Fire tickled her palms.
Kira raced past Luke, out the front door, as he scrambled to pick up the discarded research and catch up.
Somehow, vampires had managed to find them.
And knowing there would somehow be a cure, Kira didn’t really feel the need to slow the flames bursting from her palms.
Chapter Eleven
Dead.
They were all dead the second that Kira stepped out of that door. It was just that none of them knew it yet.
The flames traveling down her arms were all Punisher, were all meant to kill, and Kira just didn’t care anymore. She felt the smoke, the black fog drifting in wispy tendrils around her fire. The darkness was there, lurking. The vampire dormant inside of her was looking for a way to take over. But there was a cure. And there were vampires outside who needed to die, not just be forced away by Luke's Protector powers.
When she stepped through the door, Kira barely registered the vampire clutching her mother's head, bending it to the side to reveal a pearly, untouched throat. She didn't count the number of eyes watching, there were too many to take in. All she did was let it out—all of her power—something she hadn’t allowed herself to do in what seemed like forever.
Before the vampires knew Kira was there, they were burning in her powers, melting into ash, until all that was left had disappeared into the wind. But there were more. Kira could feel them, could almost see their glowing eyes in the shadows.
Luke rushed out behind her, surveying the damage she had already dealt.
"Kira—"
"Get my mom and keep her safe."
He hesitated for a second before nodding and jumping down the steps. He helped her mother stand and brought her closer to the house, until his back touched the wood.
Kira's eyes didn't stop scanning the trees. She trusted Luke, trusted him to keep her mother alive. He wouldn't let her down, so Kira would do her part to keep them all alive.
To her left, a vampire jumped out. Kira's hand flew on its own, casting flames so fast that the vampire evaporated before her feet even touched the ground.
On her right, another one. Kira shot out again, controlling her fire the best she could. Back to her left she saw movement.
"Above you!" She heard Luke's voice shouting into her head before the words could even form on his lips. Kira looked up just in time to see the vampire jump from the roof. She dove, rolling to the side, aiming her fire. Bull's-eye.
A sickening crunch hit her ears, and Kira turned to see the broken legs of the vampire she had scorched just enough to hurt. Its bones jutted out through charred skin. But still the vamp was clawing through the ground, trying to bite her. Reaching out, Kira finished the job.
There was a pause and Kira's heart fell as she realized what it meant. They were strategizing. Using her mother had failed, attacking from opposite directions seemed futile, and they needed a new game plan.
"Come on!" she yelled. They couldn't stop. She couldn't stop. Already with the pause, Kira became aware of the black tar inching down her veins, leaking from her heart, trying to infiltrate.
She called her flames, circling her heart in Protector powers, trying to fight it off, but the evilness was eating through her defenses. Instead of sensing vampires in the trees, the sweet smell of blood was starting to call out to her. The vampire inside of her was awakening. Her fire was being forced out, was blowing from her fingers at a rapid pace while inside a shadow took its place in her core, trying to block out the sun. Kira pushed against it, calling on her powers, using every bit of will she had not to fall.
But she did fall.
Her knees buckled and she gripped her chest, grasping for the sun with her bare hands. The outside world was slipping away.
But Luke. Her mother. They needed her.
Kira collapsed on her side, keeling over as the internal battle intensified. She didn't see the flames encircling her body, the fire surrounding her entire being. She felt it pulse, felt it melting the tar, turning it to slick oil. Kira pushed harder.
Flames tore free of her skin, escaping into the trees, doing the fighting for Kira. Every few seconds, when her body had had too much, another explosion ripped away, shooting into the world around her. But for the first time, Kira felt like maybe she was running out. Like the cloud was getting thicker, hiding more and more of the sun. Her endless reserves were emptying with each surge that wracked her body.
And then another fire joined hers, flames that were purer, were protecting her—were fighting the darkness for her. And they were winning. They were pushing it back. They were untainted.
They were Luke's.
"Kira, Kira, Kira," she heard. Her senses were returning.
Fingers covered hers, pushing against her heart, forging their own pathway through. Luke. He was saving her. He was fighting the battle she didn’t know how to win.
"Luke." She blinked, fighting the desire to reach up and bite his skin, to sink her teeth through his flesh and taste, and taste…
But it was Luke. Her best friend. Her protector. Her rock. Not her food. No matter how good he smelled.
And the thought was so absurd, that the Kira, still conscious, still fighting, gave up and started laughing instead.
"Kira?"
But she couldn’t stop, the giggles wove their way around her limbs, shaking her just enough to dislodge the black oil Luke's flames couldn't find, just enough to make it break apart and disappear.
"Okay, you're really freaking me out. We have to go."
Kira blinked again, making out his face against the blue sky, against the red flames silhouetting his features. His eyes were bulging, afraid, desperate. His skin was covered in ash, speckled with black smudges. And then another smell sifted through her nostrils. Smoke. And a heck of a lot of it.
Kira stopped laughing and sat up, slightly dizzy but almost like herself.
The trees were burning.
Kira spun, looking for her mom, who was standing above her holding her hand over her mouth, trapping the sobs that Kira hadn’t heard before. And it hit her that the fear in her mother's eyes wasn't from the vampires, it was from her—for her.
Unable to process anymore, Kira looked behind her mother to the house. It was on fire. It was crackling, burning. The dried wood had already turned black, charring in the heat, and gray flames billowed into the sky.
Her house. Her home.
Kira stood up, running toward the door. There were so many things she hadn't looked at. What if she and Luke had missed something? What if there were more clues, more trinkets left behind, waiting for her to find them?
Luke caught her around the waist.
"Kira, we have to go! We have to get out of here."
"But the house, I have to—"
"There's nothing you can do," he said, speaking urgently, trying not to yell. "I have the research, we have to go."
"But—"
Kira was silenced by a loud boom that shook the earth beneath their feet. The tree, the one resting on her house, had fallen through, splitting it down the middle.
It was gone.
A pile of rubble.
Kira screamed but didn’t protest when Luke tugged on her hand, running toward a spot in the woods that hadn't caught fire yet.
"Where do we go?" he yelled over the sound of more branches falling to the ground. Her mother had come alive.
"Follow me," she called back to him, pushing through the forest, trying to beat the fire that was hot on their tails.
And hot, oh man was it hot. Hot enough to burn, even if they were conduits. The smolder on her backside was immense, like a furnace had opened behind her. The sting of the heat was unlike anything Kira had felt, but she wondered if maybe it was hurting her more than the others, scorching her in a way it didn’t with them.
They jumped through a small stream, and Kira relished the cool droplets that splashed onto her cheeks.
"We're almost there," her mother called back, nearly falling as she turned
around to meet Kira's eyes, checking to make sure her daughter was still with them, but in what sense Kira wasn't sure.
And then she saw the clearing up ahead, the bright silver of their car. All three of them sped up, closing the gap quickly, until finally they were all sitting in leather seats, silent except for deep and heavy breathing.
Kira's mother reached for the phone she had left in the car and quickly dialed a number.
"Hello… Yes, I think I need to report a fire… yes, there's a lot of smoke coming through the trees… I don't know what else it could be… I'm driving through the mountains, maybe an hour east of the airport… yes, on that main road… you see it? On the satellite feed?… great, thank you… yes, you too. Have a wonderful day."
She hung up.
More silence.
No one even knew where to begin.
Kira stretched her fingers, bringing her flames just close enough to the surface that she could see the glow under her palms. It was still there. Deep inside, the sun was still there.
She sighed, leaning her head back against the seat to stare at the smoke leaking over the trees and onto the road.
Ominous. That was the only word that came to mind.
"Maybe we should, you know, leave? With the fire and everything, it doesn’t seem safe," Kira said while keeping her gaze on the forest. She couldn't see the actual fire yet.
Her mom started the car, slipping away from the curb and making a U-turn on the empty street. They were headed back to the airport.
"So," Kira said quietly, not sure how to finish it. All she knew was she needed a distraction, something to keep the image of her broken home from taking over.
"So," Luke said, taking a deep breath and rubbing his hands against his face. "So you really are turning into a vampire?"
"Yeah," she said quietly, ignoring her mother's concerned gaze, "I think I am."
"Then," he said and reached into his pocket, "we have some reading to do."
"You found something?" Her mom gasped, perking up ever so slightly.
"We did," Kira said and squeezed her fingers.
Luke tapped her head with the bundle of pages, scratching her skin, but Kira didn’t take them. Instead, she reclined her seat until it was almost flat and pressed her fingers into her temples. Her head was pounding.
"Can you just read it to us?" she asked.
Luke looked down at her with a smirk, his eyebrow raised.
"Come on, that way my mom can hear."
Kira closed her eyes, not waiting for another sarcastic reaction. But she heard him shift on the leather seats, getting comfortable. Then came the sandpaper like sound of shuffling pages.
"Dear Diary," Luke began, "I think my best friend is trying to kill me."
"Luke," she said wryly, not amused. Except, dang it, a smirk started to pull at her lip.
"Okay, okay." He coughed, getting back into the right mindset and started to hum a little while he scanned for something interesting.
And hum.
And hum.
"Luke," Kira said, trying to lighten her annoyed tone, "a vital part of reading something out loud is, you know, actually reading it out loud."
He sighed. "I'm looking for something new. Right now, he's just talking about the missing pages from that text, the ones we got from your grandfather. It's all Protector and scientific—about the madness, the loss of control—but there's nothing about angels or any of that."
"Humph." Kira crossed her arms, thinking.
"I'd like to hear it," her mother said from the front, keeping her attention on the road.
"Oh, right," Luke said, suddenly alert. He sat up and started reading quoted passages from the text. Kira tuned it out. She'd heard it all before. The Protectors thought their biggest fear was her losing control, her fire turning deadly to humans, her oncoming madness. They didn't even know the half of it—that the madness was the least of their concern. It was what would come after. The killing. The biting. The blood.
Kira rubbed at the spot between her eyes. Better not to think about it, not when there was still some hope left.
"Ooh, this is interesting." Kira perked up while Luke held the paper to her face. "It says 'madness=falling?'"
The scribble was unquoted, unsourced. Just a moment of pure thought from her father. She liked that he used the symbol instead of writing the word equal—it was quick and efficient, getting right to the point.
"What do you think he meant?"
"Well, madness for the Protectors was the moment the fire consumed the mixed breed conduits. When their flames exploded out of them, burning entire villages to the ground, only stopping once they died. At least, that's what the academics thought."
"But falling is completely different," Kira said, thinking out loud. "It's like something takes over inside of me, I can't even feel my fire anymore, there's just this darkness, this smoke that blocks everything else out."
"Maybe to you, but that's not what it looked like to us," her mother said softly. Kira heard her breath shake.
"That's genius, Mrs. D!" Luke exclaimed, shuffling in his seat excitedly. "The madness and the falling, they're the same thing. You practically just burned a forest down, and to us it looked like you were exploding with fire, totally out of control. The madness, get it? But inside, you were really changing, falling."
"That makes sense! It felt like maybe the sun was leaving me, like my powers had run out, but in reality they were being pushed out. The vampire was forcing out the sun, trying to make the change complete." Kira shuddered. How close had she just come to completely crossing over? "But how does this help us?"
Luke bit his lip and looked back down at the papers. "Not sure yet. But we learned something, which is a start."
"Madness," Luke muttered under his breath as he skimmed, "control…fire…burning…killed…" Kira didn’t like where this was going. "Here, read this," Luke said and held the pages above her head again.
But what about the healing? Her father had scrawled. Does it go away or is that the key? Will it save her?
All questions, no answers.
"What do you think?"
Kira shrugged. "I don't know, it's not something I really keep track of. Although…" Kira thought back to the fight outside of Sonnyville. Her broken back. Her useless limbs. It had taken a while to heal herself, so long that her mother would have died if not for Pavia. At the time, Kira thought it was just the degree of the injury, but that had never stopped her before.
She thought back further, back to her first visit to Sonnyville. A vampire had flipped their car over, mangled it into pieces and Kira had managed to not only save herself, but also Luke, his sister Vanessa and that girl Casey, who Kira refused to acknowledge as his ex-girlfriend. They all would've died, would have been ripped apart by the car.
In comparison, a broken back seemed miniscule.
Kira looked up, meeting her mother's eyes in the rearview mirror. They quickly flicked back to the road, trying to mask the worry.
"Give me your arm," she said to Luke, looking for a scrape. She flipped his hand over, running her eyes along his forearms until—aha, there we go. A nice red cut scarred his elbow.
Shifting in her seat, Kira placed her hand over the spot, letting her mind go blank so she could focus on his skin. Seal shut, she thought and pictured the red wound lightening to pink until it disappeared entirely. Her head began to ache, a dull feeling at the crown of her neck.
A few minutes later, when she couldn't concentrate anymore, Kira pulled her hand back. The cut was gone.
Luke looked up, his mind already spinning in circles of what it could mean, of how she could heal herself. But Kira had a different thought entirely—tough. It had been too difficult. Her healing used to come as second nature, without a thought.
"It's going away," she said quietly.
"What are you talking about, going away? It is gone," Luke said, twisting his elbow around to look at the newly repaired spot.
"No, my healing,
it's going away. It's getting harder."
His arm dropped. His heart followed. Kira felt the echo in her mind and closed the bond, tightly shutting it.
Nodding toward the paper, Kira asked, "What else does it say? My father's research?"
"Not much." Luke handed her the pages, letting Kira do the reading.
The words were small, the letters straight and slightly slanted to the left. It read like a stream of consciousness, like thoughts pouring from his head. More about the madness, the Protectors, their beliefs. Of course that's what he would write down, Kira thought. All of the Punisher culture was in his head, ingrained in his very being.
She flipped over the last page. Nothing new. Nothing she hadn't heard before.
Angels.
Kira stopped, her mind caught by the word she had skimmed over. Backtracking, Kira reread the line.
"The story of the two angels…" she murmured. Searching the page for more information. What story? What angels? But there was nothing, no other mention.
"What'd you say?" Luke asked, looking over her shoulder.
"The story of the two angels," Kira repeated, just as perplexed as before.
"What story?"
Kira rolled her eyes. "I don’t know."
Her mother sucked in a breath. Kira head snapped toward the steering wheel.
"I do," her mother said and a smile slowly spread across her face, "I know it."
"Go, Mom!" Kira reached up for the high five and received a resounding slap.
"Sliding in for the win," Luke cheered from the back seat.
It was silent for a moment. Her mom was thinking, trying to drive and bring back an old memory at the same time.
"So, what is it?" Kira asked, impatient.
"Yeah, what is it?" Luke repeated, sounding like a five-year-old.
"It's an old Punisher legend, sort of like a creation story," her mother began. "I don't know why I didn't think of it earlier, although I'm not sure how truthful or helpful it is."
"It's okay." Kira placed a hand above her mother's, letting their fingers intertwine over the clutch. "Anything will help, Mom."
"Do you remember the first Punisher story, the story of how vampires and conduits came to be? Lucifer fell first, bringing other corrupted angels to the earth with him, where they feasted on human blood and turned humans into their own twisted puppets. Seeing this, the pure angels asked God to release them from the heavens so they could bring their brothers back, could save them from themselves, and God agreed. But soon even the pure angels began to change, began to fall. So, to save their souls and the earth itself, they split their powers in half, becoming conduits—beings strong enough to fight the newly created once-human vampires, but not blessed enough to fall into the darkness."
The Complete Midnight Fire Series Page 71
