by Anna Leonard
The fact that the face that held those eyes was handsome, if you could overlook the fact that its planes and angles were made of flame, almost made it all worse.
I’ve cracked, she though wildly. I’ve definitely cracked.
Two weeks ago she’d been a normal person, completely sane, and her biggest worry was how to deal with taxes and her mortgage and just keeping her in-box reasonably under control in the office. Two weeks, to go from sane to nervous breakdown. It should take longer, surely?
“The fire won’t back down,” she heard her benefactor mutter. The voice was firmer now, less crackling, so she could make out the words clearly. Or maybe she was just getting used to it. “Why won’t it back down, damn it.”
“You expect it to heel because you said so?” The words came out of her mouth, and Jackie didn’t think he could hear her, but he did.
“Sparks are malicious but not cruel, the way humans judge it,” it said—he said. It was a man’s voice, and she got the feeling he wasn’t really talking to her, or maybe that he didn’t even realize she had been the one asking the question. “And they’re not stupid. Me being here shifted the balance. It can’t burn, so why is it staying?”
Jackie started to consider that maybe she wasn’t the one who was crazy. Or, if she was crazy, maybe it made sense that her rescuer would be crazy too? There was a certain Through the Looking-Glass logic that made sense. And if they were all products of her cracked mind, there didn’t seem to be any harm in going along for the ride.
Even trapped in a fire, it seemed preferable to what waited for her, outside. She moved closer against the form, taking comfort in that.
“What’s a Spark?” she asked, trying to keep it talking. With a voice, she could close her eyes and pretend it was human.
“A fire elemental. Like me,” the voice told her. “Hush. I need to concentrate.”
Not knowing what else she could do, Jackie hushed, waiting. There was an odd hum coming from her protector, and slowly it felt as though the pressure around them lessened a little. The temperature didn’t go down, but the sheer weight of the fire ebbed slightly, as though it had taken a giant step back. Risking another look, she discovered with relief that the inhumanly fierce gaze was now directed away from her. While he was distracted, she shifted so that she could see what was happening around them.
What she saw made her shrink back, terrified. The room that had only minutes ago been night-dark was now an inferno. The bedroom was filled with flames, crackling and spitting like an angry cat, climbing over the furniture and racing along the walls and ceiling. The doorway was still blocked, the air thick with smoke…but she had been right, the flames weren’t quite as close as they had been before.
Even as she watched, they retreated another few inches, and then a few inches more, before stopping.
“Thus far and no further, hrm? All right.” The arms around her relaxed a little, and Jackie suddenly felt cold without that dry warmth surrounding her. She rubbed at her bare arms, willing herself not to look at the terrifying sight around her, focusing instead on her toes, pale and bare against the wooden floor. The unburning, solid, wooden floor.
She didn’t want to know but had to ask. “What happened? What did you do?”
“We established a standoff,” the figure said. Its voice—definitely male, she decided—was even more human-sounding now. It was still dry, but with tone and a little grim annoyance underlying it, as though he were pissed off by the entire situation. That irritation, oddly, made her feel safer, as though it was perfectly ordinary to be talking to a creature of flame, so long as it could get annoyed.
“We? You…talked to the flame.”
“In a way, yeah.” The voice didn’t sound inclined to explain further, and Jackie really didn’t want to know. Bad enough to be hallucinating, without demanding details, or logic. And if this wasn’t a hallucination…
The figure looked down at her, those flame-wrapped arms tightening around her again, the dry heat somehow reassuring, so long as she didn’t look into its—his—face, or have to deal with those coal-hot eyes. She shifted, trying to get comfortable, and bit back a surprised and totally inappropriate smile. Definitely male. And hot, in more ways than one.
“Why does a Spark want to kill you?”
“I…I don’t know what you mean.” Unnerved and annoyed herself—how was this her fault?—she tried to move away, but he tightened his grip.
“Be careful,” he warned, voice lowering to a hot rasp. “My protection only goes so far. If you break that, it will have you. Unless you want to die?”
No. She didn’t. She looked down at the arms holding her still. It was definitely human and male, for all that fire still crawled like living veins in his skin. Through the wrapping of flames around it she thought she could see a pair of loose drawstring pants, like the ones the guys in the dojo down the street from her office wore, and the stretch of a black T-shirt across the broad chest. Why would a hallucination of fire wear clothing?
Jackie shook her head, refusing all of it. She refused to meet its unnervingly brutal gaze, afraid to look into those fiery pits again. If she looked at those eyes, what little control she had over her fear would break, utterly.
He shook her, not gently. “I negotiated a truce, that’s all. If you want to get out of here alive, you have to tell me why a Spark wants to kill you!”
“I don’t even know what a Spark is!” she cried, pulling out of his hold, but not scooting too far away, conscious of how much uncharred floor remained to move in. He was scary, yeah, but he had protected her. The fire outside their little ring of cleared air…gut-deep, instinct-driven, she knew what it wanted to do to her.
“I told you,” he said, and his skin flared as though to echo his irritation. “A fire elemental. It burns things. Like your house. Like you. A Spark set this fire, and won’t let it go out. They’re not usually this stubborn—there’s always something new to burn. So it has a reason for this place, this fire. What is it?”
“If you’re one, why don’t you know?” It seemed a reasonable question to her, and she was oddly amused to see the flame-figure reach up to run fingers through his hair in exasperation, the short-cropped strands catching flame as he did so. She had thought at first that he was a redhead—a ginger, her mother would have said—but no, his hair was brown. The highlights were merely flames. His skin was darker than she’d thought at first, too—tanned, as though he’d spent a lot of time out in the sun.
The thought made her laugh. How could a fire elemental tan?
“I’m not like the others,” he said grimly. As though suddenly realizing that he was towering over her—not really conducive to getting her to answer him— he sat down, those long legs folding with an ease she envied, until he was sitting cross-legged in front of her, leaning forward.
She averted her gaze slightly, focusing on his chin—a nice, squared-off chin, the flame-veins barely noticeable—to avoid those eyes.
“I need to know why a…why someone would want you to burn. If I know that, maybe I can talk it down.” With every word, the voice became clearer, less harsh. Still fierce, though, and no longer irritated but angry. At her? “Have you pissed off anyone recently? Run into anyone who would have reason to hate you? Stopped anyone from doing something?”
Her breath hitched, and she almost looked up.
He saw it. “You have. Who?”
She shook her head, denying it, even as her traitorous brain started to poke at the idea.
“Nobody knows,” she said, trying to convince herself of that fact. “Nobody knows, I didn’t say anything, I haven’t done anything.”
His skin flared again and then subsided, as though he was consciously pulling himself under tighter control, trying not to burn or scare her. “Anything about what?”
“That was why I came here,” she said. If this was all a delusion, her brain’s way of working things out, well, Jackie figured she might as well use it. Her own subconscious wouldn’t be
tray her, right? And if any of this was real, it would be such a relief to tell someone, to share her fears out loud, finally. “I needed time to think, to weigh options…”
But she hadn’t done any of that. She’d just been going through the motions, trying to pretend it wasn’t all waiting for her back home, like a cavity that won’t go away just because you ignored it.
“Tell me.”
A hand took up hers, the dry warmth now almost like real flesh against hers, fingers curling around as though to offer support, protection against more than just the flames around them. It felt strange, and yet soothing, familiar and comforting. The reassurance might have been delusion, her mind playing tricks on her, but it worked
“The reports…I came across a falsification in the reports. Just a small thing, barely a change, but I saw it. I was going to report it, but then I figured I should have more documentation before I accused someone else of sloppy work, so I looked back, into the records.”
A memory of late at night in the office, the sky black beyond her window, sorting through screen after screen of data and comparing it to printed material, chasing down a single stream and suddenly discovering…
“There was no error,” she said, whispering as though someone might hear her. “It went all the way back to the source material. The original report had been falsified.”
“Report on what?” The fingers tightened around hers, stroking her skin as though encouraging her to continue
“A trial study,” she said, intensely conscious of the feel of that stroking, like tendrils of warmth against her already hot skin. “A clinical run….the reports didn’t match what was reported in the lab logbooks. Someone falsified a single report, and that changed everything.”
She was pretty sure the flames wreathing the hand holding hers suddenly stilled, as though her protector had stopped breathing.
“Who do you work for?” he asked.
“Bergkos,” she said. “It’s a—”
“A pharmaceutical company.”
She didn’t even question how or why a fire elemental would know that. “Yes.”
“This falsification. It was on a drug?”
“A trial series. It’s for migraines, hasn’t gotten FDA approval yet.”
“But it will. Because of that falsification?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Nobody died or even got sick, it was just an anomaly, a trial that wasn’t as good as they’d hoped…”
She was making justifications, and they didn’t sound any better now than they had when she’d first made them, lying in her own bed at home, trying to decide what to do. Two months, and nothing had changed…except the error, creeping its way deeper and deeper into the system.
“There wasn’t anything bad in that report. It just wasn’t as good as it might have been.” Repeating it made her feel a little better. She hadn’t hurt anyone by not saying anything. But she hadn’t done the right thing, either. “I just…” Her fear rose to the surface, the fear and weight of responsibility. “But if they changed one report, how many others might they have changed that nobody caught? What if something got approved, because of it, and someone died?”
All she had to do was tell someone, report it—not to management, but outside the company.
Blow the whistle.
And lose her job, maybe, certainly any hope of ever being promoted, getting a raise. Losing her network of contacts, because nobody would trust her anymore.
“Who did you tell?”
“Nobody!” She yelled it, and he absorbed the vocal blow, his hands tightening around hers the only sign that she had even spoken. She bent her head, eyes closed against the dry itching of her eyes, as though she wanted to cry but couldn’t. He leaned toward her, his forehead resting against hers, hands clasped between them. It was an intimate, almost possessive move, and Jackie felt something inside her fragment, just a little bit. It had been so long since anyone had been close to her like that, had cared about her like this. The burden was still hers to carry, but it felt lighter somehow.
“Who could know?” His voice was softer now but no less demanding.
“Anyone. If someone was monitoring my computer, or pulled up the files… The moment I realized what I’d found I backed out, but if I’d already triggered something, then they’d know. I saved everything to a thumb drive, took it and the logbooks with me…”
“Here?”
“No.” She hadn’t wanted them with her, hadn’t wanted the weight of them while she tried to decide what to do. “I watch too much television to do something that stupid. They’re hidden.”
She wasn’t about to tell him where, either. This might be a trick. She might be locked up somewhere, truth serum in her bloodstream, all this a hallucination to get her to tell them…
“Good,” her protector said.
“You’re not going to ask me where?”
“I don’t care. So long as the fire can’t get at them.”
He pulled back from her, his head turning enough that she felt safe to look up and study the line of his jaw, the curve of his ear and the way his hair barely touched the upper fold. The flames were almost gone, his skin a burnished copper-brown, as though talking to her, being close to her, dampened him, somehow. The warmth she felt had less to do with him, and more to do with…
He was very, very hot. She had never realized how appropriate that term was, before.
There was a faint shadow in the lobe that suggested that fire elementals maybe got their ears pierced, and another along the line of his jaw that said they needed to shave, too. Jackie reached up without thinking, letting her fingers touch that jawline.
It felt like fire, tingling her nerve endings and making her jerk back. The form might look human, but it wasn’t. She didn’t need to look into those eyes to be reminded of that. Still hot, though.
“Did you hear that?” her protector was saying, not to her, but the room. “Whatever you’re looking for, it isn’t here. There’s no reason to burn the house down.” If he hoped that would make the fire go out, he was disappointed. The flames shot higher, licking at the ceiling again as though to show that they were not cowed or dissuaded, and then leaned forward, ten-foot-high spears of flame with a single intent: to burn them into ash.
“It wants me dead.” Suddenly, it all seemed real. All of it was real…the fire, her protector. It wasn’t a hallucination. It wasn’t her mind playing tricks. It was real. She shuddered, from her scalp to her toes, cold in a way that the heat around her couldn’t touch.
“It doesn’t,” her protector said grimly. “Someone else does. That has to be the answer. Sparks aren’t this determined, so something else is pushing it.”
“Someone…commands a Spark.” She swallowed. “Then who commands you? Me?”
His laughter was a terrible thing His entire body rippled with flame again, and the room flashed in response, making her skin crawl with a deeper fear than she’d felt before, a purely primal reaction to the mockery of fire.
“I command me,” her protector said. But his hand was still wrapped around hers, his form still human and comforting, and she swallowed the fear by force. She had to trust him; he was her only chance of getting out of this—she almost thought—“unscathed,” and it was too much. She started to laugh, too.
The exhaustion he had felt on waking had returned. Holding off the fire long enough to get to the human had taken more than he’d been expecting, and forcing the other Spark to a truce had nearly wiped him out. Part of him, a larger part than he wanted to admit, longed to give in, to accept that his nature was to burn, to join with the other Spark and flashburn this entire house, the entire forest, to ashes and gone.
But there was a human in the room. He held her hand within his own, felt the soft, flammable flesh, and trembled with the desire to protect it, even as he yearned to destroy it. One human. Why did she make him feel this way?
And then she laughed, and as bitter and sad and terrible as that laughter was, it was beautiful,
too. A warmth that could heal as well as destroy. A heat that soothed rather than burned.
“What’s your name?” he asked suddenly. If he was going to find the strength to do this, he needed to know her name. She had to be real. He wanted her to be real.
“Jackie,” she said, her laughter subsiding, but the edges of her mouth still bitterly amused at something.
Jackie.
“And you?” she asked, oddly formal, considering their circumstances, the way their skin brushed against each other, their hands intertwined once more.
He couldn’t remember.
The realization made him almost panic. It had been too long, that sense of self was too weak, faded under the years of heat and darkness. The flames, as though sensing his sudden confusion and sense of loss, leaned forward again, hungry to finish the job. He forced them back, his will overriding the other Spark’s not because he was stronger or more determined, but because he had more to lose.
Jackie.
He wasn’t fighting for himself, but someone else.
And in that realization, that connection, he remembered.
“Paul.” A rush of something, colors and voices, distant but real. “My name was Paul.”
“Hi, Paul.” Jackie lifted his hand with her own, making their clasp into a handshake. “I’d say it’s a pleasure to meet you but, well…”
She was pretty. He realized that suddenly, the awareness of human attraction coming back to him with his name. Those blue eyes were set in an oval face, with a short, straight nose and lips that were pale but nicely formed. They looked like they would curve into a smile easily, under normal conditions. Her skin was peach-colored, like Tupelo honey, and the flesh under his hold was soft yet firm, like she was active enough to build real muscle strength. Her sleeveless top did nothing to hide the shape of her breasts, the curve of them visible at her neckline, drawing the eye down into the shadow of her cleavage, promising soft, ripe comfort to the touch.
Once upon a time, the man he had been had watched women like that move across a crowded bar floor, had danced with them all night, and made love to them until dawn. Once upon a time, when blood rather than fire had filled his veins.