by Laura Bickle
She felt an exquisite moment of weightlessness, of falling. Her body lifted in its armor, and she could feel it loosen, spinning around her skin. Sparky’s heaviness around her shoulders lifted, though her fingers still wound in his feet. Blackness surrounded her, punctuated only with sparks of light that she suspected came from her own retinas, perhaps a concussion. She could feel the eggs strung around her waist orbiting her like glowing planets. The vertebrae along her spine and the bones in her joints loosened, and she wondered for a split second if this was what the ghosts felt, ephemeral and fluid…
… and then she hit the ground. The blackness spat her out with a roar and a rush of wind on concrete. Her armor slammed around her as she took the impact on her left shoulder and hip, trying to shield Sparky and the eggs.
She groaned and rolled onto her back, Sparky squirming out of her grip with a huff. He stalked away, licking at his back as he shook his tail in irritation at the rough landing. Her fingers fluttered to the eggs strung around her waist, feeling nothing shattered. She blinked stupidly up at a streetlight, realizing that a soft skiff of snow had blown over the concrete. Snowflakes drifted in the streetlight like mosquitoes in summer. They melted when they touched her face and armor, tasting like iron and pollution.
“It helps if you hit the ground running.” Charon stood over her, hands in his pockets.
Anya sat up, got her feet under her, and slowly stood. Where she’d fallen, she’d scraped an angel in the snow. “Shove it up your psychopompous ass, Charon.”
Charon snorted. He fished in his pocket for a cigarette. Snow didn’t melt on the shoulders of his coat or in his hair, just collected there like dandruff. But Anya could smell something burning before he lit the lighter.
Her brows drew together. She was on a residential street, a familiar one. Though the aura around the streetlights was surreally soft and the numbers painted on the curb were fuzzy and indistinct, she recognized this place. She recognized the cracked macadam, the skeletons of crabapple trees planted too close to the street, the fire hydrant painted yellow. It was a place she hadn’t been since childhood, a place she’d tried to forget.
Her voice was low, threatening. But a cold sweat had broken out under her armor, a sweat that had nothing to do with the snow. “Charon. Where the fuck are we?”
The flame of the lighter illuminated Charon’s angular face, rendering it inhuman for an instant. “The train takes you where you need to go.”
“You also said the train went to hell.”
“Same difference. We’ve all got to go through hell to get where we’re going.”
Anya swallowed and turned to see her childhood home, burning to the ground.
ANYA FROZE.
She froze as she had when she was a child, looking up and seeing the Christmas tree in flames. Then Sparky had dragged her out of the house. Her mother, upstairs, had been unable to escape. She’d died in the fire… the fire that had been twelve-year-old Anya’s fault; her fault for sneaking out of her bedroom, for plugging the damn Christmas tree lights in, for falling asleep under its comforting glow with the salamander draped across her legs. The fire that had been ignited in the brittle Christmas tree—this was the first year they’d had a real one—by the multicolored lights that pulsed like stars.
She stood on the curb, fists clenched, unable to move. A hiccup congealed in her throat as she watched the flames lick through the broken front window of the little saltbox house. The husk of the Christmas tree shriveled through the smoke that began to peel and melt the vinyl siding. There were no sirens in the distance, no one coming. Only the crackle of flame and the trickle of the snow melting on the front lawn, draining away into the street gutters.
“This can’t be real,” she whispered to herself. Her vision blurred, turning orange in the glare.
Charon’s voice seemed distant behind her. “It is real. Real on this plane. Playing over and over, because you remember it.”
Sparky growled. He stood up on his hind legs and grabbed Anya’s hand in his teeth, dragged her a step toward the house.
Her suspension broke, and her firefighter’s instinct ignited. Anya raced to the front door, ripping open the screen door. The wooden door was locked fast. She front-kicked the door as hard as she could, aiming high for the lockset, the weakest point in the door. The sound was deafeningly loud in the silence, like a gunshot echoing in her helmet.
Crack.
Crack.
Crack.
Her armored foot finally rattled the lockset loose. One more hit broke it open, and she stumbled against the door sagging against the frame. Sparky lunged ahead of her, racing across the rust-colored shag carpet to the fire.
“Sparky!” she screamed.
The salamander dove into the flames, and Anya’s heart lurched into her throat. She’d not run more than two steps after him when he emerged from the blaze surrounding the corpse of the Christmas tree, dragging a small body by the collar.
It was Anya. Anya as a child, curled into a ball with her fists over her face. She recognized the Wonder Woman pajamas. Sparky hauled speckled ass past the adult armored Anya, dragging the child out to the cold snow of the lawn.
It was exactly as she remembered, Sparky rescuing her. This parallel world was unfolding exactly as it had in the real world she knew.
Smoke billowed over her, and Anya’s eyes watered and stung. Her gaze raced up the stairs. But it didn’t have to unfold exactly like the past this time.
“Mom!” she yelled.
She stumbled up the stairs, feeling the heat of fire spreading under the stairs. On the living-room wall, she could see wallpaper blackening and curling. Lack of oxygen made her vision shimmer and buzz; smoke rolled up the steps, rendering the blackness deep and total.
Over the roar of the fire below her, she could hear voices:
“You can’t have her!” It was her mother’s voice, growling in the darkness.
Anya fumbled down the hallway on her hands and knees, trying to keep below the level of smoke. Her mother’s bedroom was at the far end of the hall. Her armored fingertips clutched shag carpet that was beginning to melt, and she could taste the char in the back of her throat.
“She’s mine.” The voice that answered was one that she’d never heard, more a low hiss than human.
Anya pressed her hands against the closed bedroom door. As soon as she opened it, she knew that smoke would flood the room. She reached up for the brass doorknob, felt it sizzle against her hand through the armor. She turned it and tumbled into the room in a cloud of smoke, slammed the door behind her.
“Mom!” Anya cried.
Her mother stood barefoot in her nightgown, fists clenched. Her long dark hair floated around her in the updraft of the heat. She turned, and her face was a mask of fear and fury.
“Anya, get out!” she shouted.
Coughing, Anya looked past her, past her to the terrible creature standing before the closet door. It was the shape of a man, but there was no body. Its form was a shifting outline of flames, the heat shimmering before him and curling the plastic blinds of the window. A glass perfume bottle on her mother’s dresser broke under the heat, as if it had been shot.
The shape extended a finger toward Anya. Its voice was the hiss and pop of flame warped into a human voice. “I’ve come for her. She’s one of mine.”
“No.” Anya’s mother was between them.
“You can’t keep her from me.”
“I’ve kept her from you for twelve years. I’ll keep her from you for one more night.”
Anya reached out and grabbed her mother’s hand. She looked down and saw the hem of her mother’s polyester nightgown begin to burn. “Mom, we’ve got to go, now!”
The flame-creature growled and hissed. “That is not part of our bargain.”
Anya’s mother turned to the fiery shape. “What can I give you for a reprieve? For a pardon?”
The creature shook its head. “No pardon. But I will allow a reprieve.”
“I’ll take you.”
Anya dragged at her mother’s hand, but it seemed that the older woman had taken root, like a tree. Her mother turned, cupped her daughter’s face in her hands. Tears sizzled in the impossible heat. On some abstract level, Anya knew that nothing human could survive in it.
“You have to let me go,” her mother said, her face shimmering.
“No. I won’t.” Anya clutched her mother’s wrists with armored hands. “Not again.”
“It’s not your fault. None of this is.” Her mother’s gaze flickered to the creature blackening the ceiling. “It’s mine.”
“We need to get the hell out of here!” Anya shouted.
She shook her head, wisps of dark hair flying. “No. One of us must stay. One of us must stay with your father.”
Anya gawked at the monster. Her mind refused to comprehend, refused to process the scene further.
She grabbed her mother’s arm, intending to throw her over her shoulder and carry her from this place. But the fiery shape of the man cast a wall of fire at her that knocked her over the bed into the far corner of the room. Drywall splintered behind her back, and Anya struggled to draw breath.
Through tearing eyes, she crawled over the bed. She couldn’t make a sound above a squeak, couldn’t say anything as her mother walked toward the creature with her head lowered. The creature took her mother in its fiery embrace. Anya smelled flesh singe and hair sizzle. For a moment, her mother was gloriously beautiful, her hair ignited in flames like an angel. Fire fell like a curtain over her mother, reaching up to the ceiling, dragging down half of a roof strut with a sound like thunder.
The floor buckled. Tangled in a burning bedspread, Anya slid to the hole in the floor. The burning fringe in her fingers broke away, and she slipped down the ruin of the ceiling, crashing into the inferno of the first floor.
Flames surrounded her, washed over her in rippling waves. It felt like lying in the ocean at low tide in the sunshine, the heat of the water rolling over her. It poured into her lungs in shimmering heat, and she could hear it pop and fizzle there.
Intellectually, she knew that she couldn’t survive this. Nothing human could. But though she felt the heat roiling through her, she didn’t burn.
And if she didn’t burn, she was going to survive this. She wasn’t going to be like her mother.
She brushed the crumbling drywall away, shoved a burning beam from her legs. She climbed to her feet, watching in fascination as the fire clung to her armor and raced down her gauntlets; it reminded her of spilling alcohol in her high-school chemistry class and tipping over a Bunsen burner to watch it burn on the near-indestructible stone surface. The brilliant light seethed like a living thing but didn’t destroy her.
She breathed it in, feeling it flow down the back of her throat. It felt like when she devoured ghosts, that same burn and sting, like drinking absinthe.
Somewhere in the distance, she thought she heard the voice of the fire laugh.
The voice of the creature that was her father.
The fire roared around her, devouring the house. The skeleton of the steps crumbled, and the remaining roof beams groaned overhead. Anya stepped over the remains of the Christmas tree, past the blackened bricks of the fireplace and the flammable Christmas stockings gone up like marshmallows, melting onto the carpet of fire. She stepped over the broken glass of the front window frame, out into the cold night.
The fire had dissolved the snow on the front yard. Anya turned back to stare at it in all its terrible beauty, smoke obliterating the stars in the sky. The change in temperature fogged her armor, caused the gloss of sweat on her brow to flash-freeze to an instant chill.
In the driveway, Sparky and Charon waited. Sparky stood over the form of Anya’s younger self. She was huddled into a small ball, her arms around the salamander’s neck. Charon stood beside them, smoking a cigarette, watching the house burn.
Anya strode down the driveway to Charon. Steam rolled from her armor, and snow melted under her footsteps as she stalked up to him and struck him in the face with a closed fist. When her fist made contact, she could hear the sizzle of metal as it connected with his cheek. She’d half expected that her hand would slide right through him, like it would in her physical world. To her delight, it connected as thickly as real flesh. Charon had been right; myths and ghosts were more solid here. Satisfyingly so.
Charon fell back into the snow like a ton of bricks, dropping his cigarette.
She stood over him, glowering and steaming. “Why in the fuck did you bring me here?”
Charon put a hand to the red burn on his jaw.
“Why bring me here if I couldn’t change anything?” Anya screamed at him. “Why bring me here if I couldn’t save her?”
Charon sat up. “You could never save her. But there were things you needed to know.…”
“Fuck you, Charon. And the boat, train, whatever the fuck you rode in on.” Anya turned to Sparky, knelt in the snow before the child and salamander wound up in a tight ball.
“Hey.” She was afraid of touching the girl, afraid of burning her. But her younger self peered over Sparky’s head with solemn eyes. “I’m sorry that… I’m sorry that I couldn’t save her.” A lump rose in Anya’s throat, and she couldn’t keep the tears from sizzling on her cheek.
The child disentangled herself from Sparky, stepped barefoot in the snow before Anya. Through blurred vision, Anya saw the little girl didn’t leave any tracks in the snow.
“You weren’t supposed to. You were supposed to save yourself.” The girl opened her arms to embrace Anya… and disappeared, like ice melting in an oven.
Anya sniffled, her tears speckling the ground and burning through the snow. Sparky waddled up to her and licked her face. Like she did when she was a child, she threw her arms around his neck and sobbed.
Something plopped and sizzled as it fell to the ground.
Only then did she remember the eggs. In a panic, she reached around her waist for the girdle of eggs. She knew that they had to be kept warm, but Jesus Christ… had the fire she’d heedlessly run headlong into killed them? Had she hardboiled Sparky’s eggs?
The egg that had fallen to the snow rolled, cracked open. A tiny, perfect replica of Sparky clambered out. In amazement, Anya lowered her hand to the ground, and the baby salamander crawled into her palm. It blinked and cocked its head at her. From its marble-like eyes, down to the speckles on its tummy, it was perfect.
The other eggs began to fall into the snow. One after another, the glass-like shells cracked, and orange newts waddled free, steaming on the snow. They rolled in the snow, scratched their heads with their rear feet. Sparky stood over them, licking them and fussing like a mother chicken with a brood of chicks.
Anya counted them. All fifty-one eggs were in various stages of hatching. Anya plucked pieces of eggshell from their dewy backs. She rapped a tough egg open on the curb to release its prisoner, just like Katie would rap a chicken egg on the edge of a mixing bowl to release the yolk.
Charon stood back, watching. Anya, noticing that the burn mark she’d put on his face was gone, glared at him. She’d hit him hard enough to break his jaw. He should be spitting teeth on the driveway, not watching her with that smug air of bored superiority.
He shrugged. “I took a swim in the Styx. Like Achilles. Makes one pretty damn near invulnerable.”
Salamanders clambered up her armor, into her lap. As she watched, they seemed to flicker and grow. She guessed that they’d inherited Sparky’s talent for changing shape.
Her relief at seeing that they had hatched safely was suddenly tainted with a stab of dread.
“What do I do with them now?” she groaned.
Charon dug another cigarette out of his pocket. “Looks to me like you’ve got an army of salamanders. Which is exactly what you’re gonna need to stop Hope.”
“They’re… they’re just babies,” Anya
growled at him, watching the hatchlings tumble in the snow and chase their tails in the bright light of the burning house. Like the child, they were innocents. And she wasn’t going to take them into war. “They’re not weapons.”
“They’re salamanders.” Charon blew smoke into the sky. “They’re fearsome elemental creatures. Not children.”
A newt waddled up Anya’s arm and wagged his tail. Fearsome, indeed. “They’re not fearsome anything, Charon. They’re too little to defend themselves.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure.” Charon’s eyes narrowed, and he gestured at a shape shambling down the street. “Watch.”
A ghost drifted along the street like a plastic bag pushed by the wind. It was the ghost of a man dressed in a long policeman’s coat and sharply starched hat, the kind worn by cops in the 1940s. Anya supposed that the watchman was simply continuing his rounds in this plane, patrolling the streets in darkness. He twirled his baton as he walked, his feet making no tracks in the snow.
The salamanders lifted their heads, twisted toward the ghost, like sunflowers turning toward the sun. Tongues flickered out, and the salamanders skittered to the curb, watching. Chirps echoed through the crowd. Sparky stood behind them, staring at the watchman with black, marble-like eyes. The hair on the back of Anya’s neck rose.
The ghostly watchman saw the fire billowing behind them, paused. He lifted his whistle to his mouth with white-gloved hands. A shrill note echoed over the snow and steam, to summon help.…
The salamanders swarmed him. They skittered down into the street and washed over him in a flailing mass of legs and tails. Their jaws opened and closed, tearing into the ghost with tiny teeth and claws sprouting from their feet.
Anya ran to the ghost. Charon blocked her, grasping her by her arms. She struggled with him, but he was surprisingly strong, holding her fast by her wrists. In horror, she watched as the salamanders shredded the defenseless ghost. It was like watching a nature documentary when army ants tore a ghostly beetle apart. The policeman blew his whistle for help, over and over again, until the wheezing sound became nasal, ragged, and stilled. The little salamanders ripped off shreds of ectoplasm and gorged themselves like dogs with fresh kill, while Sparky looked on proudly from the curb.