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“Fire is my least favorite element, the most challenging.” His tail swished through the air.
“Challenging?”
“Not easy to control and highly unpredictable. I don’t like unpredictability.”
“Okay, so fire is my power. Do I, like, throw flames at You-Know-Who? Barbecue the guy? Will that do the trick?”
“First you have to open the gateway in your leg.”
“How?”
“Do you feel it? The pulsing? The energy bound there?”
I focused on my bum leg. Hurakan was right. When I isolated my thoughts to this one part of me, a strange energy pulsed through my entire body. It was amazing!
“Now feed the flame with your life source and…”
“And what?”
“You need a source of heat.” He motioned toward the sun. “Draw on its power.” I was about to ask How the heck do I do that? when he added, “Call it to you.”
I remembered the way I had felt that night at Jack in the Box. How some external force had found its way to me, and my fingers had tingled with some kind of heat. I inched closer to the sea. The waves lapped at my feet. Following my instinct, I drew on the sun and felt heat building in me. Slowly at first, then fast. Too fast. I couldn’t breathe.
Hurakan said, “Let it go.”
I raised a paw, thinking maybe I could shoot fireballs out of it or something. But nothing happened. Except the heat kept rising. I started to panic.
“Relax, Zane,” Hurakan commanded.
“Easy for you to say.” He wasn’t the one being cooked from the inside out.
“You have the power, Zane. The fire answers to you. Feed it with your breath. Yes, like that. Steady, deep breaths.”
Except my breath was smoking right out of my nose! And no way could I relax. I began to hyperventilate. The burning snaked its way through me at unimaginable speed. I started for the water, and with my first panicked stride, I saw that my claws were glowing red. As in iron-forging red.
“Zane!” Hurakan shouted as he blocked my path. “Release it!”
“I need the water!”
“No! If you take the easy way out now, you’ll never learn to control it. Trust me!”
The power was building, heavy and strong, and so hot I thought I was going to combust. Puffs of smoke curled from my nose and mouth. I spun, let out a fierce roar, and slashed a tree trunk with my burning claws. The trunk burst into flames that spread to the leaves and then the next tree and the next.
A second later, a huge wave formed, curling taller than a ten-story building. It crashed down on our heads, and I spun blindly under the water. Just as quickly, it receded. I shook my body like a dog, trying to get dry.
Hurakan sighed. “Maybe a little more focus next time.”
“Focus? It… it was burning me alive!”
“It will destroy you if you don’t release its power. The energy has to have somewhere to go. Do you understand?”
I nodded, still out of breath, and wondered if I ever wanted to call fire to me again. I thought using my power was going to be easy, or at least natural. “If you can’t control it,” I said angrily, “then how am I supposed to be able to?”
“I never said I couldn’t control it. I said fire is very challenging, Zane.”
“Yeah, no kidding.”
At the same moment the world began to spin wildly, like I was in a dryer on high.
