Masks (Out of the Box Book 9) (12 page)

“Sorry,” I said, apologizing more for their position on top of the human garbage dump than for the slightly rough landing. I turned about, zipping out toward the front of the building, where the fire was starting to get heavy again as it crept its way back through the territory I’d left bare after putting it out before. It was spreading quickly, annoyingly so, but again I didn’t have time nor optimum circumstances to snuff it, so I wormed my way carefully out the front window and shot back to the ground.

“Here,” I said, dumping my passengers with utmost care at the feet of the paramedics, who had moved back beyond the debris-clouded skies above us. There were still a bevy of fire trucks out in front of the building, the ladders up at the exposed fifth floor. I could see them helping someone down one of them, getting another civilian out of harm's way. “I think that’s … aw, hell.”

My shoulders sagged as I looked down. I had two women at my feet—Stinky and, uh … well the second lady was sleeping in heavy flannel pajamas. Which was lucky for her, because if she’d been starkers, I might have absorbed her soul through my bare arms without even realizing it, because my shoulders were aching a little from carrying the two of them as I flew. Neck cramp.

But the fact that I’d discovered two women meant that the guy I’d heard? Still inside.

I sighed and flew away again, catching only a shout of protest from Captain Frost, who was still huffing away at his oxygen mask and proving me right once again about his uselessness. I saw a black SUV sliding up through the crowd, looking like it was going to bump Captain Frost. I was rooting for it to happen, personally, but was gone before I could see if it did.

I shot back into the third-floor window. I’d been at this for a while and I hadn’t even cleared one damned floor. Flames were dancing around again as I came inside, but I was determined to get this done fast, so I didn’t stop to snuff them this time, either, instead shooting back toward the last apartment I’d visited. I pushed through the door to find another scandalously small unit. I figured maybe since I’d rescued the lady without checking the rest of the apartment, I’d missed someone in here. A quick search of the bedroom turned up nada, and then I realized that there was another door besides the closet, and it was sealed shut.

A bathroom.

I turned the knob and pushed slowly, and was once again rewarded with resistance. Someone was passed out behind the door, and they grunted as I forced my way in. The smoke was particularly strong, hanging heavy at the ceiling, probably coming in through a vent fan. I looked around the room just to be certain I wasn’t missing anyone else, but the guy behind the door was it. He was nothing more than a shadowy figure in the haze, but I picked him up, adjusting him carefully on my shoulders. He was wearing nothing but boxers and a wife beater, which was kind of a problem considering what I was wearing, so I grabbed a towel off the rack by the shower that was roughly the dimensions of a reasonable cup of coffee and wrapped him up quickly before getting the hell out of there.

When I flew back into the hall, a flaming beam came crashing down into the open stairwell, fire consuming it from top to bottom. A wave of heat hit me, and I threw out a hand to try and absorb it.
Gavrikov
, I said, and felt it come to me, heat bleeding into my open palm.

Another beam burst through the ceiling above me and I darted sideways, pulling the fire with me as I tried to put it out. It came from the ceiling like wafts of smoke drawn right to me, and as the room lit up from the other spots where fire was burning through the plaster, I started to get the feeling that this was a losing battle.

“Sonofa,” I muttered, giving it up and starting back toward the front windows. The hallway was wreathed in smoke, and timbers popped above me. I heard something crash down behind me as a wave of heat ran over my back, then another started in front of me as the smoke was displaced by a ceiling collapse. It came down hard, cutting off easy escape with a burning blaze, my forehead breaking out into an immediate sweat and dripping black dust into my eyes.

I felt heat on my shoulders and looked back to see that somehow, the towel I’d wrapped my passenger in had caught fire. Letting out a bark of surprise, I tossed him off my shoulders with care and caught him in my arms, throwing off the towel. It lit off fast, engulfed in mere seconds as another beam behind me collapsed and pushed me forward, away from the continued structural failure consuming the building at my back and toward where it was, uhh … also collapsing at my front.

“Out of the frying pan,” I groused, lifting a hand to try and suppress the flames in the debris in front of me. “But I’m not going into this fire just yet.” I couldn’t even see the windows I had been using for egress, which was worrying considering the building was starting to come down around me. There was no easy escape this way, at least not until I cleared the inferno that was blazing there. I started to draw the fire to me, and then suddenly, I felt a burning in my shoulders that had nothing to do with the flames.

“Unghhh,” my passenger moaned, and I realized that I was keeping him from falling off by holding my bare hand and arm against his chest.

“Dammit!” I shouted at no one in particular, trying to readjust but finding that his shirt had been burned with the towel and was flaking off in my grip. He writhed in my grasp, my skin touching his entirely too long, and the warmth grew in my hands, in my arm, in the rest of me as my powers began to consume his very soul.

The smoke was choking, filling Jamie’s lungs and causing her to gag. Spots flashed in her vision in the darkness, little sparkles of purple, like she’d stared into the sun too long and then shut her eyes. It felt like tons of lead were hanging from her—from her hands, feet, arms, hips—all around, ready to drag her down.

The smoke cleared briefly, and she sucked in hungry lungfuls of the warm night air, still heavy with the harsh chemical smell. She opened her eyes and coughed, the sparkles still flashing in front of her eyes, her eyelids as heavy as if she’d caught them in a gravity channel of their own.

She looked down and could see, just for a moment, all she’d wrought; pieces of the building were strung out all over the street like a jungle canopy. Firemen were climbing up through the gaps, their ladders extending so they could reach the disassembled top floor of the burning building. She watched them move, beneath the haze of light smoke that wafted off the cloud, swarming like ants heading into a hill.

She coughed, and her head felt slightly clearer. Something sagged, and she felt the weight adjust. She looked to the west and saw the flaming debris she’d shot toward the river had hit its mark, extinguished after landing in the water past the West Side Highway and Pier 94.

It wasn’t much, but it was a help, having that weight off. Her mind felt a little clearer.
Need to get more weight off
, she thought, and she brought the first loads of debris higher, pulling them toward her. She made an exhausted wave of the hand and sent them off to the west like she’d done with the other, ziplining them along a gravity channel toward the river and off her plate. She watched them streak across the sky, probably tons of brick and wood, and felt lighter when it hit, the splash visible in the darkness because of its epic size.

Jamie steadied herself, suddenly feeling stronger, like she’d blown past the threshold for weariness and come out the other side. She could see hints of flame beneath the structure of the fifth floor, but she didn’t dare take it apart now; there were firemen inside, doing their work.

“I’ll just hold it all steady,” she said, under her breath, as she watched the others work. There was still a massive amount of debris in her grip, and she couldn’t send it all to the river. No, she’d just have to hold still here, keep it from falling until things were settled down. She’d play Atlas, and hold the sky back from collapsing on New York’s Finest, as long as it took. She settled in to wait, the weight bearing down on her and her bearing it right back. She’d hold it all night if she had to.

I could feel the burn, and it wasn’t the good kind, the kind that told me I’d gotten off the couch and put down the Cheetos to build some muscle mass. No, this was the other kind of burn—err, well, one of the other kinds—a kind exclusive to me and my kind, the kind that told me I was about to get another passenger in my head.

Needless to say, I freaked the hell out.

“Ahh!” I shouted and dropped the dude immediately. He clunked hard on the floor, shaking the exposed, smoldering plywood beneath us. I cringed because I felt bad for him, but not as bad as I would have felt if he’d ended up ride-sharing my brain forever. “No! No! No!” I said, brushing myself off as I tried to stave off panic.

We could use some new company
, Wolfe said.
So very lonely in here with only the same faces to stare at.

I think you mean eat
, Zack said.
Faces to eat.

You still have yours, pretty boy
, Eve Kappler sniped back,
so clearly he hasn’t devoured it yet.

“Plus you’re all in my head,” I said, reaching my hands out to try and draw away the fire toward me to extinguish it. “How is he going to eat your face in my head?”

Oh, Wolfe can do it
, Wolfe said, and I had a flash of a Cheshire smile tinged with blood, and then a brutal image of him ripping and rending someone’s face off. I jerked as it overwhelmed me, catching me unawares, and a stream of fire shot up and hit the ceiling, clinging to it and starting the timbers alight again. I stared at my accidental handiwork and felt the rage bubble inside.

Sowwy
, Wolfe said, playing cute, which was irritating in its own way.

My face!
Zack screamed in my head, like I hadn’t just seen what Wolfe had been imagining.

“Shut up, you don’t even have a face to get eaten anymore,” I said, trying to get the fire above me under control. I coughed, the air getting heavy with smoke again, the sound of footsteps on the ceiling above clunking past as I assumed the firemen on the ladders evacuated the floor. I ran a hand over the ceiling and sucked all the fire out of the place where I’d just accidentally hosed it. I glanced down at the man at my feet and muttered, “You should consider yourself lucky you’re not getting stuck in my brain. You see what I have to deal with? And people think I should absorb more souls? Hah,” I said, not really finding any humor in that idea.

The man at my feet stirred, and the ceiling in front of me collapsed even further, more fiery debris raining down as I yanked the guy back while retreating.

“Dammit,” I said. The fire was really going now, completely cutting me off from the windows and my escape. I glanced behind me, but the situation there wasn’t any better. If I tried to draw the fire in from above, it was entirely possible some poor firefighters were gonna get roasted alive as I pulled it; if I tried to retreat downstairs, I doubted the guy at my feet would survive the trip because he had maybe ten seconds left before I absorbed him, and there weren’t any ways I could carry him without touching him. Way to sleep nearly naked, guy.

I set my feet, determined to draw off the fire in the debris ahead. If I could get it out, I could maybe worm my way through with this guy and get him to the ground in time to save him from being absorbed. Or from dying of smoke inhalation. Or building collapse, because I had a feeling that was coming, too.

I held up my hands, said, “Gavrikov,” and I could feel the Russian’s wariness.
We will try
, he said, and I started to pull the flames to me—

A sizzling burst of smoke stopped me before I could even get to it; water was streaming in through the windows at high pressure, steam filling the air, giving it a damp sensation, a sudden swampy sense that somehow made the smell of the flames so much worse than they had been a minute ago. I could see the water streaming in, dousing the flames in the debris ahead, and in that moment, I saw an opening on the right hand side, a clear path right out of the building.

“Thank you, New York Fire Department,” I said, and I snatched up the guy at my feet, not wasting a second. I clutched him close and felt the burning start in my arms as I pressed my flesh to his. I zoomed out the front of the building as he started to jerk in my grip, and I backflipped into a landing, setting him down on the street a little inelegantly, but just before I started to take his soul into me.

The stream of water in the front windows stopped as soon as I was clear, moving up the building to the top as firemen piled onto their ladders and started to move away from the building. I got a feeling I knew what was coming in the next few minutes—collapse, probably, though I wasn’t experienced enough with these things to know.

I thumped down right on my butt, exhausted, and sat there with the guy I’d just saved at my feet while the paramedics came rushing over to attend him. I blinked as they rushed up, letting out a breath and expelling smoke and nastiness in a cough.

“We got a pulse,” one of the paramedics said. “Pretty weak. If it had been another minute or two …” He looked at me and nodded appreciation.

“Yeah, well, thank the firefighters for that one,” I said, my neck sagging under the weight of my head. I was exhausted, like I’d just gone through all my adrenaline and had to borrow some from a neighbor. I closed my eyes and the flash of flame and the lights blinked in the darkness. “If they hadn’t gotten their hoses going—”

“Oh, that wasn’t the fire department,” the paramedic said, and my eyes snapped open. He wasn’t even looking at me, he was tending to his patient. “They’re still charging them. Ran into a water pressure problem, I guess.”

I felt my brow furrow. If it wasn’t the FDNY, then who sent the water geysering into the front window to save …?

I found the answer a second later, as I saw the blue flashing lights in the government SUV’s grill—the kind we’d had in the agency. He was standing right there, clad in a suit, sandy blond hair catching all the colored lights, but unmistakable in its coloring even still. I caught him looking at me, though he turned his head at the last second to try and play it cool, and in that moment I knew I’d just seen my successor at the agency.