February Thaw

by Tanya Huff

  "Mom, what are you talking about?"

  "What do you think?"

  "Mother!"

  "Sorry, force of habit. That whole answering a question with a question thing; we're all trained to do it." Beth frowned slightly. "It's supposed to make us seem mysterious. Can't see how."

  Silently vowing not to lose her temper at her mother's deathbed no matter how surreal things got, Carlene fought to keep from grinding her teeth. "Mysterious, no. Annoying, yes."

  "Thought so." Beth snorted. "Make them work it out for themselves, they told us. Once you start solving their problems, they'll expect you to solve all their problems."

  "Mom."

  "But enough about me, I'm dying..."

  "Stop saying that!"

  "...we need to talk about you."

  "I'll be fine."

  "No, you won't."

  Releasing her mother's hand, Carlene pushed back the chair, walked over to the window, counted to ten, and returned. Only her mother could turn what should be a touching moment of resolution into a petty argument. "Yes, I will. I'll miss you very much, but, after a while, I'm sure I'll be fine."

  "Fine is a relative term."

  "Mother..."

  "I’ve enjoyed being your mother." Sagging back against the pillow, Beth seemed faintly surprised by the revelation. "Watching you grow and learn was the most fun I ever had."

  "Even when I got suspended for pounding Terry McDonnell's head against the playground?"

  "The little snitch deserved what he got."

  Carlene returned the smile. "Thank you. I’ve enjoyed being your daughter."

  "You're not human, you know."

  "What?"

  Her free hand raised to forestall further protest, Beth suddenly struggled to draw a breath. "What time is it?" she gasped as she released it.

  "Ten thirty."

  "Oh, bloody hell." The eyes that locked on Carlene's might have been the eyes of a dying woman, but they were also the eyes of a woman who expected to be obeyed. "Stay away from the oxygen tanks."

  Carlene waited for the next breath.

  There was no next breath.

  Barely breathing herself, Carlene slowly stood and backed away from the bed. The too conditioned hospital air had picked up a shimmer and she could hear nothing through the sudden roaring in her ears.

  Her mother was dead.

  Beth Aswith was dead.

  Bindings began to unwind.

  Carlene remembered.

  "Oh crap..."

  She barely had time to move away from the curtains before she returned to her true form.

  The flesh she'd worn for twenty-four years turned to ash so quickly there wasn't smoke enough to register on the alarm over the door. The flooring got a little scorched and the ambient temperature of the room went up about fifteen degrees, but she managed to regain control before she set the whole hospital on fire.

  It wasn't easy and had there been an oxygen tank handy she wouldn't have been able to resist, but there wasn't and she did and, eventually, she calmed down.

  Burning only enough oxygen to maintain a brilliant white flame barely an inch high, she danced over to the bed and, leaving a scorched line along the blanket, settled in the air above the dead wizard's nose. "See," she said, unable to stop herself from flickering, "I told you I'd be fine."

  They’d been together for over a hundred years before the final experiment. Even measured in combustion rates, that amount of time, that kind of companionship, couldn't be burned away as quickly as flesh. Her flame dimmed and she dipped down close enough to temporarily warm cold lips.

  "And I miss you very much."

  A change in air currents warned her that the door was opening.

  "Ms. Aswith?"

  She sped past the nurse and out into the hospital corridor. Staying close to the ceiling where the glare of the fluorescent lights rendered her virtually invisible, she followed the blue line to the elevator, took the elevator to the ground floor with a pair of grumbling orderlies, and finally flew out the front doors.

  The sense of freedom was intoxicating. She ignited a dead leaf just because she could then sped off to rediscover the joys of a world with no boundaries.

  A nickel smelter in Sudbury.

  Fifteen hundred acres of spruce forest in Siberia.

  The marshmallow on the end of a boy scout’s stick.

  A lava flow on Maui.

  She was everywhere fire burned and everything burned if the fire was hot enough.

  There was only one, small problem. She couldn’t burn away Carlene.

  She’d gotten into the habit of being human and burning bored her.

  *

  "Tell me again; you're a what?"

  "A fire elemental."

  "Cool." Feet up on the trunk that served her for a coffee table, Alynne took another swallow of beer. "And Beth wasn't really your mother, she was a wizard who gave you a body so you could see what it was like to be human?"

  Resting on the wick of a meditation candle, Carlene flared. "That's right."

  "And you liked being human and now you want my help to get you another body."

  "Yes."

  "I don't know." Alynne's eyes narrowed as she studied the flame. "You needed my help yesterday afternoon and then you ditched me in a hospital parking lot."

  "I said I was sorry!"

  "Easy to say." Setting the empty bottle carefully on the frayed arm of the couch, Alynne stood and shrugged a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey jacket on over a faded Grateful Dead t-shirt. "Well, let's go."

  "That's it?"

  "That’s what?"

  "You're going to do it?"

  "You thought I wouldn't?" One hand beat dramatically at her chest. "You cut to the quick."

  "Sorry." Carlene carefully disengaged herself from the wick and followed her friend out into the hall. "I have to say, you're taking this whole thing a lot better than I expected."

  "How long have we been best friends?"

  "Ever since you bit me in second grade."

  "And I should throw all that away?" There were five locks on Alynne's door but only one of them worked. "What kind of best friend would that make me? Besides, that whole voice out of a burning bush thing is historically kind of hard to argue with, not that a pot of winter savoury counts as much of a bush." She lifted the gate on the freight elevator just high enough to duck under. "Although the next time you show up to tell me you've turned into something weird, you could wait until I'm not holding something breakable." Using the hammer left in the elevator for just such an occasion, she whacked the button for the first floor. "You owe me a Princess Leia Star Wars glass."

  "Sorry."

  "Actually, you're a lot more interesting now than you used to be."

  "Thanks a lot," Carlene muttered, lightly charring the two-by-six bracing the back wall.

  *

  Given the gasoline fumes leaking out of Alynne's car, Carlene thought it might be safest if she made her own way home.

  To the wizard's house.

  It looked different, dark and empty. She'd lived there as human for twenty-four years and for almost fifty years in her true form before that – had, in fact, helped the wizard decide to buy it – but she felt no more connection to the house now than she did to any other building on the street. Burning a little copper out of the air pollution, the brief blue flare the elemental equivalent of a human sigh, she wondered if everyone who discovered they were adopted felt as disconnected to their past.

  The distinctive sound of Alynne parking by Braille pulled her out of her funk and she swooped down to windshield level.

  "Swamp gas ahoy." Alynne stepped out onto the sidewalk and hip-checked the driver's side door closed. "You look like one of those will o' the wisp things."

  "Sometimes I was."

  "Yeah? You ever lure men into swamps to drown them?"

  "Once or twice in the old days to protect the wizard." Carlene lead the way up the path. "It's not something I could do now."