Authors: Jennifer Estep
The pill had started to dissolve the second it hit my tongue, and my weak struggles with Benson had only hastened the absorption process. He removed his hand from my nose and mouth, and I barely had time to suck down a breath before Burn was in my system.
Bria and Xavier had warned me about the drug’s powerful effects, but it was quite another thing to experience them firsthand. The rest of the limp, languid fog from the sedative Silvio had given me immediately vanished. A foul, bitter, almost smoky taste filled my mouth, and I could almost
feel
the pill sliding down my throat, like I’d swallowed a glowing ember, one that grew hotter and hotter the farther it dropped down my throat.
Then it hit my stomach, and the world erupted into flames.
The fire exploded low in my belly, dozens of hot, hungry little tendrils crawling outward from the epicenter
like spiders scurrying through my insides, dragging burning threads of silk along behind them and weaving together a tight, inescapable web of flaming destruction.
I stared down at my stomach, almost expecting the spiders to come surging up out of my belly button and rip through the thin fabric of the hospital gown, stringing their stinging silk over the outside of my body as well as the inside. Sweat streamed down my forehead, the salt of it irritating my eyes, but that pain was small compared with what the drug was doing to me.
Burning, burning me alive, from the inside out.
I bucked and heaved and thrashed in the chair, so hard that the restraints bruised my neck, wrists, and ankles, but I couldn’t break free of the cuffs. Even if I could have, I still couldn’t have escaped the drug and what it was doing to me. All too soon, I had exhausted what little strength I had, and I sagged against the chair, gasping for air, even though every breath I took only seemed to add more fuel to the fire roaring through my veins.
While I’d been thrashing around, Benson had pulled a chair right up beside mine, his pen and pad in hand, observing my pitiful struggles. He leaned forward, his excited breath brushing against my face, as hot and eager as the drug coursing through my system.
Benson’s nostrils quivered as he sniffed my emotions again. “Finally,” he murmured. “
Fear
.”
He looked at the watch on his wrist, scrawled something on his pad, and then raised his eyes to mine again. “Tell me, Gin,” he cooed. “We’re five minutes into our experiment. What does it feel like? All of those sweet, sweet chemicals pumping through your body. Shooting straight
into your heart, circling through your brain, and cycling back out again. What do they feel like, interacting with your own magic, your own elemental power? Hmm?”
“It . . . burns . . .” That was all I could rasp out.
I don’t know how long I sagged in the chair, just waiting and waiting for the horrible burning sensation to leave my body. But instead of lessening, it only intensified, and then—suddenly—from one blink to the next—
I was
flying
.
That was the only way to describe the feeling. My body felt completely weightless, and I was soaring through the sky, with thick white clouds all around me. The lab, Benson, Silvio, they all fell away, and all I could see, hear, and smell was the blue, blue sky—the one that always reminded me of fall, Fletcher, and my murdered family.
I was so delighted that I laughed.
I’d spent so much of my life learning how to control my emotions, always pushing aside my pain, fear, and anxiety, especially these past few months with everyone gunning for me. But right now, I didn’t have any worries. No cares, no complaints, no concerns of any kind. It was just me and the clouds drifting through the sky.
And I
loved
it, every single second of it.
But even more than that, I felt so
strong
in that moment. Powerful. Invincible. Unstoppable. Like I could zoom up through the clouds into the heavens above, wrap my fist around a star, and snuff it out. Smash my way through the moon with my bare hands. Eliminate everything and everyone who dared to displease me.
I didn’t need Bria or Finn or Owen or any of the rest of my friends and family. I was better than the whole lot of
them, all weak, pitiful, and small. Especially Bria, always worrying about doing things the right way. Always nattering on and on and
on
about the law and justice, instead of just doing what needed to be done, like I always did.
I didn’t need Bria and her rules and regulations and her guilt about my being an assassin. Not anymore. I didn’t need her hanging around, the albatross she was around my neck, such a bothersome
burden
.
All I needed was
this
—this feeling, this power, this drug.
All I needed was Burn.
“Only fifteen minutes in, and she’s in the euphoria stage already,” I heard Benson murmur. “She’s reacting quicker to the drug than anyone before. Amazing.”
“Isn’t it?” Silvio’s tone was as dry as Benson’s was excited.
Their voices penetrated my dizzying rush, making me frown and look at the clouds clustered around me. The longer I stared at them, the more I realized that something was wrong. The puffy white edges started to darken and smoke, their edges singed like marshmallows that had been held over a campfire too long. Melting, melting everywhere . . .
And I started to fall.
In an instant, I wasn’t strong anymore. Not powerful, not unstoppable, and certainly not invincible. No, I was the one who was weak, pitiful, and small.
My body grew hotter and hotter, even as the ground rushed up to meet me. But right before my impact, the brown earth dissolved into a pit of roaring green flames. I screamed, even though there was nothing I could do
to keep from plummeting straight into the heart of that raging fire.
I sucked down another breath to scream, and I snapped back to reality. To the lab and the chair and Benson watching me, the rat in his cage.
“Twenty-five minutes in, and out of the euphoria stage already. Most fascinating indeed.”
He glanced at his watch and scribbled another note on that damn pad of his.
But my anger at the vamp and his sick torture of me was quickly replaced by more pain, as Burn continued to rage through my body. The poison pulsed through every single part of me. I stared down at my arms, and I swear that I could actually
see
those spiders crawling around underneath my skin, their fat bellies swollen with bubbling green lava and their eyes flashing the same wicked color as they drew their matching strings of silk along behind them. The burning threads scorched every single part of me that they touched, wrapping around me tighter and tighter until I thought my whole body would spontaneously combust.
I started screaming then, and I didn’t stop.
I
couldn’t
stop.
Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep.
Mixed in with my screams, the monitors continued to chirp out my heartbeat, the sound and tempo accelerating like a car engine.
“Silvio,” Benson said, his voice seeming small and far away. “Check her vitals. I’m going to get some adrenaline. At the rate the drug is cycling through her body, the crash might kill her. And I’d hate to lose such an interesting test subject.”
Test subject? I snarled at the idea that he wanted to do this to me again and again, although the sound was lost amid my screams and the high-pitched squealing of the monitors.
I was dimly aware of Benson sliding his chair away from mine, getting to his feet, and hurrying into the back of the lab. Then Silvio was leaning over me, pressing his fingers into the pulse point on my right wrist. The cool, soft touch of his hand made me sigh, although my relief was short-lived, as another wave of fire roared through my veins.
“Gin,” Silvio whispered in my ear. “You’re reacting badly to the drug. I think it has some sort of elemental magic in it. That’s the ingredient that I think Benson is missing. If that’s true, then whatever kind of magic it is, your own power doesn’t like it. So you have to fight it. You have to fight the magic, or it will kill you. Do you understand?”
Silvio’s face swam in front of my eyes, his bronze skin melting at the edges, just like the marshmallow clouds had. But I sucked in a breath and forced myself to concentrate, to focus, until his features solidified.
“Gin?” he whispered again, his tone more urgent than before. “Do you understand?”
I stared into his eyes, his gray eyes that were almost the same color as mine, as my power, as my magic.
Elemental magic
. . .
Silvio’s words swirled around and around my mind. Burn contained some sort of elemental magic? His shocking statement cut through some of my confusion. Well, that would explain why Benson hadn’t been able to
reverse-engineer the formula yet and also why the drug affected elementals the most, like Benson and Bria had both told me. I didn’t like the feel of other elementals’ magic, much less it actually being absorbed into my system. Silvio was right. If I didn’t figure out what kind of power it was, or at least how to counteract it, the drug would kill me.
So for the first time, instead of trying to push it away or dampen it down or ignore it, I actually
concentrated
on the feel of the drug. But it wasn’t enough. Even as I tried to focus on it, my own natural defenses rose up, trying to smother the heat with my own cold rage.
“Fight it, Gin!” Silvio gave me one more urgent whisper before moving away.
Benson stepped back into view, holding a large needle full of pale yellow liquid. Somehow I knew that if he stabbed me with that, if he pumped adrenaline into my veins, it wouldn’t help me—it would kill me outright instead.
So I forced myself to relax. I let my legs go slack against the chair, unclenched my hands, and tilted my head back so that it rested on the cushion. Toe by toe, finger by finger, muscle by muscle, I relaxed every single part of my body as much as I could. I shuddered in a breath.
And then I let go completely.
My pain, my anger, my fear. I just . . . let go. I’d already eased the tension in my body, and without my emotions locked up tight behind their usual wall, the drug raged through my system unchecked.
It was brutal, like being boiled alive, but I swallowed down my screams and concentrated on the horrible, agonizing
sensations sweeping through me, comparing them with all the other kinds of magic that had been used against me over the years.
Burn didn’t contain my own Ice or Stone power, for I would welcome those cold and solid sensations, even when they were killing me. And it wasn’t Air either, or pins and needles would have been stabbing into my body. Whatever magic was in the drug seemed the closest to Fire and the bright, hot burn I’d always associated with that power.
But it wasn’t Fire.
Not really, not
exactly
.
So what the hell was it, then?
I forced myself to focus on the sensations and the fire that wasn’t Fire that was still surging through me. The lab melted away, and suddenly, I was back in the Pork Pit, picking up that fork from the floor, the one the auburn-haired woman had been using.
Understanding flashed through me like lightning.
Maybe it was the drug and the hallucinations that went along with it, but in that instant, everything clicked into place, including Burn and exactly what kind of magic was in it.
And I knew what I had to do to save myself.
I lolled my head to one side and tilted it forward, so that I could see my right wrist shackled to the chair. I couldn’t move my arm all that much, but I managed to curl my hand around so that I could see the silverstone symbol branded into my palm—that small circle surrounded by eight thin rays that represented patience.
The Burn drug might have sent threads of acidic fire
spinning through my veins, but I had spiders of my own.
Two of them, one in either hand.
I looked at my rune, and I thought of it as a real spider, sitting there in the palm of my hand, ready to do my bidding. And I pictured the same thing happening to my other rune on my left hand. Then I reached for my Ice magic. More of that damn acidic green fire covered the cold crystal spring of my power, trying to burn it to ash, but I ripped and clawed and tore off those stinging threads of silk, slicing through the sticky cobwebs of heat, until I could feel
my
magic—cold, hard, unstoppable.
Just like me.
I grabbed hold of that power and imagined pouring it into those spiders in my palms, until their bellies were as fat and swollen with my silvery Ice magic as the ones under my skin had been with their bright green chemical heat and pain and suffering.
Then I let my spiders loose.
They zipped through my body, carrying their own Icy strings of silk along behind them, weaving their own cold, crystalline webs in delicate but deadly patterns. Slowly, very, very slowly, a numb feeling began to spread through my body as my imaginary spiders froze me from the inside out.
And slowly, very, very slowly, things started to change.
My vision cleared, my breathing came more easily, and the sweat covering my body cooled. The agony from the drug lessened, although I could still feel the fiery combination of the chemicals and the elemental power licking at the strings of my Ice magic, trying to scorch right through them. So I focused on my own cold power that
much more, using it to maintain and spread the numbness in my body. Anything else was too much for me right now.
But it was enough.
The longer I held on to my Ice magic, the more I could feel it freezing out the Burn drug in my body. I wasn’t a hundred percent—not even close to that—but I knew that the danger had passed.
This danger, at least.
“What’s happening? Why is her heart rate dropping?” Benson muttered, staring at the monitors. “She should be crashing hard right now, not stabilizing.”
“Perhaps that batch of pills was not as strong as the supplier promised,” Silvio murmured, his voice as bland as ever. “It did seem to flare out of her rather quickly.”
Benson stared at the monitors
chirp-chirp-chirp
ing out my vitals, his face completely crestfallen, as though someone had just taken away his favorite toy. He set the needle full of adrenaline down on the table, then started flipping through his pad, reading back through his scribbles.