Fire. Fire. Fire. Fear. Fear. Fire. Fire. Fire, they whispered. The winter-dormant trees and grasses that had survived the salamanders came aware. Their old enemy was among them. Fire, the destroyer, attacking. Fear raced through the earth.
A naked Justin Tolliver—Devin—trailed after the young salamanders. I caught a glimpse as he raced through flames and wasn’t burned. Where his bare feet touched the ground, new flames shot up. He was hunting me. I dashed around the front of the house. The cool air shut off the extraordinary heat and noise, though cold air whistled past me, feeding the fire. Overhead, I saw a flash of light, but when I looked up, Soul was gone. She reappeared, and dove at the pool area, blasting light. JoJo was yelling about fire departments and Tandy and getting my white ass back to the truck. I peeked out from the brick wall.
Devin was striding toward me. He threw out his hands. Fire, orange and soot-dark, shot at me. A spotted leopard leaped in front of the fire.
“Occam!” I shouted. “No!”
The fireball hit him.
The werecat screamed. Fell.
Fury leaped inside me. Leaves burst from my fingertips.
From the trees, Rick LaFleur, in black leopard form, hurtled, dropped down, landing just behind the pyro. He leaped and hit the salamander with front and back feet. They went down, landing hard. Rick bit down on Devin’s neck and he shook the creature like prey.
Blue blood splattered. The thing on the earth rolled, knocking Rick away. Blasted Rick with fire. The werecat screamed and fell, silent.
Knowingly or not, he had given me salamander blood. A great deal of the blue blood. Bloodlust merged with the fury. Needing.
I dropped and shoved my hands into the earth. Breaking nails, digging deep. I caught the droplets of blue blood as they landed. My gift. My curse. I caught the blood and caught the creature it came from. It wasn’t human. Its blood was wrong. But I hungered. I wanted.
The craving for that strange metallic blood roared up in me like the wildfire that consumed the wood. The soil sucked at the blood, the awareness of the trees awakening, turning to the fire but seeking me, ready, impatient. A quiver of power zapped through the trees across the road and through me. I claimed the land with the strange blue blood. The forest was awake and full of fury, seething with need, with blood-hunger, the strange sour metallic blood of the pyro creature. The salamander was mine.
This was my magic, my dark power. To take the life of anyone who bled onto land I claimed as my own. My gift—to feed that life to the woods. The trees pulsed through me. The heat of the fire scorched me as it rounded the corner of the house. Evil air that breathed and burned and killed. Killed Occam. Killed Rick. Killed Occam! I screamed in fury and grief.
I called to the blue blood on the earth, pulling on it, on the life it represented, drawing the burning life force to me, gathering it as if fire webbed between my fingers, buried that life in the dirt. I felt Devin writhing on the ground, his life force disentangling from his body, shuddering through the ground. My magic caught it, pulling it to me and across my flesh, an embrace, a vow, and a threat, burning and scorching and killing.
I shoved Devin’s life away from me, deep underground, dismantling it as I worked, ripping, tearing. The process was slow and purposeful as I fed him to the earth, my mind focused. Aboveground, I burned. The pain my body was experiencing, I ignored. I was on fire, but I couldn’t care. I pulled other salamanders to me, breaking them, bleeding the adults and the tadpoles into the earth. Pulling each body to pieces, each bone and muscle and tendon. Undoing each cell. The life force, alien, strange, fed the land. The flames in the dark slid below me, scratching at me as they went, screaming deep into the dark beneath. Feeding them deeper.
My awareness spread out, to the trees and grasses and shrubs all around. I claimed them, feeding the creatures of fire into them, awakening them, giving them life. What was left of the blue-blooded things, I pushed all deep. Deep. Into the magma I had called to the surface by accident. The salamanders screamed, reached back. They fought. All of them in a single concerted assault. But the magma and the earth wanted the heat that was salamander. Salamanders. All of them. All that rich, strong, potent blue blood and alien life. I fed them to the earth. I fed them to avenge Occam. To avenge his death. I fed and fed. And I learned how feeding truly worked. It was a gift of myself, as much as a sacrifice of blood.
When the salamanders were gone, I reached back to Soulwood and found the walled-off prison that hid and protected Brother Ephraim. I fashioned a blue spear out of the remaining life force of the salamanders and I thrust it into the cell that hid and protected and imprisoned Ephraim. Pointed and sharp, edged and spiked, like a two-edged sword, it slid through the cell wall. The Bible verse came back at me as I pulled back and rammed the pointed edge again into the protective wall. For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
That was what I needed. Something that would divide Ephraim’s soul and spirit and joints and marrow. I hadn’t prayed to God very often, not since I’d killed the first man on Soulwood. Not really. Not with need. But now . . . Now I was avenger and death come calling, and I refashioned the spear into a sword of light and heat. I shouted to the heavens, “Death to Ephraim for the evils of his heart! I claim him for the earth! Death! Death! Until nothing is left for heaven or hell!”
Ephraim gathered the scarlet and black energies into himself. The snakelike power whipped and whirled and began to form a point, a weapon.
The blade of vengeance sliced back and forth through the walls of Brother Ephraim’s prison. I stabbed and cut and ripped into the cavern. Into his snake-energies. Ephraim tried to resist, tried to pull power from the earth, from the church and the tree that shared my genetics. But the sword of vengeance was faster and hotter. Heated by the earth and by the magma that was mine to call. And I sliced into the foul old man’s soul, cutting, cutting, dissolving each sliver of life into separate components—individual thoughts, needs, hopes, memories—and fed them to the heart of the world. This time I didn’t stop too soon. This time I gave myself as I tore and cut and ripped and fed, fed, fed Brother Ephraim to the land until there was nothing left.