by Eli Constant
It’s Liam, I realize as the smoke and fire begin to overwhelm me. Of course it’s Liam.
That tether to my fairy finally brings me back. He is my anchor. I feel my soul rushing across the distance to my body on the bed in my home. I’m going to be safe soon. Everything will be fine. I will figure out where the arsonists are, and I will stop them.
Safety is an exhalation away. The fire will die away. Everything will be fine.
Solid. I am becoming solid again.
I can feel the realness of my limbs.
But then why am I still burning?
Chapter Twenty-Five
When I can feel the realness of me again, I’m startled to find that the fire has somehow traveled here. I can still feel heat. My skin still feels like the outside of an oven on high broil. My eyes flash open to find my room on fire, flames licking up the curtains and reaching for the ceiling. The fan above is still steadily thumping away, blowing sparks around like fireflies.
“Oh my God,” I cough out, sitting up and frantically looking around the room. “No, no… this can’t be happening.”
The fire has followed me here. My skin feels like the outside of an oven on high broil, coated in a thin layer of ash. A craggy piece of the ceiling is on the bed beside my cheek. Instinctively, I reach up and brush my fingers against my face. That’s what slapped me. I cannot find the soft thing that hit me while caught in the spirit realm, but I do see one of the ceiling fan blades broken on the floor. All of the walls look like they’re melting and peeling. The curtains are dancing infernos. Clouds of gray roil about the ceiling like a gathering of ghosts.
My home, my beloved home, is burning.
“Tori!” Someone’s yelling my name, and it’s not Liam. Was it ever Liam? Guilt wants to press into my mind, that Kyle was not the magnet pulling me home. But there’s no time for hashing out my crippled love life, there’s only time to survive. And the voice is loud, as if magnified, but too distorted to recognize. “Tori! Dammit, get that ladder up there!” The same voice shouts. “No! Stop him! He can’t go in there! Kyle, don’t be an idiot!” Terrance, the voice is Terrance.
But Kyle… the thought of him forcing his way into this building—this structure that is nothing really but wood and paint, the vessel for memories just as my body is the vessel for my soul—spurs me onward. He is more important than this house.
There is no clear path to the bedroom window through the fire. It has been burning long enough to spread. The bathroom curtain is even burning. Flames traveling both ways and I am caught betwixt and between. A stream of fire leaks out of my room into the hallway.
Carefully I slink off the bed, dropping nearly to my knees onto a sliver of floor that is not ablaze. I cough again, and search for something to put over my face. There’s a sock under my bed. I grab it and stuff my fingers into it, then sink my covered hand into a half-filled cup by the bed. I often have water on my nightstand. Sometimes random partial glasses around the kitchen. Ever since I saw that movie in which the aliens could only be killed with water and the family is saved because the little kid never picks up her unfinished water bottles and cups.
I press the damp sock over my face and begin to crawl, but my eyes widen as I pause at the threshold of my room. I turn around frantically and spy Adam’s jacket still folded on the foot of the bed. The bedspread is on fire, it’s so close to the coat. I stumble back as fast as I can and I grab it, then move as fast as I can into the hallway.
“Tori! We’re coming! Stay where you are!” I hear the loud voice again, crackly and unfamiliar.
The fire has reached the kitchen and is slithering its way into the living room. The large window near the fireplace is a portal to the outside world, which is dark. How long had I been caught in the astral plane? What trick of time had caused it to go from afternoon to late evening in a blink?
I make it to the window and peer out. There are three cop cars, a fire truck, and an ambulance haphazardly parked on the Victorian’s manicured lawn. Terrance is holding a megaphone. And I find Kyle, being held back by three cops and an EMT. He’s struggling, but not to get out of the men’s grasps. I know he’s trying to control himself, to keep from beasting-out to save me. His instincts must be going wild.
Coughing, I bang on the glass and fumble with the window locks. I can’t remember the last time I’ve opened it, and it’s stuck from years of disuse and ill maintenance. I bang again, as hard as I can, but the smoke is too much and everyone is focusing on my room. They’re lifting the ladder there. I don’t understand why. I’m right here. Can’t they see me?
Moving away from the window, I assess the room again. The fire is growing so fast, like it has a life of its own. And it probably does, because it can’t just be a normal fire—not with my luck, not with my life.
Keeping low, one hand still on my face though the sock is already nearly dry, I crawl to the door of the apartment and kneel to unlock the bolts, and then reach for the knob. “Shit!” I cry as the metal surface burns my fingers, hotter than a stove burner on high.
I lower my sock-covered hand and pull Adam’s coat from under my arm where I’ve had it shoved so I could crawl. I wrap it around the knob and it provides enough guard to let me turn it and swing the door open. I’m blasted backwards by oiling heat and fire that screams inward, renewed by the oxygen I’ve just provided.
How do I get out? I’ve got to get out… I can’t die like this. I can’t burn!
I grab Adam’s jacket and move back to the window. I can get it open. I just have to try harder. I worry the window lock until it finally gives, leaving my fingers sore from the effort. I gasp in relief, then give the window a shove upwards. It doesn’t budge, not even a fraction.
Nailssssssssssssssssssssssss. The ghostly utterance floats through my head like a bad dream. Because that’s what it is. A bad dream. A nightmare.
The window is nailed shut. I can see several bent nails through the pane of glass. But when? How?
My mind reels. I’m going to die. And something about that fact yanks me to a conversation with Dean—about the salesman who’d insisted on checking the windows. Why hadn’t I put two and two together? Why hadn’t I realized? Hindsight… is the fucking devil. A trickster who turns every choice into a roll of the dice.
“Help!” I scream, giving into my baser instincts. The girl in the movie who’s reached her final attempt at salvation. The last victim standing who runs up the stairs instead of out of the house. “Help!” I slam my hands against the window. “Please, help!”
It’s Kyle that finds me in the window. A fireman is up the ladder now, almost to my bedroom window. He’s carrying an ax. I need him here though, not there. And I can’t go back to my room. The hallway is a wall of blazing heat.
I turn around, desperately looking for something to help me. I need to break the window. I pull the leather jacket onto my body and yank the now-dry sock off my hand. Army crawling, the air so thick in the apartment now that I run the risk of dying of smoke inhalation before I actually burn, I make my way to the kitchen table and grab a chair. It’s not the heaviest in the world, but not the lightest either. I pray it’ll be enough.
Dragging it back, I fight through the heat and haze to stand. My bare feet burn against the floor and I’m coughing again. I can’t stop. My body is rebelling, trying to repel the death that wants to ride me like a horse. I lift the chair over my head and I slam it down at the window. I know two things will happen when I break the glass—they’ll know where I am, they’ll direct their efforts here to this window… and the fire will strengthen from the fresh air.
The window cracks.
I steel myself, lift the chair higher, I slam it down as hard as I can whilst coughing. My eyes are stinging, watering. I can barely see what my struggle produces this time.
I can hear though. The shattering of glass, the tinkling of shards against the hardwood. And I lurch forward as the chair pushes through to the other side. I let go, my eyes opening as it falls away fr
om me.
So I scream. I scream and I scream and I feel the fire intensify behind me.
And then I’m falling, the last of my energy gone.
This is the end.
The burning.
The world consumed by fire.
And he who levels the world will come, to reap my soul and take me to that choice between ether and anti-ether.
“I won’t let you die.” A familiar presence fills me. Not Liam. This scares me. It is the power that filled me at Mordecai’s home. It is sinister. Who or what is it?
Will I go to hell now? Is that what waits for me beyond the ether?
Once, I did not believe in hell.
And heaven was a glimmer hope.
Yet now I stand on the precipice of death—
this hollow exit to a life short-lived—
And truly I wish they did exist.
Even as I go down, into that dark abyss.
Chapter Twenty-Six
One thing about nearly dying…coming back to life really, really sucks.
But your mind is also uninhibited somehow, clear of all the extra mess that mucks with your life. The overthinking, the overanalyzing, the trying to please people and keep your existence peaceful. The only thing you’re focused on is breathing.
A line around my nose and mouth, and the push of plastic, tells me I’m wearing a mask. Every inhalation and exhalation is slightly cool, and tastes sterile and medicinal.
One breath.
Then a second breath.
Feel your heart beating inside, and soak in the vitality of it.
I’m not dead. And that is the most wonderful thing in the world.
And the second most wonderful thing? As I rest against a barely-soft surface feeling the night air brushing against me and the hum of human activity rushing around me?
I know where the arsonists are. I know where we have to go. I have no fucking idea what to do when we get there or how to stop them, but half the battle is won already in my head because I have a location. I could figure out how to win the war on the fly.
I… hoped.
“Tori? Babe?” A large hand brushes my forehead and musses my hair. “Tori, wake up.”
I suppose I should open my eyes now, I think, but I’m loathe to let go of the freedom of being away from the hustle of life, to only focus on the nature of things.
“Tori, please.” This is another voice. Terrance. “I got your damn note. It was on the floor. I didn’t see it. You got to be okay, woman. I told you this sounded too dangerous.”
“She almost died, Terrance. Shelve the ‘told you so’.” Kyle’s voice butts in. “Babe, wake up.”
You can’t stay dead forever, especially not in my line of work. I open my eyes slowly, my lashes fluttering a bit like a wounded bird. My gaze is still watery, the gas mask still in place. My skin is sensitive and tingly, the way it feels the day after a moderate burn. I’m already healing, slowly but surely. I reach with my power and taste the blood and how it is working its magic on my vessel.
“I’m okay,” I croak out lowly. Then my eyes widen. I have to tell Terrance what I know. We have to go before it’s too late. The larger question still remains though… how do we stop them? I grab Terrance’s sleeve and I yank. He leans forward. “I know where they are,” I whisper, my words as brittle as burned paper. “It was so obvious. An idiot could have guessed.”
Mordecai, in his cryptic way, had even given me the answer. I had it, all this time, trapped in my mind.
“Don’t worry about that right now, Tori. We need to get you to the hospital.” Kyle hovers his hands above me, trying to figure out where he can touch that isn’t charred. I don’t bother telling him that he can touch me anywhere, that my body is already magically on the mend. The necromancer slash Blood Queen life has its benefits.
“We have to worry about it.” I try to sit up, but both Kyle and Terrance push me back down. “We don’t have time to—”
“Kyle’s right, Tori. You need to rest.” Terrance is waving a hand to summon one of his deputies over. When he arrives, he speaks again. “Follow the ambulance to the hospital. I don’t want you to leave Ms. Cage’s side.” The deputy nods.
“No,” I say forcefully, then I look at the deputy. “Can you give us a minute…” I know his name, but I can’t bring it to life on my tongue right now. I glance down at his badge. “Radley.” It’s his last name, and it’s obvious I’ve forgotten his first, but I don’t care.
Radley looks at Terrance for confirmation and walks away once he gets a quick nod of ascent.
“It’s happening now, Terrance. It’s now or never because a giant fucking portal to hell will be open in the middle of town.” There’s no need for me to force intensity into my words, no need to try and make the scenario anymore grave than it actually is. If we don’t go now, and stop the coven leaders… hello, hellmouth.
I don’t want to think about what Bonneau will look like tomorrow.
Stripping the oxygen mask from my face, I sit up. This time, the two men don’t try and stop me—though an EMT catches sight of me and begins walking over to us, looking more than a little unhappy.
“Where are they, Tori?” Terrance has his cop face on now. He’s weighed the balance of risk, and his desire to not see me harmed, with the fate of everyone under his protection.
The EMT is closing in, so I speak quickly. “At the core of everything. The middle of the pentagram. The center of all things that is neither good nor bad.”
“The restaurant,” Terrance breathed out. “No, we checked every inch of that place.”
“That’s where they are, Terrance. Trust me.” My gaze flashes to where the EMT was advancing. Radley has stopped him for some reason, maybe securing the privacy I’d asked for.
Terrance’s eyes study mine, his gaze deep and searching. Finally, he says what I already know in my heart. “I do trust you. Let me get my men together. We need to tell them—”
“You can’t tell them,” I say quickly, grabbing his sleeve again and making him stop. “This is magic, Terrance. It’s not a serial killer on the loose. They can’t fight this. You have to keep them away. I can handle this.”
“I’m going.” He holds up a hand to stop me talking, because I’ve opened my mouth to protest. He didn’t want to risk me; I don’t want to risk him. “This is my town. Human or not, I’m fighting.”
“I’m going too,” Kyle speaks, having stood quiet during our exchange.
This time, I do fight. “Kyle, you almost died once already this week. You’re still healing. No. You’re not coming.”
“You nearly died this week too,” he looks up at my house, which is still burning despite the firemen’s efforts to extinguish the blaze. “And it’s my genetic job to protect you. Remember?” His smile was slight and a bit sad, but his fingers brushing my chin were gentle and loving.
Terrance quirked an eyebrow at Kyle’s strange revelation, but didn’t comment.
“Kyle, ride with her to the hospital. I’ll tell my men that I’m going to follow, stay with you until we’ve seen a doctor and I know you’re safe. They won’t question me.” He turns away, heading towards his group of men watching the arc of water shoot from the giant python hose trailing from the firetruck.
The ambulance is silent as it drives away from my home and business. Terrance’s squad car is a dark blotch against the evening sky behind us, only announced by a pair of weak headlights.
I can see the Victorian through the two windows of the vehicle’s double back doors.
My last family member is dying before my eyes. And there’s nothing I can do to stop what’s happening.
Revenge though. That might be something I can manage.
***
The EMTs take me into the emergency room and process me into the hospital. Kyle stays by my side each step of the way. Terrance, despite following closely behind the ambulance the entire drive, has not appeared yet.
I’m put in one of those too-small rooms in w
hich the adjustable bed and basic medical equipment barely fit. It’s a transitional room, where they stick patients who are being assessed for admittance. Apparently, I’m not so bad that anyone feels the need to rush to my side for diagnosis.
After what feels like an eternity, Terrance appears. “Okay, let’s go.” He hands me a pair of jeans and a set of brown boots. I give him a questioning look. “I know a woman who works in the NIC-U. She always has spare clothes.”
Grateful to strip out of the giant sweat pants, I soon find the jeans are at least a size too slim. But the woman is tall at least, so the jeans don’t cut off at an awkward length on my legs. The tight pants cause my stomach to pooch out slightly against the tank top. But that’s the least of my worries.
Fighting is going to be a bitch in tight pants.
Amazingly, we leave the hospital easily. No one stops us, no one wonders where we’re going. Maybe it helps that my ass isn’t hanging out of a hospital gown. We’re just three visitors, late at night, checking on a relative or whatever. Easy breezy, beautiful undercover girl.
I’m cold when I get outside, and it’s the first time I realize I don’t have Adam’s jacket. I remember putting it on before fainting in the fire. I stop dead in my tracks, brushing my hands over my bare arms. “Where’s my jacket? Please tell me you have it?”
“I’ve got it,” Terrance answers my prayer and I start walking again, following behind both him and Kyle. When we reach the squad car, Terrance unlocks it and opens the back passenger door. Adam’s jacket is sitting on the back seat.
I lean in and get it, a sigh of relief escaping my lips. “Thank you. It… means a lot to me.”
“I know,” Terrance replies. “You hadn’t worn it for a long time. I’d almost forgotten about it.”
When we’re all settled in the car, Terrance shifting into gear, Kyle turns his body slightly in the seat next to me. “What’s with the jacket?”
My gaze flicks to Terrance in the front seat, and I catch his eyes in the rearview. There’s an apology there.