A Kiss of Fire (A Kiss of Magic #2)(107)

Screaming, she realized, was too ineffective a response. It didn’t alert anyone to anything except that there was a woman somewhere screaming her bloody head off. So she began to scream words.

“Traitor! The traitor Vich is in the temple! Traitor! The traitor Vich is in the temple!”

A man came out of nowhere and grabbed for her. She didn’t know whom he was with until he tried to slap a hand over her mouth. The minute he did that she generated a pulse of pure heat and drove it into the core of him. It literally cooked the man from the inside out. He had no chance to even scream.

She continued yelling as she tore into the main body of the temple. To her credit, Mariah kept up with her. Ariana paused in one of the cross halls and tried to think of what would be the next best course of action. She could go to the stables, get a horse…ride hard away.

Vich would only chase her down. There really was only one thing she could do. She had to find Vich and take him out herself. It was the only way. Once their leader was gone his men would have no direction. No one to lead them. That meant she had to find him. And if she had guessed right then he would be with Fatima.

“Mariah, go find a place to hide. Somewhere dark and small. Quickly!”

Mariah nodded and, bless her, didn’t hesitate. She ran off and left Ariana to her own devices. Ariana turned toward Fatima’s quarters and came around the corner just in time to see Vich yanking his mother out into the hallway by her arm. He looked up and saw her.

“You! I’m going to kill you, you little—“

Ariana did not wait for him to finish the statement. She knew Vich was a Death Singer shaman. If he wanted someone to enter the afterlife all he had to do was focus long enough and hard enough. She didn’t give him the opportunity. She ran forward, barreling into him, wrenching him apart from Fatima and sending him sprawling back into his contingent of guards. She generated fire and heat from her hands and flung it all out toward Vich and his guards. They all caught fire, including herself. Her nightgown went up in flames, but she ignored it. The fire wouldn’t burn her. She was impervious to it.

She felt Vich’s hand close around her arm. He was screaming in pain, dragging her down as if he could make her burn with him.

He could not.

She wrenched free of him then shucked off her nightgown. She quickly turned to Fatima. Fatima was reaching out toward her dying son, her expression horrified and grief-stricken.

“You must come away. The temple is burning,” she said to her as firmly as possible without yelling at her. Flame was climbing up the hallway walls. The temple was probably on fire in the other wing she had just come from as well. She realized then that she had told Mariah to hide. To hide in a burning building.

The screaming of the men she had set on fire had come to a halt. Their bodies were burning like cordwood, lying in a jumbled stack of melting flesh. Vich, she realized, was dead. But the threat was not over. Not as long as some of his men were still threaded throughout the temple. And there was no way of knowing who was Vich’s men and who were Sin’s. Vich’s men would not know Vich was dead. Not unless she told them…and why would they believe her? Plus, she didn’t plan on sticking around long enough to exchange words with them.

“We need to get to the troop barracks and alert them to the invasion of Vich’s men into the temple and try to arrange fire brigades before the temple burns to the ground with everyone inside! Fatima, please you must come!”

This last finally got through to the older woman. She had fallen to the floor in the scuffle, but now she got to her feet, her chin raised high as though she were walking into a grand ballroom and not standing in a hall with the smell of her burned son thick in her nostrils. She followed Ariana out of the building and into the cold, stark night. It did not matter to her that she was naked for everyone to see. What mattered to her was Mariah and all of the other innocent people in danger of burning to death because of the fires she had set. She could not bear any deaths on her conscience. Once Fatima was safe with the watch commander, Ariana ran back into the burning building. The antithesis of her power was to take flame away from where it burned, so if she could act quickly enough she could literally snatch the flame away from its fuel. But it took a lot of energy to take flame into herself like that and there was an element of danger to it too. It heated her core body temperature like a fever, burning her up from the inside. It could be deadly to her if she did not use the ability with moderation and there was no telling what it would do to her unborn child.

She started in the hall to Fatima’s rooms. She ignored the men pushing her around to get water back and forth to the fire. Some even throwing sand on the fire to smother it, others beating at it with their jackets. She began to focus on the flame, on drawing it back into herself, and then slowly a line of fire leading from the burning building to the center of her body formed. She began to devour the flames, the fire dousing, no longer growing. Her body began to heat up, making her break a sweat. She panted hard for breath. There was so much of it…so much flame. It had spread to the new timbers with alarming ease. The flames subsided though, until all that was left were little patches of cinder and ash.

Men stood still suddenly, the pandemonium of their shouts and actions coming to a halt. They all turned to look at her. One of them leapt to her side, shrugging out of his coat and wrapping her naked body up in it.

“Come my lady…come away.”