Rising Fury (Hexing House Book 1) (21 page)

“Thea!”

Someone was slapping her face, only sort-of gently. Thea opened her eyes and saw Nero’s face above her. She immediately cried out as she became aware of pain in her arm. By the feel of it, it was broken.

“What happened?” She looked around and saw grass and dirt and not much else. There was an orange light in the sky. “Where are we?”

Nero’s words were unintelligible. Her ears were ringing too loudly.

“What?”

“Behind the house!” he shouted. “I have to go back inside. I think the guards we hexed were still in there.”

“It’s burning?”

He almost laughed. “Yeah, it’s burning, all right. Furnace exploded. You got thrown.”

Thea sat up, wobbled, fell. For the first time, she saw Elon beside her, a makeshift bandage around his leg that had been made from half his shirt.

“Why didn’t you take him back?” Thea asked, but Nero was already flying back to the house.

It was engulfed in flames, the roof so completely that Thea felt sure it would collapse any second. They had no time to lose. She managed to get to her feet, and experimentally opened her wings. They were sore, but didn’t seem injured. She hurried after Nero.

“You’ll only slow me down,” he said when he saw her.

“No, actually, I’ll speed things up. You’ll have to drag them out one at a time if you do it. I can remove the hexes.”

Nero flew through the window he’d opened when they escaped. The two guards they’d hexed were on the floor, but there was no sign of the one with the wounded knee, or of Philip. Thea followed Nero into the burning room and leaned over the closest guard to her. She sensed the sloth, touched it with her mind, pulled it away. She turned and did the same to the other.

There was a crash behind her as part of the ceiling caved in, blocking off the window they’d just come through. It was louder than she’d realized a fire would be. The whole room seemed to be roaring, and her throat closed with smoke. Thea and Nero got the guards to their feet, then half ran, half flew out of the room and into the hallway beyond.

There was no way through the fire.

Another crash, and a piece of wall hit one of the guards. He shrieked as his arm and part of his wing lit up. Without thinking, Thea shot out a wing, batting at the flames. She managed to put them out, but she wasn’t sure she’d really prolonged his life.

They were trapped, and choking on smoke.

“In here!” Nero shouted. He dove through a doorway into a larger room with several desks. Metal desks. They were dangerously hot, but Nero rolled under one of them and dragged the guard he was helping with him.

“The roof is coming down!” he shouted, and Thea understood. This room was at the edge of the house. She’d seen several pieces of ceiling fall already. When the roof collapsed, as it was clearly about to do, they might be sheltered enough here to escape through the gap it left.

She crouched under another desk, but the fire closed in. Thea realized she’d effectively put herself in an oven. They wouldn’t be able to wait much longer.

Then there was a deafening crash. Something slammed into the desk, sending Thea flying across the hot floor. In her panic and confusion, she was barely aware of the pain. She rolled. Someone was shouting. Then someone was tugging on her arm.

Her broken arm. There was a white-hot shot of agony that nearly made Thea pass out, but she managed to hang on. And the pain made her alert, at least.

She could see nothing but fire and smoke and the blackened face of the guard who was trying to pull her up. Thea pushed off with her feet and flew upward, hoping against hope that she’d find empty space instead of a ceiling on fire.

She did.

Gasping and coughing, they all collapsed onto the lawn where they’d left Elon.

Red lights were flashing, and there was shouting from the street. The fire trucks had arrived while they were inside.

“We should get back,” she said, and was shocked by the sound of her own voice, ruined by smoke. “The humans.”

They all had burns that would need tending, and sooner rather than later. But one of the guards was in especially bad shape. Half his body seemed to be burned, and he was sobbing.

“Is there anyone else in there?” Thea asked.

The other guard shook his head. “I don’t know.”

She looked at Nero. “What about the ones who were chasing us?”

“One of them was flying back to campus with the one who got shot in the knee,” Nero said. “The other one, I knocked out of the air when you were on the roof. I don’t know where he is now, but he was definitely outside when the place blew up.”

A few feet away, Elon groaned. Thea dragged herself over to him. She didn’t even have to look at his leg. She could smell the blood. “Shit, Nero, we’ve got to get him back.”

“Cassius, too,” one of the guards said, nodding down at the crying one.

But before they could pick up their wounded, there was a shout of such intense rage that they stopped and stared in the direction of the inferno that had been the lab.

Thea stepped toward the side of the house and saw two men in their pajamas, dangerously close to the fire, fighting like they wanted to kill one another. She flew toward them.

And then she felt it.

“Get back!” she shouted at the others, as she jumped back herself. “Get them out of here! I can handle this!” She wasn’t at all sure that was true, but Elon and Cassius couldn’t wait. “Go!”

Nero and the guard flew off, carrying their charges. Thea turned back to the house.

It was the superhex, some cloud of it, like fumes from a chemical fire. Thea steeled herself to resist it, and moved toward the fighting men. In the street beyond them, she could see a woman in a bathrobe, sitting on the pavement and laughing hysterically. One of the firemen was running away. Three of the onlookers had turned on one another, and two others were grappling on the ground, whether in wrath or lust she couldn’t tell.

And that was all she saw before it hit her, and one of the men she’d been approaching became a giant wasp. A swarm of yellow jackets came out of his mouth as he screamed.

His companion started shrieking, running from what looked like a horde of rats. Thea’s mind felt sluggish, and she vaguely wondered whether she was seeing his hallucination, or her own.

She fought against the hex as the man tackled her. He was trying to get his hands around her throat. Thea pushed with her one good arm, trying to get away, while at the same time fighting against the hex.

Thankfully, whatever residue of the superhex this was had an even shorter lifespan than Hex Nine had in the lab. As suddenly as it had come, it passed.

The man who’d been attacking her gagged, coughed, then reeled back in horror.

Thea stood and looked around. The bathrobe woman and the fleeing fireman were standing, shocked, staring at the fire. Some of the neighbors who’d been fighting were crying, some arguing. One had her hands over her face and was screaming in pain, while blood flowed through her fingers.

The man who’d been running from the rats was on the lawn a few feet from Thea, crouched with his hands over his head. By the way he was screaming, the rats were still biting. The hex hadn’t let go.

“Hey!” A fireman was approaching them, walking fast.

Thea ignored him and went to the howling man. She searched for the sulfur and smoke—difficult to pick out, when the sky was full of that same smell—until she found a flimsy veil of the hex still stuck to him. She focused, pulled it away, felt it drift into the foul air.

The man collapsed in a dead faint.

“What is going on here? What were they doing in that h—” The fireman stopped dead, staring at Thea, taking in her wings. He shook his head, then turned to the man who had attacked her, still sitting on the lawn.

“I tried to tell the police,” the man said with a shrug. “These monsters have been flying around the neighborhood for months. But of course everyone just wants to call me crazy.”

Thea was about to just fly away and let them sort it out, now that they seemed to be out of danger, but just then a fury flew down and landed in front of the fireman. Thea caught a flash of the fury’s arm moving, and then the fireman smiled, sat on the lawn, and began plucking at blades of grass.

It was the guard who Nero had knocked down. He seemed to have no interest in shooting Thea now. He just shook his head and said, “What a mess.”

The men who had been fighting clearly wanted nothing more to do with this. One helped the other to his feet, and they hurried away.

“Why would you hex him?” Thea demanded, pointing at the fireman. “We haven’t just had enough of that?”

“They usually come around from the serenity hex with foggy memories of what went on,” the guard said. “I figured that would be best for him. Luckily they gave us a couple extra when they sent us out here. I’ve been trying to keep a lid on everything, but…” He gestured back at the street, where neighbors still stood gawking at the house. “Whatever that was hit them, and it was pretty ugly for a couple of minutes.”

“What’s your name?” Thea asked.

“Damon.”

“Well, Damon, you’ve just been introduced to the superhex. Or just its leftovers, I guess, but that was bad enough.”

He gaped at her. “You set off—”

“Of course I didn’t, you idiot,” Thea snapped. Her arm was broken, she was burned, her head ached from having that hot desk thrown into her. She was in no mood. “It was in the house.”

“But they said it had been destroyed,” Damon said. “They told us they were just cataloging all the other evidence here.”

“Yeah, well, they told you a lot of things.”

Damon looked uncertain. “I’m going to have to take you back,” he said, although Thea could tell his heart wasn’t in it. He was still shaken up. She wondered what he’d seen when the superhex had hit him.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll come willingly. I need to know what happened to my friends.”

“I can tell you, if you mean Alecto,” Damon said. “Some guys in my department were watching Cora—”

“Why?” Thea interrupted.

“They caught her communicating with Alecto or something,” Damon said. “They put her under guard, and Alecto tried to break her out.”

“And they both got caught?”

“I guess they came willingly when reinforcements from Security came and Alecto saw she wouldn’t be able to fight her way out without serious injuries. To tell you the truth, I thought that was kind of cool of her. I saw her in action once. She could have killed those guys, no problem.”

When Thea told Damon about Cassius, he agreed to stop at Wellness before he took her to Graves. Thea was beat up pretty badly, but at least her wings worked. Thanks to the homing signal, they made it in less than five minutes.

The night assistant told them that both Elon and Cassius were being tended to, but that it was too early to know how either of them would come out of it. No, neither one of them could have visitors just then.

“Langdon is at Administration,” the assistant added. “Urgent meeting, got the whole board out of bed.”

Damon escorted Thea there. They found the board gathered in a conference room, where Graves appeared to be questioning Alecto.

“Thea! How convenient!” Graves said. “Saves us the trouble of looking for you. I understand you broke into the lab in an attempt to steal some data.”

Of course Philip was in the room, sitting in the corner and smirking. The guard who had flown Cassius back was there too, but there was no sign of Nero.

To Damon Graves said, “Thank you for catching her. Your good work will be noted in your file.”

“I didn’t catch her,” Damon said. “She came willingly.”

“She saved my life, and Cassius’s,” the other guard said. “Her and Nero.”

“After she hexed you, by your own account,” said Graves.

“She may have saved some humans’ lives too,” Damon added. “A few of them seemed bent on killing one another, and at least one couldn’t shake the hex without her help.”

Graves tried to dismiss them after that, but Gordon insisted on hearing what his men had to say. Damon and the other guard, whose name turned out to be Jacob, told them all that had happened. Their stories matched each other’s, and Thea’s.