Fire Fall

by Bethany Frenette

  Unless Mom and the other Guardians could stop it. And they didn’t even have a plan.

  Iris’s voice whispered into me. You have to do it. You’re the only one who can.

  And Daniel’s voice echoing. The Remnant was never the one who decides it. You are.

  I slumped onto the bed. I couldn’t do anything this far from the Circle—kill Gideon or cut the connection or whatever other solution I still hadn’t found—even if I’d known what to do.

  Leon was clearly still angry with me. He crawled up onto the bed and turned to his side, facing away from me. He was wearing his boxers and undershirt, resting on top of the quilt rather than under it, even though I’d rid the sheets of anything, living or dead, that might have occupied them. I lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling. I felt all knotted up inside. Like I wanted to kick something, or just run around outside and scream. I hated being up here, in the stillness of the warm July night, where I couldn’t do anything but wait and worry. I hated that Leon wouldn’t talk to me.

  I turned to look at him. He was as close to the edge as he could get without toppling over. Part of me wanted to just give him a shove and listen to him crash to the floor. The other part of me wanted to grab him and pull him to me. I did neither. Instead, I closed my eyes and rolled away from him.

  I wasn’t certain how I managed to sleep. For a while I drifted in a strange, half-conscious state, imagining that shapes in the darkness were creeping toward me. Sometimes they were shadows, peeling off the walls and leaving thick black footprints wherever they stepped. I watched them move about the room, rearranging themselves and standing frozen against the furniture whenever I looked directly at them, like some ghostly game of Red Light/Green Light. But when I turned on my phone, beaming light about the room, I found everything in its proper place. No shadows shuffling along the floor, no twisting shapes. Once, I reached over to touch Leon’s shoulder, to make certain he hadn’t somehow disappeared. He was asleep, his breathing even, rising and falling beneath my hand. I considered turning and curling against him, but I knew he didn’t want me there. Eventually, my eyes closed and stayed closed, and when I woke again I was alone in the bed, and sunlight was streaming into the cabin. I grabbed my phone and checked my messages. Mom had texted two hours earlier to say she was fine, but not to come home yet.

  “What are we even supposed to do here?” I asked, roaming restlessly about the cabin, which made the toad in the bathroom croak in alarm. “We shouldn’t have left. We should be fighting.”

  Sitting at the table, Leon shot me a sour look. “Why are you yelling at me? You think it was my idea to run and hide?”

  “You agreed to it.”

  “You’ll notice I’m not here alone.”

  “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “Neither did I. Lucy said she was sending you away from the Circle. You’re my charge. I go where you go.”

  And then he got up and left the cabin, because apparently going where I went didn’t involve remaining in my direct vicinity.

  The rest of the day was miserable. The weather was beautiful—the air warm but not sweltering, the sun undisturbed by even the smallest wisps of clouds. Down at the lake, the water shimmered so bright it was blinding, and even though I’d forgotten bug spray, most of the mosquitoes left me alone. But I was in turmoil. The world was falling apart all around me, the ground giving way with each step. I shouldn’t be there.

  Something was happening in the Cities, even now—I felt it, in that quiet, hidden space at the rim of my senses, that slight tingle that made goose bumps rise along my arms. There was a charge in the air all around me, waiting, like an indrawn breath. Almost-Knowings, Gram had called them—those moments when the universe begins to shift. I’d felt it before, the day we had met Drew, the day he’d told us of Val’s visions. I felt it now. Something unseen had slipped into my thoughts as we left the Cities. It had been with us on the road, in each bend of the highway, with every mile that fell away behind us. It had followed us here. It whispered that this was not where I needed to be. It urged me to go back.

  And then there was Leon. After driving into town that afternoon to pick up more supplies, he spent the rest of the day wandering about outside the cabin and brooding. I tried to explain to him why I couldn’t tell him about Gideon, why I couldn’t tell anyone, but whenever I brought up the subject, he just got that closed-off look in his eyes, and told me we had other things to worry about.

  “Can we please talk about this for a minute?” I asked, standing just outside the cabin while the last of the sunset flared on the horizon. He’d been heading inside, but I stepped in front of him, closing the door before he could escape me. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m really sorry.”

  He folded his arms in front of him. “You’re not, though. If you had to do it again, you’d do the same damn thing.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m not sorry.”

  “That’s exactly what it means.”

  “Then what else do you want me to say? How are we supposed to get past this?” As soon as the words left my mouth, a horrible thought struck me—maybe he didn’t want to get past this. Maybe that was the entire point. He’d basically said that already. He was only there with me because I was his charge. Because he had to be. My chest tightened. I sucked in breaths, but somehow I couldn’t get enough oxygen. “I need you to forgive me,” I said.

  “Audrey…”

  “I need you to forgive me. I can’t stand this. I can’t have you hating me.” I didn’t even care that I was begging. My entire body had gone cold; I couldn’t stop shivering. I just stood there staring up at him, clutching my arms against me.

  His gaze flicked away. “I don’t hate you.”

  “Thanks,” I choked out.

  “Look,” he said, retreating a step and running a hand through his hair. “Me being pissed at you doesn’t mean I don’t love you, it just means that I’m pissed.”

  My heart came to a stop. I knew he’d spoken other words. I’d seen his mouth moving, but all I heard was—“You love me?”

  He scowled. I had no idea how he could say something like that while looking as irritated as he did. “You know how I feel about you.”

  “Um, no, actually.”

  Now his gaze turned wary. “How do you not know that?”

  “Maybe because you’ve never said it? Maybe because you are the king of mixed signals?”

  Suddenly, I was crying. And suddenly I was the one who was angry. Something inside me had snapped. I spun around, so fast I almost slipped and fell on my face—because that would have been the perfect dignified exit. Since I didn’t fall, I marched away as fast as my feet would take me—which wasn’t nearly fast enough, given that not only did Leon have longer legs, he could also teleport. I quickened my pace, until I was nearly running. I heard him calling my name, but I ignored it. Let him know what that felt like. I raced all the way to the lake, to the end of the dock, and decided that if he followed me there I would dive in and swim and keep swimming until I was too tired to care anymore.

  Instead, when I heard him come up behind me a second later, I whirled around and gave him a hard shove, right in the chest, sending him backward into the water.

  He rose up sputtering. “What the hell?”

  Fuming, I stalked back and forth on the dock in front of him. “I have had enough of this, okay? I made a mistake!”

  “I tell you I love you and you push me into a lake, and I’m the one sending mixed signals?” His gaze was pinned on me, and the way his eyes narrowed told me that I should flee if I didn’t want to be submerged.

  But if I fled, he’d just follow and catch me and toss me in, so I decided to deprive him of the satisfaction. Giving him a defiant glare, I folded my arms, then stepped off the dock and plunged into the lake.

  The water was cold, much colder than I’d anticipated. I broke the surface with a gasp, remembering belatedly that these were the only pair of shorts I had with me, and now they were going to smell like a
lgae and weeds and whatever else was growing at the bottom of the lake. I’d also lost one of my sandals. It floated to the surface, bobbing on the water beside me. I grabbed it and shoved it into my back pocket.

  Leon paddled toward me. We weren’t deep enough in that his feet couldn’t touch the bottom, but he must have decided it would be faster to swim than to wade. I considered retreat, but while I hesitated, he reached me.

  “If you’re planning to dunk me,” he said, “I’d advise against it. Can we continue this conversation on dry land?”

  “So you can just ignore me again?” My teeth were chattering, but I gave him another mutinous look. “I made a mistake. And I lied to you. I knew who he was, and I knew what he did, and I lied to you. And I can’t take it back, so what do you want me to do? I’ve said I was sorry. How many times do you want me to say it? Do you want me to grovel? Beg?”

  “No!”

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I kicked through the water and started making my way to shore. Leon swam up beside me, water lapping around him. He caught my hand.

  “I want you to understand,” he said.

  “I do.”

  “You don’t.” He drew in a ragged breath, not releasing my hand. Ripples chased out around us, glinting in the falling light. “I told you I hated my parents. But that’s…only part of it. I was angry for a long time. And I was horrible to my grandfather. He kept trying to explain it to me, to tell me stories about my mother, and how much she loved me. That’s why he kept taking me to the lake year after year, until I finally just started refusing.” Another pause. He lowered his gaze. “Then, when I was thirteen, I got so angry that I took all of his photo albums and burned them. Every picture.”

  I stared at him. So that was why he didn’t have any photos of his parents. There weren’t any left.

  He rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand. “When my grandfather found out, he didn’t even punish me. He just—looked at me. But he stopped trying after that. He didn’t talk to me about my parents anymore. He never brought me to the lake again.”

  I looked down into the water, at the waves sliding against us, at the space where our fingers met beneath the surface, distorted by the swell of the current. Leon had told me once that he didn’t think of his parents often. But that wasn’t true, I realized. And I’d been wrong to ever believe it. When I lifted my gaze to his now, I saw it. The hurt was there, in his eyes. Questions always forming in his mind. Who they had been. What they would have thought of him. He could never know them. He would never see their faces or hear them speak his name. Because Verrick had killed them.

  I thought of him going out to his parents’ lake alone. He went there to think, he’d told me. I saw him taking his motorcycle and driving beneath the sweaty summer sky, the horizon thick with stars; I saw him heading to the park and sitting on the picnic tables that overlooked the water. He’d brought me there, when I’d first learned about the Kin. To make me feel better. To comfort me in the place that comforted him.

  I didn’t know what to say—if there was anything to say. I just moved toward him, sliding my arms around him and laying my head against his chest.

  He didn’t say he forgave me then, but I felt it. There was an easing in the way he stood, in the way he gently disengaged my arms, taking both of my hands and sliding them into his. When I looked up again, he was looking back down at me, and for once his face wasn’t inscrutable, but open, like it had always been this way, like he’d never been difficult to read. I wondered how it was that I’d missed these things before—that through the seriousness that lived in his eyes I could see that closed door and the boy who waited behind it, who was still waiting and probably always would be. I could see all the way up north if I looked hard enough, to the great blue empty of Lake Superior, and an angry, scrawny youth, all arms and legs, who raced across a track not to see how fast he could run but to find how far they would chase him. I could see the night he was called, a little light suddenly flaring within, and the way he fought against it hour after hour, week after week, until one day he finally got on his motorcycle and drove south, drove all the way to Minneapolis in the hot July evening to step through the grass and stand before me.

  Now, around us, dusk was fast approaching. In a nearby cabin, someone had lit a fire. The air was warm and smoky. We moved out of the lake. Up past the dock and onto the grass, where the ground was cool underfoot, and insects were humming. By the time we reached the cabin, he was kissing me, his hands moving up under my shirt, peeling it off my wet skin.

  “We should get into dry clothes,” he was saying, like that was the reason he’d tossed my shirt over my head, not even watching where it landed. His mouth made its way to my throat, and his hands fumbled with unbuttoning my shorts.

  “Well, there’s a problem with that,” I said, excited and somewhat breathless.

  He paused what he was doing in order to look at me. “Yeah?”

  “These are the only pants I have.”

  Leon didn’t reply. Laughing, he bent, hooked an elbow under my knees, and swung me up into his arms.

  We lay facing each other, the last of the light from outside falling onto the sheet between us. Leon’s eyelids fluttered closed now and then, until I blew air on his face and he opened them again. The third time I did it, a smile tugged at his lips.

  “You’re a brat,” he said.

  “You’re a suck-up,” I countered.

  “You’re a smartass.”

  I would’ve replied, but he moved forward and sealed my mouth with a kiss.

  I felt weightless lying there, speaking in hushed tones, like we were all alone in the world, in some separate space of the cosmos where nothing could reach us. No worries could intrude, no harsh reality that existed beyond the walls would steal its way in through the windows we’d left open. The air that hung around us was flecked with gold—never mind that it was only dust stirred up by the evening wind, which drifted through the cabin and brought the faint scent of the bonfire in with it. Leon laced his fingers through mine, and I looked at the knots of his knuckles, the puckered line of the scar that made a long jagged path down the back of his hand. His skin was warm, and when I slid my fingers down his wrist I could feel the steady beat of his pulse. I would be perfectly happy to never move again, I thought. I could just stay there, listening to Leon’s breathing and watching the dusk recede around us.

  But we couldn’t stay there.

  I knew that even as I closed my own eyes finally and we both drifted to sleep. I knew it when I woke in the morning, though my sleep had been dreamless and I’d spent the night with Leon’s arm curled around me.

  That sense was there, the almost-Knowing, creeping in with the daylight that pooled across the bedspread and our tangled limbs. I felt it in every inhale and exhale. For a long moment, I looked at Leon, still asleep, his hair tousled, the trace of stubble darkening his jaw. Then I rose from the bed to check my phone.

  No messages. No calls. No texts.

  I tried calling Mom, then Tink, then Elspeth. None of them answered.

  After he woke, Leon checked his phone, which was likewise empty of messages. “If they’re busy coordinating, they probably don’t have time to talk,” he said, but he didn’t sound convinced. His brow was furrowed, his eyes troubled.

  When morning burned into afternoon and there’d been no communication, I went through my list of calls again, leaving messages that sounded slightly frantic even to my own ears. Next I tried calling my grandfather. When he didn’t answer either, I searched through my call log until I found Mr. Alvarez’s number, and listened to it ring and ring. Through voice mail, his words sounded thin and far away.

  And every moment, that almost-Knowing grew louder. It spoke with Iris’s voice. Unless, of course, you’d rather the rest of us die so your friend can live, it accused.

  They could be dying now, I thought.

  They could be already dead.

  I close
d my eyes for a moment, then left the cabin and walked down to the dock, where Leon was sitting, staring out over the lake. I sat down beside him, removing my sandals and slipping my feet into the water. The chill sent a quick shiver up me.

  He eyed me sideways. “We’re not going for another swim, are we?”

  I didn’t answer right away. In the middle of the lake, the afternoon sun glinted off a boat drifting on the waves. A few ducks were idling near the reeds that grew along the shore. The sky was nearly empty, nothing but wide blue and a few wispy clouds like faint white brushstrokes. Finally, I turned to Leon and said in one long exhale: “We have to go back.” I was expecting a fight, so when he opened his mouth, I hurried to add, “Just hear me out.”

  “I wasn’t going to argue,” he said quietly. “I was going to agree.”

  It took me a second. “You agree?”

  “Lucy shouldn’t have sent us away. And we shouldn’t have gone.”

  I nodded, biting my lip. “Something’s wrong. I feel it.”

  “You Know something?”

  “Not exactly.” I paused, studying him a moment before speaking again. He was watching me expectantly. I sucked in a breath. It was time for my own confession. “I need to tell you something, and I need you not to comment at first, no matter how much you want to.”

  His gaze turned cautious. “That’s promising.”

  “Starting now.” I looked down at the lake, watching the ripples spread out as I moved my feet. Below the surface, the water was clear enough to see the sand, close enough that I could dive in and touch it and then kick away from the dock, swimming away from the words I didn’t want to speak. Instead, I gripped the edge of the dock with both hands. “Iris told me I need to kill Gideon. She said that the reason the Beneath is awake is because of what happened on Harlow Tower six months ago. Gideon—Verrick—is connected to the Astral Circle, and when I released its power, that…triggered something Beneath. The Circle is keeping it awake.”