The Girl in the Box 02 - Untouched by Robert J. Crane Page A

nose, in my eyes, in my throat and it was threatening to make me gag, cry or throw up. Maybe some combination of the three. The heat was steadily getting weaker until I ran into something and fire burst around me.
    I fell on my backside, Sessions still in my arms. I looked up and saw the same eyes I’d seen only a day before, behind the glass of a containment cell as Clary carried it away from me.
    Gavrikov.
    I drew a sharp breath as I looked at him. He was wreathed in flame from head to toe, not an inch of flesh visible. The fire stood out, reaching a few inches from his arms, his head, from everywhere. His eyes were something else entirely, just a shadow and a shape, with no hint of a pupil or an iris, as though they were nothing but spheres surrounded by a living, breathing fire.
    He drew up in front of me and I remembered what Zack had said about him, about his power to control flame; he could start an inferno right here with me at the heart and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it other than chuck a charred lab rat at him and run. And that was iffy.
    He stared down at me with those burning, empty eyes and raised his hand. I scooted Dr. Sessions off me, laid him on the snow with only a murmur of pain from him and stood, wary and ready to dodge, for whatever that might have been worth. I stared at him, he stared back at me.
    “Thank you,” he said, his voice no more than a whisper. “Thank you.” I looked at him, confused but still tense. I braced for whatever he might do. He seemed as though he might take another step, lifting a leg off the ground, but instead his other leg joined him and he hovered a few feet above me. “Your kindness will not go unrepaid.”
    I felt a clutch of unnerving suspicion inside, but before I could question him, he shot into the sky in a blur, and he was gone.
    Dr. Perugini was beside me in the next moment, bending low over the body of Dr. Sessions, barking commands to others around her. I turned to look at him and realized that his flesh was charred, hideous. His lab coat was burned perversely, his glasses fused into his flesh. His clothing was blackened, what was left of it. I couldn’t see a single place where he wasn’t burned, and I wondered how he could still be alive.
    “Sienna,” Ariadne cut through the chaos and I realized with a shock that she was wearing a robe, a red one, silken and utterly out of character for what I would have suspected of her. “What did you see? What did he say to you?”
    I couldn’t take my eyes off Dr. Sessions. “I don’t know,” I lied, far too nimbly. “Is...is he going to be okay?”
    “Does he LOOK like he’s going to be okay?” Dr. Perugini nearly screamed the reply, her distress increasing the potency of her accent. “I need...” Her head spun around until it alighted on Kat Forrest, who was standing in a nearby knot of metas in nothing but a tank top and briefs. “You.”
    The delicate, gushing girl who I had met earlier in the cafeteria stepped forward, tentative. She shook from the cold, and her breath came out in great clouds as she walked in halting steps toward where Dr. Perugini waited for her. “He doesn’t have all night!” Perugini snapped and Kat quickened her pace, dropping to her knees in the snow. She reached out, her hands curled up tight to ward against the cold. She unfurled them, bringing them to Sessions’ face. I may have imagined it, but it seemed like the snow was melting around her legs.
    Her hands were on his face, the soft light of the overhead lamps illuminating the nighttime scene. He moaned when she first brushed his cheek, then again when her fingers anchored around his cheeks. The charred and blackened flesh seemed to grow redder around where her hands rested and Sessions grunted in pain. Then he started to scream.
    I made a move forward, shrugging off Ariadne as she grasped at me. I felt a hand land on my shoulder and I started to turn and attack, but as I moved to do so, the hands released