by Jane Toombs
Beware the double-edged gift of fire…
Born under the light of a falling star, Danica Linstrom is fiery in every sense of the word, from her impetuous Sagittarian nature, to her passion for helping mentally challenged children. Now she wishes she hadn’t impulsively visited a palm reader. Instead of the healing light she channels to her patients, the old woman sees danger.
With the flames of a sinister prophecy licking at her heels, Danica flees to the rugged Sierra foothills, hoping Evan Hanover remembers he once invited her to work at his camp for troubled children, Camp Star-Fire.
At first, she basks in the warmth of a psychic community guided by the handsome, enigmatic Galt Anders. But soon, beneath the camp’s serene veneer, she senses a plot to destroy one vulnerable, timid child she has come to cherish.
Unsure which man she can trust, Danica must trust her inborn intuition to discern which is her lover, and which is her deadly enemy. Choose wrongly, and all hope for the child’s survival—and her own—will be irrevocably lost.
This Retro Romance reprint was originally published in 1976 by Berkley.
The Star-Fire Prophecy
Jane Toombs
Chapter One
The dark woman shook her head and the gold gypsy hoops swung from her ears. “I never lie,” she said. “Why would I warn of fire if I didn’t see flames in my mind? Will it bring me more money to tell you trouble comes, a perilous time? No. Who wants to hear of danger?” Her voice became a croon. “A handsome man, dark, tall, an ocean trip, love, happiness. Those are the golden words.”
Danica Linstrom tried to draw away, but the seer still held her left hand.
“When I look in your palm, flames rise to hide the lines of heart and life. Fire is your fate.” The woman released Danica’s hand with a slight shove as though pushing away what she’d seen. “I can tell you no more,” she said.
Danica tried to push away the words, too, but others rose in her mind: ancient words, words she hadn’t remembered for many years. Again she felt the awe and fright of twelve-year-old Danica as an image of the desert and the man called Francisco filled her head. His chant blotted out the face of the gypsy, the room…
“November born in falling flame
The firebird shall give you name
Leaves turn
Arrows burn
Beware the two-edged gift of fire
The ashes of the funeral pyre
Birds fly
Years die
Your charm the molten archer’s sign
Your fate the numbers nine on nine
Find death’s black flower in disguise
Burn, phoenix, and arise.”
Someone was shaking her arm. Danica lifted her head and looked into pale blue eyes, concerned eyes.
“Danny, what’s the matter, are you all right? Danny?”
“She is remembering,” the dark woman said. “I advise you to take your friend and go.”
Danica knew she was on her feet, walking: then Angie Henderson was steering her toward the door, helping her outside.
“Honestly, Danny, whatever happened to you?” Angie asked as she started the Vega. “You really reacted—facial pallor, eyes staring straight ahead. Your pulse must have been somewhere in the hundreds and thready. I thought you were going into shock—you scared me.”
Danica took a deep, shaky breath. “I—she—did you hear what she told me?”
“Madame Rena? No. I was sitting in the little waiting room by the door when she suddenly appeared and said you needed me.”
“I wish I hadn’t gone,” Danica said.
Angie threw her an exasperated glance. “Well, I’m sorry I asked you. It was just for fun—I didn’t think you’d…”
“Not that I believed what she said,” Danica broke in. “But the words she used made me remember something else, something from a long time ago.”
Angie sighed. “Well, I wouldn’t object to the tall blond stranger she saw in my future. I hope he’s real.” She checked her watch. “Wouldn’t you know, we don’t have time to stop for lunch—it’s already after one. If the freeway traffic’s heavy you’re going to be late for work.”
Danica stared out at the thin haze—light smog, the weather report said—hanging between her and the distant San Bernardino Mountains. She had to be on duty by three o’clock and she didn’t want to go. She could ask Angie to call the hospital and say she had a cold, had the flu, something to keep her from going. The visit to Madame Rena had left her drained.
“I don’t know why you don’t get on days,” Angie said. “You can’t even have a decent date on the three-to-eleven shift. And why you stay on with those gorks is beyond me completely.”
Danica shook her head, but didn’t argue with Angie. She felt curiously empty, as though the touch of the seer’s hand had sapped her psychic energy. Ordinarily she would have flown to the defense of the disabled children she worked with. Angie was a nurse in the intensive care unit at Harbor Hospital and wasn’t able to understand why any RN as competent as she knew Danica to be could “waste her time” with the mentally disabled.
“Just out of curiosity,” Angie said as she eased the Vega into the fast lane, “what did Madame Rena tell you?”
“She said there was danger ahead.”
Angie made a face, waved a hand at the cars surrounding them. “So what’s new about that on an L.A. freeway? Look, I’m sorry you had a bad time. You okay now?”
Danica turned to smile at her friend. Angie was an impulsive and outspoken roommate, but despite their disagreements they liked one another.
“I’m all right,” she said. “And, by the way, I did meet a tall blond man last week; maybe the seer got us mixed up.”
“Now you tell me,” Angie said. “If I had red hair and green eyes like you I sure would put them to better use. What did you do—tell him it was nice to meet him and walk away?”
“No, actually I said I thought his work sounded fascinating, but I was happy with what I was doing.”
“You mean he offered you a job?”
“Not exactly. It was at that seminar.”
“Oh.” Angie lost all interest. The seminar had been about caring for mentally disabled children.
All the while they were talking, Danica had the feeling of holding the past away, throwing up words as a barrier to remembering. She didn’t want to think about the Arizona Indian reservation and the year she was twelve. The night had been a fantasy of shooting stars, a meteor shower, and she had gone into the desert just before dawn…
No. The past was just that. Past.
At the apartment she changed hurriedly into her uniform, then ate an apple as she drove her scarlet VW toward the convalescent hospital where she worked. Maybe Angie was right, she should ask for a transfer to the day shift. But days were busier. She’d have less time for trying out the techniques she’d learned: the controversial, yet age-old, techniques of laying on of hands.
At first Danica had been reluctant to try what she was learning with the disabled patients. But assured time and again by her instructors that the children couldn’t possibly be harmed by what she did, she had ventured to concentrate the light-fire energies on the patients in her care. The gold energy seemed to work best, she didn’t know why. One of the extremely hyperactive boys had been so much calmer after her first session with him that she’d thought he was getting sick. But he’d continued to improve with daily exposure to the light energies channeled through her hands. There was no effect on his mental retardation, but his personality changed; he became a more pleasant, more manageable child, easier to care for, easier to love. And that brought its own rewards.
Rewards for Danica, too. The director of nurses, impressed and enthusiastic,
arranged for her to present the case at the seminar—where she’d met Evan Hanover. And she hadn’t merely told him she was glad to meet him and walked away, as Angie thought she did with all the men she met. Danica and Evan had gone out for coffee and talked for hours. He’d seemed interested. But he’d never called, and he hadn’t written.
“If you change your mind about Star-Fire, let me know,” he’d said. But she hadn’t changed her mind about leaving Los Angeles, because it meant leaving the children. And if further association with Evan depended on her going where he was, then she might as well forget about him.
“The children get to be like your own,” she’d tried to explain to Angie. “It’s like you belong to a family. If you left they’d miss you—you’d miss them.”
“I’ll take ICU any day,” Angie had said. “Some of my patients do die, but others get well and go home. That’s what nursing is all about—making people well. You’re doing custodial care and you’re too stubborn to admit it.”
Danica pulled the VW into a parking slot beside the Guiding Hands Manor, a name she had considered particularly appropriate ever since her own interest in laying on of hands had begun with a university extension course.
When she opened the hospital door, Kevin was waiting for her as he always did. He was twelve years old but small for his age, not unusual looking—he had none of the obvious stigmata of a mentally disabled child—and he smiled and called her name as soon as he spotted her.
“Danny, Danny!” he yelled as he ran toward her.
“Hands,” he said, pulling at hers, trying to put them to his head, as she did during her sessions with him.
“Not now, Kevin. Not time now. After supper. You remember. We do the hands after supper.”
“After supper, after supper,” he repeated, racing up the hall and back.
Danica didn’t know why Kevin was her favorite of all the patients at the hospital. Certainly he was difficult to handle, even now, with his improvement, he was constantly active, getting into trouble. But the tantrums were a thing of the past, those terrible shrieking rages. And the doctor had been able to reduce his tranquilizer dose so Kevin was better coordinated. He’d even learned to tie his own shoes this past week. Maybe she felt closer to him because she knew from his history that he’d been a premature baby, and so had she—born a month too soon. But she was normal mentally, while Kevin…
“Danny,” he called. “A pretty. Kevin has a pretty.”
“Not time now, Kevin,” she repeated. “Later I’ll come see your pretty.”
A pretty might be anything: a brightly colored piece of cloth, a white stone, a discarded toy from another child. But Danica was evening charge nurse for all seventy-three patients here in the hospital, and she had to listen to the report from the day charge nurse first.
“Looks like we’re getting a mini-epidemic of diarrhea,” the day charge told her. “Seven kids on the east hall have it, three of them have fevers. I hope it’s not a flu bug.”
Danica wrote down their names.
“And you’ll have to call Dr. Kendrick about Penny’s X-ray. The film showed a crack fracture and I haven’t been able to get him. His nurse said he’d call back, but you know those office nurses. I’ve kept Penny in bed with the arm wrapped, but she’s been crying off and on, probably hurts her, poor baby.”
Danica gave the afternoon medicines, called the doctor, checked the sick children, and talked to visiting relatives.
“Yes,” she said to Jerry’s mother. “He’s been cheerful this week. And we haven’t noticed him taking things from the others quite so much. He does seem to be learning.”
“Well, he went through my purse again today,” Jerry’s mother said ruefully. “He and that Kevin.” She shook her head. “Still, I think they put everything back, so I shouldn’t complain.”
Many of the children had to be hand fed, and suppertime was a lengthy process involving Danica as well as the nurse aides.
She had her own half-hour supper in the nurse’s lounge, shut away from the patients for a few minutes. She turned the pages of a magazine, looking at the pictures. Yosemite. The Sierras.
Evan had said the place he worked was in the foothills of the Sierras. Not as far north as Yosemite, though. Must be nice to be out of the smog and traffic. But who would care for Kevin? Danica asked herself. Who would go on with the techniques she had started? No, she didn’t really want to leave. She closed the magazine and went back onto the ward.
Now came the next round of medicines and then she’d have time to spend with Kevin and the other two children she had started using the light-fire with.
“It doesn’t make any difference if you believe in the energy or not,” the instructor had told them. “The important thing is to learn the techniques. You’ll find they work whether you believe or not. Be as skeptical as you need to be—but learn.”
Danica still didn’t know if she actually believed in the white star of energy six inches above her head, above everyone’s, as far as that went, but the techniques she had learned were helping her patients. So what did it matter, star or not? Something happened between her and Kevin and that something made him better.
Was that the fire the woman had seen in her palm? Crazy, anyway, to go to a seer. Angie had the weirdest notions. But it had been frightening. “Flames in my mind,” Madame Rena had said.
It reminded Danica of what her mother had told her about her birth. “They brought me there by deceit,” she told Danica, “and all because a child must be born during the night of falling flames. My child, for some ridiculous reason. You, as it turned out. Born prematurely.”
So she’d been born on that night of falling flame, that November night on the reservation. But what did any of it have to do with her, with Danica Linstrom? An old man’s prophecy, a Gypsy’s warning? She smiled and shook her head, but a sense of uneasiness persisted and she shivered.
Time now for Kevin, and where was he? “Kevin,” she called, “you’d better stop hiding. It’s time for hands. Kevin?” But he didn’t come. After a few minutes she realized Jerry wasn’t around either. Neither of the boys were in their beds, in the day room, anywhere.
Danica remembered Jerry’s mother saying the boys had gone through her purse. Had she had anything in it that they might have eaten, been poisoned from? But even if so—where were they?
“Miss Linstrom,” one of the aides said, “I smell smoke.” And then she did, too. The hall was filled with smoke, and while she dialed the fire department, another aide screamed to her to hurry. By the time she raced down the west wing she could see the flames, little red fingers reaching for her. Then she heard shrieks and Jerry staggered through the fire with his clothes burning. They grabbed him and rolled him in a blanket.
But it took the firemen to reach Kevin in the closet with the burned cotton balls and the butane lighter stolen from the purse. Kevin’s pretty.
Chapter Two
Danica pulled the brush listlessly through her red hair. In the mirror she saw the shaded circles under her eyes. Even their translucent green seemed dimmed, as she herself was. Nothing would ever be the same. She had failed in her duty, failed the solemn oath she had taken three years ago to “practice my profession faithfully.” She hadn’t.
Those who said she wasn’t to blame were wrong: the director of nurses at the hospital, Angie, even Kevin’s parents.
“Fire,” the gypsy woman had said. “Not time now,” Danica had said to Kevin, but the time had been then and she hadn’t known, though she should have. She’d been warned three times: by Madame Rena, by Kevin himself, and by Jerry’s mother. But she’d ignored each warning. Now Kevin was dead and Jerry in Children’s Hospital with his burns. Was she to carry tragedy to others? Is this what her birth prophecy meant?
“I understand your feeling,” Miss Defoe, the director of nurses, had said. “Of course you need some time off. But please don’t resign. No one blames you. The janitor’s closet should have been locked, but none of us knew
the lock was defective. How the boys got hold of the cotton balls I simply can’t imagine. And the lighter from Jerry’s mother’s purse…” Miss Defoe sighed. “She blames herself most of all.”
“I was in charge,” Danica said stiffly. “It was my job to know what was going on at all times. My fault…”
Miss Defoe held up a hand. “I’ll certainly grant you a leave of absence. But we’d like you to come back. You’ve been a conscientious nurse, but more than that, you love the children. They’ll miss you. Take some time away from nursing, but don’t brood. You aren’t guilty and there’s danger in condemning oneself. It’s not mentally healthy.”
So here she was brooding and not working. In another week it would be her birthday, she’d be twenty-four. She did have some money saved, perhaps she should go to Tahoe as Angie urged. Or to Las Vegas. The gaudy neon lights flashed in her mind as bright as fire.
No. Not Las Vegas. She was in no mood to seek pleasure. And she didn’t want to go into the desert. Once away from the frenzy of the Strip, there was nothing but desert all around Las Vegas. Emptiness, the sky black with night, the stars blazing, a shooting star tracing its own death path…
But the old man had said meteors brought life. It had been November then, too, the year Danica turned twelve. Her mother’s great-aunt had died on the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation in southern Arizona, and Danica and her mother had come to attend the funeral.
“I didn’t know your grandmother was Indian,” Danica said to her mother. “That makes me part…”
“Not Indian,” her mother said. “I wish she had been.”
“But then why…?”
“This is where they chose to live, the two sisters. And now they’re both gone, finally gone. No one left at all except…” Her mother’s voice trailed away and she stared out into the desert night. “Do you hear me, Path Marker?” she called suddenly. Her words fell into a rhythm. “I have kept the pact, I bore the child, I have brought her here this last time, now I am released. Do you hear, Path Marker?”