He shrugged again. “It’s just good business. I’m tired of being everyone’s middleman, the dirty little secret they don’t want anyone to know about. I learned a long time ago that you’re either on top or you’re nothing.”

Well, I couldn’t argue with that, since I was currently shackled to a chair.

“Although it’s not just power that I’m after,” Benson continued. “It’s the elementals’ reaction to Burn that truly fascinates me. Like I said, there’s one small component that I’m missing from the formula, and I think it’s the key to how the drug affects elementals.”

“So how I am going to help you with your little theory?” I sniped.

“I’ve tested it on all sorts of elementals. Air, Fire, Ice, and Stone. But I haven’t had the opportunity to test it on someone who is gifted in more than one element, like you’re rumored to be, Gin.”

Benson kept his gaze locked on my face, gauging my reaction to his words and the fact that he wanted to make me his own human guinea pig. A cold tendril of fear curled up in the bottom of my stomach. My face stayed frozen, but my heart gave me away.

Beep-beep-beep. Beep-beep-beep.

The machine monitoring my pulse picked up speed as my heart thumped in time to my growing worry.

Benson cocked his head to the side. His eyes were still on my face, but once again, I got the sense that he wasn’t looking at me so much as he was peering inside me. The faintest sensation swept over my body, one of invisible sandpaper sliding across my skin. I knew what it really was: the phantom teeth of Benson’s Air magic, ready to tear into my body and rip out my emotions for him to feast on one terrified breath at a time.

It disgusted me.

Not too long ago, a vampire named Randall Dekes had bitten me, sinking his fangs into my body over and over again. That had been a brutal, vicious attack, but at least it had been head-on. Benson’s magic was far more sinister than that. The sort of sneak attack you wouldn’t even realize had started until he’d sucked away half your soul and was licking his chops in anticipation of dining on the rest.

Beep-beep-beep. Beep-beep-beep.

My heart continued to pick up speed, but instead of giving into my fear, anger, and disgust, I forced myself to take slow, deep breaths and remain calm. No way was I giving Benson any more ammunition in his deranged game of doctor. I wondered how many other people he’d done this to. How many people he’d shackled to this chair. How many of their emotions he’d snacked on while conducting his twisted experiments. I made a silent promise to myself that I was going to be the last one, that I was going to find some way to end him—even if it killed me.

Benson’s lips puckered, his eyes focused, and the horrid feeling of that invisible sandpaper sliding across my skin vanished. Apparently, I’d annoyed him by not giving into my fear. Well, too damn bad.

“Silvio,” he said. “Please retrieve the latest sample for me.”

Silvio walked out of my line of sight. The door on one of the refrigerators snicked open, and I heard him rustling around inside. A few seconds later, he came back over to his boss and held out a plastic bag.

A single pill lay inside.

Benson took the bag from him, opened it, and carefully drew out the drug. “I just got this in this morning. It’s a new and improved formula that my supplier came up with. One that is supposedly ten times more potent than what my men have been distributing.”

He held it up between his fingers so that I could look at it.

Unlike the red ones that I’d seen before, this pill was a vivid green, although it still featured the same crown-and-flame rune as the others. It looked so innocent, almost like a breath mint he was about to pop into his mouth, but it was anything but. I’d seen Benson’s drug den, and I had no doubt that taking even just that one small pill would f**k me up in the worst way possible.

“Drugs have always fascinated me,” Benson said, staring at the pill, a dreamy expression on his pasty face. “No, that’s not quite right. People’s reactions to drugs have always fascinated me. You can give a dozen people the same drug, the exact same chemical formula in the exact same dosage, and you will most likely get a dozen different reactions. Oh, the majority of them will be more or less the same, but there are always one or two that surprise you.”

He waited, as if he expected me to chime in. When I didn’t, he continued with his musings.

“Some people have violent allergic reactions, of course, which cut short any sort of pleasure they might experience from the drug,” he replied. “But what’s most interesting to me are the people who are so controlled, so buttoned-up, so tightly wound. The ones who have such a clamp on their emotions and never seem to show what they are really thinking or feeling. Drugs always seem to impact them the most—and in the most interesting ways.”

He tilted his head to the side again. “I’m most curious to know what losing control would do to you, Gin.”

I still didn’t respond, but apparently, Benson was tired of chatting. Before I could try to move, before I could bite his hand, before I could do anything, he leaned forward, pried open my mouth, and shoved the pill inside.

I tried to spit it out, but he clamped his hand over my nose and mouth, cutting off my air. I could see the silent promise in his eyes. Take the pill, or he’d suffocate me right here, right now, in this chair, his experiment be damned.

Die now, or hope that I could survive what trip Burn might take me on.

No choice, really.

I swallowed the drug.

20

The pill had started to dissolve the second it hit my tongue, and my weak struggles with Benson had only hastened the absorption process. He removed his hand from my nose and mouth, and I barely had time to suck down a breath before Burn was in my system.

Bria and Xavier had warned me about the drug’s powerful effects, but it was quite another thing to experience them firsthand. The rest of the limp, languid fog from the sedative Silvio had given me immediately vanished. A foul, bitter, almost smoky taste filled my mouth, and I could almost feel the pill sliding down my throat, like I’d swallowed a glowing ember, one that grew hotter and hotter the farther it dropped down my throat.

Then it hit my stomach, and the world erupted into flames.

The fire exploded low in my belly, dozens of hot, hungry little tendrils crawling outward from the epicenter like spiders scurrying through my insides, dragging burning threads of silk along behind them and weaving together a tight, inescapable web of flaming destruction. I stared down at my stomach, almost expecting the spiders to come surging up out of my belly button and rip through the thin fabric of the hospital gown, stringing their stinging silk over the outside of my body as well as the inside. Sweat streamed down my forehead, the salt of it irritating my eyes, but that pain was small compared with what the drug was doing to me.

Burning, burning me alive, from the inside out.

I bucked and heaved and thrashed in the chair, so hard that the restraints bruised my neck, wrists, and ankles, but I couldn’t break free of the cuffs. Even if I could have, I still couldn’t have escaped the drug and what it was doing to me. All too soon, I had exhausted what little strength I had, and I sagged against the chair, gasping for air, even though every breath I took only seemed to add more fuel to the fire roaring through my veins.

While I’d been thrashing around, Benson had pulled a chair right up beside mine, his pen and pad in hand, observing my pitiful struggles. He leaned forward, his excited breath brushing against my face, as hot and eager as the drug coursing through my system.

Benson’s nostrils quivered as he sniffed my emotions again. “Finally,” he murmured. “Fear.”

He looked at the watch on his wrist, scrawled something on his pad, and then raised his eyes to mine again. “Tell me, Gin,” he cooed. “We’re five minutes into our experiment. What does it feel like? All of those sweet, sweet chemicals pumping through your body. Shooting straight into your heart, circling through your brain, and cycling back out again. What do they feel like, interacting with your own magic, your own elemental power? Hmm?”

“It . . . burns . . .” That was all I could rasp out.

I don’t know how long I sagged in the chair, just waiting and waiting for the horrible burning sensation to leave my body. But instead of lessening, it only intensified, and then—suddenly—from one blink to the next—

I was flying.

That was the only way to describe the feeling. My body felt completely weightless, and I was soaring through the sky, with thick white clouds all around me. The lab, Benson, Silvio, they all fell away, and all I could see, hear, and smell was the blue, blue sky—the one that always reminded me of fall, Fletcher, and my murdered family.

I was so delighted that I laughed.

I’d spent so much of my life learning how to control my emotions, always pushing aside my pain, fear, and anxiety, especially these past few months with everyone gunning for me. But right now, I didn’t have any worries. No cares, no complaints, no concerns of any kind. It was just me and the clouds drifting through the sky.

And I loved it, every single second of it.

But even more than that, I felt so strong in that moment. Powerful. Invincible. Unstoppable. Like I could zoom up through the clouds into the heavens above, wrap my fist around a star, and snuff it out. Smash my way through the moon with my bare hands. Eliminate everything and everyone who dared to displease me.

I didn’t need Bria or Finn or Owen or any of the rest of my friends and family. I was better than the whole lot of them, all weak, pitiful, and small. Especially Bria, always worrying about doing things the right way. Always nattering on and on and on about the law and justice, instead of just doing what needed to be done, like I always did. I didn’t need Bria and her rules and regulations and her guilt about my being an assassin. Not anymore. I didn’t need her hanging around, the albatross she was around my neck, such a bothersome burden.

All I needed was this—this feeling, this power, this drug.

All I needed was Burn.

“Only fifteen minutes in, and she’s in the euphoria stage already,” I heard Benson murmur. “She’s reacting quicker to the drug than anyone before. Amazing.”

“Isn’t it?” Silvio’s tone was as dry as Benson’s was excited.

Their voices penetrated my dizzying rush, making me frown and look at the clouds clustered around me. The longer I stared at them, the more I realized that something was wrong. The puffy white edges started to darken and smoke, their edges singed like marshmallows that had been held over a campfire too long. Melting, melting everywhere . . .

And I started to fall.

In an instant, I wasn’t strong anymore. Not powerful, not unstoppable, and certainly not invincible. No, I was the one who was weak, pitiful, and small.

My body grew hotter and hotter, even as the ground rushed up to meet me. But right before my impact, the brown earth dissolved into a pit of roaring green flames. I screamed, even though there was nothing I could do to keep from plummeting straight into the heart of that raging fire.

I sucked down another breath to scream, and I snapped back to reality. To the lab and the chair and Benson watching me, the rat in his cage.

“Twenty-five minutes in, and out of the euphoria stage already. Most fascinating indeed.”

He glanced at his watch and scribbled another note on that damn pad of his.

But my anger at the vamp and his sick torture of me was quickly replaced by more pain, as Burn continued to rage through my body. The poison pulsed through every single part of me. I stared down at my arms, and I swear that I could actually see those spiders crawling around underneath my skin, their fat bellies swollen with bubbling green lava and their eyes flashing the same wicked color as they drew their matching strings of silk along behind them. The burning threads scorched every single part of me that they touched, wrapping around me tighter and tighter until I thought my whole body would spontaneously combust.

I started screaming then, and I didn’t stop.

I couldn’t stop.

Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep.

Mixed in with my screams, the monitors continued to chirp out my heartbeat, the sound and tempo accelerating like a car engine.

“Silvio,” Benson said, his voice seeming small and far away. “Check her vitals. I’m going to get some adrenaline. At the rate the drug is cycling through her body, the crash might kill her. And I’d hate to lose such an interesting test subject.”

Test subject? I snarled at the idea that he wanted to do this to me again and again, although the sound was lost amid my screams and the high-pitched squealing of the monitors.

I was dimly aware of Benson sliding his chair away from mine, getting to his feet, and hurrying into the back of the lab. Then Silvio was leaning over me, pressing his fingers into the pulse point on my right wrist. The cool, soft touch of his hand made me sigh, although my relief was short-lived, as another wave of fire roared through my veins.

“Gin,” Silvio whispered in my ear. “You’re reacting badly to the drug. I think it has some sort of elemental magic in it. That’s the ingredient that I think Benson is missing. If that’s true, then whatever kind of magic it is, your own power doesn’t like it. So you have to fight it. You have to fight the magic, or it will kill you. Do you understand?”

Silvio’s face swam in front of my eyes, his bronze skin melting at the edges, just like the marshmallow clouds had. But I sucked in a breath and forced myself to concentrate, to focus, until his features solidified.

“Gin?” he whispered again, his tone more urgent than before. “Do you understand?”

I stared into his eyes, his gray eyes that were almost the same color as mine, as my power, as my magic.