Pocket Full of Tinder

by Jill Archer

  I picked my way through the broken dam’s destruction, fearing I’d find him trapped under a mountain of debris, but he was on his feet and rushing toward me. I stepped toward him, my magic swirling around me like a fiery vortex. Even before we neared each other, my signature erupted and its bubbly, billowy edges raced to meet his. Without thinking, I let our magic merge and that feeling of comfortable warmth and buzzy intoxication went supernova.

  Ari’s mulberry-colored eyes were just as deep and dark and undeniably hypnotic as I remembered. His hair was long and unruly, its mahogany color rich and slightly glowing, like banked coals. We spoke at the same time.

  “I thought you weren’t coming until tonight.”

  “They said you were missing.”

  His tone was incredulous and reverent, as though I was a comet who’d appeared in the sky sooner than expected, while mine was full of awe… and not a little restraint. We stared at each other, our signatures a melded, viscous, steamy mix of unshed emotion.

  Who knows what might have happened next? I like to think I would have gained control of myself and my emotions, but possibly not. My reactions to Ari had never been one hundred percent manageable. He always made me feel as if I teetered on the brink of something boundless. Something that would consume me so completely that there would be nothing left of me, only it.

  Love? No, we’d fallen into that abyss long ago.

  Madness? Maybe.

  In any case, thank Luck, the lurching of the train brought me back from the brink.

  4

  MEMENTO MORI

  Despite my disorientation, or perhaps due to it, I’d fallen asleep. I shook off the remnants of my dream as the railcar slowed to a stop. Across from me, Fara stood and peered out of the railcar window. I could see nothing but blackness.

  “Another funicular?” Fara murmured. “Or something else?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered softly, also rising. I snapped quietly at Nova to stop her growling as Fara whispered the words to Nocturne, a spell that increased night vision, hearing, and smell; and Camouflage, a spell that lowered body temperature and shielded its target from echolocation. My right hand flexed, an instinctive precursor to shaping a weapon.

  A few seconds later, the railcar door slid open with a bang. The conductor stood at the entrance holding a cross-bow, but it was pointed at the ground, not us.

  Was I paranoid?

  You bet I was. MITs who weren’t often didn’t graduate. There might be no reason to suspect an attack, but it made me more than a little edgy to be this far into Halja’s hinterlands with no witnesses to our potential fate but the lone conductor of a steam locomotive and its single railcar.

  “This is as far as I can take you,” he said. “The gorge is less than a few miles from here. The viaduct was destroyed, but there’s a set of stairs that leads down to the river. If you want to wait until morning…” His voice trailed off when I shook my head and jumped out, followed by Fara, Nova, Virtus, our bags, and my trousseau chest. I squinted and Nocturne kicked in, allowing me to see a set of rail tracks, the side of a forested mountain, and a foggy night sky. The air felt chilly and damp, but I’d hiked in worse and wanted to keep moving. If this was as far as the train could take us, we likely had an hour of walking to go before we reached the gorge.

  “Luck be with you then,” the conductor said. “I’ll be up again once the viaduct is repaired. Oh, and watch out,” he said, motioning behind us. “They don’t call them hidebehinds for nothing.”

  Hidebehinds were a type of northern rogare. As their name suggested, they hid behind their prey. Like a few other demons I’d encountered (most notably, hellcnights), hidebehinds had specially adapted signatures. I’d only be able to sense one if I was facing it. So, obviously, the conductor’s words caused a mild burst of alarm. I spun around, shaping a fiery sword.

  But there was nothing behind me.

  I swallowed my groan, resheathed my sword (as beautifully simple for me now as closing my hand), and relaxed my signature.

  The railroad tracks stretched in front of us, gently curving right around an enormous mountain. On the left, the land dropped sharply. Except for the track, everything was covered in vegetation. No doubt a Mederi could have told us what all of the various species of plants and trees were, but to me, it just looked like greenish-black cover for things that might be lying in wait to kill us. The low-lying mist didn’t help, but we set off immediately.

  Our footsteps on the ground sounded, to my spell-enhanced ears, like a giant chewing on rocks, and my trumped-up sense of smell only aggravated me. As a waning magic user, I’d grown up avoiding greenery. I may have been exposed to considerably more of it in the last year and a half of my life than during the first twenty, but that didn’t make the smell of damp earth, decomposing wood, or pine any less distressing.

  Shortly after sunrise we reached the rim of the gorge. Even though I stood on solid ground and there was no immediate danger of falling into it, my stomach dropped as if I had. The gorge was enormous – a near-vertical drop into a dark chasm hundreds of feet below us. At the bottom, the Acheron River was dry. I knew from the materials in my dossier that the river had been diverted during construction. The plans and specs called for the viaduct to be converted into a dam. Gazing at the wreckage below, however, I knew the project had once again been set back. Pieces of the viaduct’s ruined archways were strewn about the dry riverbed as if they were toy building blocks that had been kicked over by a child with a temper. But it hadn’t been a child. It had been a bomber – one who’d killed twelve people, possibly more.

  One who’d possibly killed Ari.

  All through the night, I’d managed to ignore my growing panic. Ari was strong and powerful… robust and nearly invincible…

  Wasn’t he?

  But standing at the edge of Halja’s northernmost ravine, staring down at what looked like an army of ants rather than a rescue party made up of demons and men, I could no longer ignore my feelings. I was afraid. Not of falling into the gorge, but of what I might find at the bottom.

  The stairs were as precarious as one could imagine. Barely wide enough for Nova, covered in loose scree, with no rail or rope. Even with Fara’s levitation spell, the hike down took all our concentration. Her spell lifted an object mere inches off the ground, not feet. So one ill-chosen step and we’d have plummeted over the side. I didn’t – couldn’t – think about what might be happening at the bottom until we got there.

  It took all morning.

  Around midday, my foot finally settled on solid ground. For the first time since sunrise, I gazed beyond my feet. The gorge was no less impressive from below. Its rocky, variegated walls rose straight up into the air, infinitely higher than the stacked shacks of Myriostos. All around us were patches of dust, pockets of mud, stone debris ranging in size from an apple to a railcar… and men, women, and demons.

  Their collective signatures assailed me. None were familiar. I’d managed to keep a lid on my hysteria by concentrating on getting down here, but now that I was here, and I still couldn’t feel Ari’s signature…

  I spun around, cursing the fact that I still had trouble sensing signatures beyond physical barriers. My own signature flashed – more blinding light than burning heat. But it got the demons’ attention. A score or more turned my way. Some were curious, others annoyed, but most were distracted by the ongoing search and rescue.

  Victims of the explosion and viaduct/dam collapse lay everywhere. They looked like rag dolls, their limbs twisted, broken, and bent in unnatural ways. Skulls were crushed, bellies burst open, eyes stared glassily at a sky they couldn’t see… there was blood everywhere. I realized then that most of the victims had perished in the fall, not the initial explosion. I looked up to where the Memento Mori viaduct had been not twenty-four hours ago and a cold, hard knot of fear formed in my chest.

  How could anyone survive that fall?

  Ari has wings, I reminded myself. But I knew that fact alone would
n’t have saved him.

  Displodo will pay for this, I thought next, and was just about to suggest to Fara that we split up when a demon stepped in front of us. With scrawny legs, bulbous eyes, and a protruding stomach, he looked like someone I could easily take in a fight. But his signature felt tough and sinewy – like beef jerky. He grinned lasciviously at Fara and then frowned at me.

  “An’ who are you? Yer not welcome here, you know? Especially now. I’ll take yer bondservant though.” He turned toward Fara and gave her an even wider grin, intentionally baring four outsize incisors. “Put ‘er to good use, I can,” he said. He leaned toward her and snapped his jaw shut just a hair’s breadth from the tip of her nose. I nearly singed him on the spot but Fara stopped me by murmuring “Peace, Nouiomo,” and then she changed her glamour. Her blue tabard became a snakeskin robe, her braided, blonde hair became the tail end of a rattlesnake, and her cornflower-blue eyes turned golden with narrow black slits for pupils. She faced our assailant, opened her mouth, and hissed, revealing inch-long fangs and a forked tongue.

  “You’ll do no such thing, demon,” she rasped. “This is Nouiomo Onyx, the patron’s consigliere and ex-inamorata, and I’m her Guardian. You’ll address her respectfully or I’ll cast Venom, Necrosis, and Gangrene over you, you sleazy, mangy rag.”

  Oh boy. For her first formal act on my behalf, Fara had exceeded my expectations – and the bounds of discretion and propriety. I didn’t blame her—this demon’s signature felt as vile as a rogare’s—but I cringed nonetheless. It was dangerous for an Angel to threaten a demon. But the demon shrugged her off and turned to me. His scornful gaze raked me head to toe.

  “You were the patron’s inamorata?”

  By then my patience had fled. I straightened my shoulders and held out my hand, palm side up. In the past, when I’d pulled off these little tricks to establish my magic and my authority, I’d always formed fireballs. They were easy, after all, and it had been only Hyrkes I’d needed to convince. This demon, I thought, required something more. He reminded me of a rat, so that’s what I formed in my hand. It grew quickly, appearing there almost as if Luck himself had spawned it. Only the barest traces of smoke and fire betrayed the fact that it wasn’t real.

  The demon’s gaze widened and his signature contracted. I doubted anyone in Rockthorn Gorge had seen waning magic shaped into anything more intricate than a two-piece bow and arrow, and certainly nothing that had its own sentience. Just so there would be no more misunderstandings, I clapped my hands together, snuffing out the rat. I smiled sweetly at the demon, opened my hands, and showed him a pile of ashes. I blew them into the air and stared at him.

  “Rumor reached me that Lord Aristos was missing. Has he been found?”

  The demon shook his head. His eyes were respectfully downcast but instead of disdain, his signature was now full of enmity.

  “Where was he when the explosion occurred?”

  “Standing on top of the dam.”

  After that, Fara and I split up.

  By mid-morning, I began to despair. Debris was everywhere, most of it in piles much taller than me. There didn’t seem to be much organization to the search efforts either. Hyrkes and demons alike wandered through the rubble looking for survivors and digging them out. I was tempted to use magic to blast through the bigger mounds of fallen rock, but was too worried I’d make matters worse. The last thing a buried, unconscious survivor needed was to be blasted with waning magic.

  So I searched and I rescued, pulling victims out from under the wreckage one by one. Eventually, I hoped, one of them would be Ari – and that he’d be alive.

  Around noon, I found him. He was standing on the other side of a massive chunk of the old viaduct. He had a bloody gash on his forehead and his right hand held the corners of a ripped cloak. It swirled around his bare legs and I realized that, under it, he was naked. But the realization was alarming rather than amorous. He must have shifted, I thought. That’s how he survived. But he hadn’t flown fast enough to avoid getting trapped under the falling debris.

  Standing in front of him with an inscrutable look on her face was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. More dazzling than even Fara, and Fara had pulled off some amazing glamours. Her hair was a gorgeous mane of milky white swan feathers and her face was flawless with arched eyebrows, high cheekbones, and obsidian eyes. She wore winged epaulets… and not much else. Even if her name had not been included on Rockthorn Gorge’s “Demons of Interest” list, I would have recognized Cliodna, the Patron Demon of Waves and Waterbirds. My guess was, the white swan had been Ari’s white knight – that she’d just rescued him.

  My signature flashed and they turned toward me. I felt Ari’s signature flare. Its edges raced toward me—

  I retracted my signature, slamming it shut like a door. It was instinctive. Defensive. Cliodna’s gaze passed back and forth between us twice before she finally dropped her hands from Ari’s shoulders and stepped back. Her signature pulsed once, ominously, and then quieted.

  Ari cleared his throat. “Cliodna, this is—”

  “—Nouiomo Onyx.” The swan demoness stared at me, her dark, glassy eyes unblinking. After an uncomfortable moment, she made a moue of distaste and turned toward Ari.

  “She smells like her barghest.”

  The next encounter was only slightly less disconcerting. When the new arrival asked who I was, Ari paused briefly and then introduced me as a past Laurel Crown contender who would be serving as his consigliere for the next six months and possibly “in perpetuity” after I graduated. He then casually mentioned I’d be formally inducted into his camarilla later. I decided now wasn’t the time to worry about either the initiation ceremony or what working for Ari in perpetuity might mean.

  By nightfall, hundreds of torches and lanterns glowed in the gorge. Orange spots were concentrated in three areas: down by the dry river bed, at the base of the gorge’s northern wall, and at its top. Nephemiah Zeffre, Ari’s Hyrke foreman, had miraculously survived both blast and aftermath, and he’d rigged a temporary hoist to lift those who were too injured to climb.

  At the top, the railway continued on the other side of the now non-existent viaduct. A handcar was being used as a makeshift ambulance to shuttle people to the town’s train station, which was another fifteen miles northwest. I’d asked Fara to accompany some of the more injured workers back to the hospital so that she could cast as necessary during the trip, but I vowed to stay until the last missing person had been found.

  I spent my time after that clearing away more rocks, rubble, and debris so that trapped men could be pulled free, building a makeshift travois for Nova so that she could haul men and supplies to and from Zeffre’s hoist, and providing light, warmth, and comfort to those still waiting to be healed… or to die. It was agonizing, but how could I complain? I hadn’t lost anyone I loved.

  Finally, Ari called off the search. All of the missing had been accounted for and everyone was anxious to get back to town. I waited until nearly everyone was out of the gorge before climbing up and catching a ride back with Ari, his Captain of the Guard, Yannu—I remembered his name from the list of camarilla members—and Ari’s foreman, Zeffre.

  Barghests and bunyips are both huge so there wasn’t much room, but I managed to squeeze in between Nova and Yannu nonetheless. If the bunyip captain was surprised I chose to sit beside him rather than Ari, he didn’t show it. I likely ruined any impression of strength or bravery, however, when my signature pulsed briefly and uncontrollably after I realized his double row of teeth, two arms-length tusks, and deep-set snake eyes were only inches from my face.

  Ari sat across from me. He’d found clothes somewhere and had washed off most of the dirt, dust, and blood that had coated him earlier. Even so, he looked as worn as I felt. I wanted to ask a million questions – about Displodo, the explosion, possible suspects, clues, potential leads… about Zeffre and Yannu and the other demons on my “Demons of Interest” list… about Ari and what he’d been doin
g since I last saw him, and why he’d become patron of Rockthorn Gorge.

  But I could hardly ask questions about possible suspects in front of possible suspects, and the more personal questions should wait… or possibly not be asked at all.

  By the time I arrived in Rockthorn Gorge, I’d slept for only four hours out of the past forty-eight. I’m sure if the town had been ordinary, I wouldn’t have remembered my first glimpse of it.

  But it was anything but.

  The two words that immediately came to mind when I saw Halja’s northernmost outpost were rugged and beautiful. In its own way, it was a diamond in the rough – something dazzling and enduring carved out of something coarse and rocky.

  A serpentine street lined with slate and clay tile-topped residences wound its way from the train station to the top of the mountain while a central set of stairs provided a narrower, and infinitely steeper, way up. At the end of each switchback were larger buildings: guard towers, a giant rotunda and, at the summit, an open-air pavilion. If the map in my dossier was to be believed, the pavilion was Cliodna’s sanctuary, which meant the other building up there had to be the hospital.

  “You know what we call those stairs?”

  I turned toward Zeffre, who’d walked over to stand beside me, and shook my head.

  “The Stairway to Heaven.”

  I smiled obligingly. Apt, I thought, craning my neck. Wispy clouds shrouded the mountain’s peak. But Zeffre’s next words made me realize that “heaven” was open to interpretation here in the gorge.

  “The graveyard’s to the left of the hospital,” he explained, “and the vineyard to the right.” He smirked, but it seemed self-deprecating. Ari’s foreman had the kind of face one might describe as craggy or weathered, but his eyes were a crisp blue and his expression, post-smirk, was kind. He glanced back at Ari, who was speaking to Yannu and two other bunyips.