I Am Titanium (Pax Black Book 1) by John Patrick Kennedy Page B

Maybe he didn’t know what Scarlett had done yet. Who she really was.
    “Stay away from him,” she said, pointing her shaking finger at the people still standing in the room, “or I’ll hurt you.”
    It wasn’t a threat. It was a warning.
    The doctor with the cell phone rushed at her. Still screaming.
    With a stiff arm, Scarlett pointed toward the woman’s feet.
    Don’t lose control. Don’t lose control.
    Scarlett released a tiny amount of the sparking, burning energy in her hand.
    The floor exploded, throwing tile everywhere.
    The doctor was punched backward into the wall so hard she stuck there. A second later, she flopped forward, her arms and legs dangling limply over the seat of a chair.
    Oh, shit.
    What had Scarlett done?
    She felt a sick bubble of laughter coming up from inside her. She tried to swallow it. A single, tiny giggle escaped.
    “I warned you,” she told the people still upright and moving. Her lips were twitching, trying to grin. But she wasn’t actually talking . She was mentally projecting her thoughts out loud. She hoped—
    “—that I’m not losing control,” she said. Out loud.
    Now that was just hilarious.
    She laughed without opening her mouth. The sound echoed around the room. Her body was shaking, trying to mimic the way a real person would laugh, but it was all in her head.
    All in her head.
    Scarlett’s hands were rising in front of her, as if she were being mind-controlled.
    But she knew she wasn’t. She wished one of the astrals would take control of her. Inside herself, she was screaming.
    Her hands rose, the fingers stretching toward the doctors.
    The sound of her laughter was so loud, it was driving her crazy.
    “Help me,” she said.
    Like those pitiful doctors could do anything.
    The ends of her fingers crackled with sparks and burned with hot, white fire.

Chapter 5

    T erkun’shuks’pai could not control the body he had created. Could not, as he had planned, animate it. Could not bring it to life.
    This shocked him.
    The astral material was always so responsive on the astral plane and only slightly less so in the various physical realms where he’d tested it previously, yet now that he was physically on Earth, the astral material defied all reason and control. It absorbed the energy he fed it, but it would not respond to his efforts to give it the spark of life.
    He had failed; his plans were all for nothing, and the boy would lose his life. His calculated, awful risk was—
    The boy’s spirit, acting in some mysterious way Terkun’shuks’pai could not have predicted, entered the body and made it live.
    Terkun’shuks’pai was not so shocked that he was unable to anchor himself in the body and proceed with the next steps in his plans.
    But it unsettled him for a few long, essential moments. He isolated himself briefly within the boy’s mind, gathering himself for the tasks ahead.
    When his mind had cleared, he slipped into the boy’s mortal senses and viewed the room.
    The boy had committed a grave error.
    Considering the state of the boy’s hands—bloody—and that of the woman’s chest—crushed and punctured—Terkun’shuks’pai believed the boy had punched through the woman’s chest with his hands. Considering his emotional state afterward, he hadn’t done it on purpose. But life was fragile, and the mortal plane physically unforgiving.
    And yet the mortal female lived: the boy had bound his energy to her and was attempting to rebuild her heart from the ruined tissue within her chest cavity. The body in front of them arched upward, her face in a rictus of pain. The boy was trying to save her—but instead he had become the woman’s torturer.
    Kill me , her spirit wept. Just let it end.
    The boy was making a brilliant, if insufficient, attempt at repairing the heart tissue. He had already begun to create specialized cardiac muscle in shapeless globs that lay against her ribs. But his efforts were doomed to failure; he had created the muscle and even