Burns Like Fire (Dangerous Creatures #1) Read Free Page B

did to my father and brothers. Would you survive that as a pyro? Or would you burn?"
    Cindy snapped her mouth shut. He knew perfectly well she could still burn. The really scary thing about the question was that he looked angry enough to actually do something like that.
    Jack kept right on glaring at her. His body was trembling with the energy of his hatred for her, but then he shook his head in disgust right before he opened the door and left, slamming it behind him. A heavy lock slid into place. The sound echoed in her new prison, and it was almost as bad as the look that had been on his face. It all seemed so final.
    "I'm sorry," Cindy said, and then she started to cry.

 
    Chapter Three
     
    “What do you mean you can’t come today?” Jack snapped, clutching the phone so tightly the glass might crack any second. He paced in a wide circle as he listened to the woman on the other end, then paused and gripped his hair in a tight fist. “ No! That’s too far away! I need a Collector here for a pick up, now .”
    The secretary on the other end of the line, some woman who Jack imagined was hideously ugly with rat whiskers, just spouted the same thing she’d already told him. “A large team was already sent out on an emergency dispatch. There's no one left until they get back, and they won’t be available for another three days. Two at best, so unless you can meet another team in Barhaven then there's nothing I can do.”
    Barhaven was nearly a ten hour drive outside of Lincoln Peak. It pissed Jack off to no end that this woman thought it was remotely a good idea to travel that long by car with a pyro, regardless of whether she was shackled and boxed or not. There would be too many opportunities for her to escape.
    “What can be more of an emergency than a class four?” Jack snapped.
    “A class six,” the woman replied, and he could practically envision the little smile on her face.
    A class six . A pack of werewolves near a populated area, with at least one member of that pack wanted for murder. That would certainly require an all-hands-on-deck sort of team, and put a damper in Jack’s plans. Fuck .
    “Oh,” Jack replied.
    The voice on the other end suddenly became a little more helpful. “Look, I’ll make sure to call my boss about this right away. Someone might come back sooner and they can be sent to retrieve the paranormal. Head Office doesn't want to overlook anything, especially a class four.”
    “I don’t exactly have proper a holding cell here,” Jack said. "I never keep my catches overnight."
    He'd always been too scared for that sort of thing. After waking up to his house burning down around him, he'd become somewhat paranoid about sleeping while a dangerous individual was nearby.
    Cindy would need a bed and a toilet at the least, and those things weren’t in his basement. Would he have to provide her with a shower in that time? Extra clothes?
    “How are you holding her?” asked the secretary.
    “Spelled chains to a concrete wall. There’s nothing she can use to break free.” For now.
    “Is she isolated?”
    “Yeah,” Jack said. “It’s an area of my basement that I sealed off. It's all concrete, and there’s a box down there.”
    “Is she inside of it right now?”
    “No, she’s chained to the wall ,” Jack replied through his teeth.
    “Then she should be fine. You might want to put her into the box anyway and leave her until pick up. You wouldn’t even have to go down there and check on her.”
    In the box for two or three days straight? “It's a standard box. There’s no bathroom in there,” Jack thought that should have been obvious. Very few hunters could afford anything bigger, and those that could almost never bothered with them.
    “If you’re worried about clean up then you can let her out from time to time and she can use a bucket. Or you can keep her inside and let the handlers clean up the box after she's picked up. They'll decontaminate it before they return it