I absolutely have to stop writing short stories that turn out to actually be Chapter Ones of novels. On the bright side: I now know what my 2023 NaNoWriMo project is going to be.
The scream was wild and horrible, sounding precisely like a woman being burned alive, and it wouldn’t stop. Bernice had clearly never heard such a cacophony before, live and in person, and she took a half-step forward before Greg’s right arm was suddenly an obstacle irresistibly blocking her path. “Don’t look,” he warned her as he stabbed at more buttons, his eyes determinedly lowered. “That’s what it wants you to do! Remember your training!”
That calmed her down. “Right. It’s not human, it’s not human. What is it?”
“Well, it didn’t react when I shoved iron and silver through the flesh, so we know it’s not a blob,” Greg said conversationally as he spun a dial all the way to eleven. “And it’s not vibrating through the corners, so we can rule out an angle-hound. I’m going to guess it’s a gold-witch. And what do those get, Bernice?”
“They get more fire,” Bernice said, more or less automatically.
Greg beamed as he opened up the spouts. “Exactly.”
From inside the box the screaming increased — rivaling the alarm sirens now going off all around them — as magnesium dust was sprayed into the flames. The temperature increased noticeably in the room, but not evenly. Puffs of coldness stirred the air, but not welcome ones. It wasn’t the cool relief of spring rain, or the honest chill of the polar wastes; it was more like the corpse of heat, as if something had eaten up energy and left nothing behind but scraps and waste.