Sear

v. To char, scorch, or burn the surface of with or as if with a hot instrument.

There was also a smell: the same smell that would drift upriver, years later, to find me in my bed or in the field hockey goal. Like my own, similarly beaked nose at those times, my grandfather's nose went on alert. His nostrils flared. He inhaled. At first the smell was recognizable, part of the organic realm of bad eggs and manure. But after a few seconds the smell's chemical properties seared his nostrils, and he covered his nose with his handkerchief.

--Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

It was as though I rolled through a bed of hot coals. It seemed a whole century would pass before I would roll free, a century in which I was seared through the deepest levels of my body to the fearful breath within me and breath seared and heated to the point of explosion. It'll all be over in a flash.

--Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

....verbs that hurt.