by Jade Alters
“What…the fuck?” I mutter to myself.
“What’re you…” Jason tries to ask. Right, Jason. That reminds me about the cab. I turn to lean against the wall, so I can call our driver. My hand squiggles around inside my pocket until I hear my brother grunt. He groans and wretches enough that I turn to check on him. In an instant, horror strikes me sober.
Jason wasn’t talking to me, nor is he throwing up now. He stands stiff in the odd headlock of a tall, slender man. The man has one hand literally around Jason’s head, rather than his neck. He’s using it to turn my brother’s head away, to expose his neck. The man has his face buried in it. Whatever he’s doing is what’s causing Jason to wretch like that.
“Hey!” I scream, loud enough to crack my voice. I’m sure someone from the street heard, my panicked brain tells itself. Someone will come. I won’t have to do this alone. But I will, if this guy doesn’t stop whatever he’s doing. “Hey!”
The guy lets go of Jason’s head just enough to pull his face back. Two long, ivory sickles slip out of holes in my brother’s neck. They retract inside the guy’s closing lips, which form a little smirk. He holds Jason up so I can see two holes right in his artery, pumping blood out with each of his rapid pulses. I watch the ruby water soak into the collar of his goofy peach shirt. I watch the pulse slow.
“Jason! Jason!” I scream. How is no one hearing this? Do they not care? is the fleeting thought in my brain as I charge the attacker alone. He lets Jason go. The only way to describe what happens just now, is that the guy is suddenly behind me. My drunken eyes hardly register his movement as a blur. Part of me thinks it’s a trick of the alcohol. Another part of me knows that, if that were true, Jason would already have fallen. I watch my brother’s knees buckle. I feel the guy’s hands on my head, turning me away so he can do it to me, too. Bite me. “Get away from me!” I scream.
It’s never happened like that before. It’s so fast, I don’t understand exactly what happened. Not until after. I skip the steam and smoke stages, right to inferno. Crimson fire clouds ripple around me. They scorch up and out, until the entire alley is filled with a red blaze. The burst of force shatters every window down the dank little side street. The flame eats into the outside of the buildings on either side of me. It’s so hot, in fact, that it melts the iron support beam of the wall I held onto.
When the flames spiral out to plumes of twisting smoke, the fanged figure is somehow at the other end of the alley. A mound of gray flakes and charred black coals marks the spot on the ground where Jason tried to ask what was happening. I’m torn in two by the urges that pump through my chest.
Chase down the monster - burn him to charcoal. Find my brother - my mind isn’t ready to accept that I already know where he is. Right where he was standing, when I lost it. Before I can pick, I hear a whisper from the very end of the alley.
“You’re something else, aren’t you?” says the man-shaped creature there. That decides for me. I charge through the embers and smoke. I’ll turn myself into the spark that burns this bastard alive.
I make it two steps before the lower half of the iron support beam from the wall comes down on my head. Clang - black.
Illness and Medicine
Cece
I’m not sure exactly where I am, when I come to. As I wander around to get my bearings, an even more frightening thought creeps into my already frightened mind. What if I haven’t come to at all? After all, I’ve never seen a place like this before.
Boundless fields of black stretch out before and behind me. I don’t feel any solid ground under my feet, yet I don’t fall. When I look up, I see a thousand tiny lights drifting, like I am. They’re small and faint, almost like fireflies on a summer night. Squinting does me no good in terms of clearing things up. It’s all just fuzzy lights and darkness.
I wander until one of the lights flits down in front of me. The way it moves is more like a feather on the wind than a bug. I try to move closer to it, but I can’t. Instead, the little petal of soft orange light floats to me. Now that it’s close enough, I see it for what it is. The tiniest hint of a flame. An ember. It’s odd to watch it twist through the air, when there isn’t the slightest breeze in the dark place. It swings into a high arcing flip and hits my chest. The ember’s warmth joins with my own, and suddenly the darkness is a little less scary. If I had to put a word to the feeling of that little fire entering me, it would be connected. Connected to whom, I haven’t the foggiest.
“He-he-hello?” I call out into the darkness. The sound of my own voice cracking, even in a single word, is enough to bring it all flooding back. The alley. The pale man. The fire… Jason. “Can…can you hear me?” I whimper, still unsure who it is I’m talking to.
“I hear you.” It’s a young man’s voice that bounces back through the shadows. It echoes all around and runs through me like my own blood.
“Tha-thank God… I need help… There was this man, and my brother… Oh, God…” I stop myself before the drinks and tapas can climb back up my throat.
“Alright, alright. It’s okay now. I see you,” the voice hums. Somehow, it’s the most comforting thing I’ve heard in my life. I see you. There’s a sort of understanding that transcends names or places. He sees me. It’d be nice if I could see him, though. “Can you tell me where you are?” I glance at every side of me. More darkness. More embers.
“Somewhere…dark? Warm? There’s all these lights, but…nothing else. I can’t tell!” I shout, overwhelmed with trying to put it into words. I haven’t got time for this! I’ve got to get back to the alley! Back to my brother!
“Take it easy,” the voice hums. I want to, but I can’t. I cock back for another shout, but the voice says, “this is the Soul of Fire. I know this is confusing as all hell right now, but I need you to focus for me. You can’t tell where you are?”
“I told you, it’s too dark!” I scream into the hungry blackness.
“Alright… You must be unconscious. It’s going to be hard, but when you come round, reach out to me. If you tell me where you are, I can help you,” the voice promises. Damn voice, it doesn’t even know my name, and it’s making promises?
“Reach out to you, how?” I call back. But, just then, the ember flickers out of me and begins to drift away. I try to reach for it, but I have no hands to grasp it with. The fire slips away from me, along with the voice. When it speaks next, it sounds far away.
“You’ll figure it…”
“Hey!” I call out as the ember floats up and fades into the blackness from whence it came. One by one, every ember blows away in the non-existent wind. Each of them is swallowed, until there’s only darkness everywhere around me. Then I open my eyes.
Cece
Sutter Hospital, San Francisco
The very second the light stabs my retinas, I dismiss the “Soul of Fire” as a hallucination. I recognize what consciousness and reality feel like the second they wash over me, and it’s entirely different from the dark space where I just was. I feel the cool air from a vent blowing across my sopping wet mop of hair. I feel the paper-thin sheets of a bed I don’t recognize under my twitching fingertips. As my vision adjusts, I realize I’m being propped up by a segmented bed. It only takes the turn of my head to an IV tower and a heart rate monitor to know where I am. A hospital.
“Cecelia? Jesus - she’s awake!” Mom cries out. Her voice rings through my ears like the high register of a piccolo.
“What?” blurts out a voice I don’t know, astonished.
“Cece, can you talk? Can you hear us?” Dad’s voice rumbles over me. It takes me a second, and about a hundred rapid blinks before I can focus on any of their faces. One after the other, Mom, Dad and a man in a long white coat turn from blurry stalks to human bodies.
“Yeah… I can hear you all too well. Quiet it down for me, would you?” I try to say. Between the dryness of my throat and the ache in my chest, it comes out as a whisper.
“This is…” the doctor mumbles to himself. He p
icks up the clipboard full of my medical mumbo-jumbo. I watch his crazed eyes flit back and forth across every line. He keeps glancing up from it at me, too, to see if I’m real.
“It’s a miracle,” Mom sings. She picks up my hand in both of hers. It’s so rare they touch me anymore, because of the heat, that I notice all of a sudden how much I’ve grown. Mom and I used to have the same sized hands. Now it’s like a mouse holding a dog’s paw.
“It’s…more than that,” the doctor mumbles. He’s so transfixed on the discrepancies between the girl on the bed and the girl on paper that he only notices how close the three of them are crowding me now. “Let’s not crowd her. She’s… I’m not sure what this is.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Well, you… Uh…” the doctor fumbles.
“What is it, doc?” Dad steps in. He brushes some of my hair back so I can see unhampered.
“Well… I suppose it’s possible it was an issue with the scanners, but…your daughter’s skull was fractured from a heavy impact. Her systems were showing symptoms of a coma - I…was about to intubate her,” the doctor tells my parents. Mom and Dad cross glances with one another, then look to me, as if for confirmation.
“Yeah, I took a hard hit to the head… Guess it wasn’t as bad as you thought?” I pull completely out of my ass. Between the Soul of Fire hallucination and this, I’m just grateful to sit up and speak. I’m already eager to let the whole thing become a memory.
“What, exactly, do you remember?” the doctor asks. I bite my lip. I clamp down on it, hoping to squeeze out something to say. I know how it’s going to sound, with all the bars just before a ghoulish stranger shows up to bite my brother’s neck. Oh God… I remember, which makes me clam right up. Sweat beads up on my goosebumped skin as the image flashes before me. The arteries. The holes. The blood. The ash.
“I… We… We went out to have a drink for my birthday,” I tell the doctor and, inadvertently, my parents.
“We? You mean Jason? Jason was with you?” Mom leans in to ask. His car was still in the driveway - of course they thought he was just sleeping in.
“Yes,” I whimper. All the feeling that just flowed back into my limbs flows right back out. I’m as good as a ragdoll now, head flopping back into my pillow. I stare into the fluorescent cone of light over me, crystal streams frothing over my cheeks.
“Where is he?” Dad asks.
“I… He...” but I can’t say it. My mind still isn’t ready. I see him. Then I see the ash pile. I can’t connect them. That would mean… No.
“Let’s start with what you were saying before,” the doctor comes half to my rescue. I know where this road leads, but it’s easier to start further back.
“We went out for drinks. Me and…my brother,” I say. Smoke and embers flash before my eyes as I avoid his name. “We visited four bars, I think. The last one was Etcetera - that wine place. We went down this alley… It…it…”
“It’s alright, dear,” Mom consoles me with a hand on my searing shoulder. If only she knew the next part. I choke down the tears to force out:
“It was…just the first place I thought of to grab onto. I wanted to call our cab driver. I wanted to go home… Then this guy… He…” I suck down the deepest breath of my life. I never knew just how much air my lungs could hold until that moment. It steadies me, just a little. Just enough to say the rest of what I can. “He attacked us. He went for Jason first, and I… I just wanted to protect us…”
“Went for? Cece, what the hell happened?” Dad demands. I grab his hand. I grab Mom’s in the other. I don’t know how long they’ll stay, once they understand. More than ever before, I don’t want them to go.
“He just grabbed him, and…” I try again, but the story goes no further. Not from my lips. That would make it real.
“Cecelia,” the doctor calls my attention, “This…may be alarming, but perhaps it will help you tell us what happened. First, your brother’s body was not identified at the scene.” Mom and Dad let out a slow sigh of relief at the same time I choke on a new mouthful of tears. “Six others, however, were identified. There were marks of extreme heat on the walls and ground in the alley, and evidence that an explosion brought down part of a building on you. Was this related to the man who attacked you and your brother?”
It’s not often that a pivotal moment in your life is served to you on a silver platter. But there it is. I know the second he asks that his words have changed everything. I feel my parents beginning to understand what happened in the difference in how they hold my hands. Both of them go limp in my grasp. I see their body language stiffen in the corners of my peripherals. I don’t have to say it anymore. Now they know. I feel Mom start to pull away first.
“No, please! Mom, I didn’t… This guy- he bit Jason! You…you should have seen the blood… Please listen to me!” I scream. The temperature in the room climbs an instant ten degrees with the heat spiraling around me. The doctor loosens the collar of his suddenly stuffy shirt. Dad stares at his shoes. Mom turns completely away from me. Her fingers slip free of mine, which are now as hot as a fireplace poker.
“Doctor… What was Cecelia’s blood alcohol content when she checked in, again?” Mom asks. Again. She’s had it in her head the whole time. Why wouldn’t she chalk up the mysterious attacker to a drunken exaggeration? Hell, I did, until Jason dropped to the ground.
“Two-point-eight,” the doctor tells her.
“Jonah,” Mom says, but he’s already pulling his hand from mine. I reach over to grab his arm with all of my strength.
“Dad. This guy had Jason. He was going to kill him! I was trying to save him!” I wail. Dad looks me straight in the eyes, his arm rigid against my pull.
“Let me go, Cecelia.” He’s already decided - I see it in his eyes. He’s not looking at his little girl anymore. He’s looking at his son’s killer. My hands fall away. I clench my teeth to cage the fire inside me. To try to change their minds now would only make them more sure of what I really am. A monster.
“I think it’s best for everyone that we give her some space, like you said, doctor,” Mom whispers. I ball the sheets up around me in two clenched fists. I tense up so hard it makes me sore to keep from turning the whole room into an oven. I won’t prove them right. I didn’t kill Jason. He was already dead and I’ll prove it. I’ll find the damn freak who sunk into him and string him up over the flames of Hell itself to get it out of him.
“I’d like to keep your daughter here for the next few days for observations of her condition. A turnaround so sudden… I don’t trust it,” the doctor says.
“Keep Cecelia as long as you want,” Mom spits out, like a mouthful of curses. It’s the closest thing to one she’s ever uttered in my presence. It’s the most hurtful thing I’ve ever heard her say.
I close my eyes and clench until all three of my visitors have cleared out of the room. Then I throw my head back and scream, until the saline boils in my IV bag.
A Lone Flame
Cece
“Are you there?” a voice calls out, the same one as before. Suddenly, I realize I am somewhere, not just asleep. Great, I can’t even close my eyes anymore without someone nagging me. I’m not sure just how long it’s been since Mom and Dad left. Now I just wish this voice would leave me the way I feel - alone.
“Where else would I be?” I sigh. I float back through the dark as a hundred little embers flutter alive around me. With nothing more to do than think, I notice how the lights don’t actually illuminate anything. They just burn holes of fire in the endless dark.
“Do you know where you are now?” the voice calls me again.
“The…Soul of Fire? I mean that’s what you said, but you’re just a voice in my head,” I brush off.
“No, I mean…” the young man stops himself for a second. While he rethinks his choice of words, I search around for his ember. I know it hasn’t already touched me, or I’d feel connected again. “Where were you, when you opened your eyes? Aft
er the last time we talked?”
“A hospital… Don’t know which one,” I tell him while I trace his voice around the void. I follow it to a drifting little petal of fire just above me.
“Come on, you can do it. Think. I need something specific,” says the voice. Just then, his ember flits down into me. There it is. I feel his warmth. His kindness. A familiar kind of gentleness comes over me. Before I can help it, alienated dots in my brain start to connect themselves.
A kind voice when I feel alone. It can only reach out to me when I’m- well, not asleep, but not awake. It reaches out only after my brother…
“Jason?” I choke up. The voice is silent in reply. “Jason, is that you?”
“No, I’m sorry… I’m Lee. Who’s Jason?” the young man asks. If I even have a chest in this darkness - in this Soul of Fire - it deflates now. I sink down deeper to the depths under a thousand paperless lanterns.
“My brother… He…” I can’t bear to tell Lee any more than I could my parents. My non-existent chest doubles in its already immense weight. I feel Lee’s sorrow for me, on top of my own.
“I’m sorry about your brother. But listen - this doesn’t have to be the end for you. We can help. Try to remember. Where are you? Which hospital?” Lee pleads with me. I can hear in his echoing voice as much as I feel it like a punch in the gut, how much he wants to help. I can hardly imagine why, if I’m just a disembodied talking ember like he is, here. My brain says we? My lips, however, have other plans.
“Why shouldn’t it be?” I ask him. It’s only half-rhetorical. The other half of it is my authentic cry for a reason. “Why should I live? How is that fair? I’ll never be…half…the person…” I start to whimper. I can’t get out the rest, yet somehow Lee answers: