by Mia Marshall
“How’d these guys find you?”
“Oh, it was so romantic. There I was, studying the toe tag on a Jane Doe, and in they walked, all shiny and serious, wanting to see the inside of a man’s chest cavity. They asked me if I came there often, we compared bodies, and fate just took over from there.”
“They were there to see Mark’s body too?”
“Or there’s your boring version of events. They were postulating all sorts of unlikely theories about a killer using bags of soil and a funnel.” We’d just bought several bags of soil and a funnel. It suddenly seemed that we ought to have considered our purchases more carefully. “They have no idea what they’re dealing with. That’s the one advantage of being a creature that doesn’t exist in their version of reality. No one ever suspects you.”
We drove on without talking. It was a long drive to the local FBI office, and I enjoyed the complete quiet that fell in the car. It was the kind of rare peace one only finds in the still moments between murders and arson attempts, and I was going to take every second of it I could get.
After a few minutes, I hesitantly reached out to the radio and looked for a country station. Johnny Cash’s unmistakable bass-baritone sang to us of the pain of living and loving. This time, Sera didn’t attempt to change the station, and the sounds of “Unchained” filled the car as we circled the lake.
When we pulled up to the office, we were both in a quiet, somber mood. Johnny Cash will do that to a girl. With the local headquarters almost two hours away in Sacramento, this was a small satellite office, and about as impressive as one would expect.
Sera procrastinated for several long minutes, checking email, sending a bunch of texts, and explaining this strange new technology to me. Most elementals feel a combination of disdain and aversion when it comes to the authorities, simultaneously afraid of discovery and scornful of how little the law actually knew. Sera and I were walking a fine line even showing up at this office. “Be brave, H20,” she said, and immediately headed to the front door. I followed at a slower pace, wondering when we’d returned to nickname status.
We were immediately led to a small office that bore little resemblance to any crime show on television. There were no bright lights, no one-way glass, and no ashtrays on the table. Instead, the room held a long wooden table and four matching chairs, two on each side. It looked more like the setting for a casual meal than a tense interrogation. When they brought us cups of tea, I even felt myself relax slightly.
The door opened, and in walked two men. They at least lived up to my stereotypical ideas of the FBI. Both wore perfectly ironed suits so pristine I would have been hard pressed to find a speck of lint on either of them. I found myself wishing I could sic Simon in cat form on them, just to muss them up a little. Although their coloring suggested they came from very different gene pools, they might as well have been twins. Neither smiled, and I got the feeling they would not need to invest much money in wrinkle cream to fight future laugh lines.
“Thank you for coming in, Ms. Blais,” said the slightly taller of the two. He was the younger one and looked like he’d transferred directly from the Marines to the Bureau. His shoulders did an impressive job of filling out his suit. He kept his curly hair clipped short and worn close to the skull, and his dark face was dominated by his large brown eyes. He looked at each of us in turn, holding our gazes for just a fraction longer than was altogether polite. If he had been a shifter, I mused, he’d be a predator. “You remember my partner, Agent Carmichael.”
“Yes, of course. Agent Johnson, this is my... this is Aidan Brook. She just got into town last night, so she doesn’t know anything about recent events, but she was also friends with Christopher. We were roommates ten years ago.”
Carmichael looked me over, perhaps assessing the likelihood that I’d gone on a murderous spree during my previous time in the community. His hair was a blond so dark some would call it brown, and his blue eyes did not blink as he considered me. He seemed to be in his early thirties, the age when so many human men finally shrug off the boyishness that dogs them through their twenties and settle into their rougher adult faces. He looked like a grown-up version of the boy scout, high school quarterback, and college valedictorian, all rolled into one impressive, square-jawed package. He seemed slightly more friendly than Johnson, but that wasn’t saying much. I firmly told myself to make no jokes in front of these men.
“Please describe your relationship with the deceased, Ms. Brook,” said Carmichael.
“I didn’t know Mark… I guess I don’t even know his last name.” Both agents stared at me. “Oh, you mean Christopher?” I was off to an impressive start, I was.
For the next several hours, I answered approximately five hundred questions about my friendship with Christopher, and then I watched Sera do the same. The questions were, in turn, bland, repetitive, gentle, heart-breaking, and insinuating. When the interview was finally over, I wanted to curl up in the fetal position.
Since Sera had re-entered my life—was that really only yesterday?—I’d been so busy moving from one situation to the next that I hadn’t stopped to consider the tragedy that had brought me here in the first place. I knew Chris was gone, but my heart hadn’t bothered to catch up to my brain until now. Thanks to their invasive questions, I felt like I’d just relived Christopher’s and my entire relationship with two men who seemed to be composed of equal parts robotics and granite.
Finally, they thanked us for our time and released us. I barely made it out the door before I was sobbing, all the grief unearthed by the interview rising to the surface and demanding I react. As much as I loved Chris, it wasn’t only his loss causing the pain. The questions reminded me of what my life had been, and what it had since become.
Once, I had cared about those who surrounded me. I would have known immediately if one of them had died. Now, I was a hermit, hiding in my beat-up old house, deliberately unaware of events passing in the outside world. The past had long since stopped being a memory that plagued me. It had become a monster, a constant shadowy presence that stalked me slowly, attacking whenever my armor dropped. I’d learned to defend myself, to surround myself with such a barrier of apathy that the beast nearly gave up, finding no easy prey in my heart.
That had been the cost of my freedom, the only way I was able to live with myself: I chose to feel nothing.
It had taken two days amongst old friends to put cracks in the armor I’d spent years building, and another hour with the agents to destroy it altogether. The shards of my defenses crashed about my feet, useless and shattered. With no further warning, I felt again. I felt everything, and it was horrible.
Sera said nothing. She merely ushered me to the side of the building, providing me with a bit more privacy in which to fall apart. She stood quietly and waited.
She waited a long time. I sobbed until I was gasping and fighting for air. It took long minutes, but the sobs finally tapered off. I managed to build a temporary protection, just enough to function again. “That was...” I didn’t know how to finish. I wasn’t even certain whether I was talking about the interview or my subsequent breakdown.
“I’m sorry about that. I didn’t realize they were going to want quite that much detail.” She dug in her purse and pulled out a packet of tissues. She gave it to me, and I attempted to clean up. She fidgeted the whole time, fingers tapping restlessly against her thigh. She had something to say and was only waiting until I was done crying to say it.
Finally, the words burst from her. “Ade, do you really hate me?”
I could only be honest. “Sometimes. If it helps, I hate myself for all the same reasons I hate you.” I paused long enough to wipe my face again. The tears were finally drying up, and my face felt tired and puffy. “Do you hate me for leaving?”
She nodded. “Sometimes.” Though her eyes were still serious, still full of the pain from the interview and my breakdown, she offered me a hesitant smile. “But I’m glad you’re here.” Deciding that was enough e
motional honesty for one day, she added, “God knows why. All you do is mope and cry.”
Humans might make a face or lightly punch a friend in the arm for such a comment. I was only half-human, so I chose to hurriedly gather a bit of water from the damp air and dump it on her head. The best part was that she couldn’t get me back in equal fashion. A quick blast of water was a practical joke; third degree burns were not.
Sera glared at me. “That comment did not deserve an impromptu shower,” she protested, wiping her face with her sleeve.
“No,” I grinned, “but it made me feel better. Plus, you just subjected me to the world’s worst therapy session. What the hell did we even get out of that? They asked all the questions. We learned nothing.” Narrowing my eyes at her, I menacingly brought another ball of water toward her head.
She eyed the water, then glanced around. At least one of us was still considering whether humans were watching. I really had been away too long. Fortunately, there were no windows on this side of the building, but I was an idiot to have forgotten at all.
Embarrassed, I started to disperse the rain, but Sera was too fast for me. She drew a ring of fire around the water, letting the flames gobble up the oxygen until none of the water remained. Then, she rearranged the fire, painting a lion in the air, his fiery mane flaring behind him as he silently roared in my face. There is nothing more obnoxious than an elemental with artistic talent.
“Show off,” I muttered.
“Cheer up. You might find that our trip was not as fruitless as you imagine.” She moved to the car, unlocking my side first. “Check the back seat. We seem to have picked up a stray along the way.”
I glanced inside the car to find a very naked Simon reclining along the bench seat. On his lap, covering the one thing I probably shouldn’t examine too closely, was a manila folder with the FBI logo and a label reading “Lake Tahoe Killings.”
It was dark by the time we returned to the house. Mac had apparently decided it was safe to turn the electricity back on, and every light in the house glowed warmly, small beacons in each window welcoming us back. We were assaulted by a wave of heat the moment we opened the front door, and Sera sighed in relief. Simon promptly sat next to a radiator to warm himself, and even I had to admit it felt good.
Mac and Vivian were playing cards in the dining room. Rummy, it looked like. Vivian nodded at us as we entered, and for a moment everything felt completely normal. We were just coming home after running a few errands, about to enjoy a casual night at home with friends. Then I glanced at the living room to my right and remembered that normal was still several zip codes away.
“Would you like to join us?” asked Vivian, holding up her cards in illustration. “We decided the cleaning could wait until morning.” She had her dreads loosely tied at the nape of her neck, and she wore a beat-up pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt that read “No, I won’t fix your computer.” She looked relaxed and confident in a way she never had in a button-down shirt. It was a reminder that in the ten years I’d been gone, the world had changed and moved on while I stood still. An unexpected, desperate urge to play catch-up grabbed at me, and I spared a wasted moment to wonder who I would have been if fire and death had never touched me.
Mac turned to me, waiting for my answer. “Maybe.” For a moment, I thought longingly of my quiet room upstairs and the empty pages in my journal still waiting to be filled. It was tempting, but so was the thought of practicing my neglected rummy skills. “Where’s Brian?”
“Work.” answered Sera. “He’s still at the Rat Trap, proudly getting people drunk on a nightly basis. We might visit him later. For now, Vivian, I’m afraid you’ll have to kick Mac’s ass on your own. I need to borrow Aidan for a while.” To me, she said, “Go grab something warmer. It’s freaking cold out there.”
Curious, I did as she said without asking any questions.
Twenty minutes later, we pulled to a stop outside a tall iron fence. There were few lights, but enough to see what waited on the other side, and the lights reflected off neat rows of white marble and angelic statuary. “You feeling nimble?” she asked.
A minute later, she waited for me on the other side of the fence. She had climbed over easily. I lacked her upper body strength, but I was skinny and too stubborn to ask for help. While most of the fence reached to the ground, there were several inches of space below the locked gates. I stripped off my bulky layers and threw them to Sera, then shimmied underneath to join her.
“Why did we just break into a cemetery?” I asked through chattering teeth, quickly bundling back up.
“Because I was halfway to Oregon when they held his funeral. Come on.” I followed her through the night, ignoring the chill that nipped at both my ears and my heart. Chris was here, in this quiet and desolate place. His big, strong body and laughing face were trapped here forever, and I would never see them again.
Sera stopped by a plain headstone, engraved only with his name and the dates of his birth and death. “Shouldn’t it say he was beloved of someone?” I asked.
“They wouldn’t have enough room to write everyone who loved him. They’d need one of those.” She indicated an ostentatious tomb to our left. “It doesn’t matter. He knew.” I shook my head, remembering ten years of silence. “He knew, Aidan. I told him what we were years ago. He knew why you left and why you weren’t writing or calling. He always understood. He missed you, of course, but he understood.”
I swallowed. I thought that, after my earlier outburst, I had no tears left, but that seemed overly optimistic of me. “I should have…”
“Yes. You should have.”
“Now it’s too late.”
“Only for some things.”
I sat on the frozen ground and placed my gloved hands on his grave, as if I could suddenly channel Vivian’s power. “I’m sorry, Chris,” I whispered. “I’m sorry I left you.”
Sera knelt beside me and pressed a hand to the earth. The other she wrapped slowly around one of mine until we were all connected, Chris’s grave to Sera to me. There were still hundreds of words left to be said, words of recrimination, apology, and maybe even of forgiveness, but we said none of them.
Instead, we knelt on the grave for a very long time, until the snow that had been threatening all day finally began to fall, and even for a long while after that.
Chapter 6
A few days later, I awoke to find a toy fireman’s hat resting on the other pillow. I looked for the outrage and fear that I would expect to find, knowing that someone had snuck quietly into my room, but all I found was a warm glow and undeniable sense of pride. It was a silly little gift, but I welcomed the light-hearted token of my mad fire-fighting skills.
I had slept for a long time the night before, my body still recovering from a couple of fast-paced, stressful days. The others were already up by the time I stumbled my way downstairs. I grabbed a cup of tea and a plate of toast and joined them. It was rare to find everyone gathered together. Most days, Vivian was at school or Mac at work, and it was rare for Brian to join us before noon. It was Saturday, I realized, and no one had anywhere else they needed to be.
Simon lounged across the living room floor, studying the FBI file closely, looking for some telling detail he had missed in his previous reviews. Vivian sat in the window with a newspaper, filling in the New York Times crossword puzzle with a pen. Mac was reading an Elmore Leonard novel, and Brian and Sera whispered quietly in the corner. It was a remarkably peaceful tableau, especially considering how the room had looked three days earlier.
Days of hard labor had transformed the living room from a charred ruin into a fully livable space. Vivian and I tackled the walls, washing them and putting up new wallpaper. Mac hadn’t raised a single objection about using teddy bear wallpaper in his house, which suggested he was either insane or convinced another attack was forthcoming.
Sera couldn’t safely light a fire inside, so she arranged for a desert friend to fly up and help me dry out the carpet before it mil
dewed. She was only in the cabin for a couple hours, but that was long enough to turn the place into our own Mojave Desert, at least temporarily. The friend left the minute the job was completed, declaring herself utterly freaked out by all the trees and water. Sera steam cleaned the carpet herself, and it actually looked better than it had before. Mac had ransacked the local shops, finding every available oversized pillow and scattering them across the floor in place of the ruined sofa and armchair, which currently sat in the back yard, enjoying their second life as a cozy hotel for various small animals. Brian had skillfully avoided manual labor by offering his bartending services, making sure we all stayed so pleasantly buzzed that we didn’t mind the work ourselves. He also supervised.
Unfortunately, he’d been liberally imbibing his own concoctions at the time and thus failed a bit in his supervisory duties. This might explain why the wallpaper hung upside down on one wall. There was now a twelve foot stretch where it appeared hundreds of teddy bears were dive bombing the floor pillows. I was fairly certain I was responsible for that stretch of wall, a fact I kept to myself.
While the rest of us tackled the living room repairs, Simon sketched designs for a home security system, and we’d spent the previous day rigging the house from top to bottom. The windows were all covered with one-way film, ensuring no watching psychopaths could track our movements. Motion sensor cameras covered the house’s entire perimeter, including Mac’s trailer, and the recordings uploaded directly to a data cloud we could access at any time. Well, the others could, at least. I’d nodded and smiled when the discussion turned to server farms.
Each room also held several large plastic bins filled with soil or water, providing me and Vivian with easy access to fire prevention. A few bins even perched on the ceiling beams, ready to be dropped down at a moment’s notice if anyone dared to start a second fire. We didn’t know if the arsonist meant to warn us, scare us, or outright kill us, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to succeed.