Baptism of Fire (Playing With Hellfire Book 1) Read online

  “I can’t,” I snapped. “Moretti’s down. He’s…he’s down, but breathing.”

  “The stairs are blocked,” Ramos yelled back. “We’re working on it, hang in there.”

  Blocked with what? Nothing about this fire made any sense, so why would it start now?

  I didn’t know how badly Moretti was hurt, which made me hesitant to move him. But if we didn’t get out of this hallway—no matter how quickly the rest of our team might’ve been working—then we weren’t going to get out of here at all. On my knees, I grabbed the straps of his SCBA and started dragging him around the minefield of burning debris toward the stairs. I grit my teeth against the pain until my jaw ached, exhaling sharply through my nose as I pulled him along with me.

  It wouldn’t have been this unbearable if I hadn’t been fucking impaled. Sweat dripped down my forehead into my eyes and I tried to blink it away. With blood loss and the temperature in the hallway, the edges of my vision had turned hazy.

  “It’s all right, Anthony,” I said as if he could hear me. “Stay with me.”

  The heat flared, a sudden, familiar torrent of hot air passing over us, stoking the same dread I’d felt earlier. A silhouette emerged from the thick smoke and sauntered through the flames, not at all concerned about the heat or the danger of blistering skin and third-degree burns. I peered at the shadow that definitely hadn’t been there seconds before, watching them take shape, the details becoming clearer. A man stood on the opposite end of the hallway dressed in all black, white-gold reflecting off his sleek leather jacket. An arrogant, knowing grin curved his lips into a sneer. He was young. Dangerous.

  He’d been with us in the attic.

  I didn’t know how, but he’d started this fire.

  The stranger lifted his hand, his palm outstretched to face me. The next gust of intense hot air hit me like a shockwave. I flew back into a wall, narrowly missing an open doorway and a line of flames by a few terrifying inches. The mystery debris lodged in my side seemed to dig in deeper, searing and ripping at flesh and muscle. The dizzying rush shook my mask and protective hood loose, my body tossed aside like garbage in a careless wind. A foolish mix of blood loss-induced confusion and anger made me tear both of them off, leaving my face exposed.

  It wasn’t a decision I’d reached with any coherent, rational thought.

  His attention shifted to Moretti’s prone body. He took a few deliberate, slow steps forward, the long shadows across his razor-sharp cheekbones casting a sinister look. I pushed myself off the wall, crying out, lunging for Moretti before the stranger could get to him.

  But he didn’t have to.

  A nonchalant flick of his wrist, and the flames leapt up—a shock of bright white that was almost blue—to do what they’d done since the very first spark. Except this time they were at the mercy of someone’s complete control.

  The stranger’s fire destroyed and I was powerless to stop it. Moretti’s screaming, his last moments of anguish filled up the desolate, burning hallway of this goddamn house. Haunting it. And me.

  It happened in a moment. That’s all it took. Nausea welled up in my stomach while I watched the flames catch hold of him, shifting from a blaze of white to an impossible, scalding blue. It should’ve been enchanting, like those street performers in The Raze who could change the color of a fire with just a handful of powdery chemicals. But this was something else entirely, something that could burn hotter and obliterate faster.

  By the time I reached the singed patch of floor where Anthony Moretti had been, his ashes drifted in the strange light of the inferno, settling on my turnout coat, on my skin, in my hair. There was nothing else left of him.

  Just like that.

  I knelt there surrounded by and covered in his ashes, numb from shock, faintly aware of the smoke wafting into my lungs when I took a shaky breath. I fought off the wave of nausea, coughing, and rose to my feet on legs that threatened to give out at any second. The tears didn’t come. The only thing in me was rage, blistering hot as the fire roaring around us. An inferno that had turned from gold to white to blue with the full force of its heat. The dingy wallpaper peeled, curling and singed as it flaked off. I heard all of the cracking and hissing and popping of those awful blue flames.

  The stranger’s arrogant smirk hadn’t died out. I wanted to claw it right off his face with my bare hands, wanted him to scream the way he’d tortured Moretti in his final breaths. Even if this whole house caved in on top of me.

  He stayed where he was, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, a slow, malicious grin illuminating his bony face. The fire ravaging the hallway between us appeared to have stopped spreading. It burned where it was, sustained, undaunted. Who was he?

  My hands curled into fists at my sides, nails biting into my skin. I took a defiant step toward him. I’d hit mid-stride when he coaxed a handful of flames into his outstretched palm—I thought it was an illusion, but no, they were there, floating—before he launched them directly at my chest.

  I had just enough awareness left to duck out of the fireball’s path. Another second and I would’ve met the same terrible end. He hadn’t been counting on me having much of a reaction time—really, neither had I—because the fact that I wasn’t dead yet had finally wiped some of that smug ass grin off his face. He thought I’d go down easy. I knew he could see the blood I was dripping everywhere.

  With a snarl, the stranger summoned more fire to him, flames balanced in each palm. The halo of light behind him highlighted streaks of burnt blue through his blond hair. He would’ve looked angelic, maybe, if it weren’t for his eyes. They seemed to absorb everything around him without giving anything back. A hollow, black stare like the void.

  Unless that happened to be an effect of blood loss and smoke inhalation currently wreaking havoc on my body.

  He flung both fistfuls at me, one after the other, and never broke contact with that dead-eyed gaze. I dodged the first, though the burst of heat hit my back from the explosion it caused when it landed somewhere behind me. He’d made sure the second one headed straight for my head. Instinctively, I threw up my arms in front of my face to shield myself from the blast, knowing I’d never be able to get out of the way in time. I waited for the impact, the pain of seared flesh, and shut my eyes.

  It never hit.

  I kept my arms up but cracked an eyelid open. The fireball had slowed in its trajectory, burning weaker than when it had left the guy’s palm. Like a candle running out of wick, a fireplace burning low without wood left to consume. My hands curled into fists, still expecting to get a face full of fire, but the flames extinguished themselves in midair. It left behind a few sparks and a wisp of smoke…and what I thought to be a very faint odor of sulfur.

  It took me this long to realize it might’ve been brimstone.

  The stranger gaped at me from his end of the hallway, dark eyes piercing through my soul. He was absolutely furious. More than that, he looked horrified.

  It wasn’t until then that I noticed my hands were giving off a strange light. I lowered my arms, holding my hands out in front of me, the stranger’s horror becoming my own. Without giving any thought to self-preservation, I wrenched off my gloves. Little veins of light crept across my skin as if I had millions of tiny embers just below the surface. I pulled up one sleeve of my turnout coat to confirm the suspicion that they’d spread along my arm…and maybe elsewhere. They seemed to converge at my fingertips—a preternatural reddish burnt orange glow like I’d become the fire itself.

  What did he do to me?

  The stranger lobbed more fire, backpedaling while I advanced on him. I had no idea what I was doing and everything felt strange, but there was power rising inside of me. A surge of heat burning hot and bright underneath my skin, racing through my veins. The fire snuffed itself out before it reached me. A bright flare in my veins and it was gone, as if I’d absorbed it.

  Impossible, I thought. This can’t be right.

  As proof that it wasn’t just the c
limbing temperature around me—my body was suddenly running abnormally hot—the mystery debris stuck in my left side crumbled to ash.

  The conditions in the hallway changed in a matter of seconds around us. The persistent sizzle of the fire demolishing everything began to fade, stifled by another power I couldn’t begin to understand.

  As I moved, the blue flames that had taken hold of the walls, the broken ceiling guttered and died out. Charred remains and smoking ash and hollow rooms with scorch marks were all that was left standing behind me. I held out my hands if only to watch the weird glow under my skin, blazing and flickering once the flames were extinguished.

  Not with fire hydrants and hoses.

  Extinguished by me.

  My useless, bleeding mortal body absorbing an entire inferno…There was no way. No fucking way.

  I’d expected it to be excruciating. It should have been. I should’ve been dead by now. Maybe I’d cracked my head open in the fall like Moretti. Maybe this was all a strange, horrific nightmare.

  I felt so hot that I thought I might spontaneously combust.

  In his panicked fury, the stranger tossed another handful of fire at me, this time conjured from nowhere since I’d smothered everything else. I reached for it, surprised at my own reflexes. Instead of putting it out, the fireball deflected back toward him, soaring through the air with a hypnotic grace, more white-hot now than blue. Neither of us expected it—he let out a pained groan when the fire singed the hand he’d held up to protect himself.

  Cradling his injured hand against his chest, he glared at me. “What are you?”

  I charged at him, my rage still real and alive and dangerous. My hands closed around thin air, the embers he’d left behind floating upward. He’d disappeared quicker than I could think.

  The glow under my skin began to recede. Once the fire inside me went out, my legs wavered until they buckled altogether. Weak and exhausted, I fell to my knees in the burned out shell of the hallway, stirring up a cloud of ash. I’d been covered in it, gray staining my hands and clinging to my turnout gear. Some part of me was upset that I’d lost Moretti’s ashes in this mess. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry the tears I’d been too angry for earlier. But I didn’t even have enough energy for my own grief.

  “Moretti!” There were voices, rough footfalls of boots on whatever was left of the stairs. “Phoenix!”

  I finally collapsed, sinking into the darkness.

  3

  “Wake up, Nix.”

  Softly, like those gentle, cool storms that sometimes interrupted Perdition Falls’ stubborn high temperatures, Moretti’s voice coaxed me out of the dark. He sounded so real and alive and there. At my side as always. I felt the insistent press of his fingers squeezing my shoulder.

  My eyes snapped open. I lifted my head from where it’d fallen against my fisted hand, propped up on the arm of a chair, the rough upholstery scratching my elbow. I sat in a familiar hospital room—Ally Moretti’s hospital room. She’d fallen asleep after an exhausting labor and delivery. Her pale blonde hair fanned out across the starched white pillows, aglow in the ethereal light pouring through the window. It didn’t look right. Too bright, too much. Everything was diffused and fuzzy around the edges.

  And I’d been here before.

  This is wrong, a distant part of my subconscious cautioned. This isn’t real.

  “Falling asleep on me already?” Moretti teased.

  He held his newborn son in his arms, swaddled in a standard-issue hospital blanket. A tuft of downy black hair peeked out of the striped blue and pink fabric. That dreamy, adoring smile hadn’t left his face since his son had arrived. He was running on hospital-grade coffee and new parent joy. Not that keeping odd hours was anything new to either of us.

  I remembered this day. I’d lived it.

  Lucky for me, among the trash heap of crappy incidents that had landed me in a hospital—smoke inhalation, minor burns, accidents, friends getting hurt on the job—I had a few rare instances of good memories in this place. Sure, this had been a happy memory, but now it would forever be bittersweet. I allowed myself to slip into it anyway, if only to hear his voice again.

  It was like I’d switched places with the past version of me, reliving this moment with the context of the present.

  But Anthony Moretti remained the same, in the past. Where he’d always be.

  Let me pretend it’s real. Please, just let me have this.

  “You caught me,” I told him. I wanted to cry. He was right there in front me, breathing, smiling, holding his baby boy.

  “Want to hold him? I think it’s safe now. Family’s cleared out.”

  I laughed. “Are you…sure about that?”

  “I double-checked the gift shop and vending machines while getting coffee.”

  “Hell yes, I want to see my nephew.” He gingerly placed the sleeping bundle in my awaiting arms.

  Baby Aidan Moretti was all cherub cheeks and flyaway black hair and delicate eyelashes. I recognized that soft infant smell on his splotchy skin from when I’d once held my newborn cousins, but that had been years ago now. “Your brothers are gonna hate me when they find out I got to hold him first.”

  “You were here first.” Moretti stood nearby sipping his hospital coffee, his eyes still a little red-rimmed and two days’ worth of stubble along his jaw. “They’ll get over it.”

  “Eventually,” I corrected. “But I’ll be hearing about it for weeks.”

  Moretti’s younger brother Pietro had already video chatted with the new parents from the UCLA campus on the opposite end of the country to get a glimpse of his nephew. His older brother Lorenzo planned to fly in from New York City once he could get a few days off work. I’d been here at the hospital fulfilling my duties as the stand-in sibling. They’d made me an honorary member of their boisterous family ever since I’d gone to one of their Sunday dinners for some home-cooked Italian food when we were just fourteen years old.

  “He’s adorable.” I brushed the pad of my thumb across one of Aidan’s round cheeks. He stirred a little, making a tiny sound. “Which is shocking, because he looks like you.”

  “Oh, you’re hilarious.” He set aside his Styrofoam cup to snap a picture of me holding his newborn son. “Don’t quit your day job, Vic.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” I countered. “You wouldn’t know what to do without me.”

  He laughed, gravelly and low from lack of sleep. He sunk into the other chair near mine with his coffee, the tension visibly draining from his muscles. My chest ached as my own words rattled around my subconscious.

  “Actually,” he blew on the steam coiling up into his face from his cup, “I think Patterson’d be happy if we weren’t his problem anymore.”

  “Fair point, but I think he’d get bored.”

  He hummed in agreement, the sound muffled by Styrofoam. I lingered on his relaxed form, the way his eyes only left the sleeping infant in my arms to cast an assessing glance at his wife. I wondered just how many times I’d revisit this and a million other moments like it and if I’d be able to bear the bittersweet taste. My life seemed that way: a collection of tattered, bruised memories scavenged from the aftermath of sorrow. Visitation rights to people I once knew in broken images, in dreams, some I could barely piece back together anymore.

  “Thank you, Vic,” he said to me, his voice thick with the sleep he wasn’t getting.

  “For what?”

  “Being here. Especially for Ally, she wouldn’t have gotten through this without your help.”

  “She did all the work.”

  “Hell yeah, she did,” Moretti agreed. “But your support, it meant a lot to her. I’m sure she’ll tell you herself later, but I wanted you to know.”

  Aidan shifted again in the shelter of his blanket, chirping like a cat being disturbed from its slumber. His long, delicate eyelashes fluttered but he didn’t open those blue newborn eyes even as he managed to wrestle one of his hands free from his swaddled prison. I pressed
my index finger into his tiny palm and made an embarrassing squeak of a noise when his tiny fingers instinctively latched onto mine.

  “He escaped the baby burrito,” Moretti said. He stole another picture.

  “We have a full-on jailbreak situation over here. Blanket unraveling and everything.”

  He pointed a finger at Aidan. “I’m in trouble.”

  “Well, trouble he gets from you.”

  “All right, that I’ll own up to,” he answered. “But he’s cute because he looks like Ally.”

  “You think?”

  “I know.”

  The debate about who Aidan favored would go on forever. But now I realized it was a good thing Ally and I agreed he looked a lot like his father. I was grateful for it.

  “You just wanted to hang out with your Aunt Nix,” I whispered to Aidan. “Right? I’m not remotely cool but I can try. Maybe you’ll think I’m cool, I don’t know. I’ll be the fun aunt.”

  “That sounds dangerous.”

  “Of course it is. He’ll need me when he hits his teen years and parenting sucks all the trouble out of you.”

  He groaned, then took another sip of what I guessed was lukewarm coffee. “Are you insinuating that my kid is going to make me boring?”

  “I mean…maybe.”

  “Don’t make me revoke your godmother status.”

  It took several long seconds for the information to process. Even now, the words thrown around so casually, hit something raw in my subconscious. Something painfully familiar.

  “Excuse me? My what, now?”

  “Ally and I talked about it months ago. I think the two of us always knew, you know? She’s an only child, I’ll have the other two fighting over godparent privileges, so that’ll be great. You’re my sister, Vic. It just makes sense.” My jaw must’ve dropped in either abject terror or shock because he added, “Unless you don’t want to.”

  “No, no…I do,” I replied. “I’m just—I’d love to, Anthony. I know that means a lot to you both. And me. Thank you.” I traced my fingertip over Aidan’s tiny knuckles. “Guess your little guy is stuck with me, huh?”