Fire Fall

by Bethany Frenette

  Leon’s hand dropped. He divided a look between Tink and me, his expression going strict and serious. “Don’t take any risks. Do it quick and clean.” And then he was in motion. He vanished, reappearing an instant later behind the red-haired demon. She spun around with a noise that was half-snarl, half-howl.

  I turned to Tink. Her face was ashen. A thin trail of red was beading along her collarbone where a claw had grazed the skin. “You okay?”

  “No,” she said, and launched herself at the Harrower.

  It rose to meet her, parrying her blows as I hurried to help. Tink struck again and again, her hand a blur of color, hot light trailing through the thick blue of dusk. The demon latched onto her arm, but Tink was stronger than it was. She broke from its grip with ease, even as its talons clenched. One claw caught her shoulder, leaving a long rent in the fabric, but it didn’t sink in. No blood welled up in the tear. Tink shoved the Harrower away, moving forward as it fell back. I was quick to follow.

  We pushed the attack. This time when the Harrower dodged Tink’s blow, my own strike connected. My hand seized its throat. Cold flesh burned against my palm, and Knowing coursed through me. I felt the flare of the demon’s rage, the hate bubbling up within it; I couldn’t block it out. Tink took hold of the back of the demon’s neck, her fingers digging in, squeezing. The Harrower thrashed and flailed, but we held fast. Through the silver of its scales, its spine went red.

  Kill it, I thought. End it.

  But I hesitated.

  My thoughts spun back to Susannah once more. I saw the flash of her hair; I heard her low laughter. Her eyes were watchful, her smile sly. Her golden dress glittered as she danced. I recalled how Leon and I had fought her, how we had killed her. The way she had kicked. The feel of her neck snapping. The final breath that had strangled within her.

  For just a moment, my fingers loosened.

  A moment was all the Harrower needed. It wrenched free, staggering backward. One hand swung out wildly, catching Tink and tossing her to the sidewalk. She landed on her side a short distance away, gasping, the impact a heavy thud that reverberated through both of us.

  The connection between us shattered.

  The strength in my arm died out. The demon whirled toward me, teeth bared and gnashing.

  Leon teleported between us.

  “Don’t amplify,” he warned, and his arm circled me once more. He drew me tightly to him as the demon sped toward us. Its claws sliced the air. We blinked into nothingness.

  The teleportation lasted less than a second. Sudden dark enveloped me, a gap in my senses, and then we were on the street again, a few short steps from the demon. It pivoted, searching, a growl rumbling within it.

  “Ready?” I asked Leon.

  He nodded.

  Amplifying with Leon was easier than with Tink. We’d been working at it, training for months—and our connection was stronger. I didn’t even need to start with Knowing. It was instinct, instant. I pressed one hand to Leon’s shoulder, then withdrew it. The link blazed between us. Power burned through my veins once more. Together, we turned toward the Harrower.

  We moved without a word spoken between us. With Leon’s abilities Amplified, the demon seemed to realize that it was no match for us. It looked as though it might flee, escape back into the waiting Beneath. But it lunged instead, throwing itself forward with a burst of strength. Leon deflected it effortlessly, and then caught it by the neck. I took a step back. My fingers curled into a fist.

  The end came quickly. Leon’s grip tightened. There was a sudden crack. The demon’s body slackened, sliding free from Leon’s hands and collapsing onto the sidewalk. It lay there, lifeless, its milk-white eyes sightless and staring.

  “Tink?” I called, moving toward her.

  She lifted herself onto her hands and knees, then climbed unsteadily to her feet. “I’m fine. I bit my tongue, that’s all.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure. What happened to the other one?”

  We turned to the sound of a scream.

  A few feet away, the red-haired demon lay writhing on the street. Her legs bucked upward, her heels slamming against the asphalt. Her head rocked backward and struck the curb. She screamed again, but her cry was cut off with a sudden cough. A spray of blood plumed into the air. Then, from below, tendrils of shadow crept up around her, dark vines that covered her, choking her. Steam rose from her body, seeping into the air. The shadows tightened, squeezing her until she lay flat against the road. There was a sickening crunch. Then the demon went still. Her body lost all trace of humanity, her flesh dissolving into scales. Crimson bloomed on her face, sticky trails sliding from her eyes and mouth.

  Tink covered her own mouth with her hand. She backed away. “Ugh! That’s disgusting.”

  I agreed. My stomach roiled. I stopped amplifying and turned to Leon. “What did you do to her?”

  “Not this,” he said. “At least, I don’t think so. I injured her, but…” He shook his head, grimacing.

  A smell of decay filled the air, so strong I almost gagged. Then the demon vanished, her body drawn back Beneath. A wisp of smoke spiraled up from the street. Beside us, the other Harrower also disappeared, leaving only a thin smear of blood to mark where it had been.

  The Beneath was never sated, I thought. It hungered always. It fed on its own.

  I hugged my arms, feeling a chill in spite of the clinging heat. Around us, dark had finally fallen. The stars had emerged, tiny points of clear light, not the deep red I’d seen earlier. The moon was a slender crescent hanging above, glowing dully orange. All down the street, I felt the hush brought by the Harrowers, the quiet that came as they clouded the senses. But the Harrowers were dead. The street was empty, though it didn’t feel empty. It felt…wrong.

  A single word broke the silence.

  “Audrey.”

  A voice, far off, echoing.

  “Audrey.”

  I whipped around.

  I searched for a face and saw only street. The hush receded. Sound filled the air: nearby traffic, someone’s laughter. I heard a police siren wailing in the distance. A window slammed shut. But I didn’t hear the voice again, or find its source. We were alone. No figures stood nearby, and all the cars were dark.

  “Did you guys hear that?” I asked, straining to listen and abruptly afraid, more afraid than I’d been when the Harrowers had appeared. The voice had been familiar. I’d heard it before. It lived in my memories. And, sometimes, in my nightmares.

  Leon frowned. “Hear what?”

  “Is it another Harrower?” Tink asked. “Please tell me it’s not another Harrower.”

  I shook my head. “No, it’s—”

  I broke off. I didn’t want to speak it. Turning again, I searched the shadows along the street, the dark spaces between houses. At the end of the block, a screen door was swinging, and I heard the sudden sharp bark of a dog, but there was no other movement. I reached out with my Knowing and sensed nothing. She was gone, if she’d ever been there.

  “What are you looking for?” Tink asked.

  Black hair, I thought. A silver necklace hanging in the hollow of a throat. A face I knew. The smell of roses. I closed my eyes, letting out a breath.

  “It’s nothing,” I said.

  But what I thought was:

  Iris.

  It’s Iris.

  As soon as the thought took form, I rebelled against it. No one had seen or heard from Iris since the end of December, more than six months ago. She was gone. She’d been swallowed up by the Beneath. She wasn’t coming back. Even her sister, Elspeth, had stopped asking about her.

  I told myself I had merely been imagining things. There had been no sound in the stillness. No voice had breathed my name. It was an illusion, my mind playing tricks on me. A fear called forth from my dreams.

  I dreamed of Iris often lately. Not as she had been, that sad-eyed girl I had known, whose grief had clouded the air around her, whose smiles had kept her secrets close. When
she appeared, she was all fragments and angles, pieces aligning to form a different picture. She was no longer cousin or Kin or even human. Her teeth were red; her eyes were blank. In my dreams, she rewrote memories. In my dreams, she wore Susannah’s face.

  The two of them blended together, one body, one being, a changeling that rearranged itself in every shift of light. They stood in the snow atop Harlow Tower, a knife in their grip, their hair streaming out—now bird-wing black, now bright as flame. A boy lay unconscious at their feet. “The beast within him sleeps,” they taunted. Their laughter shook the air. And then their throat was in my hands, and I was squeezing.

  I would wake in a blind panic, soaked in sweat. Slowly, deliberately, I would make myself relax; I would remind myself that not all nightmares were Knowings. But even then I was troubled, afraid. Because Susannah was dead, but Iris might not be. And that was the problem.

  Iris knew. She knew about Gideon.

  No, I told myself again. She was gone. She was nothing.

  Now, with effort, I let my hands fall to my sides. I scanned my surroundings once more, if only to reassure myself. There was movement at the end of the block, but it was only a girl on a bicycle, swerving to miss a soccer ball that had been left in the road. The lights of Minneapolis burned all around us, keeping the dark at bay. In the distance, a car horn honked.

  Beside me, Leon and Tink were discussing what to do next. Tink was scowling, rubbing her elbow, which she must have scraped when she’d fallen.

  “We’re supposed to report in to Ryan whenever there’s an attack,” she was saying. “Time, location, detailed description of incident.”

  Leon blinked at her. Since, in addition to being my Guardian, he was basically Mom’s sidekick, most of his patrols were with her—and she didn’t report to anybody. “Seriously?”

  Tink scrunched up her face. “Seriously. So he can chart them.”

  “What, you mean he keeps some sort of demon-sighting spreadsheet?” I asked.

  “You’re surprised by this?”

  “No,” I admitted with a laugh. Mr. Alvarez really could not resist the urge to give homework. I was only surprised he didn’t hand out quizzes on the proper technique for fighting demons. Although, now that I thought about it, maybe he did.

  Before I could question Tink on the subject, she pulled out her phone, glanced at it half a moment, and then handed it to Leon. “You call,” she said. “I don’t feel like talking to him.” Without waiting for a response, she turned her back and stalked away. She seated herself on the curb a few feet from us, her legs folded up against her.

  I went to sit beside her, kicking a pebble onto the street. It skidded into the air, bounced a short distance, and disappeared beneath a car.

  Tink hunched her shoulders. “Do not ask me if I’m okay.”

  “Okay.” I hesitated. Tink was afraid, and not without reason. Though her injuries tonight were superficial, there was no guarantee she’d survive the next fight, or the one after that. I gazed at the line of blood on her collarbone, crimson already drying into a thin, flaky brown. The rip in her sleeve had widened, baring her shoulder. She wouldn’t look at me, but what I saw of her face was damp with tears.

  When she’d first told me she’d been called, I hadn’t understood her reluctance. At the time, I’d wanted nothing more than to be a Guardian myself. That had changed the night Leon and I killed Susannah. Now I no longer knew what I wanted. I could still be called, but it seemed less and less likely that I would be. My seventeenth birthday had come and gone, and though some Guardians weren’t called until their late teens, fifteen and sixteen were more common.

  I leaned back on my hands and stared skyward. “You did it, though,” I told Tink. “You fought. You didn’t run away.”

  Her voice was quiet. “I was useless.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “No, you’re right. I was worse than useless.”

  “We’re alive. We’re not hurt. And, hey, you didn’t even pee your pants.” I paused and turned toward her again. “Did you?”

  “You are so not funny.” But she laughed, wiping the tears from her face.

  Leon crossed the sidewalk to us and held Tink’s phone out to her. “He wants to talk to you.”

  She groaned but hopped to her feet and took the phone.

  I stood and faced Leon, skimming my eyes over him. There were no cuts that I could see in his clothing or skin, and no bruises beginning to spread—though there was a slight smudge of dirt along his jaw. His dark brown hair was tousled, wisps of it curling haphazardly. He was watching me with a tiny furrow in his brow, his blue eyes troubled. I laughed when I realized he was looking me over much as I was doing to him.

  Raising my hands in the air, I turned in a circle. “Not even a scrape. You?”

  He shook his head, smiling a little.

  I stepped forward and looped my arms around his neck. “Thanks for the help,” I said. “And for not dumping me onto my bed and disappearing.”

  “Never letting that one go, are you?”

  “Nope.”

  For a moment, his smile widened into a grin. Then his expression turned serious. “Audrey—”

  He wanted to talk about the Harrower fight, I supposed. I didn’t. Not just yet. “Can we do this later?” I asked, sliding my arms back to my sides. I turned away, toward the glow of the skyline.

  Tink was still talking to Mr. Alvarez. I couldn’t hear their conversation, but she didn’t look happy. I wondered if there had been more attacks. Though there hadn’t been many incidents since Susannah’s death three months ago, the Guardians were still tracking down the rest of her followers—weaker Harrowers she’d brought up from Beneath, and other stragglers who’d been under her sway for a time. The two demons we’d fought tonight must have been hers, I reasoned. They hadn’t seemed strong enough to breach the Astral Circle—the barrier that protected our world from the Beneath—on their own.

  “Okay,” Tink said after a minute, tucking her phone into her pocket. “This patrol is now officially over.”

  “You want to come back to my house?” I asked. Her mother—an ER nurse—was on night shift; their apartment would be empty.

  Tink sighed, closing her eyes briefly. “I just want to go home.”

  Since her car was parked several blocks away, Leon offered to teleport her to it. He reappeared in front of me a moment later, then took my hand and drew me to him. There was a second of blank space, darkness swimming across my vision and a welcoming coolness against my skin, and then we were in the entryway of my house.

  Leon flicked on the hall light as I kicked off my shoes. “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  Tink and I had eaten a quick dinner before we’d left for patrol, but the fight—or perhaps my Amplification—had burned all the energy right out of me. I grinned up at him. “Are you cooking?”

  “I’ll make you a sandwich.”

  “I’d rather have an omelet.”

  “At ten at night?”

  “What? Is that weird?”

  He shook his head and walked toward the kitchen.

  The house was dark and hot around me. The air-conditioning was once again broken, so I went from room to room tugging open windows and turning on fans. A moth beat at the screen in the living room, leaving a little film of dust on the mesh. I paused at the sill, gazing into the yard.

  Outside, the air smelled of cut grass and humidity. The streetlamps threw shadows across the lawn. Everything was shaded gray and green. Down the road, the beam of headlights sliced through the darkness and then disappeared. I flicked at the moth with one finger, sending it fluttering off into the sticky night. Then I made my way to the kitchen and stood in the doorway, watching Leon.

  Officially, he was no longer living with us. He had his own tiny apartment near the University of Minnesota campus, since Mom considered it irresponsible parenting for me to live with my boyfriend. Never mind that Leon could just teleport into the house whenever he wanted, or that he was a
lways over here, anyway—it was the principle of the thing, Mom said. I didn’t mention that now we just spent most of our time making out at his apartment. And we didn’t have to worry about her walking in on us, which she had done on more than one mortifying occasion. That had led to even further mortification: shortly after Leon and I had started dating, she’d sat me down for a truly excruciating talk, in which she told me that sex was healthy so long as it was safe, and not to do anything until I was ready. I’d chosen to go on birth control—and though I wasn’t quite ready yet, I was having fun getting there.

  Leon glanced over his shoulder at me as I stepped into the kitchen. “What do you want in it?”

  “Everything.”

  Leon was better at baked goods than at entrées, so I decided to help. I rummaged through the fridge until I found a green pepper, then brought it to the counter to chop. Leon had rolled up his sleeves and was busy dicing a tomato into cubes. He had a small pile of ingredients next to him: a block of cheddar to be grated, half an onion sealed in a plastic bag, and a handful of white mushrooms. We had Mickey, Mom’s boyfriend, to thank for the vegetables. He’d clued into the fact that Mom—whose dinner ideas usually came out of cans—frequently forgot to go shopping, and whenever he stopped over he brought a bag of groceries.

  I pulled Gram’s big wooden cutting board out from a drawer and placed the green pepper on it, but I didn’t set to work immediately. I simply stood, listening to the quiet of the kitchen. The only sounds were the whir of the overhead fan and the rhythm of the knife in Leon’s hands. I eyed him and frowned. He was silent, concentrating, but I didn’t trust that silence. Though I could never read Leon well with my Knowing, I didn’t need any psychic ability to guess his thoughts. He was going to bring up the fight with the Harrowers again. Right now, he was probably replaying the attack in his mind, every detail, each action and reaction: the Harrowers’ movements, his own movements, mine; Tink hitting the sidewalk; the demon lunging.

  I still wasn’t ready to discuss it. I was keenly aware of the fact that I’d hesitated—and that my hesitation had put both Tink and me at risk. And if Leon didn’t know that already, he would soon. Any second now he was going to realize it.