Ember Born

Chapter 14: Into The Fire

Jade stared at the burning house.

Smoke filled the sky. Flames pushed through the windows, growing larger with every second.

Fifteen minutes. Tyler didn't have fifteen minutes.

Helen tightened her grip on his arm. "Jade, what are you thinking?"

He looked down at his hands. They were just hands. His hands.

But they were stronger than they should have been. Faster than they should have been. And somehow, they could hold fire without being burned.

Jade looked back at the house.

Then he stepped forward.

"Jade!" Helen shouted.

He stopped for only a second.

"I have to get him."

"You can't go in there!"

Jade looked at the flames again.

Maybe she was right.

Maybe he couldn't do it.

Maybe whatever was inside that fire was stronger than he was.

But Tyler was still in there.

And Jade had never been given a choice about what his powers were for.

The flame had shown him the future.

Now it was giving him a chance to change it.

Jade took another step toward the burning house.

Then he ran.

He didn't get more than a few steps before he heard his name being shouted from behind him.

"Jade!"

He turned. Daniel and Mary were pushing through the crowd, both of them out of breath, having sprinted the moment a neighbor called to tell them their son was standing in front of a burning house.

"Jade, get back!" Daniel shouted, grabbing for his arm. "That house could come down any second, you are not going in there!"

"Tyler's still inside," Jade said. "Nobody else can get to him. The fire trucks are still ten minutes out."

"Then we wait for the fire trucks," Mary said, her voice shaking with fear. "Jade, please, you're not a firefighter, you don't know what you're doing—"

"I'm not normal, Mom," Jade said, and something in his voice made both of his parents go still. "I never have been. You know that. You've known that for years."

Mary's eyes filled with tears. "Jade—"

"I can do this," Jade said. "I have to."

Daniel's grip on his arm tightened. "If you go in there and something happens to you—"

"If I don't go, something happens to Tyler," Jade said. "I can't just stand here and let that happen. Not when I might be able to stop it."

For a long moment, nobody moved. Daniel looked at his son, really looked at him, at the calm certainty in his eyes that didn't match a normal sixteen-year-old standing in front of a burning building.

Slowly, his grip loosened.

"Be careful," Daniel said quietly. "Please."

Mary reached out and squeezed Jade's hand once, tears streaming down her face, unable to say anything else.

Jade nodded at both of them. Then he turned, and ran straight toward the fire.

Heat slammed into him the moment he reached the front door, thick and heavy, the kind of heat that should have stopped him in his tracks. It didn't. He pushed through it, feeling the flame's strange gift settle over his skin like an invisible shield, the fire l*****g close around him but never quite touching him the way it should have.

Inside, smoke filled the hallway, thick and choking. Jade dropped low, remembering something he'd learned in a school safety video years ago, and crawled forward, calling out as loud as he could.

"Tyler! Tyler, where are you?"

A faint, coughing voice answered from somewhere down the hall. "In here! I'm stuck!"

Jade followed the sound to a bedroom door, flames already crawling up one side of the frame. He grabbed the handle; it was hot enough that it should have burned straight through his palm. It didn't. He pulled the door open and found Tyler curled on the floor near the window, coughing hard, his eyes red and streaming from the smoke.

"Jade?" Tyler croaked, disbelief cutting through his panic. "What are you, how did you—"

"Talk later," Jade said, hauling him up by the arm. "We need to move, now."

He half carried, half dragged Tyler back through the smoke-filled hallway, moving faster than should have been possible while still holding another person's weight. The heat pressed in harder the closer they got to the front door, the fire spreading fast now, eating through wood and furniture with a low, hungry roar.

They burst out through the front door together, Tyler collapsing onto the front lawn, gasping for clean air. The crowd erupted into shouts of relief, several neighbors rushing forward to help pull Tyler further away from the house.

Jade stumbled back himself, coughing hard, his lungs burning despite everything else that hadn't. Mary reached him first, wrapping her arms around him tightly, sobbing with relief.

"You did it," she said. "You actually did it."

But Jade's relief lasted only a second.

Because that's when he smelled it, faint at first, then stronger. Gas.

"Everybody back!" Jade shouted, pushing away from his mother, his heart suddenly pounding for a completely different reason. "Get back, now! Something's wrong!"

Later, investigators would explain that a gas line running beneath the kitchen had been slowly leaking for days before the fire even started. The small kitchen fire, the one that had first caught the curtains and spread up the wall, had only been the beginning. As the flames worked their way through the house, they'd finally reached the leaking gas line itself.

Jade didn't know any of that yet. All he knew, in that moment, was a feeling in his gut, sharp and certain, the same kind of feeling that had once told him about a swing set chain years ago, and about a bomb hidden under his father's car.

"Move!" he shouted again, grabbing Tyler under one arm and shoving Helen and his parents further back with the other, using strength no ordinary teenager should have had.

The house exploded a second later.

The blast knocked several people off their feet, throwing debris and thick black smoke high into the air. Windows shattered up and down the street. For a moment, everything was noise and chaos, screaming, coughing, the roar of fire suddenly doubling in size.

When the dust settled, everyone was, miraculously, alive. Jade had pushed the group back just far enough, just in time.

But now, standing in the middle of the street, soot-covered and breathing hard, surrounded by dozens of neighbors who had just watched him run into a burning building and pull someone out with his bare hands, Jade realized there was no explaining any of it away anymore.

Someone in the crowd had caught part of it on their phone, Jade running faster than a normal person should be able to, Jade pulling open a door that should have burned his hand off, Jade shouting a warning about the gas leak seconds before it happened.

Phones were already out, some recording, some already posting what they'd seen online.

Whispers moved through the crowd. "Did you see that?" "How did he do that?" "That's not normal, that's not possible."

Jade stood there, chest heaving, Tyler safely wrapped in a blanket a few feet away, his parents' hands resting protectively on his shoulders, and understood, with a sinking feeling in his stomach, that the secret he'd guarded his whole life had just ended, right here, in the middle of his own neighborhood street.

There was no taking it back now.

The world had just found out that Jade wasn't like everyone else.

And somewhere, thousands of miles away, something ancient and dangerous was about to feel that truth too.