Klaus Himmel smelled smoke.<br/><br/>It was not the kind of smoke that comes from a proper wood fire, or even the lighter-fluid smell of a charcoal grill. What he smelled was burning hair and skin, and it was leaking under his door. His arm was still outstretched from where he was returning his phone to the far side of his desk, the slim black piece of electronics suspended between his fingers and forgotten the moment he'd heard the scream from the other side. It wasn't until the smell, though, that acrid barber-shop-fire stench, that he felt the bottom drop out of his stomach.<br/><br/>Jack Darrens opened the door into his office and stepped inside without aplomb, trailing something along after him. He didn't bother to close it behind him.<br/><br/>"Klaus. Been a while."<br/><br/>His voice was surprisingly curt--Himmel had expected him to burst into one of his famous rages, but then again perhaps this was the true nature of fury for a man like Darrens. An inferno at the best of times, perhaps with his malanthropy channeled he was more blowtorch than holocaust.<br/><br/>Then again, you never could tell.<br/><br/>Klaus Himmel sat across his desk and looked to the man he'd known was coming, and he felt his shoulders sink. He thought he'd have more time--he thought he'd be safer here. He thought he'd made it. All these thoughts of his flew out of his head in ashes as he watched Darrens raise the body of his former secretary and primary bodyguard by the scalp. It was from here that the smoke rose, billowing from where his fingers met what was left of Elizabeth Shaw's skull, the bone a charred black and the flesh long ago burned away. The skin at her neck had cauterized and bubbled down a few vertebre already, and as Himmel watched the bone hissed and finally gave way beneath the man's glowing fingers. The body fell in an unceremonious heap at the floor, and Darrens dusted his hands of whatever was left of her face on them. His eyes had never left Himmel.<br/><br/>"I'll admit, you fat fuck, you were a mighty good liar."<br/><br/>There is a point between resignation and acceptance where the brief idea of resistance is considered. Ice could withstand fire for a time, after all, and he was hardly helpless. Everything froze, and if he could only...<br/><br/>But then the moment passed, and he let his head fall back with a slow sigh. Enough pretending--he wasn't making it out of this alive.<br/><br/>"I am not," Himmel said quietly, trying to go out with something resembling bravery, "going to apologize to you, Jack. I know what you want with her, and I told you when you first came to me that--"<br/><br/>"You said she didn't exist!" He couldn't help but jump as Jack snarled at him, shouting suddenly and taking a few swift paces across the room to knock aside the sitting chair opposite the businessman. Only a desk between them now, and though the room was at an air-conditioned seventy degrees Himmel knew it was only a matter of time. "A statistical fucking impossibility, isn't that what you told me? Did you really think you could keep her from me?!"<br/><br/>"I had to tell you something." Himmel spat, dabbing even now at his balding forehead with a handkerchief. The sweat came from nerves, not heat, which was almost the worst part of it--whatever inferno Darrens had burning inside him, he wasn't letting it leak. Pressure must be building, though, and in the anticipation of it he spoke faster. "She wasn't ready, she still didn't know--we needed more<span style="font-style: italic">time</span>--"<br/><br/>"<span style="font-style: italic">To keep her away from me</span>!" He roared, and this time as he came there was a brief lash of fire, swift and brilliant, before the desk fell in glowing halves and he was pressing Klaus against the window. There was no delay--as the fire pulled back into Darrens' fingers they glowed, first red and then a brilliant white, and in a flash they were buried between Klaus' ribs like hot pokers. Himmel screamed, really screamed, and writhed against the burning-pork smell of his flesh burning and the fat near his stomach beginning to melt and boil. "Oh<span style="font-style: italic">God</span>will you burn for trying to ruin this for me!"<br/><br/>But Klaus was screaming, his eyes rolling up in his head, his body arching violently and desperately trying to pull itself free from those murderous fingers that bored their way deep into his insides. There was no blood--they cauterized their way in--but the nerves were alive with fire, the fat sloughing off his body in thick gouts of boiling flesh and his organs cooking inside him, and God would the fire have been so much better--<br/><br/>A wave of heat, intense enough to sear his skin to a rind, and the glass behind him melted away. With a rough shove the body of Klaus Himmel tumbled towards the ground through the vitrified glass, his clothes scorched to embers and his blackened body rolling through the air.<br/><br/>Jack didn't watch him fall. As sirens started up in the distance, he turned instead for the cell phone that had been flung across the floor when it tumbled from his desk. The air around his fingers was hot enough to shimmer, but not hot enough to melt the plastic.<br/><br/>Hundreds of miles away, amidst melting ice and a ruined car, a cell-phone rang.