CHAPTER 17

The propellerheads answered my call on the first ring as Afu sped down the highway toward headquarters. It didn’t take much to convince them Yolanda had been attacked. The drawback was protocol made them gather every scientist inside the watch room and lock it down with impenetrable titanium alloy doors.

Every smoke eater crew was out of the building. The propellerhead I spoke to said a behemoth emerged outside of Cleveland and everybody had gone, including Brannigan and Naveena – which answered the question of why neither of them had answered their holoreaders.

When Afu and I pulled up outside of headquarters, the whole building looked dark, quiet, as if nothing was amiss, a regular Saturday night out in the ashes.

“What do you think Patrice is going to do with that key card?” Afu asked as we raced up the front steps.

“I hope we find her before we find that out.”

A propellerhead messaged me through the holoreader, saying they detected a heat signature on the roof. I told Afu to go put on his power suit while I made my way to the roof.

“Armor?” He opened HQ’s front door and let me through. “It’s just Patrice we’re talking about, right?”

“Call it a hunch,” I said. “Grab my helmet while you’re at it.”

He nodded and jogged off toward the Slayer bay.

The only way to the roof was through a laddered hatch on the top floor, at the end of a hallway. From what I’d seen on the video feed, Patrice had barely been able to walk. How she could have gotten onto the roof was beyond me, but then again, it was even more fucked up of an idea that Patrice would attack anything that didn’t have scales or ghostly tatters. I’d never heard of a fever making people go rabid. Even if that was a possibility, I’d think Patrice would be too sick to raise an arm, let alone wrap it around Yolanda’s throat.

I found the ladder to the roof and took a second to breathe before climbing. It had been a long night. My armored feet and hands clanked against each rung sounding like explosions in the thick quiet of the building.

When I got to the door hatch, I raised it slowly with one hand and scanned the roof like a periscope. Patrice stood at the center of the roof with her back to me, head raised to the night sky, and her hands outstretched as if she’d recently taken up occult yoga as a hobby. Climbing onto the roof, I didn’t see a pentagram drawn around her, but a jar of ashes rested between her feet.

“Patrice,” I said, barely above a whisper. “What are you doing with that jar?”

She turned, only her head at first – and I seriously wondered if the damn thing would do a full 360 – but then her body followed and we faced each other, the jar of phoenix ashes now behind her.

“It’s much cooler up here,” she said. Her voice was calm, relaxed, as if she didn’t have a care in the world.

“I’m sure you’re burning up pretty bad,” I said, daring a step closer. “Maybe the propellerheads can get something to keep you cool until your fever breaks.”

“This isn’t a fever.” She shook her head and smiled. It was creepy as fuck. I’d never seen a pain-filled smile until then.

“Whatever it is–”

“It’s in my head!” Her nostrils and eyes expanded as she touched her temples.

I raised my hands, palms toward her. “Okay. We’re here to help you, no matter what’s going on.”

“None of you can help me.” She was crying now.

“I want to try. You attacked Yolanda. I don’t think you’re in your right mind. Why did you take that key card? Why do you have those ashes? How did you even know where they were hidden?”

“I see that fucking bird, Cap. The phoenix. It’s like the fire is running through my veins. I know I sound crazy, but it’s like… it’s like it possessed me, talking to me, even though I can’t understand those damn squawks. I know what it wants. I had to get its ashes. I had to bring them up here.”

This was all my fault. Those ashes had poisoned her. She was hallucinating.

“Just come with me.” I stepped closer. “The phoenix is dead.”

I didn’t believe my own words as they came out. Something was influencing my driver, and she was too strong to let a microorganism pull her strings. The ashes in the jar glowed brighter, throbbing and pressing against the glass. They wanted out. It didn’t make any sense, but I couldn’t let Patrice open that jar. I had to try talking her down. If that didn’t work, I’d have to tackle her, drag her kicking and screaming back to the sick lab.

Moving faster than I would have expected her to, Patrice bent over and lifted the glowing jar above her head. “I know what I have to do to end the pain. It hurts, T. It hurts so fucking much.”

“Whatever you think you have to do,” I said. “I promise you, you don’t have to do anything. I don’t know what’s going on, but I want to. We have the best people in the state, maybe even the whole goddamned country that can make you better. Don’t give up, Patrice.”

“I’m not giving up.” Her face softened. She swallowed, even though her grimace made it look like razor blades were traveling down her throat. “I’m moving on.”

She smashed the jar against the roof floor.

“No!” I shouted, but the glass had already shattered before I finished.

Flames erupted from the broken shards, engulfing Patrice so fully and quickly that I lost sight of her. The fire spread in a flash of hot neon yellow. There was no way I’d be able to withstand it once I came into contact, and I would burn for days if I did. I took off toward the edge of the roof and power jumped as the flames lashed at my boots.

My thrusters lowered me to the ground, but from that height, gravity moved me faster than I would have liked. I landed on my back, ejecting all the air from my lungs. Above me, the roof was a saffron inferno. I began to cry, but it was cut off by another wail. It wasn’t a wraith. And it wasn’t Patrice.

The shriek clawed through the air, nearly splitting my ears. Up from the burning roof flew a phoenix that wasted no time hanging around. Its fiery wings streaked across the night sky, still visible as a glowing blob on the other side of the thick clouds that began to gather.

Patrice.

Patrice was dead. It was all I could think about, and after the hell I’d already been through that night, there was no way I could go on. I had one job. All I had to do was keep my crew safe, and I couldn’t even do that. What a piece of shit I was. But something inside me morphed out of misery and into a fury that would have given the phoenix fire a run for its money.

I was madder than fuck and I had to do something about it.

So I charged back into headquarters and shouted for Afu until I’d found him in the hallway leading to the roof access.

“What happened?” He handed me my helmet. “I thought you would have already been on the roof, and then I heard that explosion and the shriek. It almost sounded like–”

“The phoenix is back,” I said. “Patrice is dead. I’m going to murder that fucking bird and this time it’s going to be permanent.”

My words hit Afu like a sledge hammer to the face. He fell against the wall. “What? Patrice… she died?”

“That bird got into her head somehow, Afu.” The urge to fall down and cry beside him was intense, but the roof was on fire and this wasn’t the time to get leaky. I made myself stand straighter, cleared my throat. “Get focused. We have to evacuate the propellerheads and get all of the backup Slayer apparatus outside.”

Afu wiped tears from his eyes with his armored fingers. “Lead the way, Cap.”

Downstairs, I pounded on the sealed watch room, shouting for the propellerheads to open up, that it was me, until they finally relented and raised the titanium walls. When I told them that the roof was on fire, they tried to throw out ideas for putting the fire out, but I dismissed that shit and told them to get behind the wheel of something in the bay and drive it far enough away not to get burned, making sure to grab any tech they wouldn’t want to see burned up.

Afu ran around the corner carrying Yolanda. “She’s still out of it, but I think she’ll be okay.”

Then we were all set.

It was a mass exodus of metal and tires. I headed straight for Jet 1, because if we had a flaming bird to take down, our plane would be the thing to do it. Trouble was, I didn’t have the first fucking clue on how to even drive the jet out of the bay. I snagged a propellerhead who said he knew enough to get it outside.

Sitting in the cockpit, I made sure to study everything the propellerhead did as we moved the massive plane outside, where glowing light and dancing shadows flickered on the asphalt. The fire had extended into most of the building.

Our headquarters had been fortified to resist dragon fire. This was not the same thing. The building never had a chance.

With all apparatus and staff evacuated, everyone watched Smoke Eater headquarters go down in flames. A few of us cried or cursed – most of it came from me and Afu, given how most of the propellerheads liked to keep a stoic disposition, but even a few of them showed more emotion and anguish than I’d ever seen from them before.

This was our second home, where we spent at least a third of our lives. Hell, most of the propellerheads never left. And now it was all gone.

The rising sun brought with it an armada of Slayer apparatus, a long line of them moving down the only path cutting through the wasteland ashes, back home from dealing with a three-headed dragon.

When Brannigan jumped out of his chief’s truck, he lost all sense of his position, nearly pulling his hair out and charging toward the ever-growing flames until the heat was too much for even a smoke eater to take.

He turned and looked at all of us who’d escaped. “What in the fuck did you idiots do?”