Fire in Her Blood

by Rachel Graves

I took a deep breath, signaled the two guys to be ready, and nodded at Danny before I dialed again. It rang three times before a shaky voice answered.

  “Hello?” a girl asked. She sounded half asleep or maybe a little high.

  “Is this Kelly McRae?”

  “Who is this?”

  I took that for a yes. “I’m a detective. Your parents asked me to look for you.”

  “Bullshit,” she said bitterly. “They don’t want me.”

  “That’s not true.” I summoned my best social worker voice from my previous job and started to say something comforting, but she interrupted me.

  “Yes, it is. Or if they do, they won’t when they know what I am or what I’ve done.”

  “You mean when they know you’re a fire witch?”

  The other end of the line was silent, and I glanced up at the two men manning machines. They gave me drastic looks that meant I had to keep her on the phone longer.

  “It’s not horrible, Kelly, lots of people are witches.”

  “Fuck you. You don’t know anything about it. You don’t know what I’ve done.”

  “No matter what you’ve done, your parents still love you,” I said, praying it was true.

  “Is that what they told you? Wow, and you bought it? God, what a moron. Let me tell you the truth. They love me when I can be the perfect daughter they bought. Otherwise, they’ll ship me off wherever.”

  The detective running the tracing machine was looking at me frantically. I searched for something to get through to her.

  “What about your other mom? What about your real mom, Kelly?”

  “What?”

  “Your biological mother. She came to see me. She’s desperate to find you. She comes from a family of fire witches.”

  “A whole family?” Her voice went from bitter bravado to uncertainty.

  “Lots of them, with red hair like yours and everything.” I sounded stupid, and it might all be lies, but if it made her trust me, I didn’t care. “You know the fire witches, right? You were at their festival, weren’t you?”

  “Yeah, I went,” she admitted, hesitantly.

  “Did you see the tall woman, running the thing?” I didn’t wait for her to answer. “She’s your cousin; she’s a fire witch too.”

  “Really?”

  “Really, I know she’d love to meet you. Your mom would to. All you have to do is tell me where you are―”

  “No, I can’t, you don’t understand…” Her voice trailed off into anguish. “Chris makes me do things. I tried to go for help, and he made me burn the place down. If they come here, he’ll make me kill them.” She broke down in sobs, her false front completely destroyed.

  “Kelly, we can help you—”

  “No one can help me!” she wailed before the phone went dead in my ear.

  I stared at it for a second, trying to understand how someone so young could feel so out of options.

  “We got enough,” the nameless detective told me. A printer whirled in the background. I trusted Danny to get the printout. I didn’t want to stay in the room a minute longer.

  Back on my own floor, I made a beeline for the desk beside my own. “What are you doing?” I asked Simon.

  “Filing some reports. Lucas is out because of the full moon, so I might as well clean things up.”

  “Good. Then you’re coming with us. We found our fire witch, and she’s seriously screwed up. It shouldn’t be a problem for you to pick her out a block away.”

  “No.”

  I was almost out the door when it registered that he wasn’t behind me. “What?”

  “I mean, I’d rather not.” Simon looked guilty, then spoke too fast to cover it. “With what happened the other day, I’d rather not go after any fire witches.”

  I favored him with a look of disdain.

  “Look at me all you want.” Hostility had crept into his voice. “Maybe you summon Pagan gods and survive fires all the time, but I don’t. I don’t want to either. I have enough trouble being a spirit witch. I don’t need any more. So, if you make it an order, if you pull rank or go to the lieutenant or whatever, then fine, yes, I’ll help you, but I’m not going to like it.”

  He finished, and silence fell over the office. He’d been scared the other day, the way anyone whose office had been firebombed would be. Asking him to go after Kelly meant asking him to face his fear, something he wasn’t ready to do. But, damn it, I needed him. The technical guys only promised us so much. If I had any hoping of getting Kelly away from Chris it was now, when the sun was high. If we spent three or four hours finding her, Chris would be awake, and we’d probably lose them both.

  “You can track a vampire as quickly as I can track someone who’s depressed,” Simon offered.

  “You’re right,” I said, realizing he was. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t realize how shaken up you were.”

  “Don’t be. I’m good at covering what I’m feeling.” He paused for a second. “The rest of the team, they all think this is normal. Just another day in the SIU. It’s not normal for me. I felt the thing hovering over the lieutenant. The thing that went to you. I don’t even want to talk about it, because I felt the way the Fire Inspector held on to that fire. This is all too much for me.”

  Before I could think of anything to say, Simon turned and left. I wondered why I didn’t feel the same way. I should have been traumatized too. But I wasn’t. Maybe it was something about being a death witch? Whatever the reason, the most important thing on my mind was solving the case, and Simon was right. I didn’t need his help to do it.

  Danny was coming off of the elevator, but I turned him back into it.

  “What gives? I was going to see if Simon could help us,” he protested.

  “He’s not up to it,” I said, pushing the button for the motor pool. “Which means it’s you and me, so we’d better work fast. What have we got?”

  “Warehouse district.” He handed me a printout showing a shaded area.

  “Is this where?”

  “Yeah, it’s where.”

  Where we’d found the remains of two werewolves that had been left out for us, hung up from a ceiling beam like macabre Christmas ornaments so we’d find them and think the werewolf killings were over. The landscape of the warehouse district, with all the metal tubes coming out of the ground and open empty buildings bothered me a little. After that case, it bothered me a lot. Sure the chemical plants and processing buildings brought money into our economy, but in my head they furnished an area that was too easy to kill in, an area I didn’t want to go back to.

  There’d been an earlier killing there as well, one where the people who died were high on drugs when they went, high enough that I’d gotten a contact high when I felt their death. Gangbangers who were dealing on the side, the kind of disposable people that can die and have someone take their place the next day without anyone noticing. If I was betting, I’d say that was what brought Chris and Kelly to the area. It was an area where Kelly could get a steady supply of drugs from people who wouldn’t ask questions. People who would be easy prey even for the youngest of vampires like Chris.

  We fell into the same routine we’d practiced yesterday. Only this time when I was finished using magic, we both went inside to show around pictures. And this time the people inside were lucid enough that I trusted them when they said they hadn’t seen either of our photos. The clock ticked slowly down, and the chance for this to end well today slipped away. Tracing the phone call yielded a wide five block radius, each block was taking us twenty minutes. With the blocks we had to search we’d be likely to find them after three when the sun would be starting to set.

  We pulled into a factory that bordered an edge of heavy scrub. It was the same as every other chemical plant and big box building in the area, white with a scoured look and too many man made shapes. Nothing here was built to be pleasing to the eyes. There was no vampire inside, which wasn’t surprising, but a foreman recognized Kelly. He called over a few other p
eople, and they all recognized her. She’d been out by the lunch truck once or twice. We got one of the guys to show us where the truck parked, but there was nothing there now. Frustrated, we moved on to the next block.

  I was searching, pulling the power into my body, and then sending it out to find me something. Normally it drifted back frustrated and empty. I took another swallow of Dr. Pepper and repeated the process as Danny crawled by at fifteen miles an hour.

  “Stop!” I called. For a minute I thought I’d spoken too fast, but it was there, a tiny little breeze of a thing, a hint of power. “There’s something here.”

  “No, there’s not,” Danny corrected. “We’re in a parking lot.”

  I looked out the car window and cursed. We were in a very large, very empty parking lot. It bordered the same stand of trees the lunch truck used for shade, but on the other side.

  “Give me a minute, okay?”

  Danny nodded and parked the car. I got out and put everything I had into the sweep. I took a long deep breath and let it go, seeing my power go with it, exhaling until I had nothing left, concentrating everything on that feeling of power and breath leaving me at once. When I was sure there was no air left in my lungs, I pulled it back in, forcing myself to take the air in slowly, to examine everything I was feeling. There were bugs, tiny things coming to the close of short life spans. There were rats, diseased and dying but not too quickly. And then, under it all, a whisper, a hint of something…of vampire. Not a strong vampire, not enough for me to really recognize it, but something that felt like vampire.

  “He’s here. Don’t ask me how, but he’s here.”

  “I believe you,” Danny said, getting out of the car.

  “I’m glad, because I’m starting to doubt myself.” I opened my eyes to the parking lot around me. The sun beat down on the asphalt surface hard enough that it was bleached to a white-gray. There were tufts of weeds sticking up here and there, but even they had withered in the summer heat. The landscape was baked and bare; with no place for a vampire to hide.

  “Do you see that?” Danny asked. He’d walked to the edge of the parking lot, where a small dip in the earth formed a muddy gutter.

  “See what?”

  “Scorch marks.” Closer to it I could see what he was saying, at the edge the concrete might have been burned. It might have been stained to, or painted or maybe some other thing we didn’t know. I pointed this out to Danny who agreed with a sigh.

  “But they do look sort of like scorch marks,” he said, squatting close to look again.

  “Sure, but how do we tell? Call Forensics and ask them to test for carbon? We don’t have that much time.”

  “No,” he shook his head. “No, we don’t.” His voice came up at the end like he was on to something, but I couldn’t figure out what.

  “Partner?” I called but he didn’t hear me. Danny was half into the car and already on the phone.

  ****

  E arrived twenty minutes later. Twenty minutes we didn’t have—the sun began to dip in the sky, but downtown traffic on a Friday afternoon didn’t care.

  “Where’s the fire?” she asked.

  “Hopefully it was there,” Danny pointed.

  She settled on her knees and put her hands over the marks. Straight lines of black came out at too many angles. The stain splashed across the pavement like paint splatter or an oil spill, the strong southern sun made it hard to tell which it was. But for E the choice was obvious. She put her hand over the mark and announced, “It was fire, a magical one, about two days ago maybe?”

  “Can you tell who did it?”

  She shook her head. Okay, maybe that was asking for too much. Magical fire, Kelly sighted by a lunch truck, a faint whiff of vampire, we were definitely in the right place.

  “Thanks for your help; that’s all we needed.”

  “Yeah, I appreciate your coming out,” Danny echoed my gratitude.

  “I’m not leaving,” she said flatly.

  “You have to. We’re looking for a vampire and a fire witch; it’s not safe,” I said.

  “Sorry, not leaving.” She didn’t give me much of her attention; instead she turned around in a circle, focused on looking around her. “In fact, I’m going in there.”

  I followed her finger to a small concrete building.

  “What is that?”

  “Storage unit? Access to an underground parking lot? I don’t know. Let’s go find out.”

  She had already started walking, and Danny followed her. I followed them, trying not to look clueless. Five feet from the door it was obvious, but from fifty feet away, I hadn’t seen it at all. The dirty concrete blended in the landscape. A few years ago it might have been as cleanly white as its neighbors, but now it was reclaimed by the earth, hidden in plain sight.

  “Wait!” I called out trying to stop E, her hand was already on the door.

  She didn’t spare me a glance as she grabbed the industrial handle and yanked. I expected a screech of metal as the door slid to the side, instead nothing happened. “It’s locked,” she said, immediately beginning the search for alternate entrances.

  “Good.” I put my hand on her arm to stop her. “That gives me a chance to see what’s inside.” I tightened that supernatural muscle like a fist so I could open it again. Touching E made it easier somehow, and the power flowed from me like water. No, like fire I corrected myself mentally as it poured out, like flames. I finally recognized the power that had been looking back at me from Vianne’s basement. A fire witch had been reaching out toward me, and Raya, the goddess that gave her strength, was furious I didn’t know the feeling. I should have recognized it from when it saved my life last summer. Later I’d ask E for the proper way to apologize, but for now I pushed forward.

  There was no vampire in front of us, not in the storage unit, but it was there somewhere. I remembered the breeze by the car and stretched the magic farther. The building in front of us was small compared to the spaces underground. My psychic wind echoed off the walls until it found Chris. He was down deep, hidden from the sun by twenty feet of rock.

  “Okay, they’re in there. He’s asleep, but on the edge.” I took my hand off E and felt instantly weaker.

  “That doesn’t make any sense. He’s too young to be up now.” Danny was right. It was later than I would like but still bright out.

  “Fire doesn’t care what time it is. He’s stealing power from her.” She didn’t look happy about it.

  “Fair enough. I’ll call in and see if we can get someone to open the door.” Danny started to walk back to the car.

  “Don’t bother,” E said. She put her hand on the metal handle. The metal glowed, then melted, then finally fell off as the door sprang open. “Who’s coming in with me?”

  “You’re not going in. It’s dangerous, and it’s police business. You’re not a cop,” I said.

  “I don’t really care about police business.” She spoke the words over her shoulder as she made her way into the dark building.

  “Call it in. I’ll follow her.” Danny started to walk inside, but I darted in front of him.

  “I’ll go down. You call it in.” I remembered the way the lieutenant had almost died, the way the death that came for him looked to me for permission. “If there’s a vampire, I’m better at them.”

  Danny pulled back, but I could see he wasn’t sure.

  “If one of you is coming with me, now’s the time!” E shouted at us.

  “Do you think we could stop her?” he asked me.

  I shook my head. I didn’t think anyone could stop her.

  “I’ll call, then I’ll get back here in case someone comes out”—Danny half-turned but couldn’t leave without muttering—“but this isn’t a good idea.”

  I ran toward E in the dark building. The dusty concrete floor crunched under my feet. I looked down to see trash and heavy dust. Whoever owned this storage space didn’t seem to care too much about it. The floor angled sharply downward, and after a few wonky ste
ps, I caught up to E in nearly complete darkness. She snapped her fingers. Where they rubbed together, a fire popped up lighting our way.

  “Should you be showing off?” I asked.

  “Nothing down here scares me.”

  “Not even the vampire?”

  “Especially not the vampire.”

  “I guess growing up with Jakob helped with that.”

  She laughed and the sound bounced off the bare stone walls. “He’s about the most unvampirelike vampire in the world. No, the war cured of me being afraid.”

  “Lots of vampires in the war?” I was nervous, and it made me talk too much.

  “Only one. He was enough.”

  We walked deeper into the building, passing tunnels and hallways. E seemed to know where we were going. Rounding a corner, I could see why, there was a flicker of candle light. In the darkness it seemed overly bright. I knew the girl in front of the flame, even though I’d never seen her before. Kelly was seventeen, tall with long strawberry blonde hair. She should have glowed with youth and health, should have smiled and talked about her flute. Instead she was underground, her eyes sunken into her face as if her whole body was consumed by sadness.

  “Hi Kelly,” I said softly. She looked up afraid.

  “Who are you? Oh shit, you’re the one who called. You have to get out of here.”

  “We’ll leave when you do,” E said.

  “I can’t leave. Chris needs me. He loves me.” Love knew no bounds. I struggled to find a way to tell her the truth. He might love her, but he was bad for her, very bad, and she needed to leave.

  “Yeah, loves you enough to use you to get revenge on everyone in his life.” E wasn’t struggling to be kind.

  “That’s not true!” Kelly stood up ready to defend her man, and the candle flame leaped higher.

  “Really? Then what happened at the bar? At the high school?” E taunted her, and the flame went up a notch. She was making it grow; adding otherworldly fuel to the fire Kelly started.

  “Stop it! He loves me, and I won’t listen to you.”

  “People who love you don’t ask you to kill for them,” I said calmly, trying to diffuse the fight E seemed intent on having.