Burning, burning me alive, from the inside out.
I bucked and heaved and thrashed in the chair, so hard that the restraints bruised my neck, wrists, and ankles, but I couldn’t break free of the cuffs. Even if I could have, I still couldn’t have escaped the drug and what it was doing to me. All too soon, I had exhausted what little strength I had, and I sagged against the chair, gasping for air, even though every breath I took only seemed to add more fuel to the fire roaring through my veins.
While I’d been thrashing around, Benson had pulled a chair right up beside mine, his pen and pad in hand, observing my pitiful struggles. He leaned forward, his excited breath brushing against my face, as hot and eager as the drug coursing through my system.
Benson’s nostrils quivered as he sniffed my emotions again. “Finally,” he murmured. “Fear.”
He looked at the watch on his wrist, scrawled something on his pad, and then raised his eyes to mine again. “Tell me, Gin,” he cooed. “We’re five minutes into our experiment. What does it feel like? All of those sweet, sweet chemicals pumping through your body. Shooting straight into your heart, circling through your brain, and cycling back out again. What do they feel like, interacting with your own magic, your own elemental power? Hmm?”
“It . . . burns . . .” That was all I could rasp out.
I don’t know how long I sagged in the chair, just waiting and waiting for the horrible burning sensation to leave my body. But instead of lessening, it only intensified, and then—suddenly—from one blink to the next—
I was flying.
That was the only way to describe the feeling. My body felt completely weightless, and I was soaring through the sky, with thick white clouds all around me. The lab, Benson, Silvio, they all fell away, and all I could see, hear, and smell was the blue, blue sky—the one that always reminded me of fall, Fletcher, and my murdered family.
I was so delighted that I laughed.
I’d spent so much of my life learning how to control my emotions, always pushing aside my pain, fear, and anxiety, especially these past few months with everyone gunning for me. But right now, I didn’t have any worries. No cares, no complaints, no concerns of any kind. It was just me and the clouds drifting through the sky.
And I loved it, every single second of it.
But even more than that, I felt so strong in that moment. Powerful. Invincible. Unstoppable. Like I could zoom up through the clouds into the heavens above, wrap my fist around a star, and snuff it out. Smash my way through the moon with my bare hands. Eliminate everything and everyone who dared to displease me.
I didn’t need Bria or Finn or Owen or any of the rest of my friends and family. I was better than the whole lot of them, all weak, pitiful, and small. Especially Bria, always worrying about doing things the right way. Always nattering on and on and on about the law and justice, instead of just doing what needed to be done, like I always did. I didn’t need Bria and her rules and regulations and her guilt about my being an assassin. Not anymore. I didn’t need her hanging around, the albatross she was around my neck, such a bothersome burden.
All I needed was this—this feeling, this power, this drug.
All I needed was Burn.
“Only fifteen minutes in, and she’s in the euphoria stage already,” I heard Benson murmur. “She’s reacting quicker to the drug than anyone before. Amazing.”
“Isn’t it?” Silvio’s tone was as dry as Benson’s was excited.
Their voices penetrated my dizzying rush, making me frown and look at the clouds clustered around me. The longer I stared at them, the more I realized that something was wrong. The puffy white edges started to darken and smoke, their edges singed like marshmallows that had been held over a campfire too long. Melting, melting everywhere . . .
And I started to fall.
In an instant, I wasn’t strong anymore. Not powerful, not unstoppable, and certainly not invincible. No, I was the one who was weak, pitiful, and small.
My body grew hotter and hotter, even as the ground rushed up to meet me. But right before my impact, the brown earth dissolved into a pit of roaring green flames. I screamed, even though there was nothing I could do to keep from plummeting straight into the heart of that raging fire.
I sucked down another breath to scream, and I snapped back to reality. To the lab and the chair and Benson watching me, the rat in his cage.
“Twenty-five minutes in, and out of the euphoria stage already. Most fascinating indeed.”
He glanced at his watch and scribbled another note on that damn pad of his.
But my anger at the vamp and his sick torture of me was quickly replaced by more pain, as Burn continued to rage through my body. The poison pulsed through every single part of me. I stared down at my arms, and I swear that I could actually see those spiders crawling around underneath my skin, their fat bellies swollen with bubbling green lava and their eyes flashing the same wicked color as they drew their matching strings of silk along behind them. The burning threads scorched every single part of me that they touched, wrapping around me tighter and tighter until I thought my whole body would spontaneously combust.
I started screaming then, and I didn’t stop.
I couldn’t stop.
Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep.
Mixed in with my screams, the monitors continued to chirp out my heartbeat, the sound and tempo accelerating like a car engine.
“Silvio,” Benson said, his voice seeming small and far away. “Check her vitals. I’m going to get some adrenaline. At the rate the drug is cycling through her body, the crash might kill her. And I’d hate to lose such an interesting test subject.”
Test subject? I snarled at the idea that he wanted to do this to me again and again, although the sound was lost amid my screams and the high-pitched squealing of the monitors.
I was dimly aware of Benson sliding his chair away from mine, getting to his feet, and hurrying into the back of the lab. Then Silvio was leaning over me, pressing his fingers into the pulse point on my right wrist. The cool, soft touch of his hand made me sigh, although my relief was short-lived, as another wave of fire roared through my veins.
“Gin,” Silvio whispered in my ear. “You’re reacting badly to the drug. I think it has some sort of elemental magic in it. That’s the ingredient that I think Benson is missing. If that’s true, then whatever kind of magic it is, your own power doesn’t like it. So you have to fight it. You have to fight the magic, or it will kill you. Do you understand?”