Flicker & Burn: A Cold Fury Novel by T.M. Goeglein Read Free Book Online

used to try and slice me into meatloaf with your crazy eyes.”
    “For the last time, stop calling me crazy.”
    “I wasn’t. I really meant your eyes. They were glowing.”
    “Please don’t say red,” I said, staggering to my feet.
    Doug shook his head. “Blue, like your normal color but with light behind them. It was pretty terrifying, but damn . . . it was
awesome.
”
    “Great. My evolution as a circus freak continues. I was perfectly aware of what I was doing, by the way.”
    “Which was what, exactly?”
    “To put it bluntly,” I said, as teensy pops of enervating voltage jumped along my spine and faded away, “I was killing you because you deserved to die.”
    Doug, always analytical, even with peed-in jeans, asked, “Why?”
    “What you told me about Max. Part of me is sure he’ll dump me someday, and you tapped into it and made it real. And then, when I was sure it was over between Max and me—like I’d been sure my family was dead—all of the love I had for him was turned into murderous hatred for you,” I said with a shrug. “You deserved to die.”
    “You know I made it all up, right? To get the electricity flowing?” he said. “The stuff about Max and some girl in California? It was all nonsense.”
    “Yeah, I know now. Good job with that.”
    “Ugh, thanks,” he said with a ripple of fatigue, drawing a hand over his face and sighing. “God, listen . . . all of that shit I talked was to activate cold fury. It definitely has to be rolling before the electrical part kicks in.”
    “Like ‘big-nosed geek’?”
    “Right,” he said sheepishly. “It wouldn’t have occurred to me if you weren’t always bringing it up. Your braces too. I never notice them unless you’re eating, like, corn or something.” He sighed and said, “You know I . . . well, what I mean is, I love being your partner in this thing . . .”
    “I know. I love you, too, Doug.”
    He blushed, looking at his shoes, and then kicked away some books and papers. “What’s this?” he said, lifting the silver ice cream cone dropped by the creature. I’d placed it on the control center for his analysis, and explained how the thing had slurped at it before trying to run me down. Doug held it to the light, reading,
“Soy belleza . . .”
    “And beauty is me,” I said.
    He rolled it between two fingers. “Reminds me of a one-hitter . . . the little metal pipe thingies used to smoke dope? My dad used to leave them all over the house.” He looked inside it at the pink, sticky residue and sniffed. “It smells like a chemical.”
    “It was soft serve.”
    “There are tons of chemicals in Mister Kreamy Kone concoctions,” he sighed. “Delicious ones.”
    “Track it down online, figure out what it is. It could lead somewhere.”
    “Give me twenty-four hours,” he said. “By the way, your eyes aren’t glowing anymore. But when the electricity was flowing, man, you should have seen them. They were also projecting these little beams of gold light.”
    Watching Doug push a broom, cleaning up glass, I realized how correct he’d been to try and discover the source of the electricity. If I was forced to shuttle between the remnants of the former Sara Jane, ignorant but happy daughter and sister, and the emerging Sara Jane, counselor-at-large, it was vital to understand what was contained in my brain. Everything nudged me back to the notebook, and now so did that word Doug had uttered—
gold.
Chapter one (
“Nostro”—
Us) refers to the Outfit in general and the Rispoli clan in particular, especially an ancient ancestor, an Egyptian tribal leader with gold-flecked eyes.
    I understood then that the notebook was not just a repository of old secrets.
    It was also a living document where I’d find traces of me.

4
    I ONCE WATCHED A NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC program with my brother, Lou, when he was in his large-animals-that-eat-other-large-animals phase.
    With a combination of awe and horror, I witnessed an