Firestorm (Smoke & Ashes Book 1) Read online

  “That’s all, I’m afraid. I will show you out,” Elyssa said, and without meeting my eyes, she turned around and started walking back where we came from.

  Nostalgia hit me as I watched all those witches out there. There were at least fifty of them that I could see. What would it have been like if I’d grown up like this? With a witch mom, a part of the Witch Alliance, attending the witch school, living the simple witch life?

  What would it have been like if I’d had a normal father?

  “Sassy,” Feather Girl said, as if she could read my thoughts and wanted me to snap out of it. I did. “C’mon, what are you waiting for?” She was right—I was being silly.

  We’d already reached the edge of the main building, and Elyssa Masters had disappeared to the side of it. With a sigh, I followed.

  We were about to walk out the gates, feeling more hopeless by the second. I’d known I wouldn’t find anything useful here, but then again, it beat sitting around at the apartment all day.

  But then…

  “Sassy,” Elyssa called, and when I turned around, I saw that she hadn’t closed the gates yet. Instead, she was standing in front of it, holding onto the hems of the grey jacket of her suit.

  “Yes?”

  She looked behind her at the Alliance buildings, then stepped outside on the sidewalk, her high heels slamming against the concrete. Her eyes were wide and alert, full of panic, and when she reached into the pocket of her pants, I almost thought she was going to attack me.

  Instead, all she pulled out was her phone.

  “I found this burning on the ground when I was searching for her a week ago,” she said, and with shaking fingers, she pulled out a picture on the screen.

  It showed a square hole in the ground somewhere, a couple inches deep by the looks of it. There were five crystals around it, some dried leaves here and there, but the symbol in the middle of it was what surprised me. It looked like fire at first, but it wasn’t. I took the liberty of zooming in the picture to see it more clearly, and I was right. It wasn’t fire. It was simply an orange glow.

  “Where did you find this?” I asked Elyssa and took out my own phone to take a picture of hers.

  “Close to Roosevelt Boulevard. I was chasing after her when she turned all the lampposts off and disappeared. All she left behind was this, in the yard of a human’s house,” Elyssa said, and as soon as I took the picture, she put her phone back in her pocket quickly, looking behind her at the gates. She was definitely not supposed to be sharing this with me, but I appreciated it that she did.

  “That’s where I met with her, actually.” The house I’d found her in had been on Roosevelt Boulevard, too.

  “Do you know what it means?” she asked.

  “A symbol,” I said under my breath. “It’s a symbol of the Fallen.”

  My father had showed a letter to me once, during our Bonding Time. It was all sharp lines, crisscrossed as if on purpose, to make it look like it was just a doodle and had no meaning at all. I wasn’t one to pay attention to things I didn’t care about, but I had remembered this because of how strange it looked—and if you stared at it for long enough, you’d get the feeling that it was moving. Speaking. Calling out to you.

  “But what does it mean?”

  To that, I had no answer, so I shook my head. “Thanks for showing it to me, Elyssa. I appreciate it.” I turned around to leave.

  “She stole books,” she called after me. “Pages of books. Ripped them out and took them with.”

  So much for of course it’s safe. If that nocturnal witch could steal crystals and book pages from the Alliance, they weren’t half as good as they claimed to be at keeping their things safe.

  “We’ll find her soon. Don’t worry about it,” I called, waving my hand because I did feel bad for her. The fear in her eyes took all the life out of them.

  She opened her mouth like she wanted to say something else but decided against it. All the better. When we got in the car, I no longer felt like this visit had been a waste of time.

  “Does this mean a Fallen himself was after her at one point?” Feather Girl asked when I started driving.

  “Could be, but not very likely,” I said, tapping the steering wheel. The Fallen had summoned me to find and kill the witch. If they’d gone after her themselves, my father would have told me.

  But the Fallen weren’t the only ones who knew these symbols. They showed them to their offspring, too, just like my father had showed them to me.

  Had it been Lexar?

  For whatever reason, every instinct in my body screamed no. He didn’t even know about the witch until last night, and Elyssa had taken that picture a week ago.

  “What now?” Feather Girl said. “Because I can’t feel her at all.”

  “Now we go back and wait,” I said in half a voice.

  Something stank, and I couldn’t wait to find out what it was.

  11

  My head buzzed with questions. Something didn’t feel right.

  Why had that witch chosen Philadelphia? She’d started coming here years ago—three years, according to Feather Girl. Since the Witch Alliance and the Fallen hadn’t been alarmed by her presence then, that meant she wasn’t doing dangerous magic before she started messing with evil spirits.

  Yeah, the Fallen didn’t consider taking people’s souls as dangerous magic. So long as it didn’t affect or endanger them personally, they just didn’t give a shit. And an extra soul in Hell? They would probably pay the witch to do the dirty work for them if they could.

  But they didn’t really need to. That’s what maggots were for, why they even let them out of Hell in the first place. Because do you really believe that seven fallen angels couldn’t stop far lesser creatures from entering Earth if they really wanted to?

  They didn’t. They wanted maggots here to mess with humans, spread evil like a fucking disease, planting ideas and encouragement into people’s heads—or stealing the good things from them.

  But mess with evil spirits, who could become too powerful for even the Fallen to defeat, and they rang the alarm and called me to do their work for them.

  Not that I minded. I would have hunted that witch by myself if I’d known what she was doing, but knowing that my father ordered me to do it just took the fun right out of it.

  The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that knowing exactly what the nocturnal witch was after was the best idea. Understanding her motive not only meant that I’d be able to make a good guess about where she would be next but also how far she was willing to go for it. I needed to know that to prepare myself because underestimating her at this point would be foolish. To kill her, I might even have to shift, so I definitely needed to plan ahead. Shifting for me was walking hand in hand with death, and I still wanted to live. There were a few things I could control, risks I could calculate, instead of dumping it all on luck. But to do that, I needed to know more.

  I parked the car in front of my apartment building and rubbed my eyes. I was tired, and some of the pain in my limbs from the fight had returned. I was also hungry and very cranky at the moment. I didn’t like not knowing what I was dealing with. Maggots were easy—I knew every species of them, knew how to hunt them, where to find them and how to kill them. With evil spirits, I was way out of my depth, but at least it was experience. The next time around, I’d know exactly how to react at the sight of one.

  I was by the entrance of the building before Feather Girl even made it out of the car. She was even more pissed off by the fact that we hadn’t found the witch than I was, and that was saying something. But she didn’t give any indication that something was wrong, and I didn’t hear anything until I was on the second floor.

  My apartment was on the third and noise was coming from it. I froze mid-step, my mind completely focused on my ears.

  A rumbling, something falling on the floor.

  A scream.

  Chelsea’s scream.

  I don’t remember how I ran up there
and how I even opened the door. Just a blank spot in my memory until I saw the inside of my living room—the bottom half of a beast at least five feet tall, and another leaping out the open window. I only caught its tail, and I had no idea what the hell it even was, but another scream from Chelsea, and I was already moving.

  Fire everywhere around me. I couldn’t see my hands at all, but I didn’t need to. My mind was not my own as I jumped the beast, and he turned with his jaws wide open, huge teeth coated red. A werewolf.

  He jumped back, my fire reflecting in his yellow eyes. Away from Chelsea, who was on the floor, white shirt torn almost all the way, blood coming out of her left shoulder as she held it and gritted her teeth. I watched her only for a split second, just to make sure that she was really alive and my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me, before I jumped the beast again.

  He was on his way to the window, too, just like his friend, but there was no way in Heaven, Hell, or Earth I’d let him get away. My fire touched his tail before my fingers wrapped around it, and I pulled with all the strength I had in me. It was easy to access it in those moments, so much easier than it had ever been, but my mind really didn’t feel like my own. Black dots clouded my vision but not enough to take the entire view away from me. I saw myself, as if in a dream, jump on the wolf’s back as he let out the most heart-wrenching howl I’d ever heard. He leaned to the side to get me off him, but my legs were secured tightly around his middle, so he came down with me. His paws were twice the size of my palms, and he must have scratched me, but the pain never registered. I was focused on his face, trying to reach his neck, every fiber in me invested in the thought of burning him from the inside out.

  The smell of burned fur and skin filled my nostrils as I tried to move closer to his head. Holding onto fur didn’t work when as soon as I touched it, it turned to ashes. I dug my fingers in his burned skin instead, and he howled so loudly, my ears whistled. He couldn’t fight back, not with me burning him. All he wanted to do was get me off him and howl the pain away, but I didn’t let go.

  Eventually, my hands wrapped around his thick neck, and his head turned, two-inch canines coming for my face.

  But he was wounded, tired, and I was faster. I slipped my hand into his mouth, very aware that he could bite it off any second, but it just didn’t seem as important to me in those moments. My fire slipped down his throat so fast, he was dead or at least unconscious long before he thought to bite down on my hand. His teeth still bit into my skin when his whole body went limb, but they’d be nothing but grazes. I poured liquid fire inside him until he began to melt right between my legs.

  Eventually, I had to let him go while my fire still ate at him. It would continue to do so until nothing remained of him but ashes—and my ruined floor.

  Gritting my teeth, I jumped to my feet and turned around to find Feather Girl standing by Chelsea’s feet, looking at me like my whole body was on fire. The shock in her eyes was like a wakeup call, and suddenly, I began to see more, to understand more of what the hell was happening.

  Chelsea, on the ground, covered in blood, writhing in pain.

  My fire flickered out of existence by the time I was on my knees in front of Chelsea. I took her in my arms, pulling her up as gently as I could.

  “You’re okay,” I whispered, pushing the hair from her face. “You’re okay, just breathe.”

  “It hurts so bad,” she said, holding onto her shoulder that didn’t even look like a shoulder anymore, just a mess of torn flesh and blood. I could see her bones through it, too, and it made my stomach turn with rage. “Make it stop, Sassy. Just make it stop!”

  “Can you sit up?” I asked, and my brain slowly started to function again. She didn’t say anything, just grunted in pain, but I pulled her up anyway. As far as I could see, the rest of her looked okay. No torn clothes anywhere else—or blood.

  Behind me, Feather Girl dumped water on the floor—possibly the still burning remains of the werewolf. I focused on Chelsea and breathed deeply as I settled her against the couch’s back.

  “What happened? Can you tell me what happened?”

  “It…it…bit me,” she said, eyes squeezed shut.

  Bitten by a werewolf. You’ve probably read enough books and seen enough movies to know what that meant. When you’re bitten by a werewolf, you turn into a werewolf—if you don’t die first.

  Chelsea was shaking, her skin glistening with sweat. I touched her forehead, and though my skin was still warm from my fire, I could still tell she was burning up with fever.

  “Can you get up, Chelsea?” I asked. She was taller than me, and heavier. I could still carry her on my back, but if she could stand, it would be less painful for her.

  “God, it hurts! Motherfucker!” she screamed instead, pulling at her arm under her wound like she wanted to tear it off completely.

  “I can get her cleaned up,” Feather Girl said, squatting down in front of Chelsea. I didn’t even turn to look at the remains of the werewolf. It sufficed to know that he was dead.

  “No need. Help me get her up. We need to go.” I pulled Chelsea’s wounded arm and she screamed again, so hard it felt like the sound shook the ground. But I had no choice. Every second she was here was potentially her last second alive, or at least the last second as herself. Things tended to get bad fast when humans got bitten by shifters. I’d never seen it happen around here. Most of them were born shifters, and they didn’t turn people as a general rule enforced by the Fallen. But I didn’t think that werewolf and whoever his friend was had intended to turn Chelsea. No, they had tried to kill her, and if I hadn’t come back when I had…

  “Go? Go where? She’s burning up,” Feather Girl said, the panic in her voice feeding my own.

  But I swallowed hard and pushed it down. There was no room for panic. What I needed to do was perfectly clear to me—I needed to find Lexar. Now.

  “Lexar,” I said pulling a screaming Chelsea by the waist. The pain must have been incredible—she could take it like a champ, normally. I’d seen her sick countless times, and she’d never even complained about her occasional nasty migraines that her doctor said should have had her in bed for days. “I need you to find him for me. Can you do that?” Feather Girl narrowed her brows in confusion but nodded. “Put her arm around your shoulders.”

  I was surprised she could hear me from all the screaming Chelsea was doing. Her voice flooded my brain, inviting image after terrifying image of her dead on the ground, lifeless eyes staring at the ceiling—or worse.

  No, I wasn’t going to let that happen.

  Holding her by the waist as well as I could without touching her shoulder, I pushed her toward the door, ignoring the mess that was my apartment. Whatever damage those shifters had done, it could be repaired. But if I didn’t get to Lexar in time, none of it would even matter.

  When shifters bit, the lycan virus transferred to the new host instantly. There was no possibility that it wouldn’t, and the older the human, the harder for the virus to transform it into what it wasn’t—half man, half beast. That is why the majority of the time when this happened, humans died.

  Those who survived turned into whatever species of shifter had bitten them.

  That’s what was going to happen here, with Chelsea. That werewolf had bitten her, and she wasn’t going to die. She was going to turn into a werewolf instead.

  But she was not going to die.

  According to my father, there was one thing that could sort of smooth out the transition from human to shifter, act like a buffer between the different genes to give the host body more time to adjust and shift. It’s demon blood. The actual blood of a demon—like the one with horns I’d seen outside of my father’s castle in Hell. But demons couldn’t slip through to the earthly plane no matter what. They were tied to the Underworld by magic and even the Fallen couldn’t break that tie. So, to get demon blood, I needed someone to go to Hell and take it. I would go myself, no matter what I said in the past, if I had the access. I’d do it wi
thout a second thought, but I couldn’t. Lexar could. He could command any demon to give him his blood, too.

  And, yes, I know what I said—that I would chew my own arm off first before I went to him for help, but it was Chelsea. I had never been more afraid in my life, and I would do anything at all Lexar asked of me if it meant saving her life, no questions asked. He could have whatever the hell he wanted from me.

  Going down the stairs was torture. Every person who lived in the apartment building was in the hallway, looking at us, mouths wide open, terrified looks in their eyes. Feather Girl told them Chelsea had slipped and fallen or something, and that we were taking her to the hospital. Also, that she was drunk and that’s why she was screaming so loudly. I don’t know if anyone believed her, but I couldn’t care less.

  Getting Chelsea in the car was worse than I thought it would be because I couldn’t focus. There had been another shifter in the apartment with that werewolf, and he had jumped out the window. The third floor wasn’t that high a jump for a shifter, so I had no doubt he had survived. I wanted him to be there so badly, my fists shook as I searched the street with my eyes. I wanted to burn him from the inside out, too, just in case it would lighten the weight on my chest that was slowly suffocating me.

  But there was nobody there.

  Feather Girl drove. I sat in the back with Chelsea, holding her hand, promising her that it was all going to be okay while she begged me to stop the pain. But I was a goddamn liar. I didn’t know that it was going to be okay.

  All I knew was that I needed Lexar.

  “What the hell is taking so long?” I shouted over Chelsea’s screams. It felt like hours since Feather Girl turned the ignition on.

  “He’s far away,” she shouted back. “Don’t distract me!”

  I held onto Chelsea’s hand and squeezed her fingers.

  “I’m going to die, aren’t I?” Chelsea whispered, her eyes still closed. It was like she couldn’t open them anymore, and her skin looked like she’d just been swimming. Even her hair was completely wet. Since my hoodie no longer had sleeves—they’d burned while I was killing the werewolf—I used her shirt to wipe her forehead.