I immediately picked up two streams of thought.
…why I can’t fall sleep very easily nowadays
, came one thought.
…wish I could just see my children one more time
, came another.
My heart skipped a beat and my concentration nearly broke completely.
One of the people had to be Maria!
I quickly made my way back to the propane tank.
“Well?” Sanders insisted.
“Two people; both awake,” I said. “One has to be Maria.”
“What the---” one of the tactical team members began.
“Go,” Prescott ordered over the comm. “Repeat, we’re green.”
“Let’s do this,” one of the team members added.
The four-man entry team and Prescott immediately charged up to the front porch. Sanders and I rose to follow by the time a small battering ram slammed against the front door with a loud cracking sound as the door banged inward.
A split second later, a loud boom went off in the midst of a bright flash.
My arms flew up while envisioning an imaginary wall before me as a cloud of flame and shards of wood shot toward us.
I felt the impact of intense heat, but the wall of flames wrapped around Sanders and me and kept going.
“Shit!” Sanders screamed.
Then my mind felt like a giant hammer abruptly struck it, and I staggered but managed to remain standing. Something at my feet caught my attention and I looked down at the metal battering ram while simultaneously feeling Sanders’ body pressed against my back.
Crap! The metal ram must have blown back at us.
The scene around us was utter chaos. The comm was screaming with voices.
Maria! I had to get to Maria.
“Stay here!” I yelled and charged toward the ragged, gaping hole that used to be the front door and front façade of the porch.
I silently pleaded,
please don’t be dead. Please don’t be dead!
“Logan!” Sanders shouted from behind.
I hit the front porch at a dead run. Fortunately, I was able to negotiate a smoldering hole in the wooden porch by the light of flames around me. The interior of the house was a mess and spot fires had started along two walls in the living room.
I whipped out a flashlight that I’d procured from the command post and tried to open my mind again to any stray thoughts. It was difficult to concentrate between the barrage of voices in my earpiece, the roar of fire that continued to build inside the house, and the building scream of sirens outside.
…can’t get loose
, came a stray frantic thought.
…house is going up
, came another.
Great, I was hustling through yet another rapidly burning home.
God, I hated house fires.
I dodged past a small end table obstructing my path in the hallway.
…get to him before the tunnel
, came a vague thought.
Tunnel?
“Maria!” I yelled.
I was halfway down a narrow smoke-filled hallway when the dim silhouette of a tall, burly fellow rounded the corner. I quickly focused upon what appeared to be a shotgun that was leveled at me.
Shield
, I thought as I dropped my flashlight and lifted both of my palms up before me.
Two flashes came in quick succession, lighting the hallway, even as loud gunshots nearly deafened me.
My head felt like it was practically splitting open, but I still sensed, almost felt, the mass of pellets before me. They felt almost tactile somehow.
A flood of anger surged inside of me and I yelled while thrusting my palms away from me. The man made a gurgling noise as his body flew backward against a wall at the end of the hallway with a resounding thud. The telltale sound of pellets ricocheting against both the wall and through glass immediately followed.
I grabbed my flashlight and illuminated the smoky hallway to reveal the man’s bloody and bullet-riddled body slumped on the floor.
“Help!” came a scream from my left.
The wooden door to my left failed to yield when I tried twisting the door handle. I backed against the wall and swift-kicked at it instead.
The door flew open and banged against the interior wall, revealing Maria on a bed before me. She was fully clothed, but appeared to be frantically tugging against a chain that was attached to the floor.
“Maria!” I shouted, rushing into the dimly lit room.
Thank God, she was alive!
I heard a roar behind me and felt intense heat. I managed to slam the door shut just as flames shot into view before me.
I turned back to her, and her eyes were wild with fear as she practically leapt into my arms. It was hard to miss the bruises on her face and the nearly blackened eye indicating that someone had abused her; a fact that sent a pang of rage through me.
“Oh, Logan,” she half-wept. “Thank God you found me!”
“I know,” I said, silently thankful that holding out hope hadn’t been in vain. “We’ve gotta’ get you the hell outta’ here.”
I pulled away from her to see that a set of metal leg cuffs were fastened around her ankles and locked to a chain that had been secured into the floor.
“The man that took me has the keys,” she stammered.
Oh, crap. The man that I just killed and left in the hallway that’s currently ablaze.
I activated my comm link as the small nearby table lamp started flickering.
“This is Bringer. I’m in a room on the first floor and I found Maria,” I half-shouted as I assessed the room.
No windows.
“I don’t have an exit; the hallway’s engulfed,” I added, noting that smoke was pouring in from underneath the door. I glanced up and saw that the paint was bubbling on the ceiling as it smoldered.
Oh, shit.
“Bringer! Fire trucks are on scene now,” came Sanders’ voice.
I knew that I didn’t have time to wait for the fire crews. Besides, I also needed to get Maria loose somehow, too.
Then I spied a heavy oak dresser across the room and got an idea.
“Get people ready on the back side of the house,” I ordered. “I need somebody with bolt cutters in order to free Maria. Come in as soon as you see my exit.”
“What exit?” Sanders demanded.
I grabbed Maria in my arms and positioned her behind me. Fortunately, her chain permitted just enough slack for that.
She tightly wrapped her arms around my midsection and started crying.
Part of the ceiling above the door gave away and flames licked into the room as I concentrated on the oak dresser. I held out my hands and focused on mentally grabbing it, just as I’d done with the garbage bin outside that Chicago apartment.
It rattled and began shaking as I reached out to it with my thoughts. Something in my mind seemed to click into place because I almost
felt
the solidness of the dresser under my hands.
The room filled with smoke and increasing heat, and I felt my body pouring with sweat. There was no way that I was going to let Maria die in this house. The very thought of it made me so angry that I wanted to crush something.
I jerked my hands toward me as if trying to cast the dresser across the room to my right.
The oak dresser seemed to leap up into the air from its resting place and launched across the room in a blur to smash against the wall. A resounding crash accompanied boards snapping in half and sheet rock being rent asunder by the wooden projective.
I noted via the nearly four-foot-across hole in the wall that the dresser had rolled across the back yard some distance from the house.
“Holy shit!” yelled somebody outside.
“Get in here!” I yelled at the top of my lungs.
My attention diverted to the ceiling where flames burst above our heads. The lamp in the room flickered one final time and then went out, leaving only the flames in the ceiling to light the room in a hellish-looking hue.
As two tactical team members squeezed through the hole, I held my hands up and concentrated on another shield.
“What are you---” one officer began.
“Just get her outta’ here!” I yelled before trying to refocus my thoughts.
I yanked the earpiece out of my ear to avoid the chatter coming in over the comm.
Shield, shield, shield
, I thought over and over as I held my palms up before me.
I imagined that I was smoothing out a giant piece of elastic glass before me, and I immediately saw the flames lapping against the invisible barrier. I sensed intense heat in my head, almost feverish-feeling, as well as a prickling and numbing sensation in my hands.
“Don’t worry, ma’am,” an officer cooed reassuringly. “We’re getting you out of here.”
“Mother, Mary, and Joseph,” I heard a man gasp behind me.
I spared a quick look behind me to see a tactical team member shining his light at me and staring at me wide-eyed like I was the devil or something.
“Hurry up!” I barked, to which the man snapped out of his trance to help his partner.
I heard a clanking sound, which I hoped was Maria’s chain tether being severed with bolt cutters.
“Go! Get her outta’ here!” one of the tactical team members shouted.
My barrier was quickly being flanked by a host of flames as sweat poured down my face, though whether from the searing heat or my growing sense of exhaustion, I had no idea. The only certainty in my mind was I was losing the battle before me, and I didn’t think I could hold the shield for more than another minute before I collapsed.
“Clear!” shouted a voice behind me.
“Logan!” Sanders shouted somewhere outside. “Get the hell out of there!”
It felt like my body was cooking both outside and inside my head as I collapsed the shield before me. The ceiling completely caved in on that side of the room as black smoke generated an eerie cloud around me. I looked down at my hands in astonishment to see that flames remained suspended above my palms, floating above them like macabre, haunting spirits.
I felt momentarily transfixed by them.
I flapped my hands to extinguish the flames, coughing spasmodically and nearly falling to the floor in weakness. I lurched forward, placing my body closer to the hole in the wall, only to feel multiple sets of hands grabbing at me.
My body went momentarily airborne before being dragged across the rough ground outside.
When I came to a stop, an oxygen mask was pressed to my face amidst a half dozen flashlights shining down upon me.
Sanders face appeared before me.
“Welcome back, hero,” she teased.
The sounds of radio chatter, sirens, and multiple shouting voices created a roar of noise around me. Yet, one man standing nearby managed to shout above the rancor.
“That’s the most amazing damned thing I’ve ever seen! Just who the hell is he, anyway?”
“Him? He’s Captain JFM,” Sanders half-shouted.
“What’s JFM?” asked another man.
“Just Fucking Magic,” she answered with a smirk as her hazel eyes peered into mine.
I chuckled despite myself.
“Speaking of magic,” I began. “Look around for some kind of tunnel under the house. I’ll bet you’ll find a disappearing trick.”
Chapter 13
The night’s events had nearly resulted in another debacle. At least my competency with my talents had improved somewhat. My thought-reading had divined a relatively simple tunnel system underneath the house with tunnels leading to a couple of useful escape points hundreds of yards from the property’s structures.
Best of all, I’d found Maria alive.
God, I’m exhausted.
Even after consuming two containers of sports drinks and taking a long, hot shower at our hotel, my body still felt like it’d been run over by a truck. Of course, it was well after two in the morning, and I’d just used more of my talent in one day than I had since first discovering my abilities.
And yet, now that Maria was resting safe and sound under protective custody just down the hall, I also felt relieved, nearly giddy, as I wrapped a towel around my bare waist.
I plopped down on the edge of my bed and momentarily considered placing a call to Lexi to see how she and the rest of the family were doing. That’s when the time of night returned to the forefront of my mind, so I placed my phone back onto the nightstand instead.
“How the hell did I get into all of this in the first place?” I asked aloud.
Honestly, the past week or so had felt like a blur in my mind.
Maybe I was simply exhausted from the events of recent days. It felt like I was back in a combat zone all over again.
A knock at my room’s door roused me from my reverie and I slipped on a pair of sweatpants and T-shirt.
Agent Sanders stood before me wearing a pair of jeans and FBI-labeled sweatshirt. Ever the consummate professional agent, her badge and service pistol were strapped to her waistband.