Fire Of Love

by Preston Walker

  An enormous TV perched awkwardly on a stand across from the bed. Also on the stand were a number of gaming systems, ranging from boxy older models to the newest streamlined gadgets. The only other thing of note was a cell phone, the screen dark.

  There were also two bookcases. One of these bookcases held novel adaptations of video games, set in a shared universe. The other held what must have been prized items, because they were all in little display cases.

  Moody pulled in a breath and then let it out. He had to be as quick about this as possible, while missing absolutely nothing.

  First, he went over to the bed and pulled out the storage boxes from underneath.

  He was not expecting the contents, although he probably should have. This was, after all, Arlo.

  Japanese manga -and some which appeared to be Vietnamese or Korean. Yet, these were no novels of ordinary anime antics. Rather, they were clearly porn. Tentacles in place of dicks, oversized female sex organs, absurd and provocative clothes that only made sense in a land of fantasy.

  Rubbing his hands on his jeans, Moody stood up and headed over to the closet. It was one of those closets with two sliding doors, the kind that always tended to get stuck for no reason.

  Opening the right side, he discovered a cheap dresser.

  Moody started at the bottom, pulling open drawers to reveal a cluttered mess of jeans and shorts. He tore all of them out, felt in every single pocket for something that might be hidden. No luck. He then ran his fingers all along the inside of the splintery drawer, feeling for a latch or hidden compartment.

  Still nothing.

  Similarly, the second and third drawers were uninteresting.

  The top drawer was actually two small drawers, one on the left and one on the right. Moody yanked open the right, discovered a plethora of boring white underwear.

  The left drawer caught a little when Moody opened it. He paused, frowning a little as anticipatory shivers raced down his spine. He had had similar difficulties with the other drawers, though nothing like this. This was a clunky, wooden sound, rather than something soft and fabric.

  He pulled out the contents of the drawer, then ran his hand along the inside. Very near the top of the inner wall of the drawer, where it was likely to catch on the framework of the dresser, was a thin wooden box.

  Pulling the box away, Moody heard the distinctive sound of Velcro coming apart. And sure enough, there were Velcro strips on the back of the box.

  “What the hell?” he whispered.

  The box was thin and flat, though not very long. A wallet had more bulk to it, essentially.

  Moody’s fingers trembled as he opened the box. He dropped the lid on the carpet, mouth opening with astonishment. His mind blanked for an instant. This couldn’t be. It was too good to be true, too coincidental to seem real. Yet, he had the box in his hand, the slick grain under his fingers, the soft weight on his palm.

  Inside the box was a velvet lining, thick and plush to prevent the contents from rattling around and causing a disturbance. And the contents was a book of waterproof matches, and a tiny vial of sticky liquid that looked like gasoline or something else flammable.

  “Holy fuck,” Moody whispered.

  This was like a tinderbox for arsonists, a firestarter’s emergency kit.

  Moody placed the lid back on the box, then set it down on top of the dresser. He had more of the closet to explore. This one bit of evidence seemed quite damning to him, though that was only because he knew deep down in his heart that Arlo was an arsonist. Anyone else could look at this and agree it was a little weird, though they wouldn’t know what to really make of it. Maybe it was for emergencies or other unforeseen scenarios in which a quick fire could make all the difference. This wasn’t enough to convince anyone of anything, in other words. He needed more.

  At least he knew he was on the right track.

  Briefly, he wondered how Isaac was holding up. Was Arlo still out?

  He would have gone to check on the situation except for the fact that his sense of paranoia and guilt was back, urging him to complete this task as fast as he possibly could.

  Moving on, he inspected the various outfits hanging on hooks around the dresser. Mostly jackets, a few pairs of dress pants, and a suit that looked as if it would not have arms or legs nearly long enough to fit Arlo. A holdover from an event in the past, perhaps a wedding or just some sort of ceremony he was expected to be proud of.

  Empty pockets. Lint. He moved on.

  There was a shelf that ran the length of the closer, and it was from this shelf that the hangers were hung. On top, unopened puzzles, boxes with the factory wrapping still in place, and another grocery store product box. This one had a waxy coating that signaled it came from the produce section, decorated with smiling tangerines and jovial red grapes.

  Moody was partial to the purple ones, which was a thing he’d discovered was rare. No one liked fucking purple grapes. It was always green or red.

  His curiosity piqued, by his own opinions if nothing else, he grabbed the box and pulled it down.

  “Oh!”

  He nearly dropped the damn thing, his heart skipping a beat. He couldn’t see what was inside but it was much, much heavier than it looked.

  Adjusting his grip, he set the fruit box down on top of the dresser and looked inside.

  Notebooks. A variety of notebooks. Some were the spiral bound notebooks found on school supply lists across the country, while others were black-and-white composition notebooks. Some were solid colors, and others were decorated with puppies and kittens and emojis.

  Moody felt a chill run down his spine.

  Alongside the notebooks were decorative journals, crumpled scraps of loose-leaf, folders, and a single binder stuffed to capacity.

  Moody picked up one of the notebooks, a college-ruled spiral bound book which looked to have had half of its pages torn out at some point. Heart in his throat, he flipped to the first page.

  At the top of the page was a date, blocked out in a child’s painstaking letters. February 23rd, from almost two decades ago.

  The entry was short, and the letters turned into an illegible scrawl at the end, presumably as the writer ran out of speed and patience. Moody didn’t need to try to read that part, didn’t need to read anything but the first sentence, which read, “Mommy told me not to but I did it anyway.”

  Taking up the rest of the space on the page was an enormous frowning face, so smudged from the passing of time that it was hardly visible.

  What did you do, Arlo?

  He flipped through the rest of the notebook and found nothing of interest. At least, nothing he could decipher. Childhood recollections, told in the simplest of formats.

  “Dear Diary, I pet a puppy today.”

  “Dear Diary, it’s my birfday!”

  “Today was the worstest day ever, Diary. Eric said Pokemon is for babies.”

  Some of the statements made him smile, because they were so pure. In a world torn by war, with hellish crimes being committed on the daily, here were snippets of joy and innocence. Seeing pretty flowers, playing a favorite game in PE, petting a puppy, impressing his father with his shifter abilities.

  Moody picked up another notebook, making sure the entries started at a later date. The writing hadn’t improved much, if at all. More simplicity. He flipped through the book faster than the last, wondering if maybe the first concerning entry had just been a fluke.

  Until he reached the last page of this one.

  “I did it again. But you wont tell, will you, Diary? Your my friend, even if your just paper.”

  Moody picked up book after book, turning pages, flipping through entries.

  Most of the earlier notebooks contained very little information. Nearly all of them were 100% innocent. At some points, Arlo would stop writing and he would fill lined pages with a child’s incompetent drawings. He liked dinosaurs, then Star Wars. He would reproduce terrible imitations of cartoon scenes, complete with speech bubbles.
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  In some places, he used these notebooks for homework assignments. Essays, long division, Punnett squares.

  Then, at a certain point, Arlo had left the spiral notebooks behind, transitioning into exclusive use of journals and composition notebooks. He had the writing voice now of a young teenager, and Moody supposed the date backed that up.

  The first journal had a very long entry. Moody read in silence, keeping his ears prick all the while for any sign of a disturbance coming from the living room.

  “Hey, Diary,” Arlo had written. “This is my first real book, I guess. No more of that kid stuff. I’m a grown-up now. Dad says so. I just turned 13. I got this journal as a present cuz of how much I like to write. I said thanks and everything and I was smiling, I guess, cuz Mom complimented me on my manners. She doesn’t know why I was smiling, though.”

  Here, it seemed like Arlo had paused, thinking with his pen pressed to the paper, resulting in a blob of ink. As the entries went on, these blobs of thought would become more and more common until there was a single page composed of nothing but blobs and a slash through it all.

  “I guess it’s okay to tell you. No one reads this. Mom and Dad say a boy should have a place where no one else listens in on him. I guess, for me, that’s diaries. So, I smiled, because there’s lots of things I want to write about. I didn’t know how when I was just a kid. Kids are stupid. But I’m an adult now, Dad says so. So now I can tell.

  “I like to play with matches. Fire is pretty. Real pretty. I like how it eats things up. I dunno how old I was when I figured that out. Maybe at Uncle Johnny’s bonfires every New Year Eve. Whatever. It doesn’t matter.

  “I used to try to play with matches and sometimes Mom wouldn’t catch me for like, an hour. Not until she smelled the smoke. I was too dumb to figure out how to stop before that. And then, one day, she didn’t stop me. She didn’t know. I was outside. So, I burned some ants. I found their hole out in the backyard and I stuck a match in. It went out real quick, but they were scared and running all over. The ones inside came out and the ones outside were trying to get in. Ants don’t have brains.”

  And that was the end.

  Moody looked up, startled to discover that he still stood in front of the dresser and not much time had passed at all. His heart thumped hard in his chest.

  This was what they had been looking for. The confession of an arsonist, talking openly about his deeds in a place where no one else could judge him.

  What kid doesn’t play with matches? Moody argued with himself, trying to pretend he was a cop. This still wasn’t enough.

  He kept reading, paying more attention now. The process repeated exactly the same as before. Arlo wrote about his daily life, though he skipped entries here and there, never for longer than a week. School crushes, bad grades, coming to terms with the fact that he was going to be an omega.

  Regular human things, interspersed naturally with mentions of shifting.

  And, very occasionally, mentions of fire. Buying matches with birthday money. Terrorizing ants and beetles, though sometimes he expressed remorse for these creatures and would only burn inanimate objects for some time afterward.

  Arlo got older, started high school.

  Started his first big fire.

  “I don’t know what came over me,” the entry went. Many ink spots, many pauses for thought. Slow, thick letters, as if the words had heavy weight behind them. “I guess I wasn’t thinking. There was this big pile of leaves out back in the schoolyard, near the track where we run for gym. I like to run. I’m good at it. I’ve got the school record beat. Does that matter, though? I’m the one who made that record, and I beat my own record that time, too. Anyway. Rambling. Ms. Halverson says rambling isn’t good for writing essays. But this isn’t an essay?

  “The pile of leaves. It was just there. And there’s been all this rain recently, so I didn’t think it would do anything but make a lot of smoke.

  “I keep my matches in my pocket all the time now. I don’t know why. I just like to have them near. It makes me feel better. So, when we were coming back from PE and going inside, I lit a match and tossed it. I thought it went out because nothing happened.

  “And then, like, fifteen minutes later, the principal came over the loudspeaker, telling everyone to evacuate! So we did, and there was this huge column of black smoke rising up from the back of the school. I felt so bad cuz I knew it was my fault, but I also had a boner, because wow. They evacuated school because of ME! I did that. I did something important. It was bad, but it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t know it was going to happen.”

  The entry went on to reveal that not only did the pile of leaves combust, the heat actually set several nearby trees on fire, threatening to reach some electrical wires.

  The evacuated students were sent home, and did not return to school for two days, to ensure that no damage had been done to the wires or anything else.

  Arlo expressed remorse in a brief entry, and then did not write again for several days. Back to business as usual.

  Through the years, the omega easily maintained his double life. He was able to do this quite easily, since he didn’t always start fires. Weeks and months went by without a mention of a match or a flame. Then, suddenly, from nowhere, would be a passing mention of this burned, or that set ablaze. These events rarely had consequence. Arlo was being careful.

  Then, he would slip. He described these moments as accidents, or as relief. Something would burn more readily than he expected, and he would go back to being careful.

  But, as time went on, as Moody poured over the journals faster and faster, he became aware of a terrible pattern. Arlo’s caution grew less severe. He at first became passionate about historical arsonists, and then seemed to deny his fate of joining them for nearly a year before apparently committing to his lifestyle.

  “If I don’t do it very often, if I only do it to things no one will miss, it isn’t harmful. It’s actually helpful. Burned forests can come back stronger than before.”

  The flaw in this logic was that a city was not a forest. Buildings were not trees, which grew back all the time. And Arlo was not a force of nature, a lightning strike or a heat wave. He was an errant wolf with a love of fire which he often tried to figure out, to no avail.

  Then, Moody brought out a journal that had entries dated around the time the building fires began.

  “I can’t help it, diary. I did another one today.”

  Each confession came with a newspaper clipping, detailing the event. Arlo seemed to treat himself as the victim in these situations, explaining how he couldn’t control his desires.

  “Everyone seems to be pointing fingers at Isaac. It’s not his fault. It’s not mine, either, though. I can’t help it. I can’t take the blame. Maybe he’ll have to do it for me.”

  “You fucking bitch,” Moody whispered. His heart clenched hard, black tendrils of rage squeezing around the vessel. He saw red, tasted copper as his fangs filled his mouth and nipped into his own flesh.

  A short time later: “They chased Isaac away. There’s no more scapegoat. I’m going to have to stop. So beautiful. I can’t. I have to.”

  For nearly two years, normal entries. Arlo’s life in the pack, knowing his place as the weird one who was picked on. He listed the things he was looking forward to, the interesting things he saw at his job as a department head at Target. Nothing really seemed out of the ordinary, but Moody had spent so much time already coming to know Arlo’s writing style that he knew something was wrong. These entries all had a feeling of desperation, like he was urgently trying to pretend everything was going perfectly.

  Then, the fires started again. Arlo broke.

  “Lance is onto me,” he wrote. “I think I’m going to have to get rid of him.”

  Chills ran down Moody’s spine. His fingers tightened on the journal. He reached to flip the page, not wanting to know what happened next, yet incapable of looking away. He was watching a train wreck, a surgery, a car crash, horrif
ying and visceral and inescapable.

  Something touched his shoulder.

  He shrieked. He couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop the shrill cry from wrenching out of his lungs. Whirling around, he smacked his hip on the dresser and fell backward onto it. Clothes on hangers caught at his pinwheeling arms as he tried to catch his balance.

  “Hey, Moody! Easy! Holy shit!” Isaac’s voice, high with concern.

  Blinking rapidly, Moody realized that it wasn’t the snaring grip of the hangers holding him in place. Instead, Isaac had grabbed onto him, hands around his upper back to prevent him from falling any further.

  He had been so absorbed in reading that he hadn’t even noticed the alpha approaching, hadn’t heard his footsteps or smelled his scent. The touch on his shoulder had only been Isaac’s hand, but to Moody it had been the burning, ghastly claw of a monster.

  Breath whooshed in and out of his lungs, uncontrollably fast. His lungs seemed to deflate like punctured balloons, no amount of air filling them. Cold, dreadful chills racked his spine, made his chest quiver. Wrapping his arms around himself, Moody tried desperately to pull himself together; it was a fight he had already lost, and he knew that because of the speckles closing in on his vision.

  Isaac spoke, his voice low and soothing. Moody registered none of the words, only the sound.

  All of this was too much, more than he could ever hope to deal with on his own. He tried so hard but this last fright was the straw that broke the camel’s back, a tipping point. He was an avalanche of stone, small skittering pebbles rolling down the slope, disturbing stones, boulders, great gouts of earth, all of it cascading down and down and down. Faster, faster, faster.

  Fingers in his hair, a distant touch. Warmth surrounding him. Hard muscles, hard like boulders, but soft skin. Rocking, not falling.

  Whispered words in his ear. “You’re okay. You’re okay.” Repeated over and over, a sighing mantra which didn’t match up with the thunderous, chaotic roar of the avalanche.

  Bit by bit, Moody realized he was sitting in Isaac’s lap, leaning against his chest. The alpha was wrapped around him, holding him securely, stroking him, soothing him down from the panic attack.