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“Why? What are you planning?” Desmond looked over his shoulder, able to take his gaze off the road because of how slow we were moving. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
Holden snorted, but his grip around my waist eased up, and soon I wasn’t worried about knocking him off if I did—as Desmond suspected—something stupid.
“On the count of three I’m going to need you to let go, okay?” I said to Holden.
“Am I going to regret it?”
I smiled to myself. “Probably. But it’s either you regret it, or we all die. Take your pick.”
“On three, then.”
“Smart man.”
“Only occasionally.”
I attempted to clear my mind, driving out all the color and distraction, all the eerie moaning from the dead. Instead I singled them out, counting each and every one by passing my gaze over the crowd. I ignored any that had fallen and focused on the ones moving through the street, blocking our way. It was like seeing a thousand grains of rice at once, but instead of an uncountable mass, I understood each of them as an individual. My mind drew an invisible tether between all of them, a thin blue energy I could feel more than see.
“One.” I angled the bike towards the sidewalk, away from the bulk of the risen. I braced myself as the energy climbed up my skin and made my brain feel like a channel of fuzzy static. “Two.” I wanted to look to either Desmond or Holden and give them a reassuring smile, or tell them this was all going to be fine. But my mouth only seemed capable of forming one final word. “Three.”
Within my mind the command again was Burn.
Holden released me, and I braked the bike, bracing my feet on the ground. Ahead of me Desmond had stopped, and he and Sutherland had turned to watch me. The invisible tether in my mind sparked like the fuse on a bomb. My feel for it switched from blue to red, and in less time than it took me to say Three, the bodies were going up like pyres. I was reminded of a barbeque being lit with all the fwoosh sounds sparking to life around me, and with each one a new body was engulfed.
“Jesus fuck,” Desmond said, raising his hand against the wave of heat that washed out towards us.
Holden almost fell off the back of the bike but managed to regain his balance.
Soon the heat from all the burning bodies stung our faces, but I was immobile, my hands lifted to the sky and my skin tingling with the sensation. I was like a revivalist preacher, only instead of screaming about the threat of brimstone raining down on my flock, I was the one lighting fires.
The bodies continued to go up in smoke one after the other, fwoosh, fwoosh, fwoosh, until we were surrounded by a new sun, one of my own creation, and the light was so bright I couldn’t look directly at it. I was grateful I hadn’t targeted all of them. If I’d lit the nearby fallen bodies, the bikes might have gone up in smoke.
As the bodies fell in their place, transformed from columns of ash into nothing but dust on the wind, we found ourselves in the middle of an empty street. The cars around us were untouched. Nothing else had been burned.
Desmond came to his senses first. He glanced around at the destruction—or more accurately at the absence of it. I hadn’t left a single walking body. The
only thing that remained were the few corpses fallen nearby, and none of them were in our path.
I’d done it.
“Secret, what happened to you?”
“I don’t know if now is the best time to talk about it. We’re almost back at the hotel, let’s—”
From down the block came the unmistakable sound of crackling glass.
We all looked up in time to see the shiny black tower of Rain Hotel ripple, then the glass exploded outwards, showering down on the street below. The wave of hot air hit us a moment later, and I was pushed back against Holden, who kept me upright. When we turned our gazes back to the hotel, the top stories were all engulfed in flame.
I wasn’t the only one playing with fire tonight.
Chapter Thirty
My pyrotechnic display had nothing on the mayhem now laid out before us.
“Go,” I screamed at Desmond, grabbing the bike’s handles and opening up the throttle, thankful I’d only stopped it and hadn’t turned it off.
Logic told me I ought to get the hell away from the explosion as fast as possible. But raw emotion reminded me all my friends were meant to be meeting us at the hotel, and some or all of them might have been there when things blew.
I sped past Desmond, who was still working to start his engine again, and flew down the block. Holden clung to me, his fingers digging into my ribs as he maintained his hold. Within seconds we were in front of the hotel. A few straggling dead who hadn’t been caught by my incendiary attack or by the explosion were wandering around, but not enough to pose a problem.
