Excerpt from Reva: The Elemental

Before Reva Stone became something the world wanted to capture, control, or destroy, she was simply trying to survive a fire. In this excerpt from Reva: The Elemental, one woman discovers that power does not always arrive as a blessing. Sometimes, it arrives as a warning.

Excerpt from Reva: The Elemental

Chapter 1: The Burning

The flames engulfed the room before anyone had a chance to scream.

Reva Stone pressed herself against the far wall of the Stabler Labs media suite, her camera equipment abandoned on its tripod, the video shoot forgotten the moment the first explosion tore through the east corridor. Smoke poured under the sealed door. The sprinkler system had already failed. Around her, the other lab employees scrambled, some toward windows that would not open, others toward the door that led directly into the fire. She had always been good under pressure. It was why Harlan Stabler had hired her as communications director in the first place. But nothing in her career, not the live broadcasts from flood zones, not the emergency press conferences, not the years of controlled chaos, had prepared her for this.

Reva focused.

It was the only thing she knew how to do.

She focused on the fire rolling beneath the door frame, orange and alive and hungry, and willed herself to think past the heat, past the noise, past the terror climbing up her throat. Then something shifted inside her, something deep and structural, like a lock turning that she hadn’t known existed.

She wasn’t pushing back against the fire.

She was consuming it. The flames at the door began to retract. Not because they were dying, but because they were moving toward her, drawn into her like water into a drain. She felt no heat. No pain. Only energy, clean and enormous, flooding every cell in her body. The room filled with a strange, breathless silence as the fire simply ceased to exist.

Reva looked down at her hands. They were glowing.

Then the screams stopped entirely, and she realized the room was not silent because everyone had escaped. It was silent because every person in it had frozen. Colleagues. Scientists. The security guard who always gave her coffee on Tuesday mornings.

They stared at her the way people stare at something that defies explanation. Something they cannot yet name. Reva felt it then, the first cold crawl of a truth she could not outrun:

She was not in danger from the fire.

She was the danger now.