Baptisms of Fire and Ice

by Nadia Sheridan

  The pack had gained a couple scratch marks, where the imps had prodded it. Nothing was broken though, and all the latches were still secure. So Adara hauled the pack onto her back, grunting at the added weight, and turned to Enzo. “This is the part where we run away. Very, very fast.”

  Enzo let out a hysterical laugh, looking between her and the injured demons. “You don’t have to tell me twice,” he said and darted off for the gate of the chain-link fence that surrounded the back lot.

  While he was busy unbolting the latch on the gate, Adara spun back toward the cellar doors. At the perfect time to see the imp that had bloodied itself to get into the storeroom attempt to sail straight through the doorway and tackle her.

  Adara looked the demon in its oil-black eyes, shut the cellar doors in its face, and threw herself, heavy pack and all, on top of the slanted doors. The imp smacked the doors, rebounded with a screech, and crashed into something made of glass that shattered into a thousand pieces.

  “Hope you like wine, you little bastard,” she muttered.

  Then she heaved herself off the doors, hopped over the half-dead demon that had been dragged across the gravel like roadkill, and caught up to Enzo just as he kicked the gate open.

  “Where to?” he asked breathlessly.

  Adara peered back at the bar, now a foreboding structure filled to the brim with the red-streaked signs of tragedy and loss. In a voice as faint as a distant echo, she answered, “Anywhere but here.”

  Radio Roadstead

  “You just enjoyed the relaxing tones of Hanna Lowell and the Blue Beats, and now you’re back with me, Triple J, for the early morning news. Latest out of Washington says that the ‘surprise impact event’ affected seventy-six US cities and towns, along with at least ninety unpopulated wilderness areas across the lower forty-eight and Alaska. The largest cities impacted by the event were New York City, Miami, Los Angeles, Houston, Phoenix, New Orleans, and DC itself.

  “Casualty reports are still being tallied as of right now, but the official US death toll is currently sitting just under four thousand, most of them people who were near the epicenter of an impact. There’s no solid word yet on the number of injured, but numerous urban hospitals reported a sharp uptick in ER visits yesterday afternoon and evening, and early indications are that most of the nonfatal injuries suffered during the event were minor.

  “Strangely, despite the rising death toll, the amount of property damage sustained by the impacts appears to have been minimal, with the bulk of the damage occurring as a result of fires that were sparked by the heat of the impacts. Experts are saying that the meteorites may have had some kind of rare mineral composition that accounts for this abnormal behavior.

  “But whatever the facts of the matter, one conclusion is undeniable: This is a sad day across America, and across the world, as families, friends, and communities grieve for those who were lost to this shocking natural disaster. Let us take a moment of silence to honor the memory of the fallen, and also to pray for the swift recovery of all those who were injured.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  For the second time in as many days, Adara Caine woke in a strange place.

  The lumpy couch with the paisley pattern on which she lay sat against the back wall of a small, stuffy living room. Opposite the couch, a TV that had seen its better days framed a series of cell phone videos that had been taken of the unforeseen impact event. Some of the videos, Adara had already watched, but several depicted new scenes of death and destruction. A house on fire here. A twelve-car pileup there.

  The TV was turned to a low volume, and the screams of terrified people were drowned out by the sputtering hum of a struggling air conditioner. Adara tracked the sound to a bulky AC unit sticking out from between two identical bookshelves on the wall adjacent to the TV. Well over half of the books on the shelves were medical textbooks.

  Adara lay listlessly on the uncomfortable couch for an indeterminate period of time, trying to recall how she got here and where exactly here was. The memories came to her in bits and pieces, in between the chugs of the AC and the wails of the bystanders on TV.

  After she and Enzo had fled from Hudson and Grail’s, they traveled almost a full mile before they both ran out of steam and had to take a break. They found themselves a lovely bench in a small dog park in the Paulson’s Corner neighborhood, plopped down onto the damp wooden planks, and slumped against each other, wheezing like a couple of asthmatics who’d been huffing Chinese smog.

  As they were catching their breath, it finally became apparent to Adara that Enzo needed medical attention from someone with more qualifications than a former summer lifeguard. He kept experiencing sporadic episodes of confusion, likely the result of a concussion from the punch that blackened his eye. Additionally, his left hand was so badly misaligned that he could barely use his fingers.

  Adara had had a fierce debate with herself over whether or not to take him to a hospital.

  On the one hand, she was well aware of how quickly and badly head injuries could worsen if they weren’t treated properly from the get-go. She also knew that a person could suffer permanent damage and loss of mobility if dislocated joints weren’t treated in time.

  On the other hand, demons. If either she or Enzo accidentally used their god shards in or near a hospital, or if one of the imps from the bar managed to manually tail them to one, they could put hundreds of people in mortal danger.

  Sprawled on that bench, the cool air chilling her damp skin, her nerves set alight by the disturbing sensation of ants crawling up her spine, Adara had nearly been sick at the thought of leading those vicious imps to an ER filled with unsuspecting innocents. It would be the equivalent of leading a pack of hungry wolves into a cage filled wall to wall with lambs.

  So the choice of what to do about Enzo hadn’t been as straightforward as Adara would have liked. In fact, she downright hated having to weigh Enzo’s well-being against the well-being of people she did not know.

  Yesterday, before the impact event, helping her best friend wouldn’t have been in question, for any reason. The speed at which she’d been forced to change her perspective left a bad taste in her mouth. Or maybe that was just the stale beer.

  As it was, after Adara wasted several minutes arguing with herself, it had been the groggy Enzo who came up with a workable compromise: his second cousin, Nadine Pritchard.

  Nadine was a first-year resident at Agnes-Thorne Teaching Hospital, and she was currently on rotation in the ER. Enzo had spoken with her earlier in the day, when he was checking up on his relatives in the immediate wake of the impacts. He’d learned that Nadine had been sent home from her shift early despite the influx of injured people to the ER because she herself had been injured.

  A grieving father who’d learned his eighteen-year-old daughter was among the fatalities at Edgerton College had flown into a rage and punched Nadine in the face. The blow sent Nadine reeling into a wall, where she’d cracked her head open on the metal edge of a bulletin board. She’d earned herself six stitches for being the bearer of bad news.

  She’d also earned a shift off. An ER couldn’t have a woozy doctor working on people with critical injuries. They’d sent her home to sleep off the effects of a minor concussion. And home was exactly where Nadine had been at quarter past two AM when Adara and Enzo, tired and hurting, plodded across her front porch and rang the doorbell.

  Nadine had not been happy to have her rejuvenating sleep interrupted by what she at first mistook in the late-night darkness for teenage hooligans. She answered the door with a golf club in her hands and a threat on the tip of her tongue. Her anger immediately morphed into concern, however, when she recognized one of the “hooligans” as her younger cousin.

  Enzo and Nadine were not close. Their family branches had a major falling-out when the two were young teens. Afterward, they barely saw each other until they both wound up in Edgerton to further their careers. Even now, they hardly spoke, the bad blood still running hot over the smol
dering coals of a family feud a decade in the making.

  But despite the familial rift, Nadine didn’t hesitate to help the two bedraggled people on her porch. She ushered them into the house without asking a single question and gave both Enzo and Adara the most thorough evaluations she could with the limited amount of tools she had on hand.

  As Adara had feared, Enzo had a concussion. But Nadine didn’t think it was worse than her own. So she relocated Enzo’s wrist with a couple swift tugs that had her poor cousin shrieking, and splinted the wrist to keep it still so it could heal. Then she gave Enzo an ice pack for his eye, along with some painkillers for the rest of his aches, and told him to drink plenty of fluids and get some rest.

  Enzo, exhausted from his near-death experience at the bar, hobbled off to the guest bedroom with no more than a garbled thank-you.

  It was Adara who told Nadine what happened at Hudson and Grail’s. As Nadine stitched up the gunshot wound on Adara’s arm, Adara gave her a sanitized version of the bar tragedy that excluded demons and magic powers, and emphasized the lacking role of the overburdened Edgerton police.

  She claimed that Enzo had tried to reach the cops when the four robbers first invaded the bar, but his call to 911 hadn’t been answered, the operators all busy with other emergencies. Enzo, panicking, had called Adara instead. She’d shown up armed and dangerous to save him from the cash-hungry bastards who’d killed a bar owner and brutalized an employee just because they could.

  It was a good story. And it was almost true.

  After Adara finished recounting her slightly modified version of events, the furious Nadine had only two things to say on the matter: “I’m glad you gave those fuckers what they deserved” and “Thank you for helping my cousin.”

  To express her gratefulness, she offered Adara the use of her shower to wash off the stink of beer, and the use of her couch so Adara could get some shut-eye before she fell out on the floor from fatigue.

  It turned out that transforming into a giant beer puddle sapped a lot of energy.

  Who would’ve guessed?

  Adara took Nadine up on both offers. She scrubbed the beer off her skin in the shower, patted herself dry with a rough towel, and promptly collapsed onto the lumpy couch, a throw blanket pulled up to her chin. Adara was used to sleeping on rough ground, thanks to her many hiking trips, so she was out like a light and slept soundly all night long.

  Now it was morning. The sun shone brightly through the gaps in the shade of the living room picture window. The birds chirped loudly in the trees in the back yard. The grumbles of a hundred cars on the nearby highway subtly vibrated through the house’s bones. And Adara could no longer bury her face in the scratchy couch pillow and deny that it was time for her to rise and face a brand-new day.

  I really hope today goes better than yesterday, she thought as she sat up, working out the stiffness in her muscles. But I have a sinking feeling things will be much worse, and will continue to get worse until I fix the cornerstone spell.

  Chapter Eighteen

  In the cramped kitchen that abutted the living room, Adara found a note from Nadine. She swiped the piece of notebook paper off the countertop on her way to the fridge. As she filled a glass with some cool water from the fridge dispenser, she unfolded the note and gave it a quick read. Nadine had that typical doctor chicken scratch, but Adara managed to parse most of the lines after some strategic squinting and turning of the paper.

  According to the note, Nadine had left at the crack of dawn to return to the hospital, and was likely to be gone for at least a double shift. She was offering the use of her house, food included, to Adara and Enzo until tomorrow morning. That way, neither of them would feel pressured to brave the hectic streets of a city scrambling to recover from a disaster while they were both injured.

  Alternatively, the note said, if either of them felt up to driving, they could borrow Nadine’s spare car, an old clunker she’d inherited from her late father, and use that to make their way around town in lieu of walking or taking the bus. As long as they paid for their own gas and didn’t crash the car, Nadine didn’t care if they kept it for a while.

  Adara grimaced at the generous offers and set the paper back on the countertop. Taking a large gulp of the refreshing water, she rued the fact that she couldn’t tell Nadine the whole truth about what was going on. At least not without making the woman think Adara was batshit crazy.

  Putting Adara and Enzo up in her house for even one night was dangerous enough, given that the demons could pinpoint their location every time they used their god shards. The longer they stayed here, the more likely it was they’d doom Nadine’s house to perpetual demon surveillance, just like Adara’s apartment.

  And the car? Well, if it really was a clunker, then Nadine wouldn’t lose too much money if the demons got their hands on it. But Adara still wasn’t keen on the prospect of risking a significant piece of property that didn’t belong to her.

  She didn’t want to share her misfortunes with others. Enough people had already suffered from the consequences of the impact event. Many were still suffering and would be for some time. It was Adara’s duty—thanks to her being in the wrong place at the right time to get a piece of God lodged in her soul—to make things better for people, not worse.

  With every step I take, this is going to get more complicated, isn’t it? she thought, draining the rest of her water.

  She set the emptied glass on the countertop next to the note and attempted to dig through the jumble of thoughts that had piled up during yesterday’s “excitement.” She had a great many things to process, and very little time to soothe her psyche before she had to go back out onto the battlefield this city had become.

  Selaphiel had said the Edgerton cornerstone could fail in a matter of hours. So Adara did not have time to sit in a corner and dwell on the things she’d already done, the things she’d failed to do, and the things, both great and terrible, she’d have to do from here on out. She simply had to keep doing things, necessary things, to the best of her ability, until the demon invasion had been fully averted.

  Even if some of those things made her want to vomit all over the floor.

  She glanced at her hunting bow. It was in the foyer, along with her pack, sitting next to a side table near the front door. She’d shot people with that bow last night, without hesitation and without remorse. Shot them with the full intention of causing their deaths. She’d also set up two men to inadvertently shoot themselves with a shotgun, and in so doing, she’d caused them an immense amount of pain.

  While it was true that all those men had ultimately been killed by the imp, there was no doubt that Adara had played a major role in their demise.

  Adara had shot and killed animals before. Some geese. Some ducks. Some deer. Even a wild turkey one time. But she’d never inflicted that sort of violence on another human being.

  The closest she’d come before last night was that day in the sixth grade where she’d punched Jodie Donnager in the face because the girl cut a chunk of Adara’s hair off with safety scissors in art class. Adara had decked her so hard that the girl lost both her front teeth. Her permanent front teeth.

  That had been violent, yes, but it had also been kind of funny in hindsight. What Adara had done to those men was not funny in the slightest and never would be.

  Is that the kind of person I want to be from here on out? she asked herself, and immediately realized it was the wrong question. The right question was: Is that the kind of person I’ll have to be to survive in the post-Shattering world?

  The desperate part of her hoped the answer was no.

  The logical part of her knew better.

  Sighing at the heavy mound of problems that now lay on her shoulders, Adara tugged the fridge door open and rummaged around for some breakfast food. She found a carton of eggs and half a package of thick-cut bacon, along with some butter, milk, and orange juice. In the freezer, she spotted a box of frozen hash browns two days from their expiration
date, so she grabbed those as well.

  It took her a few minutes to find everything she needed in the unfamiliar kitchen. But soon, she had the oven on, the burners lit, and several slices of bacon sizzling in a pan.

  She threw herself into the cooking more intently than she ever had before, trying to stave off the myriad questions about angels and demons and the death of God that seemed to burn twice as hot as the flickering flames on the stovetop. She felt that if she tried to answer any of those questions, her throat would blister and her tongue would melt away.

  Yet they had to be answered eventually. And if she wanted to save her city, she had to be the one who answered them.

  All this because you were the first, she thought as she dropped a dollop of butter into a second pan. The first human to blindly stumble into a power you unwittingly inherited from God.

  Usually, when someone came first in something, they felt proud of themselves.

  Adara felt no pride in the use of her god shard. She felt dread and nothing else.

  Either the smell of cooking food or the loud pops and sizzles roused Enzo from his deep sleep. While Adara was scrambling the eggs, he shambled out of the guest bedroom. He wore nothing but his boxers and his spare pair of glasses, which he must’ve had hidden in a pocket last night. His short dark hair was sticking up in nine different directions, and he had patchy stubble on his chin and cheeks.

  Adara would’ve laughed at him like she had countless times—he always looked hungover when he woke up before noon—but the extensive bruising on his face sucked all the fun out of the moment. The swelling around his eye had reached its peak, and every inch of skin from temple to jaw was dark purple. His split bottom lip had scabbed over again, but it too had swollen up and now jutted out over his upper lip.