by K. Gorman
Kitten, less than two meters away from her, paused when he saw it.
“That’s cute. Does it come in pink?”
She clenched her jaw, forcing back the fear that fluttered through her body—everything about Kitten, from the unnatural tones of his speech, the gaunt, aggressive snarl that made his face and the unnatural way his coat seemed to shift and blend, to the sickness and venom that pierced her with his blue-eyed gaze, made her want to scream and run, to find a bright, strongly-lit area and a large gun—but she forced herself to stare him down and stand her ground.
“What’s your deal? Like, why chase us?”
“Why?” The cat’s laugh was more a hiss. “Why not? It’s in my nature. I like to chase things.”
“You like to hurt things?” She noticed Kitty moving in her peripheral vision, creeping up along Kitten’s right flank, so she made a deliberate move to shift her stance, to keep him focused on her movement. “Haven’t you hurt enough? I mean, I heard you left a dead guy somewhere.”
“Enough? If she hadn’t been interfering, I could have killed hundreds.”
His paw jabbed toward Kitty as he spoke—so much for him not noticing her—and his tone took on a more broken, gravelly hoarseness, sounding like the combination of a man with a deep baritone and someone who had spent the last twenty years chain-smoking.
She was just thinking of ways to get his attention back when his eyes snapped to her again, and he took another few steps toward her.
“But you are a fine victim. Come on, give us a scream.”
He leapt with a snarl, and she fired. The little gun cracked its recoil back into her hand and wrist much stronger than she thought it would, but the bullet went too wide. Just after the crack, she saw the incendiary round burst against the concrete several feet behind him.
Despite this, Kitten had flinched at the shot, somehow changing his trajectory mid-leap to land about a meter and a half to her left.
Slowly, he looked from her to the small flutter of the incendiary charge that licked the ground more than two meters away from him, then back again.
“A bit rusty, are we?” His smile flashed a show of razor-sharp teeth, more than she thought normal for a cat’s mouth. “Maybe you should have brought a bigger gun for this.”
“I suppose.” She glanced down at her gun, angling it to the side. “But, to be honest, when I heard your name was ‘Kitten,’ I thought we’d be sending a rescue to the humane society.”
The growl was the only warning she got before everything went black.
She yelped and leapt—to the right, away from the drop—scrambling against another crossbeam with her hand and pulling herself along its rough wood grain. Her head thunked into another section of it an instant later. She ducked and shoved herself past.
Claws caught at her shirt, larger than a mountain lion’s, scratching into the soft skin of her back. A beast’s growl erupted in the air around her head as Kitten shoved her hard, her hiss of pain drowned in the tumble of motion. She sprawled to the ground, wrists and knees hitting hard. As she attempted to twist around and get back to her feet, another snarl came from her left. A slash of pain scratched deep into her arm.
She yelled, the gun bumping into her wrist as she clutched at the wound. Her entire body went rigid, breath catching at the back of her throat in a raw gasp.
A few seconds later, the darkness rippled away from her. The dim rooftop appeared again. Kitten stood close to her, licking at her blood on his claws.
“Like I said, you should have brought a bigger gun.”
She rolled over, her body stiff with pain, and got back to her feet. She still held the gun in her hand.
Jesus. All I wanted to do was talk to a person. And now, I’m going to fucking die.
Pain throbbed up from her arm. She couldn’t feel much from the area around the wound, but the blood that flushed from it made a dark, straight gash along the back of her arm. She tried not to look at it too much, instead taking deep, shaking breaths to get her panic back under control.
She’d never been hurt like this. In all her seventeen years, she’d never even broken a bone—only sprained a few things. She felt the wound through her entire body, as if every nerve trembled with the pain in her arm. Raw, desperate emotions unwound in her chest, urging her to strike out, to scream, to run—it even spread into the pockets where the Phoenix had been. The pain was not so much excruciating as it was constant, its echoes pushing through her body like the pulse of an alarm.
Dust stirred as it slid against the Phoenix’s old power, the ash stirring at the back of her mind like a small, gritty cloud.
“Oh, I dunno,” she said, wincing as she brought her arm up to aim at him again. “Not sure a gun’s really going to help me at this point.”
In the background, Kitty had crept closer. No electricity moved around her, and she still clutched her bad hand to her side, but the air at her end of the rooftop appeared to move with her—which caught Mieshka off-guard. Trying not to frown, or direct any attention toward whatever the hell Kitty was doing, she kept her eyes on Kitten but focused her attention on her peripheral vision, examining Kitty and the air around her with whatever senses she had left over.
She felt a connection.
Kitty’s electricity had a dry, quick feel to it, filling the air with an invisible potential that snapped along the edge of her mind like the third rail of the subway track, or one of the electrical boxes she saw at the stations with the electrocution warnings on them. The awareness of it, and the cloying scent of the darkness that Kitten controlled, slipped through her senses and into her mind, again stirring the dust that had once been the Phoenix.
She shook her head, clearing the sensation from her head, and refocused on Kitten.
He smiled a saccharine grin toward her, his lips touched with the blood he’d licked from his claws. The large gash on the back of her arm stood out against her pale skin, and the pain it created was constant, and un-ignorable.
Holding his gaze, she felt something shift inside her. She almost let out a growl herself.
Fuck it. If I’m going to die, I’ll be damned if I don’t go without a fight.
Lining up her shot, she pulled the trigger once, then again—the first shot cracked across Kitten’s back, making him snarl, and the second where his abdomen would have been before he jumped out of the way, both streaking into small divets of flame where they hit the ground behind him—and twisted the now-empty gun around so that she was holding it like a bludgeon. She ran forward with a yell, adjusting her path to aim a kick at where Kitten had landed. In the background, Kitty, too, was sprinting forward.
Kitten landed a split-second before she got there and looked up.
Then, in a silent rush, the darkness flooded over her once again.
She was almost immediately knocked on her ass. She scratched and kicked at her attacker, attempting to keep him from her face. Claws sank through her jeans, ripping at her skin, and she managed to connect an awkward kick with her left shin before they vanished. Hot breath rolled down on her face, stinking and fetid.
Just as Kitten lurched in for the attack, the energy shifted. Every hair on her free arm stood straight up.
He dodged to the side just as a thunderbolt slammed through the scene, illuminating the dark with the thickness of a tree trunk. Power rode through the air, its concussive boom thrumming an echo of its energy through her bones, loud enough to shake the soft tissue of her lungs.
When it vanished, her skin prickled.
She lay there, breathing hard, stock still, feeling the tingle running through her.
Then, Kitten came back for the final strike.
Pain slashed across her other arm, and she dropped the gun with a hoarse yelp. Twisting, she rolled away from the attack, snapping her arms up to protect her head. Claws slashed, catching part of her already-injured forearm at a different angle. She yelled again, trying to bat at him.
All at once, the tingling intensified on her skin
. Warmth flooded her wounds, then spread to the rest of her body in a flood.
This time, when she heard a yelp, it wasn’t her own.
Inside her chest, a long-dead pile of dust sparked and crackled back to life. Wings unfolded within her, spreading past her skin. Fire interlaced her vision. She felt more than saw the shield they created.
The heat kept moving, filling her lungs, her heart, her stomach. It lifted through her spine like igniting embers, crackling the power alive within her once again. Slowly, she brought her hands in front of her face, staring at the fire that engulfed them, burning in a yellow-gold light.
Then, her attention shifted to Kitten, who had backed off a few paces. The fire glowed with such a fierce, harsh light that it burned through the dark fog he had created, casting a small circle of light around her that illuminated the rough and broken grit of the rooftop below him. His face lit up in orange, the blue in his eyes almost overpowered by the firelight that they reflected.
Their gazes locked.
As the fear in her heartbeat slowed, replaced by a growing sense of elation and power, she narrowed her eyes and ground her teeth together.
The Phoenix lifted its head. Through their connection, she felt its laser-focus center on its target.
Power began to swell.
Drawing a deep breath, Mieshka joined it. Together, their energy roared, and a pillar of fire twisted into existence around them, burning away the darkness and everything that had been in it.
Within seconds, the cat was caught, and all his darkness with it.
The inhuman, supernatural screams that ripped through the air as the demon died would stay with her for a long time after.
*
They watched the fire burn the remains of the cat, growing lower and lower with each passing minute until it was little more than a set of tea light-sized flames sputtering on a dark stain close to the ground with a stink of burning hair and flesh tainting the air. Kitten had been dead for more than a half hour, and his darkness dispatched with him, but, looking at the mix of emotion that furrowed Kitty’s brow, she’d felt that the woman had needed to stay until the very end.
The Phoenix had left her as quickly as it had come, but she could still feel it inside her. The warmth had returned, driving out every ounce of chill the city’s winter rain had put in her. After a while, she was more focused on that than the burning remains of the demon cat in front of her—even though she could still feel the fire that had eaten him.
Kitty was right. It was like tuning into another sense. She could feel the flutter of flames in front of her, and could likely re-take control of them if she tried. She could also feel the fire within her, though her immediate connection with the Phoenix itself had been shuttered and was growing smaller and smaller as time passed.
Well, at least, I know it’s not dead.
That was a relief, anyway. She tried not to dwell on the fact that it appeared to have gone back to sleep—maybe it had expended too much energy in defending her and needed to get it back. This was the first time it had resurfaced since creating the shield, and the warmth it had brought wasn’t subsiding. Her ability to use her Element hadn’t been cut off, either, she suspected.
She frowned, thinking on that last part. Then, she reached her hand out, focusing on the fire still burning the cat.
It crackled and hissed, the flames growing larger at her command. They also pulled on her, the feeling reminding her oddly of getting blood drawn at her high school nurse’s office.
She let the Element go quickly, and the flames shrank back down, mulling over Kitten’s corpse.
Kitty raised an eyebrow.
“Just checking,” Mieshka said.
“Mhmm.”
She winced as the pull of the Element weighed on her, feeling like a muscle she’d overexerted.
Whatever. She was just glad it was back. Now that she had regained Elemental control, Aiden could sort out the rest.
“You know how I mentioned that Kitten used to live in my head?” Kitty said.
“Yeah?”
“It’s weird now. Without him, it feels like my head’s too empty. Too quiet. You know what I mean?” She shook her head. “Is this normal?”
“Maybe? I mean, I get that quiet, empty feeling sometimes, too…” Mieshka frowned. “Of course, technically, I’m kind of like you since I’ve apparently had a large, powerful Phoenix sharing my head with me for these past few months.”
There was a pause. She glanced up, meeting Kitty’s gaze. Kitty had a similar frown on her face. Several feet to their right, Kitten’s burning remains fluttered at the edge of her peripheral vision, their movement mirrored in the Elemental senses that followed the fire.
“Okay,” Mieshka said. “Let’s just assume it’s normal. And let’s also never again admit that our heads feel empty, because that sounds like we don’t possess brains, and we’re way too smart and high-profile for those jokes to start going around, am I right?”
Kitty’s laugh burst out of her like a bird, and her teeth flashed in the firelight, baring the first grin Mieshka had seen from her since Kitten had come onto the scene.
“Fuck, yes, you’re right—and I definitely don’t need any more jokes made about me. Now come on, let’s go find some civilization. I haven’t eaten anything besides fruit bars and bread for three days.”
As they walked off the rooftop, following their way back toward the window, Kitty paused to scoop up the remains of her gun and emptied the rest of its magazine through the top where Kitten had cut it. Then, they left.
The flames burned lower and lower behind them over the few bits of grease and liquid that had once resembled a cat. Eventually, they went out, leaving a thin trail of smoke wisping into the air.
The demon was dead.
The End
Thank you so much for reading Into the Fire. This was the first book I’d ever written and, publishing it all the way back in 2013, and it’s always so exciting to see people continue to read and enjoy the work in 2020. If you enjoyed the book, there is much more in store for you—over 1,000 pages if I’ve done my math right, with close to 1,000 more on their way. The series continues in Firebird, then I recommend dipping over to the Fury of the Wind series to read Sylphide and Tempest before heading over to The Elemental Wars’ third book, Palace of Glass.
And, what’s more, you can get all of those books wrapped up into a nice, neat little package for $2.99.
The Elemental Wars & Fury of the Wind Five Book Omnibus Edition: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08N82MJMD/
And, if you enjoyed Into the Fire and have a few minutes, would you mind giving it a review? I would appreciate it a lot! Reviews help others know if the book is for them or not, and they also help me get into different promotion sites (many sites have a review number requirement before they’ll promote my book).
Feel free to also stalk me on social media (links below!) and harass me about book release schedules. I’m quite a friendly person and love to chat. Plus, I have no life outside of books. Fastest replies happen through Facebook, Twitter, and [email protected] .
Cheers,
Kelly
Website: http://kgorman.ca
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/K.-Gorman/e/B004WXHZ22/
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