Black Candle

by H. P. Bayne

  “Do you want an answer?”

  “Depends. Are they here to help or make things worse?”

  But Sully’s attention was now on the ghosts—plural. He could sense more than Breanna. Gabriella was there, too. And someone else, someone he’d first seen at the fire at the Blakes’ thirteen years ago. A teenage girl with purple hair.

  None of them were visible to him, but they were all there, not bothering to manifest their energy in a visible way as they focused in on a single, possibly hopeless task.

  Sully stepped closer to the door, placing one hand against it and the other on the box containing the destroyed PIN mechanism. “Use my energy,” he said. “I don’t care if it kills me, use all of it if it gets the others out.”

  He felt the draw immediately, like someone was sucking his life force out through his chest. He was struggling to keep his feet in a moment, and it was only the solid support of Bulldog’s muscled arms that kept him from dropping beneath the water’s surface. His hands fell from mechanism and door and, in what remained of consciousness, he could feel a heat next to him. A gently uttered curse word from Bulldog coincided with movement, the feeling of being pulled away from the heat source, and Sully opened his eyes to see an intense orange glow.

  Dez’s voice filtered through the gathering fog. “Jesus, Sully. The PIN pad’s on fire!”

  Sully heard the sounds that meant an answer to his prayers: the loud, mechanical click of the door unlocking and Dez’s maniacal giggle.

  A moment later, Sully was peering up at his brother’s hulking presence.

  “Damn it, Sull, not again,” Dez muttered as he took the weight of his younger brother’s drained form from Bulldog. Energy and full consciousness were on the way back, allowing Sully to follow Bulldog’s movements back to the door behind which Sparrow was being kept. Paul was already there, once again unlocking the door.

  “Bree, it’s your brother here. I know you’re trying to keep the kid safe, but you’ve got to leave it to me now. We need to get her out of here now, okay? The Forks is gonna go. I need you to release the door so we can get to her.”

  This time, when Bulldog pushed at the door, there was plenty of give—enough to send a torrent of water rushing to fill the new space. Enough to take everyone with it.

  Sully felt the relentless press of water as he was sucked down below it, he and Dez taken off balance by the power of the flow. He didn’t stay there long, Dez shifting quickly back to his feet and dragging Sully to the same position a moment later.

  “Eva?” Dez called. “You okay?”

  “All good. Mazur’s going to have a headache, though.”

  “Bulldog?”

  Sully turned his head to see their friend ploughing through the water, a small, soaked teenage girl clinging to his neck as he carried her piggyback. Bulldog was drenched and heaving breaths, but the grin he wore belied all of that.

  “Never better. Paul, you coming there?”

  Paul’s emergence from the room was heralded by a beam of light. “Needed to find my flashlight. Let’s get out of here.”

  They met Eva in the hall, holding a dazed-looking Mazur against the wall in an armlock. “I’m going to need a hand lugging the jerk. I think I gave him a concussion.”

  “We should leave the bastard here to drown,” Bulldog said. “It’s no more than he deserves.”

  “While I’m inclined to agree, he’s the key to getting Danny released and the charges dropped,” Eva said. “No arguments. Let’s go. ”

  Sully’s head had cleared, but Dez was staying close as the two brought up the rear in the waterlogged procession.

  “How’d you find us?” Sully asked.

  “You won’t believe this …. Well, actually, you may be the only person who would believe it. Breanna left us her version of a trail of breadcrumbs. I had a feeling you might have come to Paul’s—I mean, he said he would keep an ear to the ground for us—but at first I wasn’t sure enough to risk it. Then I started seeing the iris petals.”

  “Really? Where?”

  “Everywhere. Blowing across the bridge, floating down the streets in The Forks, sticking to the windshield. The whole way to Paul’s, there they were. Would’ve freaked me out if I didn’t have more important things to worry about.”

  Sully glanced around, but found no sign of Breanna’s luminescent form near them. It was possible she’d expended too much energy helping to free them from the locked panic room, but he suspected otherwise; having ensured the arrival of the Dez-and-Eva cavalry, she’d been able to quietly fade away—for the time being, anyway. Whether Sully would see her again was anyone’d guess at this point.

  “What I don’t get is why she didn’t just give us some sign the first time we came here,” Dez said. “Why not show you where Sparrow was then?”

  “I don’t think she was worried about us finding Sparrow. Not then, anyway; she knew she was safe with Paul. What she wanted was for us to deal with the bigger threat so Sparrow would be safe once she was healthy enough to leave Paul’s.”

  “So, mission accomplished, then.”

  The turning to the stairs leading to the main floor lay just ahead. Beside them stood the ghost Sully had been looking for, marking their path for Sully in case flashlights failed to show them the way. She looked the same, long hair matted and shadowing a portion of her face, hands still bound before her.

  But as they neared, her head moved slowly, up and down. In Sully’s mind, the movement wasn’t so much agreement as approval.

  As if to prove him right, she unfolded her hands, revealing not a heap of loose petals, but an entire healthy iris bloom. As the others filed blindly past her, Sully watched as the flower grew within the shelter of her fingers, becoming increasingly vibrant as it unfolded as if to catch the rays of a warm summer sun.

  To Sully, the symbolism was clear enough.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Mission accomplished.”

  20

  They made it across the bridge just as the dam released.

  Eva had handed Zane Mazur over to the nearest patrol unit and was providing the necessary explanation when a Biblical-sized torrent came rushing from the west.

  As if in irony, the rain chose that moment to stop, and Sully watched as street lights were swallowed, roadways destroyed and homes along the river’s north and south banks reduced to timber, broken glass and scattered belongings.

  Then The Forks was hit.

  Unable to continue watching, he turned to the others standing with him. Sparrow was engulfed within Bulldog’s protective embrace while Paul stood on her other side, hugging his arms across his chest as his eyes focused wide on the carnage below—or what was visible in the glow from the numerous searchlights that remained on scene. Police officers alternated between watching the devastation below and ensuring onlookers—many of them shattered Forks residents—didn’t get too close to the point of danger.

  Eva regained Dez’s side and the two of them stood huddled together, arms encircling each other in a half-hug, eyes wide in the horror shared by everyone this side of Forks Bridge.

  The expressions of pain and loss on the faces of those standing here on the South Bank proved worse than anything Sully might have seen had he been watching the flood along with everyone else. He returned his gaze below; from what he could tell, The Forks had largely disappeared beneath the dark waters of the Kimotan. And while evacuation orders had been given and received, he sensed without needing to see the grisly proof that some had decided not to leave their homes.

  As it turned out, they had anyway.

  Sully felt a solid arm loop around his neck and yank him into a shared hug with Dez and Eva. As expected, Dez was crying, although Sully perceived there was as much relief in his tears as sorrow.

  “If you ever pull a stunt like that again, Sull, I’ll kill you myself,” Dez said.

  Eva cupped a hand around the back of Sully’s head, pulling him in until their foreheads touched. “Double for me, brother. You got that?�
�

  Between unemployment, addictions, and now this flood, there were a lot of families who had been torn apart in Kimotan Rapids in the past few years. Sully’s life wasn’t perfect, never had been, but this right here—this family he’d somehow lucked into—this was as close to perfect as anyone could ever wish for.

  Sully gripped Dez and Eva back hard. “I love you guys.”

  “We love you too,” Eva said. “But that’s not the answer I was looking for.”

  “You’ll never get it out of him,” Dez said. “Believe me, I’ve tried.” Then to Sully, “Looks like you’re not too old to need your big brother after all, huh?”

  Sully, soaked through and chilled to the bone, felt an internal glow of warmth as he regarded the two people who’d risked their lives to save him—one of them the brother who routinely faced his own fears to protect Sully from his.

  “I’m not a kid anymore, D, and I know how to handle myself,” he said. “But I’ll never be too old to need you.”

  A year passed before Zane Mazur, snowed under by the weight of the evidence against him, pleaded guilty to the murders of Breanna Bird and Gabriella Aguado.

  He had been charged with the attempted murders of Sully, Bulldog, Paul and Sparrow, but the prosecutor dropped those charges as part of the plea bargain.

  “That stinks,” Dez muttered next to Sully as he sat slouched on the courtroom bench. “He should have gone down for everything. He shouldn’t get a walk on what he did to you.”

  Sully shrugged, not wanting to answer in words as one of the deputy sheriffs guarding the courtroom shot him and Dez a warning glance to be quiet. In Sully’s view, it didn’t matter, not really. The result was a life sentence whichever way you cut it, no parole for at least twenty years. Additional charges wouldn’t affect the sentence anyway. And there was the fact Ken Barwell now knew the name of the man who’d been behind the rip-off. Paul told them Barwell had agreed to give the girl a pass (Sully expected some money had changed hands), but Zane wasn’t likely to be as lucky. Sully guessed it was only a matter of time before Zane was found dead in prison under suspicious circumstances. At that point, all Sully could hope was that he didn’t end up with a new ghost to deal with.

  For now, what truly mattered was right here, surrounding Sully. Flynn and Mara Braddock were flanking their sons, Mara’s hand gently covering Sully’s. And on Mara’s other side were Bulldog, Danny Newton and, between her father and uncle, a healthy-looking Iris Edwards. She’d gone into treatment within days of escaping the flood, and she and her father had become each other’s primary motivation to stay clean.

  Standing next to them was the other reason.

  Gabriella had gone into the light shortly after Zane’s arrest, but Breanna had stayed. Sully suspected, driven as she was to protect those she cared about, she wasn’t going anywhere until she’d seen firsthand that justice was being done and her family left safe.

  After court, once Flynn and Mara had doled out parting hugs and left, Sully and Dez joined Bulldog, Danny and Iris—as she now insisted on being called—on the courthouse steps. Iris greeted each of them with a hug while Bulldog insisted on delivering his usual playful yet firm jab to Dez’s gut.

  Danny smiled softly at Sully as he extended a warm hand for a shake. “I know I’ve said this before, but thank you. I thought I deserved to be locked up for what I put Bree through but, if you hadn’t stepped in, I’d be doing another man’s time and my little girl would be dead because of the same guy.”

  “You need to thank Breanna,” Sully said. “She’s the reason I kept going. She wouldn’t stop, and she wouldn’t let me quit either.”

  Danny laughed. “Yeah, sounds like Bree all right. Stubborn like a mule, that one.”

  “Is she here?” Iris asked.

  Sully nodded to Iris’s left shoulder where Breanna was standing. “Yeah. She’s here.”

  “Is she okay?”

  Sully was debating how best to answer, given that Breanna looked the same to him as when he’d first encountered her—milky-eyed, bruised and bound with that mark around her throat from where Zane had strangled her to death.

  Iris cut in before Sully could come up with an answer. “I mean, I love her like she was my real mom. My real mother was a disaster. I wanted to find my dad so many times, but she told me he was dead. I didn’t believe her, but I didn’t know where to start looking. I ended up in Kimotan Rapids because I knew that’s where I was born. But I had no one, nothing, so I ended up on the streets in less than a week. Then Bree and I found each other at The Hub, and things got a little bit better. She introduced me to Paul and they got me into some programming and into a house with other girls who were changing their lives around. After Bree died, I felt like nothing mattered anymore. I need her to be okay. If she isn’t, I can’t be either. Can you tell her that?”

  The girl’s words sparked something in Breanna that Sully hadn’t ever seen besides in pictures of her: a smile. The expression proved the tipping point for a transformation that indicated she was ready to cross, the ropes falling away, the injuries fading into nothing, and her eyes clearing into shining pools of light, the fear giving way to pure love as Breanna regarded her family.

  “She hears you,” Sully said. “And, yeah, she’s okay. She’s ready to go.”

  Iris, already on the edge of emotion, burst into tears. “I don’t want her to leave.”

  Sully searched his brain for the best response and was surprised when Dez provided one for him. “I know it’s hard, believe me. I lost someone I love a while back in a really bad way. But I think the universe, or whatever you want to call it, looks after you. And I don’t think the people we love ever really leave us. My mom always told me you’ve just got to learn to look for signs. That’s how you’ll know Breanna’s still there, that she’s still looking after you.”

  Iris sniffled and hugged her dad. “Then as long as I know she’ll be all right, I will be too. Right, Dad?” She peered up at Danny, who returned her smile with his own.

  “Right, my girl. Kisâkihtin, Bree. Go and find peace.”

  Breanna kissed each of her loved ones and gave Sully a final, lingering smile that replaced the need for words he’d never hear.

  A glow formed around her, so bright and warm and full it was impossible to tell if it came from inside her or somewhere beyond, somewhere Sully didn’t have the eyes to see. Into that warmth Breanna faded, an expression of the most serene peace settling over her once-anguished face.

  Then she was gone.

  Sully placed the last couple of bottles into the beer fridge and closed the door while, a few feet away, Betty scrubbed at the stain on the bar.

  “Betty?” he said. “You know Dez was kidding about putting that stain there, right? I think that’s part of the wood grain.”

  Betty’s head shifted up toward him, her gaze taking a moment to follow. “Hmm?”

  “You all right?”

  “Fine, Sully. Just fine. Just trying to clean this goddam stain your brother put here.”

  He was about to repeat his statement when Betty changed the subject. “How was court today? That bastard get what he had coming to him?”

  “He pled out and got a life sentence, no parole for twenty years.”

  “Good. Good. And you’re doing okay?”

  Sully frowned. He’d known Betty a while now and although he knew she liked him well enough, she’d never before expressed much concern about him. It wasn’t her style. “Yeah, I’m fine. How about you?”

  She’d gone back to the stain—albeit with an expression and movements that signified her mind was elsewhere—and her eyes snapped back up at his question. “Of course I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “No reason. Just asking.”

  The two worked in silence as they prepared the bar for opening, and so Sully was surprised when she spoke up again.

  “Something I wanted to ask you. Not sure how exactly.”

  Sully feigned indifference. Betty tended to get
uncomfortable when someone focused on her too much. “What’s up?”

  He was met with another long silence, enough that he wondered whether she’d thought better of asking, until she broke it with a quietly asked question. “What do you think of your uncle?”

  “Lowell?”

  She looked up from her scrubbing, head tilted and eyes studying him in a way that spoke to the stupidity of Sully’s query.

  “He’s … I don’t know. He’s all right, I guess.”

  “You don’t really think that, though, do you.” It was more an observation than a question, one that required a reply nonetheless.

  Sully shrugged. “I’ve never really gotten along with him all that well, I guess. I mean, he gave me this job, so there’s that. He didn’t have to.”

  “Did you want this job?”

  “I didn’t really know what else I wanted to do. The only skill I really have is playing guitar, and there’s not exactly a lot of call for that.” He watched Betty as he considered how much he could get away with asking. Curiosity won out. “Why do you want to know about Lowell?”

  “No reason,” she said. “Just wondering. That’s all.”

  It wasn’t all. Far from it, if Sully was any judge of people. But whatever Betty had been wanting to ask, possibly to reveal, had slipped irretrievably back into her mind, far out of his immediate reach.

  For now, the two of them worked in his uncle’s bar within a silence that had become more uncomfortable than companionable.

  And then, as his eyes caught slight movement at his left side, he realized two had become three.

  The spirit formed slowly, like a soft morning mist caught in a gentle breeze as it drifted across a dewy lawn. The first thing he saw was a wet tuft of red hair not far above the level of his waist, followed by a shining set of green eyes. Although the ghost was still materializing, Sully didn’t need to see the additional features to recognize the child. He’d seen him before, long ago, standing next to the creek that ran behind the house where Sully had been lucky enough to do most of his growing up. He recognized the boy from photographs, and from the colouring he shared with his father and now-grown big brother.