I hopped down from the bed and sat on the toilet again.Plink plink plink.I dropped all the pills into the water. Trey’s voice trembled against the inside of my head. I wondered if I’d dream of him tonight.
I hoped I would.
But dreams could wait. I needed to practice. This monster was going to learn some self-control.
Chapter Four
I started small, tearing off squares of toilet paper, laying them on the cold tile floor, and thinking about things that made me angry until my palms felt hot. It wasn’t difficult, not when I pictured Ayaz’s cold eyes and the way he had turned on me, throwing the night we’d shared back in my face.
Square after square of toilet paper went up in flames before my eyes. I stopped when I could smell the smoke in the air. Even with the vent open, the smoke alarm was only by the door, and I couldn’t risk setting it off. I rubbed my palms together, trying to shake off any residual heat, then crawled into bed. I closed my eyes, hoping Trey would visit my dreams. Or Quinn. My heart ached for his silliness and total disregard for rules or propriety. I longed to hear him called me ‘Hazy’ in his carefree way.
But I couldn’t sleep. All night I tossed and turned, thinking about those squares of toilet paper immolating, thinking about another fire that started with a spark and a whoosh of rage and flame and ended with two urns filled with ashes.
The next day, I had to wait until after breakfast and an inane arts and crafts class that reminded me painfully of Ayaz to be left alone in my room. First, I tried individual squares again, making sure yesterday’s progress wasn’t a fluke. Next, I practiced with the same-sized squares, but moved further away. I needed to understand how close I needed to stand to start a fire. I leaned against the shower stall, watching the orange flame flicker and go out as the fire consumed its fuel. How far away could I be and still summon a flame at will?
It turned out, I could control the fire from two feet inside my bedroom. Interesting.
By the end of the week, I was sending up toilet paper pyres from the farthest corner of the room, without even looking in the direction of the bathroom. I no longer had to have visual sight of my target. I just needed to visualize it and BOOM – up in smoke it went.
Inside me, the monster clawed at my skin, its fire burning bright and hot. I’d always had some sense of the monster, some inkling of a secret hidden inside me. But I’d been running from it my whole life, trying to escape its grasp. Now, for the first time, I’d deliberately dug it up and fed it on my rage.
My mother and I had always lived on the edge of my fire, moving one step ahead of the flames. Memories flooded me as I focused on my task – Age three; I lay on the couch, listening to my mother entertain one of her clients in the tiny bedroom we shared, while down the street his car burned out. Age six; a teacher told me I wasn’t allowed a second cookie, and her hair caught fire. Age ten; Mom scrimped and saved to buy us a car, but we had to sleep in it for two weeks after her deadbeat boyfriend kicked us out. One night she couldn’t afford dinner for us. I got angry. The engine exploded. We were lucky to escape with our lives. The car wasn’t so lucky.
I spent my whole life trying to suppress the fire, knowing that with my anger came a power that would destroy everything good that came our way. I’d never tried to test the limits of what I could do. I didn’t even know if therewasa limit.
Mom never mentioned the fires to me. We just didn’t talk about them. She kept everything light and fluffy – trying to build a fantasy world for me that would distract me from my empty stomach and the bruises on her arms from her clients. But sometimes… I’d catch her watching me with wary eyes, like she suspected me. Like she didn’t know me. I never told Dante – I never had to, because when I was around him I never felt like burning anything to the ground. He made everything better.
Until I destroyed him, too.
I’d already destroyed all that was good in my life. But was I, Hazel Waite, burner of things, destroyer of worlds, powerful enough to burn an entity from across space and time? It was possible, but I needed to know for certain.
I needed to test my fire on something bigger. I needed to know how powerful I was. And I needed to knowsoon. The clock was ticking – just four days left until I was rushed off to have my brain sucked out through my nose.
During breakfast, I started a grease fire in the kitchen that sent billows of smoke over the cafeteria and caused us to be evacuated into the garden. Then, I made Dr. Peaslee’s car battery explode, taking out the two cars parked either side of him in the parking lot.
Bigger. Bigger.
The more I burned, the more the flames crackled beneath my skin – a deep rage that had been bubbling for decades, for longer than I’d been at the mercy of Ms. West and Miskatonic Prep.
I wanted to burn it all.
I would have my chance.
The next afternoon, three days before I went under the knife (and probably never came back) our schedule allowed for an hour outside. Nurses would escort us around the grounds or get us involved in games of tetherball or other inane things. I was assigned to Nurse Craig, who usually opted to hand out scraps of bread for patients to throw at the apoplectic-looking ducks while she snuck away for a cigarette. Or possibly to write a romance novel. No one had ever thought to ask.
I crumbled my bread through my fingers while I watched Nurse Craig back away toward the path, hiding behind a topiary to light up her cigarette. A pile of dead leaves had been swept into the corner of the path by the gardeners.
Ten feet away, Nurse Craig rolled her head back in ecstasy, the smoke dangling from her fingers.
I turned back to the ducks. The last of my bread grew hot in my hand, the edges blackening as the heat seeped through my skin. I dropped it in the water with a splash as I flicked my hand out and aimed the flare of heat behind me. I kept walking around the lake, feigning delight as the ducks dipped and dived for the bread (clearly the institution hadn’t got the memo that bread wasn’t healthy for a duck’s digestive system) andthinkingthe fire into being.
A whiff of burning caught my nostrils.
I didn’t turn around until the commotion started. The hiss of a hose dousing the flames. The cries of the inmates, startled by orange flames leaping from the leaves. The topiary roared, as if possessed, before the flames consumed the last of their living nourishment.
“Nurse Craig, how could you be so careless?” Nurse Waterford shouted as she sprayed water over the ruined topiary. “You can’t smoke outside near the leaves.”
“But I wasn’t anywhere near the leaves,” Nurse Craig shot back. “I don’t see how any ash could have possibly reached that pile.”
