to follow me inside.
My titanium skin didn’t register temperature, but I could sense how hot it was. Cinders glowed with magical heat. Even though the fire had already devoured most of the building, flames still crackled on the floor’s charred remains. I shielded my eyes against the floating ash.
There was nothing to see except rubble. In just a few minutes, the blaze had eaten away at everything. My eyes watered as fire turned to smoke. My throat burned. While my exterior was titanium, my insides were still normal.
I shielded my nose and mouth with my arm as I moved deeper into the building.
“Help me.”
The cry was weak, but I’d definitely heard the male voice. Someone was alive.
“Where are you?” I cried. Hope and panic surged through me.
I barreled through the remains of a wall that was barely standing. It crashed behind me in a flurry of embers. I hardly noticed. I swiped ash from my hair without slowing as I raced from one burned-out room to another.
“Where are you?” I called again. With my raspy voice and soot-covered skin, I felt like something out of a nightmare.
Movement caught my attention. I hurried forward, heedless of the remaining ceiling beams that could come down on my head at any moment.
I burst through the building’s far wall. Even though I was in some kind of alley lined with dumpsters, the air seemed gloriously clean compared to the noxious fumes within the still-burning building.
“Please. Help.”
I came to a screeching halt as I caught sight of the voice’s owner.
A boy was sitting on the ground. His knees were drawn up to his chin, and his whole body was trembling. He looked up at me through tear-swollen eyes.
I went still. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought the kid on the ground was an innocent bystander. With his twiggy limbs and the soot smudged across his cheeks, he didn’t look capable of any crime worse than talking back to grown-ups. But I knew better. For the first time, I was grateful Smith had made me memorize every detail of the Super Mags’ files.
I was standing in front of the Pyro who was responsible for this inferno.
“You.” I clenched my hands into fists. Power flowed through my veins. I crossed the distance separating us in two leaps. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?!”
I grabbed the back of the boy’s shirt and yanked him to his feet. His head snapped back like a ragdoll.
I expected the Pyro to hurl flames in my face. Instead, he sagged in my grip. The Pyro hellion didn’t look at me with anger or defiance. His eyes were dull. He seemed broken.
His shaking hands drew my attention.
“Shit,” I gasped as acid flooded my mouth.
The boy’s hands were burned almost beyond recognition. Patches of black, scaly skin were punctuated by oozing red blisters. His hands and forearms looked more like raw meat than human skin.
“What the hell happened to you?”
Part of the deal with Pyros was that they couldn’t be harmed by fire. Just like I wouldn’t be able to knock myself out with my own titanium fist. Not that I’d ever put it to the test….
The boy who had burned down an old age home and killed dozens of people began to sob.
“It’s gone,” he cried. “It’s gone. It’s gone. It’s gone.”
“The building?” I asked, staring at the smoldering remains. What the hell did he expect would happen?
“No.” The boy let out a soft whimper. “My magic’s gone.”
CHAPTER 2
We stood within sight of the burnt-down retirement home as emergency personnel flurried around. I calmly gave my statement to the cops, all the while pretending like the anxious fluttering in my stomach wasn’t making me feel like doing a thousand push-ups.
Twenty-seven people were dead.
Maybe if I’d moved faster…searched harder….
“That’s all we need, Ms. Hammond. Thank you for your time.”
&nbs
p; A few words from Michael ensured the Seven of us could stay through the Pyro’s arrest and interrogation. I stood off to the side, trying to be discreet as I bounced on the balls of my feet in abbreviated jumping jacks.
I excelled at the doing part of things. I still hadn’t mastered the waiting around part.
“One of the Super Mags cut her leg,” the Pyro told the Mag detective, scowling when his handcuffs clinked against his bandaged hands. “I hadda get a first aid kit, and the old people home seemed like they’d have one.”
“Did it ever occur to you to go to a store and just buy one?” the detective asked dryly.
The Pyro glared at the woman. The detective took a step back, but no flames came spouting out of the Pyro’s bandaged fingers.
“Those nurses shouldn’t have fought back!” the Pyro growled. He looked down at his bandaged hands and seemed to deflate. “I guess I panicked.”
We all turned to look at the smoldering remains of the retirement home. Blackened beams and sooty ash were all that remained.
“You’re going to rot in jail for a long time,” the detective told the Pyro with satisfaction. She’d been searching for the Pyro ever since he’d burned down MagLab and escaped with fifty other Super Mags. “You’re barely thirteen, and you’re already a mass murder. The world will be better with you locked away.”
A sense of righteous justice flared through me. Now, this maniac would never hurt anyone else again.
“I’d like to know about what happened after the fire,” Graysen told the Pyro.
The detective stiffened. I wasn’t sure if it was because she felt like Graysen was stepping on her toes or because she didn’t like Nats. Either way, she knew enough to keep her mouth shut.
“Someone dragged me outta the building.” The Pyro scowled. “I couldn’t see anyone, so I don’t know who it was. I got stuck with something sharp—a needle, I think. And then my magic stopped working.” His voice broke and his shoulders sagged. In spite of the still-smoking heap of rubble in front of us, I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for the kid.
The Mag paramedics on the scene confirmed that the Pyro had been injected with the Magical Reduction Potion—MRP as we now called it to save syllables.
The vile potion was developed by Edwardian Remwald’s Alchemists in MagLab, and the different gradations of MRP could take away a Mag’s powers temporarily or permanently.
The Pyro had been injected with the permanent kind.
“It’s like the others,” Kaira said in a low voice.
About a month ago, one of the Super Mags had been playing with her doll in the park when she was injected with the MRP. The same thing had happened to another of the kids a few days later. And now this.
Someone was injecting the Super Mags with the Magical Reduction Potion. Whoever it was must be incredibly stealthy…and either really smart or really stupid. So far, no one had been able to find out anything about the attacker’s identity, even though the cops and other Super Mags were on the hunt.
“I’m gonna get that…that magic ripper!” the Pyro snarled as the detective led him to her cruiser. “I’m gonna find that sonuvabitch and burn him down to dust!”
“Without your magic, you won’t be burning anyone or anything again,” the detective told him as she unceremoniously shoved him into the cruiser.
The boy’s retort was lost as the detective slammed the door shut.
“Magic ripper,” Yutika said. “That’s a good name. We should totally use it.”
“Totally,” A.J. agreed.
We watched as the righteous detective turned on her siren and sped away with the Pyro.
It was good the Pyro had lost his magic. The retirement home hadn’t been the first time he’d used his fire to kill. In the process of breaking himself and the other Super Mags out of MagLab, he’d killed dozens of people.
Yet, the thought of someone stealing away my magic shot so much fear through me that I was left gasping.
Besides, it wasn’t like the magic ripper had just gone after the Pyro. They had attacked innocent Super Mags, too.
“We better head home and deal with this,” Kaira said, her mouth twisted in a grim line. “Reporters are already blowing up my phone.”
“Agreed,” Graysen said as he texted on his own cell.
“I’ll see if I can track down this magic ripper,” Smith said. His head disappeared behind the screen of his laptop, which he was balancing on one palm.
“Yutika and I can go talk to some of the other Super Mags,” Michael offered. “See if they know anything that’ll help us find this mystery person.”
“I guess that leaves us,” I told A.J. My thoughts were already racing ahead to how I intended to spend my first night off in months.
Over the last four months, we’d all been consumed with helping Kaira and Graysen set up their new administration as Co-Directors of the Alliance. After the election, our entire posse had moved into the Director’s mansion. We’d had about two seconds to settle in before our collective skills were put to the test.
Every time I thought about how I and six other twenty-somethings were running the city, I got heartburn. And then I got back to work, since there was never any shortage of that these days.
It was a true marker of how busy we’d all been that A.J. hadn’t even started talking about Halloween costumes.
Guilt nagged at me; the only reason I had a night off was because twenty-seven people were dead. Still, that fact didn’t take away from the tingling sense of anticipation building in my limbs.
Finally, a voice sighed in the back of my mind. Finally, I could do something about the mystery that haunted my dreams and called to me like a siren. Finally, I might be able to get some answers.
The perpetual weight that rested between my shoulder blades eased a fraction.
“Oh, no you don’t.” A.J. narrowed his eyes at me. “You have your ass-kicking face on, and I have a date with a jacuzzi and a pumpkin latte.”
I had an ass-kicking face? Sweet.
“Not anymore, you don’t,” I informed him. “We’re going grave robbing.”
CHAPTER 3
The fall breeze washed over my bare arms, which would have been covered in goosebumps if my skin was just skin. The silver of my bare titanium arms shone pale in the darkness. With my magic, I didn’t feel the burn of muscles or exertion from all the digging I was doing. I could have dug all night without getting tired.
For just a moment, the wind pulled away the rotten earth smell and replaced it with the scent of a campfire. Somewhere nearby, people were roasting marshmallows and stargazing. While I was digging up graves.
“Is this your idea of a joke, Bri Hammond?”
I looked up. A.J. was peering down at me from the edge of the six-foot hole I’d dug. He wore a hat with a miner’s lamp, which illuminated one of his patent faux-leather loafers, tapping away in irritation.
“What are you talking about?” I asked, annoyed that A.J.’s butter-yellow suit was pristine, while my outfit was covered in dirt.
Sir Zachary let out a playful yip. His outfit—a yellow jacket that matched A.J.’s suit—was as filthy as mine. Our little dog wagged his tail as he nosed around the fresh-turned earth.
“Bringing me to a graveyard, under a full moon, a week before Halloween…?” A.J.’s voice got high at the end. “I’m getting the heebie jeebies. If it wasn’t for my incurable loyalty and perpetual good cheer, I’d do my digging from the car.”
As a Level 10 Telekinetic, A.J. was capable of doing just that. Lower level Telekinetics had to be right next to an object to make it move. A.J. could control inanimate objects that were miles away.
I’d been watching his shovel work furiously beside me for the last hour, while A.J. reclined on his checkered picnic blanket and sipped his spiked pumpkin latte.
“Well,” I drawled. “If you weren’t so worried about our public image, then I’d be glad to dig up these graves in the middle of the day.”
A.J.
squeaked. “Do you know how hard I’ve worked to portray us as semi-law-abiding Bostonians?”
Legal, but with a twist was our joking, private motto. Our public one, which had gotten Kaira and Graysen elected, was Get shit done.
Even though Kaira and Graysen were now the most powerful people in Boston, defiling graves was still a crime.
Imagine that.
A.J. did have a point about the Halloween spooky stuff, although I’d never admit it to him. There wasn’t much that could take me down, but it was admittedly a tad creepy being out here in the dark. I was usually a total sucker for scary stuff—roller coasters, horror movies, and haunted houses were my jam. But there was something about digging up a grave in the wee hours that filled my mind with images of ghosts and vampires. And zombies…oh my.
My shovel hit the hard-plastic exterior of the biohazard container I had known would be buried here. I leaned my shovel against the dirt wall and used my titanium fingers to pry the container out of its earthen cocoon. A.J. adjusted his miner’s lamp helmet to illuminate the box as I pried it open.
“Anything?” A.J. asked from the top of the hole.
“Nope.”
Just as I’d expected, the container was empty.
The container held a faint plastic-y smell. The inside was devoid of bones or whatever else would have been left behind if it had held a corpse like it was supposed to.
I leaned back against the freshly-dug hole, not even caring that dirt and earthworms were probably taking up residence in my long hair.
Before Kaira and Graysen became Directors, we’d been investigating Mag Subject 6, the Invisible and Mind Melder Super Mag who was murdering Alliance officials. He’d been the one to tell us that Mags were being kidnapped and enslaved to produce the Magical Reduction Potion.
And my niece, Lilly, had been one of the enslaved Mags.
The only person who knew where the slaves were kept had died before I could get the information out of him. Now, I was stuck in this purgatory where I didn’t know whether Lilly was dead or alive, and I didn’t have any way of finding out. All I could do was dig up the rest of the graves on the list of Mags who shared the same profile as Lilly in the hopes of finding a new lead.
Mags & Nats 3-Book Box Set Page 71
