“Not a seer!” I yelled through the gag. “Not a fucking seer!”
Glancing down at my arm, the man smiled wider. “You are not a Sarhacienne, it is true,” he conceded. “You are not of the Second Race, Miss Taylor. You are of the First Race. That is why you are able to wear that tattoo.”
I stared at him blankly.
Looking over my expression, he shook his head, sighing deeply.
“It is such a pity and a disservice to you, that you were never educated on the beauty of the scripture of your own people.” His voice and expression exuded disapproval. “This would mean so much more to you, if you were not so dismally ignorant. Take my word for it, Miss Taylor. For a mere human like myself to meet the incarnation of a First Race being, in person…”
He sighed again, shaking his head.
“…It is an unqualified honor. You have no idea the blessing your presence brings to this occasion.”
Bowing his head with that overly dramatic formality, he smiled wider.
“As I said, we were unable to identify with exactness which being your soul represents, but Javier over there…”
He pointed at one of the followers wearing all black.
The man, a young-faced Latino who was one of the three who had been tending the fire, smiled at me shyly. He bowed to me with his hands in prayer position, blushing like a fan meeting a feed star.
I could only stare at him, unable to believe he could look at me like that, when he was about to barbecue me.
“He is our resident expert on the commentaries,” Ponytail explained. “…and our liaison with the Patrón, who first told us of you. After researching the relevant texts, Javier is now reasonably certain you are either ‘Trickster’ or ‘Serpent.’”
The man bowed to me again, still smiling like a boy with a crush.
“I believe ‘S-Serpent,’ Miss,” he stammered, his words carrying just the faintest trace of a South American accent. “A most n-noble deity, Miss.”
Ponytail beamed at him, them turned to me.
“Before the Patrón, we searched for a very, very long time to find one of your kind,” he said. “Years, in fact. But then the Patrón came to us, offering his help. He gave us Javier, and new texts to scour for clues. More importantly, he gave us the biological markers with which to look for one of your kind. Our sympathetic Patrón most generously supplied us also with access to the International Registry databases, and aided us with identification of the markers for the Four. Once we received those things, it was inevitable we would find a match. For our Ancestors are always among us, even when they choose to travel in disguise.”
All I could do was stare up at him.
Truthfully, I had no idea what he was talking about.
On the plane, Jon mentioned something about a third race, but he made it sound like a myth. He also mentioned a being called The Bridge, but again, he hadn’t explained what it was.
I looked over at the female seer.
She was conscious, despite the blow from the rifle.
That probably wasn’t great news for her, but I felt a surge of relief when I saw her eyes open, and more or less clear as she stared around her, likely looking for a way out, just like me.
She definitely felt like my only ally in this coven of freaks.
She’d fallen down her log more, so must have been struggling to free herself. The fire was closer to her than me, so her spoke was burning faster, too.
There was no way I could help her.
I watched her stare at the approaching flames, her dark purple eyes wide with terror. They’d gagged her, too. For the first time, I also noticed she wore a collar, different from the more decorative one I’d seen on her that morning. It was heavier, of a darker, more vibrant green that shimmered in reflected firelight.
Without the collar, there’s no way she’d still be cuffed to that log.
She would have taken over their minds by now––used her seer powers to make them unchain her. Then, if she was anything like me, she would have told them to shoot themselves, or maybe one another.
Even just the thought of it made me wistful.
Feeling my stare, she looked over.
Her eyes turned pleading as she studied my face, as if she believed her only shred of hope lay in me, just like I did with her. The fact that we each saw the other that way, when neither of us could do jack shit to help the other, only made me feel worse.
The fire was about a yard from her log now.
Heat flushed my skin from my own fire. It bordered on painful now, so I know it must be unbearably hot for the seer.
The terror in her eyes made my stomach hurt.
It also drove reality home. A rush of feeling, images, and most of all, understanding, hit me with a visceral force. The pain of it clicked my mind into razor-sharp focus.
No one was coming.
No one would help us.
No one heard us shouting. If they had, they didn’t care.
I didn’t hear sirens, or anything but the crackle of fire, the murmurs between the different men in black as they spoke what sounded like prayers, staring from us to those reaching flames. That female seer couldn't help us. I couldn’t help us. The guy they’d chained to the third log was as crazy as the rest of them.
We were going to die.
My brother would be devastated. My mother would probably drink herself to death.
Jaden would only remember me kissing that SCARB agent. He’d probably end up dating that skank, Tina, who’d be thrilled to have an excuse to comfort him.
More than any of that, I’d be dead.
Really, really dead.
I didn’t want to be dead. I wasn’t ready to be dead.
Pain slid through me at the thought, different than physical pain, but somehow more intense. It wasn’t all fear now. Fear mixed with regret, a furious anger that it could all end so soon and so pointlessly, frustration that I had no say in it, that I could do nothing about it, that someone felt it was okay to snuff out my life without even consulting me.
My mind hated that powerlessness. Rejected it.
A part of me reached up and out.
It didn’t feel like a cry for help. Rather it felt like a scream up into the sky. That pain in my chest worsened, mixed with a helpless wanting and fury and a flat refusal to die. The intensity of the feeling made me gasp, brought tears to my eyes.
Briefly, I was sure the fire had reached me, that I was burning for real.
I wondered if I deserved this somehow.
I wondered if I’d brought it upon myself.
I’d made myself so small.
With Jaden, with my art, with the crappy jobs I continued to settle for, so that I always lived on the bare edge of subsistence––in all of those ways, I made myself small. For so many years, I’d hunched over and around myself, hiding in some way I could barely comprehend. I hid behind masks, behind roles, behind fear, behind grief, behind my brother and Cass.
I didn’t know why I did it. I didn’t know when it started, what drove me to always seek the shadows.
I didn’t care.
I didn’t care about the story. I didn’t care about the why.
I just wanted it to stop.
I screamed louder.
It echoed in the walled space, past the gag in my mouth.
I felt all of them staring at me now––the female seer, Ponytail, the Russian, the one called Javier, the others who fed the flames. I felt their fear as I screamed up at the darkness-mottled sky, and I didn’t care anymore. They didn’t matter.
I wanted to live.
I didn’t want my life to be over yet, before I’d done anything.
I exhaled that power up and up, until I felt––
Joy.
For a brief, silent moment, I felt joy. I felt a part of the world again. I felt connected to everything around me.
Pain hit at me, harder.
That time, I didn’t mind.
With it came a strangely cathart
ic feeling, a folding sensation, like an old fashioned telescope collapsing somewhere inside my mind. The golden light I’d felt, that still, beautiful sense of myself, that fire that lived somewhere inside me––it grew brighter.
That part of me rose. It rose on fire-like wings.
The bonfire, the shadowy forms of the men, the seer staring at me from across that chasm of flame, the line of fire licking and crawling closer to where I hung, chained––everything grew dim, black and white, meaningless.
An ocean lay below me.
A golden ocean rose and fell, speckled with diamond light.
I swam through those liquid light waves, fire exploding out of my chest, the feeling of flying bringing so much joy––
I wanted to live there, forever.
For a stretched span of silence, I did live there. The ocean met night. Stars rotated overhead, untarnished by dust and pollution. I saw my father––
I don’t know how long I was there.
After what felt like an endless stretch of timeless time, I fell.
As I did, that bright, golden light gradually dimmed.
When night sky once more appeared over my head––a heavier, flatter, more polluted sky, totally unlike the deep black one I’d seen in that other place, littered with vibrant stars––the sound came back on.
Regular, Earth-type sound. The sound of the black and white world.
It returned like a feed station turned from mute all the way up to full volume.
At first, all I heard was yelling.
It started off distant, then grew immediate, close.
It was an awful lot of yelling.
Another few seconds passed before I realized that yelling was because of me.
20
FIRE
I BLINKED, BLIND, gasping, light-headed.
I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open.
I fought to see, to make sense of my lack of sight.
I fought to open my eyes, then struggled to decide if I’d succeeded.
I was sweating, squinting, fighting a rush of dizziness and nausea, and I still couldn’t see. Light filled my eyes, like the blinding white after a camera flash in the dark, only tinged a sharp, vibrant green, the glow-stick green of a holographic dragon.
The light didn’t seem to be fading.
I sensed movement around me, but I could barely make it out, or what it meant.
The screaming grew louder. I winced as movement passed near me, moving the air around my body. The screams deafened me, shockingly loud inside the strange bubble I inhabited. The shadowy shapes around me seemed to be dancing, yelling, but I had no idea why.
I blinked, tried to see them… couldn’t.
I wondered if I was burning, but I wasn’t in pain.
I wondered if I was dead.
I felt my own physicality. I was acutely conscious of it, of the meat and bones that made up who I was. I don’t remember ever being so aware of my mechanical aliveness.
I felt every beat of my heart, every expansion and contraction of my lungs, sweat glands expelling water that ran down my face, tasting of salt and smoke. I felt the weight of my physical body. I didn’t just feel it hanging on the log but its more subtle battles with gravity and friction. I wondered how I could have possibly not noticed those things before.
I wondered if I’d been drugged again.
It felt more like I’d just given blood, like a part of me was missing.
No, not missing––depleted.
I blinked my eyes, trying again to see.
The green light appeared to be dimming finally. When I focused, I could almost discern shapes. It took me a few beats longer to make sense of the shadows moving and whirling and rushing around me. Once I could, I realized I already knew what they were.
They were the cultists. Most of them were still yelling.
It was disorienting, but they didn’t seem to be focused on me. It was a few seconds longer before I realized at least half of them were on fire.
I watched, lost in some state of disbelief as they screamed and rolled on the ground. Some part of me couldn’t quite see it as real. Still, the shock of it seemed to help with my eyes, dimming that pale green light until it was almost gone.
Right in front of me, Ponytail and the young South American kid who’d called me a snake rolled on the ground, burning. They were closest to me, but I could see at least two other dark-clad figures on fire across from them, on the other side of the white stone basin.
I could see the basin again, I realized.
The bonfire still burned, but much lower. The perfect symmetry of the triangle had been broken, the granite chunks scattered, spraying the fire in disjointed pieces around the garden.
Three of the shadowy forms appeared to be trying to put the others out.
I saw one guy with a long blond braid beat frantically at the clothes of the Russian, using a heavy jacket. Another seemed to be trying to do the same to Ponytail, rolling him on the grass and beating at his clothes and skin with gloved hands.
I looked down at the spoke of firewood that had been burning towards me.
It was gone.
Not just the fire––the wood was gone.
Like the triangle of granite stones, it had been wiped out of alignment, and now appeared to be spread around the lawn with the rest of the burning wood.
As I looked around, I realized pieces of the fire were scattered everywhere, some of it dozens of yards from where I hung from the log.
I saw fires burning near the stone wall on the other side of the gardens, logs stuck in the forks of tree branches, thirty feet from the ground, already catching fire to smaller branches and leaves. Broken crates and branches burned patches in the grass, while a few pieces even sat at the top of the stone wall.
I stared up at them, wondering how the hell they’d gotten up there.
Bushes burned in addition to trees and men’s clothes. A dead patch of grass smoked next to a wooden planter already smoldering from another fire.
Solitary sticks, branches, logs and chunks of packing crate burned on the stone steps leading up to the museum, turning the white stone black.
I glanced up when the branches of another tree caught fire from a piece of packing crate stuck in the thick fork of a willow trunk. The slender, burning fronds waved in the breeze as I watched, spreading the fire to a cluster of trees on the other side.
Feeling eyes on me, I turned.
The female seer was staring at me.
Still hanging from her log on the other side of the round clearing, she stared, panting, her purple eyes wide with shock. They reflected firelight from a nearby pile of blazing wood, shining with gold and orange in the center of the purple. Her smoke-smudged skin made her eyes stand out more, especially their whites.
Between the smoke and my own lingering fuzziness, I couldn’t make sense of her expression exactly, but the emotion I saw there wasn’t fear.
It was almost… wonder. Awe.
I saw relief flicker across her expression as well, when I returned her gaze––relief, and something that might have been reverence.
I was still looking at her, dumbfounded, when she smiled shyly at me, bowing her head.
The motion carried a respect I could almost feel.
I looked down, feeling a sudden flush of fear for her as I scanned the grass around her log––but the spoke of wood leading to her log had been blown apart, as well.
Individual logs and pieces of crate burned in clumps in other areas of the cement dais, but none of it was close enough to put her in danger. One of the bigger logs from the center bonfire ignited a rose bush as I watched, a good twenty feet away. I saw it catch and burn, flaring up in the wind, and realized it would likely spread to the nearby flower bushes in seconds.
Turning my head, I looked at the man with the scars and tattoos cuffed to the third log.
Unbelievably, he still lay on the very top of the thick trunk, still as a statue.
He gazed u
p at the stars, his expression blank.
The crates and branches leading to his log were somewhat more intact than the seer’s, but they’d also been blown into a diagonal line away from the pile of kindling under him.
Fanatic-boy was out of danger, too.
When I looked up at his face a second time, I saw him staring at me.
Seeing the whites of his eyes, even more prominent than the seer’s, along with those dark, pinprick pupils swallowed up by the blue of his irises, I flinched. His eyes were a darker shade of blue than those of Ponytail, but I saw a similarity there, enough that I wondered if they were related. If he was Ponytail’s son, I really did feel sorry for him.
He blinked, still staring at me. His mouth fell open, but that blank expression never left his face.
Instead of looking relieved––or gazing at me with reverence like the female seer––the man with the tattoos and scars stared at me as if frozen. The fire near him illuminated his smoke-smudged face, washing it out and making it eerily ghost-like.
I averted my gaze, breathing hard.
Staring at what remained of the center pyre, I tried to make sense of what just happened. Closing my eyes, I fought to remember. I saw nothing but light behind my eyes, those wings, a golden ocean, diamond-like shimmers across the waves, a glimpse of my father, laughing.
Feeling myself start to separate out, to lose cohesion––I bit my tongue, hard.
The pain made me gasp, forcing me back into my body.
I opened my eyes.
My tongue tasted like copper, my arms hurt, I could barely breathe, but I was alive. I could feel my heart beating hard in my chest.
Men around us continued to scream, beating at flames eating through clothing and skin. One man held his face, screaming where his hair was on fire while another dark form was trying to get him down in the grass, where he could smother the fire with another jacket.
I tried to count them. I saw seven forms on fire, three who weren’t.
No one seemed to remember the three of us tied to logs.
It seemed like hours passed with nothing but those screams punctuating the silence, along with shouts and calls from the men trying to put out the flames.
I don't know how long it really went on, but slowly, the sounds began to die out.
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