Forever Here

by Harold Wall

  Celia was already looking up to see what had transfixed him.

  Fire dangled from the roof like a vast serpent with its jaws agape.

  "Move!" she cried. She grabbed Will, toppling the pair of them to the ground.

  The tongue of flame broke loose, and it seemed to drift down like a maple seed caught on the wind, almost harmless, almost beautiful. Part of her wanted to reach out and catch it

  – and then it landed on the sofa. Flames erupted upwards. Heat clamped like feverish hands on her face as she scrambled back to the mezzanine railings. Only then did she see that

  the roof and walls were ablaze.

  "Shit, the place is going up!" Will shouted into her ear.

  She glanced over the rail to the ground and was shocked at how thick the smoke already was. "We have to go. Now."

  And she would have to leave her stilettos behind. She was barefoot in a burning building. Wonderful.

  "Stay close," he urged. "It'd be easy to get lost in this."

  She followed Will, tentative, feeling the rough wood pricking the balls of her feet. The staircase felt miles away in a haze of choking air. Each passing moment brought more smoke,

  thicker, darker.

  They hit the staircase, and Will swore.

  "What is it?"

  "Wall's smoking. Don't touch the banister that side."

  This was not good. Surely fires didn't spread this fast, even in wooden barns with thatched roofs.

  She stepped down, cautious. The stairs were as hot as sunblasted sand, full of splinters and treacherous.

  "Come on!" called Will, a couple of feet further down. "I want off this thing!"

  Pain lanced through the ball of her foot. Celia yelped, and he appeared through the smoke, fear warring with concern.

  "You okay...?" He saw her feet. "Where the hell are your shoes?"

  She looked back at him with grim finality. "By the couch. Kicked them off, remember?" Celia wrenched out a bit of wood and tottered up. "I'm sorted."

  Temporarily, at any rate. She made it to the bottom of the stairs, but her foot was bleeding. What alarmed her more was the fact she couldn't hear anyone else. It felt like she and

  Will were alone in the barn.

  They wove over the floor, achingly slow. Paths formed, then swirled away in smoky black wafts, trapping them in this kaleidoscopic, claustrophobic labyrinth. Every step was pain.

  Another splinter jabbed into her heel – she stopped, calling him, and bent to dig it out.

  When she glanced up, he was a barelythere smear on the smoke. Panic roughened his voice. "Celia! Come on!"

  She opened her mouth to answer, and there was a noise she'd never heard, like the sound of tin foil tearing on a cosmic scale. A dark blur in her peripheral vision – she flung

  herself back as there was a tremendous crash, and something like bright rain spattered her...

  Pain came in its wake – it was not water, but a rain of toasted debris that she scoured from her skin, her hair, her ruined dress.

  Cool air lapped at her as the smoke cleared to bare utter devastation. The roof was gone. No, worse – it was heaped on the floor between her and Will, and already the flames

  surged up, up, stronger than before. A barrier divided them as far as she could see.

  "Celia!" he yelled. "Are you okay?"

  He hovered on the other side, edging close to the flames before he was forced back, coughing. They stared at one another, the truth written there between them in loops of fire.

  "Get out!" she said.

  "I can't leave you."

  Skeins of smoke drifted between them like gauze. She had to shout to hear herself. "I'll find another way. Go! You can't stay, Will."

  "I'll get help. I'll bring them back..." His voice faded, and then his silhouette, and she was left in a world that was nothing but swirling smoke, nothing but fire that rippled ever

  closer, moving like the shoulders of a stalking tiger. "We'll come back for you, I promise!"

  Liar, she thought, sad, angry, so, so afraid. No one will come. No one can.

  Then she squared her shoulders, breathing too hard, too fast, and tried to ignore the sick feeling in her stomach. There had to be a way out. If the building was collapsing around

  her, well, she just needed it to collapse in the right place.

  It was a plan so ludicrous even Finn would balk at it. But at that moment, it was all she had. It was everything she had, down to her last breath.People

  spewed out of the barn like angry wasps – dark dots that scattered this way and that, first in a flurry and then in a swarm. Sunny stood, arms wrapped around herself,

  wanting to help. Unable to take even one small step closer to the flames.

  "Sunny!" Finn appeared, face bleak. "Have you seen Celia? Or Phi? Riose?"

  Knots of people were gathering – the hum of noise was becoming a hubbub punctuated with shouts and tears and tension. She kept trying to blink away all the emotions that

  fluttered birdlike above them all, winged shapes of gold and lightningwhite.

  "I was outside with Riose. He went to help." She spotted the vampire, supporting a boy across the grass who was clutching a laptop to his chest like a child. "Is everyone out?"

  "Don't know." He turned to the burning building. "I don't even know how to check."

  "Finn!" Delphine Thetis came over at a jog, concern in her face. "Thank god you're okay."

  "We need to find out if anyone's missing."

  "We can do that." The shapeshifter girl, Jo, appeared. She looked shaken, hair strewn loose about her shoulders and a long burn already fading along her arm. "Phi, you go left and

  I'll go right?" She gave Sunny an impersonal glance, still keeping a distance from her. "No offence, new girl, but you don't know anyone."

  "None taken," she murmured.

  The two girls sank into the night. She watched them move from group to group, asking questions, each time seeming to receive the answer they wanted. No one had left the

  building for a few moments, and Riose was headed their way.

  "Happy Birthday," he said to Finn. "Blow the candles out on this one."

  The witch's smile had a lopsided cant. "It'd be a hell of a wish. Saw you saved Sam's laptop."

  "He was pissed I made him leave the second one." He rubbed absently at a smoke stain on his cheek. "Barn's a goner."

  "Yeah. Telling my parents is going to be fun." Finn groaned. "Oh gods, they're going to think I did it."

  Sunny said, "Do you...set a lot of things on fire?"

  He rocked a hand. "Depends how you define a lot." At Riose's snort, he said, "Well. Yes, by the dictionary definition I do set a lot of stuff on fire. It comes with the turf."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I'm a firebug. Most witches have a bit of fire magic – the kind of stuff I did with your drink. But it's always been strong in my family and I got every last bit of it. You want

  someone to stroke crystals or heal wounds or do voodoo, I am so not your guy. But if you really want to see something burn, well, I can set your world on fire."

  "And sometimes if you don't want to see something burn, Finn will still set your world on fire," murmured Riose. "Your game console, for example, if you beat him too often."

  "I was eight!"

  Sunny couldn't help the quiver of unease that ran through her. It was one thing to know Finn could manipulate fire. It was another to know that he couldn't always control it.

  "Boys!" Jo came sprinting up, disarrayed. "We can't find Celia or Will. No one can."

  "What?" There was steel in Riose's voice. "Are you certain?"

  "They're not here." Phi joined them. "Arch said they were up in the loft." She took a breath, then said, "Maybe a prophecy would find"

  "No!" That came from Jo and Finn in fierce unison. "It's not worth your life," argued the witch. "And by the time you've done it – by the time you've looked through all the futures,

  it..." He trailed off.r />
  "It would be too late, darling," finished Jo. She stared at Riose, her eyes narrowed. "Isn't that right, Ri?"

  Riose regarded her for a very long moment. It was the face of a Fury, weighing the balance, calculating the cost. Sunny had seen it before. Then he murmured, "Exactly right."

  Phi sighed. "If you're sure."

  Sunny squinted past them. A figure was lurching from the barn, small and black on a sheet of gold. "Who's that?"

  "Where?" Riose turned with a grace too liquid to be human. Then he was gone, the others in his wake.

  Part of her – small, quailing before the flames – wanted to stay a safe distance away. But Celia was her friend, or the closest thing she'd ever had, and Sunny heard her saying

  fervently No one hurts my friends.

  It was a good mantra. She wanted to live up to it. But today of all days, she needed help.

  And she knew where to find it. Among the gleams of human fear were other emotions – excitement, from a boy filming the entire thing on his phone. Determination, from the boy

  who tinkered with his flickering laptop. She centred herself, and reached for her power. Like a siren, she called their emotions to her. Just a little, just for now, hardly enough for

  them to notice.

  And she was calmer. She could look at the fire and see something other than her own blackened past. Sunny followed the others, running on borrowed courage.

  They reached the figure, who was doubled over, coughing.

  "Will." Riose dragged him up, fist clenched in his shirt. "Where's Celia?"

  Will stared at them from reddened eyes. "She's inside. I left her...the roof collapsed. She's still in there, you have to get her." He sagged onto the grass, wheezing.

  Riose swore, bleak and low and savage. He drew their little knot away from Will. "I'm going in. Finn, can you clear me a path?"

  The witch was watching the fire with the eyes of a man sizing up the enemy. "I've never held anything this big." A mirthless smile curved on his mouth. "Time to find out how good I

  am."

  "Darling, you can't do it," hissed Jo, urgent. "There are people everywhere, and half of them don't know what we are."

  "There's no time," snapped Riose. "Jo, look!"

  "I know. I know!" The fingers she dug into his upper arms were clawed, but he didn't flinch and neither did she. The anguish in her eyes resonated in her voice. "Riose, please,

  people are already getting hurt because a couple of humans know. If you do this now, like this, they'll all know. All of them. Everything we have...you don't know what they can be

  like – you don't know what they'll do when they stop looking at you and seeing a person..."

  "Don't ask me to leave her to die," he hissed.

  Jo recoiled. "No! I wouldn't. Just – another way, Ri, please. So they don't see."

  "I can do it." It was a moment before Sunny realised she had spoken. "I can get rid of everyone. Give me twenty seconds and I'll empty the place."

  "How?"

  "No time," she said. "You need to touch me, or you'll run too."

  She didn't wait to see if they had listened – instead, she reached out for the fear that flitted on the air, and drew it in with demonic magnetism, the vacuum in her filling with all

  those bold, burning human emotions. She took them, trapped them, compressed them into a twitching lighting seed. And onto that, she added her own fear – the bonedeep, souldeep

  fears of fire and abandonment which had been realised in terrible intensity for six long years in a demon world. She was not sure it was enough.

  She opened her eyes. There were hands on her, clammy, tentative – the four of them, clustered around her like clover leaves.

  "Help me," she breathed.

  "Anything," said Finn, and Phi nodded. Almost anything, said Riose's wary eyes. Jo, quivering with revulsion, did not look at her at all.

  "I need your fear."

  "Go on," said Riose guardedly.

  "Think of your worst fear," she commanded. "The one you know might just come true if all the stars collide in all the wrong ways. Think of it, and even if it's just for a moment, let

  it have you."

  And she saw it rise from each of them, glimmering, flowing into her. Four people, and one thought, repeating in hesitant horror: not Celia.

  No, she vowed, and added their emotion to all she had gathered. Visible only to her, the sputtering globe of lightning sparked in her palm, tethered only by her will. She hefted it,

  hesitating only for a heartbeat. There could be no going back now, no hiding her strangeness. She hurled it high, and felt the night explode.

  Fear blasted across the air like a supernova, briefly blinding her. Screams came in its wake, torn from unsuspecting throats. Sunny blinked away purple afterimages to see people

  running. Not knowing why or where or how, they scattered. Even Will fled, scrambling away in uneven, ragged steps. In moments, only the five of them remained.

  "What are you?" breathed Jo, cringing back.

  Her chin came up. "Exactly what you asked for. Another way."

  "Good work," said Finn. He squeezed her hand before stepping away. "My turn. Jo, why don't you get my mom? Celia's going to need healing. Smoke and lungs are not a good mix."

  "Sure thing, darling," muttered the wildcat, vanishing into the night.

  "Riose, as soon as I tell you, run," ordered the witch. "I'll hold the way open as long as I can, but..."

  "Understood."

  Finn took a deep breath, set himself like a man bracing for impact, then raised his hands. The air around him shimmered, and Sunny felt pressure bear down upon her, as if she

  was stood under a monster storm, waiting for it to burst. His fingers hooked, one hand over the other like a man trying to pry open elevator doors – and then he heaved.

  The air groaned. Every inch of the witch was locked in a battle with unseen forces, from his white knuckles to his strained shoulders. He gasped, and his fingers slid an inch apart.

  And the flames parted like someone cracking open their curtains. It was nothing more than a wavering black line in the inferno, quickly hidden by gouts of smoke, but hope

  skewered Sunny at the sight of it.

  Riose leaned forward, a sprinter waiting on the gun.

  Finn snarled soft words, curses or spells, and with another effort, dragged open the space again, again, again. Now it was a narrow, perilous pathway. "Go!"

  Riose bolted, so fast he blurred; only a faint breath of his aftershave remained.

  "Phi..." Finn's voice was strangled. "Can you go get Cee's mom, and Ri's?"

  "He won't like that," warned Phi.

  "Why do you think I waited until he'd gone?" He took a shuddering breath. "Please."

  "Damn." She sighed. "You had to ask nicely. I'll get them. Finn – no heroics. Be smart."

  "No heroics," said he, holding back an inferno. "Pinky swear."

  With a shake of her head, Phi slipped into the shadows, feet soft thunder on the ground.

  Sunny said, "You sent them away. Why?"

  Silence unwound. Then Finn croaked, "All part of my dastardly plan. You and me alone at last. Feeling faint with lust yet?"

  "Positively dizzy," she muttered, and looked at him again, with demon eyes.

  Head bowed, breath sawing, Finn struggled against the fire. He was a black statue, and emotions pulsed around him with every breath. With all that was in him, he flung himself

  against this vast adversary, courage, anger, sheer will driving his magic.

  And pain. It was hurting him, his power dripping away like sand in an hourglass.

  Hurry, Riose, she thought. He can't hold on forever. Hurry with my blessing, if the blessing of a demon means anything when all hell has broken loose.

  The barrier was impassable both ways. Eventually smoke drove her back, coughing. She stumbled between the flames, the pain in her feet getting worse and worse as the floor

  heated. Celi
a knew she could not go on much longer. Glancing back, she saw bloody footprints on the wood.

  When an edge hit her thighs, she recognised the drinks table. And – small blessings – several large bottles of water still on it, if warm. She emptied them over herself and yanked

  off the tablecloth to put between her and the floor. It was shelter. She would rest for a minute, just a minute until her feet hurt less.

  Huddled beneath it, a minute became longer. The table protected her from pieces of the falling roof that crashed down. It was getting harder to breathe, even down on the floor. Worse, she didn't think she could stand again.

  And then she heard something. An impossible something.

  Her name.

  It had to be her imagination. Terrible fluttering hope rose in her, wringing out hot tears.

  "Celia!" A shout above the roaring flames, defiant and so familiar.

  "Here!" she cried, throat burning before coughs tore her words away. She fought them back. "Riose!"

  o0oFinn

  had been trembling since the start, but the tremors had become fullon shakes. Worse, Sunny could see the emotions around him receding. That was bad. Very bad.

  "Finn, you have to stop," she said.

  "Over my" His hands skidded – for a moment, the fire surged partway over the path, but with a feral howl, he pulled it back. The effort drove him to his knees, teeth bared. He

  took a rasping breath and finished, "dead body."

  "It will be if you carry on," she pointed out. "You're on the floor. If you don't let go of the fire now, you never will."

  "I'll be fine. Looks worse than it is." He managed to meet her gaze, his eyes dark and vast with pain. "Can't expect an outsider to understand."

  The barb took away her breath like a punch to the gut. Then Sunny steadied, recognising it for what it was. "Nice try. Don't think that being cruel to me means I'm going to let you martyr yourself. Newsflash, firebug – you're not the only one with unusual talents. I can read your emotions like a book, and you're at the cliffhanger out of power, and draining

  your life force. Fast."

  He gave a rickety laugh. "Damn it. I should have sent you on an errand too."

  "Why, so I wouldn't try and stop you?" The answer was stark in his expression. "Well, I won't." She closed her eyes: considered, but it was barely a decision at all. "Not until the