Into the Fire

by Patrick Hester

  My first impression? This didn’t really have the layout or feel of anything like a house someone lived in. Five desks, each with a wooden chair for the owner, and another in front for a guest, were arranged in the room. In just about every other free bit of space in, on, and around the desks, and on some of the extra chairs, sat books. On freestanding shelves, on shelves built into the walls, sat piles of books like little columns on the floor, each one unsteady at best and ready to fall at worst. The fireplace tucked into the corner on my right, books on either side and across the mantle. Had to be a fire hazard.

  This place had more in common with a library than it did with a house or a police precinct.

  The closest of the leaning towers of literature held dusty spines with titles I’d never seen at the Tattered Cover. They weren’t normal. Most weren’t even in English. Some only had Roman numerals on them, and a few were so old and worn that whatever had been on the spine had faded away. Honestly, I surveyed this sea of bound tomes and wondered which university had put out a missing persons report on their library.

  Mayfair came to stand beside me. “What do you think?”

  “What’s with all the books?”

  “Ah, well, books are easier to manage. Old house, old wiring. Computers don’t do so well here. The most modern thing we’ve been able to use with any consistency is the microfiche machine upstairs in the library.”

  “Wait—this isn’t—You have more books?”

  “Yes,” he laughed. “A lot more. Oh, and the microfiche is broken right now. Trying to find someone who can fix it, but the company we used for years went out of business, and the man who helped us for a bit after has retired. Sorry.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Mayfair crossed the room to a desk I presumed to be his and tossed the files he’d been carrying down. He wore a faded blue business suit beneath his coat, complete with vest and pocket watch.

  I couldn’t recall the last time I saw one of those. My grandfather, maybe?

  He pulled out the pocket watch, pressed a button, and the cover flipped open. This reminded me I had absolutely no idea what time it was, so I checked my phone only to find it off because, silly me, I’d turned it off hours ago when it wouldn’t stop ringing. Powering it on now, it flashed 4:00 PM and notified me I had twenty-nine missed calls and almost as many voicemails, plus seventeen texts.

  I flipped it shut and returned it to my belt holster. The world could be ignored for just a little bit longer.

  Part of my brain alerted me to the fact I should be exhausted. I’d hit the twenty-four-hour mark on being awake. Adrenaline had a hand in keeping me awake and alert this long. Caffeine and a couple of those little bottled-energy drinks that tasted like berry-flavored cough syrup helped, too. Everything would catch up to me soon, and the crash would come hard and fast. Nothing short of an apocalypse would be waking me at that point. But, and this was a big but, I couldn’t let it happen yet.

  I still needed answers from Jack Mayfair.

  “Five desks?” I asked to get the conversation started.

  “Mmm. This is mine,” he gestured at the desk where he stood. Pointing to the one in front of him, he added, “Nevil sits there. You’ll meet him soon enough. Kylie’s is there.” He pointed to the desk to his right. “Those two are both guest desks.” He indicated the remaining two. “You can pick either to be yours. Just clear whatever’s on it to the other empty one and make yourself at home.”

  Instead of doing as told, I asked, “Why am I here? Really?”

  “Well,” he replied, hands on hips, “that’s complicated. I thought I’d ease you in rather than dump more on you. You’ve already had an eventful couple of days.”

  Rather than let him put me off, I said, “I’m not a fan of peeling the Band-Aid back slowly. I’m here. You’re here. Let’s get this over with.”

  He regarded me for a moment before nodding. “All right,” he said. “If that’s the way you want it. Have a seat.”

  I took the seat in front of his desk.

  He sat down and leaned forward to rest his elbows on the desk. “You’re here because you experienced a supernatural event. You came face-to-face with something you couldn’t explain; then you came face-to-face with something even worse, unless I miss my guess. I’m the person who deals with things like that—the supernatural—and you’re here because of what happened after you were confronted with things you couldn’t explain.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked, turning away from him to focus on one of the freestanding bookshelves. So many books rested on the shelves they bowed in the middle. He knew about the … Ghost. What else did he know? How could he know about any of it? Supernatural?

  There had to be a logical explanation for everything. What happened after … well, how about a gas leak? Someone smoking had a cigarette burning and fell asleep. A thousand different ways to explain it.

  “You know exactly what it means. Look at me!” he shouted.

  I turned, and all the warmth fled my body. Breathing became this thing I used to do but couldn’t figure out anymore.

  Jack Mayfair hadn’t moved anything but his arm. Hand flat, palm up, a ball of blue flame danced in the air.

  “Welcome to Banba,” he repeated, juggling the fire from one hand to the other.

  I lunged for the nearest garbage can and started throwing up.

  Chapter Three

  “Last night, your world fell apart.”

  Jack Mayfair held my hair while I puked my guts out. I’d stuck my face into a garbage can just in time. My stomach heaved over and over, and everything I’d ever eaten in my life tried its best to come back up and out. I could feel the hot tears on my cheeks and I desperately wanted to stop, but my body would hear none of it. The tears kept flowing.

  “It’s never an easy thing, having your world turned upside down,” he continued.

  I heard him, heard the words, the tone of his voice so somber and quiet, but my mind traveled back in time, back to the apartment building last night. My partner and I about to bust in through the door when something caught my eye. Jorge kicked the door in, sure I’d be right behind him … only I wasn’t.

  All the heat had been pulled from my body. Somewhere, Jorge shouted, followed by a series of quick, sharp explosions of sound as he emptied his gun. But something had seen me just as I saw it, and it held me tight where I stood. I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak.

  “We’re told the boogeyman doesn’t exist, that the world is a place of black and white, right and wrong, and everything fits into these neat little columns and can be explained away by science. ‘The closet is simply a closet,’ they tell us, and we clutch at our stuffed animals and pray for the weak glow from the night-light plugged into the wall to extend just a little bit farther than it does, for it to chase away the shadow we can see just on the edge of our vision.”

  The cold flooded over me, through me. I wanted to scream, but the sound wouldn’t come. This … presence filled the air. I could feel a wave of hatred rolling out from it, how it wanted me to die, wanted my partner to die. It stood beside me and also, impossibly, down the hall, staring at me through pale white eyes. A mouth devoid of light or sound moved in mock motion like it tried to speak and didn’t know the words. The only sounds I could hear came from inside the apartment. Pain, fear, and agony. There was a pitch to it that climbed higher than a human voice should be able to achieve. It cut through me, and I turned my head just a little.

  “Eventually, we convince ourselves what we see isn’t really there; it can’t be there because that’s just childish nonsense. We develop a sort of blind ignorance to the supernatural world. When faced with the impossible, with what cannot be, our conditioning takes over, and we cannot accept it for anything other than a hoax or a fraud, something perpetrated by kooks and phonies looking to cash in on superstitious, ignorant fools.”

  The tears streaming down my face froze on the prickled skin of my cheeks. The sound from my partner had transformed i
nto this gurgling shriek, and my head turned just a little more. I could see him now out of the corner of my eye. Legs dangling in the air, suspended somehow, blood running down his pants to pool on the floor. I wanted to shriek myself, but the other presence, that other thing, held me back. It whispered to me now, cold breath on my ear, saying terrible things in a language I couldn’t know yet still understood. All my fault. Everyone knew it; why didn’t I see it? They talked about me when I left the room, always in hushed tones—didn’t I suspect? They mocked me. Hated me. Tolerated me because I never got the clue. How much better for everyone if I weren’t there? So easy to do it. Just close my eyes, let sleep come and take me away. Then it’ll take care of the rest. I won’t be a burden to anyone anymore.

  “But there are those moments, those rare and impossible moments, when the world we know crashes into the one we cannot accept, and we find ourselves having to cope with something our minds aren’t ready to handle. As adults, we see the world around us as cut-and-dry, and so we make excuses, we try to force that which doesn’t make sense to fit into those neat little columns, and one by one, they start to fall apart because it just doesn’t fit—it just doesn’t work the way we’ve been told it does.”

  Every breath became a chore, turning to fog as it passed my lips. My head moved just a bit more, and I could see what held Jorge in the air: a great big hairy half-man, half-beast animal like I had only ever seen before in horror movies. One impossibly long arm ended with a hand deep in Jorge’s chest, holding him up, while the other whipped claws across my partner’s torso, shredding the flesh and sending hot, red blood out in streaks. It had this long snout rimmed with red fangs dripping blood as if it had just taken a bite.

  Jorge screamed, still alive. A slap of the creature’s paw sent a stream of blood splattering across my face, making me blink and cracking through the ice sheeting my skin. Jorge’s face turned to mine, and our eyes met. He had this ultimate, final expression of utter horror and resignation. He knew his life had ended.

  “… Run,” he wheezed.

  I screamed.

  “Everyone reacts differently. Some have innate or repressed abilities that can help them cope and move on.”

  Suddenly, I couldn’t feel the cold anymore. Everything grew warm—warm enough that sweat started streaming down my body, mixing with the blood on my face, burning my eyes. The Ghost shrieked like a banshee, then faded away. Something inside of me had snapped. I could move again. I screamed my lungs out now, loud enough that everyone on the floor had to have heard it, not to mention anyone above or below us. I wanted the creature dead. I wanted it to suffer, wanted it to get the fuck away from Jorge. Anger and rage filled me to the point that the room and everything in it turned red, and then the heat surrounding me seemed to focus and move in a straight line that struck the creature square in the face.

  “Some, a very rare few, have a certain Talent.”

  The creature’s head exploded in blue flames, and the force of the blast flung it backwards. The flames licked the walls, dancing across them in a mad rush of hunger. In a heartbeat, everything started burning bright blue.

  * * *

  I don’t remember when I stopped vomiting or how I got onto the back porch swing. A cool enough breeze woke me just as the sun sank below the Rocky Mountains to the west. The best way to describe it in that moment is to recall the Cabo trip of 2012. According to my best-friend Jenni, I spent the night doing shots off some tanned and toned dude’s abs and woke up the next day with the mother of all hangovers and no memory whatsoever of the night before. I felt cold and shaky like someone with the worst stomach flu in history, and vowed on the flight home I would never get so drunk again.

  Which lasted exactly four months.

  Anyway. On Jack Mayfair’s back porch, my body trembled like someone going through detox. Part of it came from being cold, damned cold. A blanket smelling faintly of dust and cigarette smoke covered me. My head pounded, my eyes throbbing in their sockets. This is exactly why I vowed, again, to never get so drunk again.

  Which lasted a month after the last time I made such a vow.

  The creak of a wooden chair told me I wasn’t alone. I turned to find Mayfair sitting nearby with an ancient book in his hands. He read in the failing light on the porch. His eyes lifted from the page to meet mine, and I thought I caught a spark of something there, something I couldn’t quite identify. Relief? He placed a ribbon to mark his page and closed the book, smiling down at me. I don’t know why, but I thought it a classy thing to do, marking his book with a ribbon. Funny, the things your brain focuses on at times like that. I shook the thought away and looked back up at him. He wore thin brown glasses, which came off in a sweeping gesture ending with them in his breast pocket.

  “Feeling better?” he asked as I sat up. A glass of water appeared in his hands, and I greedily accepted it. My throat was raw and sore, the water cool and refreshing. I drained it quickly.

  “A bit,” I croaked. I could feel my face heating, and turned. I’d completely broken down and lost it right in front of him. I hated appearing weak to anyone. It never ended well for me.

  “It’s a lot to take in all at once,” he said with a smile. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  “That’s why you wanted to wait.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry. I never do anything the easy way.”

  He cocked his head to the side. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  I smiled a little sheepishly.

  He asked, “Do you have any idea what you did?”

  “Maybe,” I said, focusing my eyes on the empty glass. I’d seen him standing there with a fireball dancing above his outstretched hand, right? That was real? Crazy. Absolutely crazy.

  The empty glass sparkled, a little water still in the bottom catching the last of the light. Or so I thought. That little bit of water grew, rising from the empty bottom to the rim.

  Very carefully, I set it down on the porch.

  “Samantha,” he started, but I cut him off.

  “Sam. Everyone calls me Sam. This can’t be happening. Things like this just don’t happen!”

  “If you understand how things work, you realize things like this happen all the time.”

  “How things work? Water does not come out of nowhere! Glasses don’t fill themselves!”

  “Actually, I filled the glass—”

  “And there’s no such thing as magic!” There. I’d said it. That had to be what this was all about. A fireball bouncing from hand to hand, the weird glass of water—magic. Kid stuff. Sleight of hand and misdirection. Magic.

  “What about Werewolves?” he asked. “Or Ghosts? No such things as those either? You know what you saw, Sam—what you did. There’s no denying it. The kind of power you used does not go unnoticed.”

  “You’re insane,” I spat. “Certifiable!” I stood up, letting the smoky blanket drop to the ground. The backyard stretched out before me, much better tended than the front. Would have been a really nice view, too, if it weren’t for the graveyard. Dozens of gravestones and what had to be a mausoleum right smack dab in the center of his backyard, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. Who the hell was this guy? Who puts a graveyard next to their house?

  “I know this is hard to grasp, but it is real. Magic, Ghosts, Werewolves, and a host of other things you haven’t even considered yet—all real.”

  “And what—you fight them?”

  “I fight them when I have to, but really my job is no different from yours: to protect the innocent.”

  “Innocent Werewolves?”

  “Sometimes, but not often. That’s a long story. What do you think would happen if people learned a police officer had been mauled by a Werewolf last night? Be honest.”

  I thought about it. I know I wouldn’t believe it for a second. I’d assume whoever said it had to be insane. Even after last night, I still couldn’t believe. The look on my face told him all he needed to know.

  “Exactly,” he said. �
��That’s the line we tread, people like us,” he said. “We’re the ones who can handle what’s out there, but very few believe it even exists anymore. They’ve explained everything already, and there isn’t any room for magic, which is fine. For the most part, magic doesn’t mind being ignored and forgotten. The supernatural world prefers to be left alone.”

  “We? We’re the ones who can handle what’s out there? We want to be left alone? What does any of this have to do with me?”

  “Stubborn. I see that now,” he said, rubbing his face. “Sam, what do you think happened last night?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied. “Maybe a gas leak? Gun goes off, spark ignites the gas.” Made a little bit of sense.

  Mayfair said, “No. You used magic. You called Fire.”

  “Even if I did, maybe it’s just a fluke! It’s not like I did it on purpose.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said flatly. “You did it. Worse, you had no clue what you were doing. With the kind of power you channeled, you could have taken out a decent chunk of Denver in the blink of an eye. But we got lucky, Sam. All of your rage, your anger, focused on the Werewolf. The fire that brought the building down was an accident.”

  I hugged myself, staring out at the graveyard. I’d gotten pretty lucky, actually. With the room on fire, I’d dragged Jorge out into the hall and hit the fire alarm. Then I’d dragged him outside while people poured out of the building, most still in their pajamas. No one else had been hurt. Lucky.

  “If left unchecked,” he continued, “you could be a danger to yourself and to everyone around you. To be honest with you, I’ve never seen Talent manifest so late. Someone should have found you a long time ago and begun your training.”

  “What do you mean, ‘found me’? What sort of training?”

  “That’s why you’re here. I have to train you so you don’t hurt yourself or anyone else. You’re a Wizard, Sam, like me, and if I don’t take you in, they’ll come for you.”

  “Who’ll come for me?”