Chapter 16
The alarm pricked through her dreams first. It hovered on the periphery like a screaming mosquito that bobbed closer and closer to her neck. It couldn’t have been more than a few hours since they’d fallen asleep. Why was her alarm going off now?
If she could just reach out to grab it, crush it in her hand and grind it into silence—
Someone was shaking her shoulder. A loud voice in her ear yelled her name.
Pippa struggled awake with a snort. The alarm was louder, sharper. As she fought through the fog of sleep she realized that the sound wasn’t the buzzing squawk of her alarm clock but the high scream of a smoke alarm.
She surged upright and yanked the chain for her bedside lamp. Smoke made the air hazy and left an awful, acrid taste at the back of her throat. But there were no visible flames, no ominous glow. Not yet.
Pippa scrambled out of the bed. Maxim was already pulling on his jeans, and as she wrestled with her own pants, he glanced down the hallway.
“I don’t think it’s your apartment,” he said. “But we have to go. Right now.” He tossed her shirt to her from the floor.
Getting dressed was so much more difficult when her brain was screaming at her to flee.
She found herself caught up by little, inconsequential things: her socks didn’t match, which would mean her stupid squeaking sneakers would fit differently.
It was getting harder to breathe. Adrenaline pricked at every inch of her skin and sent her stomach lurching high in her chest. Everything seemed important and nothing seemed important.
Her shirt was on backward. Where was her phone?
Her keys? The shirt was a V-neck, which would look absolutely ridiculous.
“Pippa!” Maxim pulled her out of her spiraling thoughts by literally pulling her from the bedroom. When had he put on his t-shirt? Her books. She thought of old pages crisping in flames and a pang shot through her.
The floor was growing warm under her socked feet. Another smoke alarm began to go off, and from the apartment below, she heard the soft hiss of the sprinkler system activating.
As they ran through the front door, she had a momentary thought about whether or not she should lock up behind them, but now flames glowed in the slats between the stair treads. There came the sound of breaking glass and something large collapsing right as she and Maxim made it to the ground floor.
They were both coughing, and two paramedics hustled them away from the building. An extremely impressive response time; Pippa would have to write an email to . . . someone. She couldn’t quite think of who that would be at the moment.
The paramedic who had grabbed Pippa held her shoulders with a cool, firm grip and steered her to the back of an ambulance, where he sat her down and wrapped a flimsy Mylar blanket around her.
It seemed extremely excessive, but she wasn’t going to object.
Maxim coughed and tried to shrug off his own blanket.
The paramedic beside him tucked it closed.
What the fuck had happened? Her downstairs neighbor didn’t smoke.
He was standing in the crowd gathering in the courtyard, and even at this distance she could see the blank, empty look of utter shock on his face.
Had there been an electrical fire? Was it just luck that her own outlet hadn’t shorted at the wrong time?
Pippa looked back at the complex and the bright horror that had once been home.
The fire was spreading to her own floor despite the desperate defense of the sprinkler system.
She hadn’t ever thought she was attached to her apartment: it was cramped, not especially well-lit, and there was a spot on the carpet that, no matter how often she cleaned it, had a stain and smell that hinted at illicit pets at one point in the apartment’s life.
All of it had always just been “good enough.”
As she watched smoke barrel out of the open door, she realized that perhaps she’d grown more attached than she’d thought.
Although it hadn’t been perfect, it had been hers.
It had been where she’d flopped onto the couch after wandering dirty streets and smelly demon haunts.
Endless nights of coming back to that couch, that bed, that kitchen, thinking of that space as just a transitional one.
Somewhere to recover before it all started again.
She’d stared up at old stains on the ceiling and daydreamed about a time when she could look up and see something beautiful.
Pippa fully admitted she didn’t know much about house fires, however she didn’t think that they exploded into being this quickly, especially with modern safety regulations. The apartment complex wasn't that outdated.
Unease wiggled at the back of her brain. Something about this was wrong.
She had turned to Maxim with the intention of telling him just that when an aura crawled across her skin like a swarm of insects. Thorns and grease. It transported her back to a dark warehouse, a late night at the docks, a gore-flecked jaw opening wide.
There was a Tro’grath demon nearby. Now that she was focusing, a second aura distanced itself from the first: acid and burnt oil.
The unease in her skull unfurled and spread through the rest of her body. This fire had been completely intentional, and it was spreading so quickly because it had been made to do so.
No hostile demons had been able to get inside her apartment, but judging by the near-constant auras hovering around the building, they had tried. And since they couldn’t get in . . .
Just like unwanted vermin being eradicated from a field, Maxim and Pippa had been flushed out.
She had to get Maxim somewhere safe, somewhere warded and fortified with—fuck, with anything. Boarded-up windows and seventeen locks and maybe a mastiff.
“I’m going to give you something for the shock, okay? Your blood pressure is really high.”
Pippa barely heard the paramedic talking. For a fraction of a second, she wondered how exactly he could tell her blood pressure since he hadn’t done anything except wrap a blanket around her, but that didn’t matter right now.
She turned to Maxim. “Did you get your keys?”
He patted a pocket, then nodded. The movement made his Mylar blanket fall to his elbows, and he shrugged it back up. “Why?”
The two auras were twisting her intestines into knots. Oh, this was so bad.
She stood, turning to the paramedic to say that they were both fine, not to worry, they just needed to go somewhere quiet to calm down, but the words froze in her mouth. There was something off about the man’s face, as if his muscles were lagging behind his intended expressions.
He was holding a syringe. Before Pippa could flinch away, he jammed it into her upper arm and depressed the plunger. A horrid burning sensation flared in her arm and spread through her body.
“Hey!” she shouted at him, trying to pull her arm out of his suddenly painful grip. The Ash Coven had always impressed the importance of never doing magic in front of the populace, but what were they going to do? Not let her in? Again?
Pippa reached for the magic around her to blast this asshole away from her, but . . .
It wasn’t there. Nothing was there. She’d thrown herself into what she’d expected to be a comforting embrace only to instead fall through empty, dark air. Glancing down, the syringe still had a little of its contents: an awful, sickly green liquid.
Shock slammed into her, and everything within Pippa froze.
The taste of bitter metal coated her tongue.
Where before in the elevator she had sunk into the numbness and the disbelief, now she exploded up through it.
She’d been manipulated and her apartment had been destroyed just so she could be ambushed by two demons wearing flesh disguises.
And she didn’t have her magic. Again. Not fucking again.
She wound back her free arm and punched the paramedic full the throat, nearly throwing herself to the ground with the force of her swing. As he staggered back, she yanked the needle out of her arm and threw it at him. It bounced harmlessly off his chest.
“What the hell?” Maxim yelled. “Pippa, what are you doing?” He was suddenly at her side, Mylar blanket pooled on the asphalt.
Where she’d punched the disguised demon’s neck, the skin was hanging loose as if it had been stretched out. Little tendrils of magic flailed uselessly in an attempt to keep the shell attached, but it had not been designed to withstand any sort of impact.
The other demon grabbed Maxim and hurled him through the open ambulance doors, his body crashing into the cab’s barrier. A gurney ricocheted into a wall of cabinets with an ear-shattering crash.
Pippa cried out and looked desperately at the crowd at the apartments. Surely someone had heard. Someone could help. Anyone could help. Yet every single person was intent on the flames, and the roar of the growing blaze must have smothered all other sounds.
Her second punch wasn’t as successful.
The demon anticipated her lunge and easily dodged, then picked her up as if she were a bag of garbage to be disposed of and threw her into the ambulance. She fell bodily onto her side, her elbow digging between her ribs and forcing the air from her lungs.
The demon that had stabbed Pippa ran around to the driver’s seat while the other climbed into the back of the ambulance along with them and slammed the doors shut.
The world lurched as the van squealed into motion, and Pippa rolled into a spilled pile of boxed gloves and intravenous tubing.
Just out of arm’s reach, Maxim was struggling to sit upright.
Disentangling herself from latex and nitrile and plastic, Pippa inched her way over to him.
Something was sticking to her forearm. As she tried to swipe it away, she realized it was a bit of the skin from the demon’s disguise, and she forced down the bile that nudged at the back of her tongue before wiping her arm on her jeans.