Chapter 14 Kaye #2
My heart stutters, nausea climbing up my throat, but I nod.
“Good.” I wince as his grip tightens, but he only pushes me away. “Get out of my sight.”
Climbing to my feet on numb legs, I don’t dare to look at him again or speak for fear that he would change his mind. I stumble away, relief pulling at me like a tide, but stronger still is the shame. At the hunger building within me.
I navigate the pallet maze in a daze. I can’t believe what had just happened. What I did. My body is hot and flushed. Growing hotter by the second.
I look up to see a wall of fire reaching for the roof.
Fuck.
My feet slip out from under me as I sprint back. I hit the concrete hard, pain shooting up my elbows. Ignoring it, I vault away from the flames.
No one ever tells you how loud fire is. A roar of consumption whose sole aim is to claim everything in its path.
Hot embers rain onto my back and shoulders as I run.
I brush off the ones in my reach, but I have no choice but to grit my teeth against the sizzling where other melt my costume to my skin.
“Charade!” I yell, coughing as I inhale ash.
Black smoke fills the air at an alarming rate. I can’t see the lights above me anymore, if they’re even still running. Burning tears stream down my cheeks, the tracks evaporating as quickly as the appear.
I race the flames as they leap and dance with all the grace of a ballerina, searching.
“Chara—” I grunt as something springs out to my right and knocks me aside, stealing the little oxygen I had from my lungs.
Spots dance in front of my eyes. I sputter and choke, smoke scorching its way down my throat. I need to get lower, to escape the black monster roaring around us.
“You did this, didn’t you?”
Charade is livid. He shakes my shoulders with the force of a child shaking a doll. I shake my head, but it makes no difference. I mouth words to make him stop, but they won’t come out. Can’t, as my heart and lungs work overtime to try to keep my slowing system moving.
I almost black out as a sharp, intense pain shoots through my left side.
Charade drops his hands as if he were the one burned, and I fall to the floor.
Blessed oxygen! I gulp it down with the fervor of a drowning man thrown a lifesaver.
“You’re hurt.” Someone give this man a sticker. “I thought you were indestructible.”
My power to manipulate energy means that large amounts of it are always coursing through me.
Even as I pull it from one source and transfer it to another, bits and pieces speed through my cells, charging and recharging them on infinite loops.
So long as the power flows, I maintain some level of extra healing, but I’m still human. Too much power and I risk burning up.
The problem is when I burned that stack of papers, I drew from the well of living energy inside myself, the very essence that kept me alive. Now I’m feeling the effects of it.
“Jesus. You need help.”
He pulls me to my feet and I almost fall to the ground as a wave of nausea and pain roll over me, drowning my head in sticky, sweaty blackness.
My elbow had ground into my ribs when Charade tackled me, and now…
I don’t want to think about what a bruised rib will mean for our chances of escape, let alone if something is broken.
He prods the area with surprising gentleness. I curse when he finds a tender spot.
There’s a tingle of warm, living electricity. Hot, but not enough to burn. It pulls against my skin.
Energy. Pure, blissful.
I reach for it without really meaning to. Without conscious thought.
“I feel… strange.” Charade yawns, ending in a smoke-induced coughing fit.
Did I just siphon from him?
Glow flares to life around us, darkening the stacked walls as much as it lights them up. The fire has arrived, crackling and burning in our faces. We can’t stay here.
The new energy soothes my cracked skin, the soft tissue un-bruising as my cells repair the damage.
But now that I know that’s possible, I’m not sure what the right thing is to do.
I can take more energy from Charade, leaving him as vulnerable as I had been, or I can pull back and throw myself on his mercy. Neither option gives me comfort.
“Together?” Charade reaches his hand out, palm up. I wrap my fingers around his, and his mouth ticks up into a crooked grin.
I roar back at the fire as I roll to my feet, aided and anchored by Charade’s strength.
He hands me a soft, malleable rectangle of fabric, silky and slick, strangely cool to the touch in the face of the heat.
He stretches his own piece wide and bring it over his nose and mouth, then rush to fit my own into place.
Arm in arm, we navigate the maze of stacks, racing the ticking clock if we are going to escape the blaze. Knowing that even if the fire doesn’t flash over, the roof wasn’t made for this kind of heat.
There aren’t many openings along the walls of the production floor. It’s like the stomach of some mammoth beast. We duck as a breaker box on our left erupts into a shower of sparks, sizzling as the circuits fried.
“There,” Charade grunts. The haze is clearer up ahead, the air lighter. As we run together, the faint outlines of a four-foot by four-foot ventilation opening comes into focus, crisscrossed with a metal grate.
“No!” We hammer with our fists, but the locks hold firm.
“Can’t you do something about this?” Charade asks.
Pressing myself against the grate, I breathe in the sweet, cool night air beyond.
“I’ve seen you do things like this before—burning, pushing. Melt the bars.”
“I’m exhausted,” I admit. “My powers need an energy source, and I’m tapped out. I can’t create energy, just manipulate it.”
“The fire?”
I swallow, shaking my head. “Fire’s unpredictable. It’s combustion, fusion. Taking that kind of energy into my body is reckless. I don’t know if I can contain it.”
I would burn up from the inside out, my skin charring and falling away, until the only thing left of the great Checkmate would be my flame-retardant suit.
“There’s something else,” I gasp. “But it’s new.”
“How new?”
Ten minutes ago new. “I’ve only done it once, and I don’t think you’ll like it.”
“Do it,” he says. “Get us out.”
I feel him like a pulse in that darkness, thrumming with life. Power. I don’t need to touch him to sense it. Now that my senses are open to it, the power calls to me again and again. It’s intoxicating. Deadly. The source of him is spice and fire. It tingles along my tongue like cinnamon.
I pull at it softly at first, testing my limits and his. He sags a little next to me.
“Hurry, Checkmate. The smoke…”
It’s not the smoke. I’m not sure if I said the words aloud, but he must have felt them anyway. He turns to look at me fully, his mouth setting into a grim line of resolve.
And I draw upon him in earnest.
My eyes close as it washes over me. Like ecstasy, warm and languid, spreading throughout my nerves a hundred miles a minute, branding my corneas with starlight.
I am changed with it, newly forged with it. Full to the brim and untouchable.
When I open my eyes again, Charade is on the ground, inhaling dirt and rust and burning fumes. Breathing, but weak. The feeling sours in my stomach.
I want you to.
My attention turns to the bars, pushing myself into them. Command over my power is sharper than a razor’s edge and just as perilous with Charade’s tint to it. Effortless precision. But I know in my heart this isn’t right. Like one wrong would take me over the edge, and I would never return.
The bars disintegrate under my control.
Gathering the remaining power coursing through my veins, I stretch. My injuries fade to little more than sore muscle. When I reach for Charade, body limp and mouth twisted in a snarl, he flinches.
“You’re a monster.” The words slip out of his lips and into my ear like a centipede as I settle him over my shoulder in a firefighter’s carry. They settle deep into the very center of me.
You’re a monster.
It echoes in my head as I fish the keys from his pocket—
You’re a monster.
As I deposit him into the passenger seat of his car—
Monster.
As I drive away from the city and search for somewhere that he would be safe to recover.
Monster.
Monster.
Monster.
Neither of us utters a word, not even when I open the door and leave. Maybe there are no words for a situation like this. We had gone through the flames together and came out—if not whole than unbroken.
He had saved me. And I was a monster.
Never again, I swear as I continue my now even longer walk home.
Screw your pride. Take my energy.
I never want to feel that pulse again.