Firestorm Read online

  This was unlike anything I could have imagined. Thrust after thrust sent me into the stratosphere, my back arching as he drove so hard that he had to grip my hair for purchase.

  I was over the edge, out of body but deep in it, just a tactile creature now, every nerve in me rippling with pleasure that went on and on so that I was crying out and crying at once—and who cared if they heard, if they ripped down the walls of this place—because there was nothing except him and I and this endless moment between us.

  And then the contractions, tightening around him. He groaned into my ear, his thrusts so fast they became ragged, almost animal. And then there was his hot seed shooting up against my cervix.

  With every stroke he pushed harder, harder, like he wanted to get right to the center of me, deliver himself as deep as he could.

  Still I was squeezing around him, the two of us urging each other on, me milking him for every drop, and he delivering more, more until it was seeping out from me and dripping white heat onto the bed.

  Over a minute we slowed, stilled. The two of us breathed like we’d just surfaced, our bodies slick against each other. My hand touched his hair, and I knew—even though he was the assassin, the infiltrator now in the full bloom of his power, and I was a short, small thing—I knew I would protect him with every fiber in me from what was to come.

  And there was much to come.

  Nine

  Saturday, May 10, 2053

  1:24 a.m.

  Blaze

  Afterward we lay in the darkness, the two of us spent.

  Darcy’s head rested on my chest, and for a time she lay in wakeful silence. I could hear her breathing, distinct from sleep-breathing, sometimes deeper and sometimes shallower.

  She was thinking. And I was, too.

  I’d brought no expectations into what had just happened between us. Maybe that was why it had been the most miraculous experience of my short life. Even now, having had my fill of her, I yearned for her in a new way.

  I yearned for her nearness.

  And something else had changed. I was different, altered by possessing her, by knowing her in that way.

  I felt powerful, capable, unlike anything I had felt before.

  My body sang with life, the blood coursing fast and hot through my veins. I could have run miles, my muscles never fatiguing, heady with the simple fact of being a living, warm-blooded creature.

  All of that was thanks to her, to what the woman in my arms had awakened in me. I didn’t want to be apart from that—from her. At the thought, I held her tighter—avoiding compressing her bandaged arm—and I heard a faint exhale.

  That was her form of a gentle laugh. “Something got your hackles up?” she asked, her head shifting slightly to meet eyes.

  “The thought of losing you,” I murmured, touching my lips to her hair.

  “You won’t,” she said, settling in closer. “Well, except for the five minutes I’m about to spend in the bathroom emptying my painful balloon of a bladder.”

  I laughed. “For a woman who’s shot herself, I trust when you say ‘painful,’ you mean excruciating. Go.”

  She smiled, set her lips to my chest. Her mouth sent a warmth through me, and then she eased herself from the bed, and—to my chagrin—pulled on her shirt and pants and slipped out the door.

  I lifted my head to watch her go, and when I set it back down, I realized I didn’t feel any pain. I touched the back of my head where she and Zara had removed the chip, found the incision spot.

  It wasn’t even tender. I hadn’t healed nearly this fast before—it was something to do with what had just happened between us.

  My Scarlet hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d said I would become more powerful after the seduction training was complete. At the thought of her, her pale face appeared before me in the darkness.

  The most beautiful and the ugliest woman I’d ever seen. That had been my initial assessment of her the first time I’d met my trainer; now I could strike off the beautiful.

  The more you got to know some people, I’d found, the more they became themselves, shifted in your eyes.

  If my Scarlet followed us up here, I wouldn’t show her mercy. Not after what she’d attempted to do—to make me do to Darcy. “Code 85," which was more or less an order to execute a person.

  To execute Darcy West.

  In that way, Darcy had become infinitely more lovely to me as I'd gotten to know her. Even now, I sensed her scent approaching, heard her specific footfall. She was faintly humming that tune I’d been humming earlier—the one I didn’t know the name to.

  When she returned, she sat on my hospital bed, looking down at me. Her hand went out to my hair, touching what emerged beneath the gauze wrapping.

  “You can take that off now,” I said.

  “I was thinking it made a nice hat. Would keep you inconspicuous.” She was joking, but I realized it was a mask for how nervous she was about uncovering my wound.

  “How bad was the operation?” I said.

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I don’t remember much after the bleeding started.”

  “That’s probably for the best.” She sighed. “We nearly lost you after Zara nicked your artery. I think we threw out a bedsheet covered in your blood.”

  “Is that all? I guess that’s why you decided to be on top.”

  She laughed, and her face went serious. “Was I on top? I can't even remember—it was all a blur. Anyway, I shouldn’t have done that. I should have let you rest.”

  I lifted my hand, touched the tips of her hair. “I disagree. Personally, I feel better than ever.”

  She smiled. “Me too.”

  I hated to break the peace of this moment, but I didn’t think I could go another day without answers. “Darcy,” I said, “I need you to tell me everything you know about what I am. I need to know about the silvers. ”

  She nodded slowly. “You deserve to know the answers to all those things.”

  When she paused, I thought she might evade again. Tell me I wasn’t ready, or that they would be best left to another time. But I wouldn’t accept any more evasions—this was a point I would press her on.

  Except she didn’t make me. “Let’s start simply,” she began. “You’re an infiltrator. I designed you to thrive in this world, which used to be dominated by human civilization. That was until thirty-five years ago, when the silvers appeared.”

  “What do you mean, ‘appeared?’”

  “I only know from my parents’ stories, but from what they told me…it just sort of happened all at once. There were over three hundred million humans living in this country, and within a couple months, we had been reduced to almost nothing.”

  “Where did they come from?”

  “Creature mutation, we think, from an atomic blast. Another theory is that it was some sort of genetic engineering on wolves.”

  “Like you’ve done to us,” I murmured.

  “Like we’ve done to you,” she agreed.

  “And how did they wipe out the humans so quickly?”

  “The silvers are…ruthless. They’re killers, and if they don’t kill you, their venom will turn you. Well, not you—it’ll turn the average human. They’re also vastly more powerful than us: faster, stronger, sturdier. By the time our military had mobilized, it was like trying to keep an ocean wave from spilling onto the shore.”

  I nodded. “And all the lights in this outpost keep them at bay.”

  “They’re exclusively night creatures. Or at least, they were. And that’s part of why they were so powerful against us: our night vision is shit.”

  “What happens to them if they get caught in daylight?”

  She resumed her position against my chest, her whole body flush to mine. I had an immediate reaction, but I managed to resist doing more than setting an arm around her. “They burn. They shrivel and die.”

  “Have you seen that happen?”

  “Not personally, but…there have been humans in Beac
on who were bitten but survived. Before they turned, they agreed to submit to scientific experimentation.”

  Those were some brave humans. Braver than most I’d encountered. “And where do the silvers go during the day?” I asked.

  Her shoulders lifted, dropped helplessly. “Somewhere the sun doesn’t shine. Frankly, we’re painfully clueless as to how they live.”

  “That’s why you created us. To infiltrate them.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And there’s something else I saw the night we escaped.”

  I waited in silence.

  “I went to Dr. Ides’s cabin in the facility to drug him and get his fingerprint. On his walls, I saw a projection of one of the old cities. What we used to call Boston. He said it was still functional, or at least, people were living there.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe one of the infiltrators managed to get that far and send something back. Maybe it was just a crazy delusion.”

  “Darcy, I was listening to your conversation with Zara in the guard tower.”

  “I figured,” she said. “And I accept your apology.”

  “You said I could kill the whole silver population. Millions of them. How?”

  She shifted on the bed. “Do you remember when we were leaving the facility, we passed through that massive room Terrell called the aerie?”

  “Yes.”

  “It's a place for a specific kind of crea—”

  But her voice was drowned beneath the sound of an alarm. It rang through the hospital room, high and insistent. I'd never heard it before, but I recognized its intent at once: it was a dire warning.

  “An attack,” I said, half-sitting up.

  Her eyes had gone wide. “A silver sighting.”

  She stood, went to the nearest window. When she pushed it up, the alarms from outside barreled into our hospital room, creating a cacophonous melody. They were everywhere.

  1:45 a.m.

  Darcy

  “Stay here,” I said to Blaze, setting a hand to his bare chest to press him back onto the bed. “The guards can handle this.”

  But I wasn’t so sure. What if it wasn’t silvers? What if it was infiltrators from the facility?

  His hand caught my fingers. “Are you kidding me? This is what you created me to do, Darcy: protect you. Protect everyone in this outpost.”

  “Please,” I said, squeezing his hand. “You’re not healed. If you try to fight them right now, it could get you killed. I couldn’t bear that.”

  “And what about you?”

  “I survived twenty-seven years without you. I’ll be okay, Blaze.”

  His fingers went soft, and I realized he was abiding by my wishes. And yet I found myself stock still, unwilling to move. The truth was, I didn’t want to leave without him.

  The door to our room opened, and a figure came shrouded in the light from the hallway. “Darcy.”

  “Zara,” I breathed, crossing the room and enveloping her in a hug I knew she probably didn’t want.

  But she didn’t step back. At least, not until a few moments had passed. When she did, she sniffed at my hair. “You smell like sex.”

  My face warmed several degrees. “Now isn’t the time, dear sister.”

  “We’ve been fighting silvers our whole lives. When is the time?”

  I heard Blaze snort.

  I spun on him, shooting a look I knew he’d recognize with his keen eyesight. I hadn’t expected this ribbing from either of them. Not right now.

  “But you’re right. There’s a pack of them approaching,” Zara said, her voice gone formal and serious behind me. “Eight at least.”

  I turned back to her. “That’s uncommon.”

  “Not since you’ve been gone. They’ve been getting more brazen, and more of them come at once, more often.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re going to the scaffolding.”

  She shrugged. “Where else? I just came here to tell the two of you: don’t leave this building. You’re civilians, and I don’t care what you claim your silver-assassin boyfriend can do. I don’t want either of you out there.”

  I caught her hand. “You’re only eighteen.”

  “Eighteen-year-olds have been fighting wars as far back as the history books go, Darcy. Don’t you remember from primary?”

  I remembered. That didn’t make it any easier to let my teenage sister step to the front lines of a battle against creatures I was painfully familiar with.

  Zara had turned back toward the hallway, and I followed. “Let me go with you, at least,” I said. “Just me.”

  “Absolutely not. You’re a member of the Scientists’ Guild,” she said, wrapping her hair into a tight bun as we walked the hallway. She looked so hard, so capable.

  “I know about silvers,” I said. “I know their weaknesses.”

  “So do we,” she said, turning to me as we came to the front doors of the hospital. “We’re guardians. This is who we’re trained to fight.”

  I had heard that line before.

  I stared at her with wide eyes; nothing else was left to me, after all. It was ridiculous to stop a guardian from doing her duty—most especially a deputy captain—but I was past ridicule.

  It would kill me to lose my sister.

  “Just be careful,” I whispered, tears springing to my eyes as I pulled her to me again. I ran my hand over her head, and my chest held a quavering moment as I tried not to sob. “It’s been so long. Promise me we'll go to Moll’s Pub after.”

  “That’s a promise,” she said into my hair. When she pulled away, her eyes were wet, too.

  Both of us knew it wasn’t about the silver attack. Those weren't unusual in our lives. It was about much more than that.

  I raised her hand, kissed her knuckles, and then she was gone through the door, unseating her crossbow from her hip.

  I stood in the hospital for ten, fifteen seconds, staring after until she disappeared around a building. When I glanced back, only lantern-light waved at me. “I don’t want you out there,” she said. And I knew she’d meant it.

  But I wasn’t the obedient Darcy I’d used to be. That girl was the only family I had in the world.

  “Fuck it,” I said, and I pushed my way out the hospital doors and into the night.

  Ten

  Saturday, May 10, 2053

  2:01 a.m.

  Darcy

  When I opened the hospital door, the siren had just kicked off again, its pitch rising long and loud around the outpost. I squinted, staring up at the walls. Three guards were massed on the second story of platforms at the east wall, crossbows ready.

  I ran toward the guard tower, pressing past a group of three guards who were jogging toward the wall to reinforce. Zara was already halfway up the first stairway, her hands slung through her massive crossbow. “How close are they?” I yelled above the siren.

  She spun, her eyes narrowing on me. “What are you doing?” she hissed from the stairs.

  "Helping," I said, following the troop who’d just left the guard tower. They didn't seem terribly organized, and Zara shouted something sharp, which made them quicken their pace. And then she rushed on herself toward the next set of stairs.

  Good—she was too busy to worry about me right now.

  I followed, climbing the wooden stairs as they had done, taking the steps two at a time. The ground fell away quicker than I’d expected, and I tried not to look down, gripping the rail as I climbed. What a time to be stupidly—inanely—scared of heights.

  The guardians ran the length of the first platform, and I jogged after. We weren’t yet above the metal wall that encircled the city’s base, but I could hear crossbows loosing, arrows singing through the netting above me.

  Zara made the second staircase, and I straggled behind, breathing hard. They were probably nearly on the walls by now.

  When I got to the second platform, I had to grip the rail for balance, but not because we were so high up. We were above th
e wall, and above me, all six guards had massed on a high platform, Zara at the center of them, shouting orders. She was pointing east, through the netting to the fields below.

  From where I stood, I could pick out at least a dozen silvers making for us. That wasn’t counting the ones that had already leapt to the wall, their claws screaming over the metal serrations.

  I ran up the next set of steps and down the platform, came up behind Zara. “What the hell are they doing?” I shouted.

  She spun, her eyes wide. “No.” Her hands went out, and she was pushing me backward. “You can’t be up here.”

  But she didn’t have time to pay attention to me.

  “Marks, get that climber in his orbs,” she said. Below us, one of the slivers had managed to surmount the metal, was now pulling his way up the netting.

  I had forgotten how terrifying they looked. This one looked like a bear missing most of its fur, its massive, muscled body illuminated under the spotlights, the red eyes promising a savaging.

  And those claws, as long as daggers and sinking into the metal like butter.

  The guard she had called Marks dropped to a knee, angling his crossbow. He took a moment to aim before he unleashed. The arrow rang out, caught the sliver in the shoulder. It ignored the bolt, kept climbing.

  By the time Marks had set another bolt in his crossbow, it had flung itself up over the roof of the netting and landed on the platform right in front of him.

  Marks managed to reorient, but then a second silver dropped in behind him.

  Things happened quickly then. Marks flew with a scream, his body sailing from the platform, hitting the edge of the scaffolding a level below and landing with a sick thud at the center of Beacon.

  The other guards had only started to turn when the silver, its red eyes shining with hunger, pushed off toward Zara. She raised her crossbow, but it was too heavy, and she too slow—

  “Move!” I screamed, lunging forward. But the silver was already airborne toward her, claws fully out.

  She managed to turn, step left just as it was about to rake her down the center. And for a moment I thought she would evade the creature entirely, but its enormous shoulder caught her right in the chest and tossed her straight back into the railing.