Kissed by Smoke

by Shéa MacLeod

  “I’m nervous,” I told Addie, fingering the rough linen curtain. A slight breeze rocked the trees out back as if they were trying to bow to the earth in penance.

  Her bright green eyes peered up at me, framed by pointy eyelashes. Why? the tilt of her head inquired.

  “Because I know nothing about this place or this job.”

  You’re the idiot who accepted it without asking questions. She used her scornful voice in my imagination. I sighed, knowing I was talking to myself and that usually precluded being locked up in the bin of crazies.

  I padded downstairs in my bare feet, the wood floors cold. Addie slithered along behind me, the two of us passing through my living area with its well-worn couch and loveseat, the dark TV and the maroon recliner losing its stuffing. I’d purchased them all on the internet from various occupants of the English countryside, so none of them matched, but they were comfy.

  My kitchen was tucked in the back, only a single counter with three mismatched bar stools separating it from the living room. I plucked the long, white envelope off the gray marble, and pulled out a sheet of paper I’d already read and re-read too many times. I shoved a spoon into the roll of cookie dough in my refrigerator and stuck it in my mouth before shutting off the radio announcer in mid-sentence and unfolding the letter.

  I found it cryptic, my call to arms, so to speak. A job offer…meet at a specific GPS location in plain clothes by nine p.m. Today. I’d received the letter the day I arrived, as if they’d been watching me—whoever They should be. Dodgy, yes, but not all that out of the ordinary to a girl who could bend steel and shatter fine china with her mind. According to Dane, I was being offered the job strictly because of my powers.

  The cookie dough was sweet and salty on my tongue. I crossed an arm under my breasts, leaning my hip on the sink beneath the kitchen window and taking my time eating it, with Addie’s petite body rubbing my ankles adoringly. The moon shone like a lantern through the small window over the sink, an arc of white soaring just above the tree line. Closing my eyes, I reveled in the silence of my new home—my own home. Nobody here to keep me from pattering around in my lacy bits, to warn me off of eating raw cookie dough, or to flip on the lights when all I wanted was darkness.

  The phone rang and I dropped my spoon, licked clean, into the sink before answering, “Yeah?”

  “Vale? It’s Theresa. How you getting on, sweetie?”

  As usual, her chirpy, maternal voice brought a smile to my face. The woman always knew just when to call. “Good. Homesick, but settling in. It’s really pretty here, if a little overboard on the freezing rain.” Bending down, I cradled my cat’s body in my arms and the phone between my shoulder and ear, before I headed back upstairs to get dressed.

  “How’s the apartment? Did Dane do you good? He sent you an email last night with some names and numbers of friends he has there. In case you need anything.” She paused, then added, “Like a home cooked meal.”

  She just had to go there. I dropped Addie on the soft down comforter crumpled on the bed before answering.

  “He has friends everywhere, and I’m perfectly capable of feeding myself.” My father, Dane, had told me he’d never been here before, but it was his friend who got me the place. I glanced around my townhouse, all windows and vibrant colors. I stood in the loft-style bedroom, the balcony overlooking the dark living room to my left.

  “Cookie dough and tuna sandwiches do not cover the bases of the food pyramid,” she chastised gently.

  “I start work tonight,” I told her, attempting to aim the conversation away from my controversial eating habits and into successful territory. I rifled through my dresser for a tank top.

  Theresa drew in a breath. “It makes me nervous you know, you out there alone. You don’t know anything about this job!”

  ”You should know better by now,” I laughed, choosing a lacy camisole and sniffing it for foul odors. “I’m cut out for security.”

  She was silent for a moment. In the background I could hear the clink of dishes accompanied by splashing water. “You could have at least gone for a real law enforcement position. Your grandfather was a police officer, you know.”

  “How’s Macy? Is she doing okay with classes?” I asked, smoothly changing subjects, once again. It’s an art form with my mother. Macy, Theresa and Dane’s biological daughter, was born four years after I came to live with them, and she’s the light to my dark. Short and elfish with golden blond hair and piercing green eyes, she was a miniature Theresa with her daddy’s smile and the kind of curvy body that went out of style years ago. I took to the role of big sister with reckless abandon and have come out with a lifelong partner in crime. My oddities were already a daily occurrence before Macy, so when I could set the table at age nine without lifting a finger it was just less work for her.

  “Good, I think. She loves her Feminist Literature teacher, but I don’t think she cares for her Biology teacher. He’s very chauvinistic, and you know how your sister is. Oh!” Theresa lowered her voice. I could picture her cupping her mouth and the receiver like a teenager telling secrets. I bet she probably soaked the phone in dishwater. “She brought a girl home for dinner last night.”

  “That’s great! What was she like?” I’d only met one girlfriend before. It’d taken Macy a long time to finally come out, which is funny considering Dane and Theresa’s love-all, be-all hippie open-mindedness.

  “A lovely, lovely girl named Amy,” Theresa answered with a sigh. I could picture her standing over the sink, hand-washing the dishes she was going to put into the dishwasher. She’d be wearing the frilly pink apron Dane bought her for their fifteenth anniversary, over a billowy, ankle length skirt and sheer peasant blouse. The apron reads Don’t anger the cook, she has access to household poisons. It's my favorite. “She had pretty brown hair chopped right about her chin, and a heart shaped face with just the biggest, darkest eyes, a little like yours, dear. And she wore a dress! A pretty flowered thing, like what your sister likes to wear.”

  “Keep me posted on the Amy front, but I’ve gotta get ready for work, Mom.” I told her I loved her and hung up, tossing the cordless on the bed where it would lose it’s charge before I remembered to put it back on the base. Addie glared at me when it bounced twice and came to rest against her. She shuffled sideways, dripping disdain.

  I settled on a pair of stone washed jeans and a black tank top with gray Nikes. Thudding back to the kitchen, I tossed together a turkey sandwich, bypassing the cupboard full of tuna on principle, and opened a can of fish innards for Addie. She mewed girlishly, rubbing my ankles before digging in. We ate in silence side by side.

  The forecast had been for a cold one, so I threw on a black zip-up hoodie and slipped into a black and gold University of Southern Mississippi toboggan. Locking the door to my bumble ahode in the cool night air, I took a deep breath and smelled peace.

  It was an inky night. The sky glittered with the frost of a thousand stars, the moon hiding out behind a gargantuan cloud. So far out in the country, Quicksilver didn’t have many street lights, and what few they did have lined the main street through what was considered “downtown.” My apartment complex was a two story, six side-by-side units brick building about a fifteen minute drive from town proper. The only other civilization nearby was a set of apartments across the street, and the occasional farmhouse set off the road between home and Main.

  I’d purchased a tiny black Mini Cooper, the kind that looked stylish but would mean certain death in a battle with an SUV. Lucky the Brits were unlike Americans, who thirst for “bigger is better.” No Ford Heavy-Duty or Hummer in my neighborhood. I loved how I towered over the short car and could look down into the sunroof, yet once inside it was spacey and chic. Not that I cared about chic, of course.

  Don’t tell anybody.

  I clicked the button on my key chain to unlock the doors, and slid inside.

  It still smelled like new car. The engine barely made a sound when I turned it over, backed out of
the lot and took a right on to the street. I shifted easily for someone who’d only just recently learned how to handle a manual transmission, traveling an empty stretch of highway to pass through town.

  Quicksilver was sleeping. The single stretch of Main Street was devoid of any sign of life; no lights on in the stores, no people walking, and no cars parked on the sides of the street. I passed the bakery and deli, my favorite little grocery with the bright purple awning, and a couple antique and clothing stores, all with locked doors and closed signs. The road itself was a study in disaster, rutted with holes that shook my car as I passed over them.

  My headlights illuminated street after empty street as I avidly followed each turn barked out by Lucy, the trusty GPS with a saucy Australian accent, on the way out of town. A sharp left had me turning into a wall of trees, where the road became narrow and only roughly paved. Within a minute, I was creeping down a dirt road, the arc of my headlights hitting nothing but deep darkness.

  “You have reached your destination,” Lucy said in her phone sex voice. I turned her off as I came to a stop in a small clearing, the screen going black and plunging the car into darkness. A tan SUV—color me corrected—of indecipherable make waited for me, parking lights on. A white haired man was leaning against the back bumper, and as I exited my vehicle, he came to shake my hand, long tan coat swishing. His smile was genuine, the hair at his temples light gray in deep contrast to his chestnut hair.

  “Miss Avari, so nice to meet you,” he said kindly in an impeccable English accent. “I have spoken at length with your father of you. I’m Edward Nice.” He pronounced his last name like the Paris vacation hot spot, not the adjective.

  I nodded and glanced around, gesturing to the dark forest. “I’m not about to be kidnapped and sent to a military lab for testing, am I? I don’t do well in small spaces.”

  His laugh was hearty as he clapped a hand to my shoulder. The smile that accompanied the sound made him intensely handsome, for a man who was old enough to have borne and raised my parents. “Heavens no, my dear! Here, your unusual talents could well come in handy and will most surely be commended. If you would follow me?”

  We crunched across a bed of fallen leaves and into the trees, surrounded by the symphony of the night. The insects droned in a ceaseless wave of noise, broken only by our footsteps on the ground. I caught the eye of a fox, sliding silently through the underbrush about ten feet to the right, and his tongue flicked out at me as he licked his lips. I’ve got damn near perfect night vision, a plus when I played nighttime Capture the Flag back home. It gets boring in small town America. Population 996 on a good day, my hometown was 75 miles from the nearest city and nothing but woods and river. You learn to amuse yourself early in a setting like that.

  “So, from what I understand, you’ve got more powers than you know what to do with. An all-purpose kind of girl, eh?” His smile was infectious, but his gaze too intense, too seeing.

  I shoved my hands into the pockets of my hoodie and averted my eyes. “You could say that.”

  “Levitation, including of yourself, if I understand correctly.”

  I nodded, blowing out a breath that was visible in the air. “I can use a vessel of some kind to levitate myself, like a broom or a carpet, but I can’t fly.”

  “Ah, a modern day witch!” We both chuckled; not the first time I’d heard that little joke. It tickled my parents to death. “So, night vision, super strength, telekinesis, some psychic abilities, am I right?”

  “I can speak to spirits if they come to me, but I can’t summon them. I’ve never had the training. And I can hold objects and,” I searched for the word I wanted, “just, know things about them.” I certainly didn’t want to talk about the most embarrassing power I have; thankfully, he didn’t bring it up. Score one to my dad for keeping some things to himself.

  It came out when I hit puberty. I remember it was cloudy and cold outside, or as cold as it gets in southern Mississippi. Our school had been about forty years old, with a heating system to match. I’d worn old, wool gloves to school and had been chilled enough to sit through three class periods with them on. At lunch, I was surrounded by bodies and warmth. I took off my gloves to pick at the vile chicken-based product that passed as protein and crunchy mac and cheese on my plate, only half listening to my friends.

  We were talking about kissing, oddly enough. At that age, everything’s interesting if you haven’t done it. Aaron Stockholm, one of my best friends, was turned around and gesticulating wildly with a classmate across the room, when I reached over and grabbed his forearm to get his attention. I watched in shock as the touch of my hand gave my thirteen year-old classmate his first orgasm.

  A month later, I was being home schooled. No big deal, with both Dane and Theresa being Literature and Biology professors, respectively, at the local community college. Sprinkle on top of that my tendencies toward the anti-social, and it was a good recipe. The revelations of my adolescent years shaped my entire outlook on growing up and unfortunately chose to make a skeptic of me. Until I learned to control my powers, I wore black leather gloves despite the season.

  The boys in town used to think it was funny to call me Michael Jackson. You don’t even want to know what they called me when that whole child abuse thing went down.

  “Anything I missed on that list?”

  I shrugged, evading the question. “To be honest, I’ve been discovering powers constantly. At least every couple of years something else surprises me. When you call me all-purpose, it’s not a joke.”

  We crunched along. “Dane told me they found you? As a baby, he said. How magnificent!” Edward smiled, his bushy mustache twitching. “I would say that was quite a shock for them.”

  Truth was it didn’t faze my parents one bit. They live their own odd lifestyle, believing in fate and the never-ending web of destiny. Finding an infant in the woods behind their house was life mundane to a pair of practicing Witches. Worshippers of the misunderstood religion of Wicca, my parents dance naked beneath the swollen moon each month, burning incense and tossing seasonal herbs into the fire pit with yells of exaltation. Little makes them stop and double-take.

  “No, not a shock,” I replied thoughtfully, picking at a lump of dryer lint inside the pocket of my hoodie. I wondered if the path we were on would ever end.

  “A gift.” Edward nodded sagely.

  The trees broke and I stopped abruptly with a gasp, my jaw dropping.

  Rising in a circular clearing before me was the most beautiful structure I’d ever seen. Like some medieval castle, it loomed in the night, one central tower growing from the sloping roof, dark brown wood thick with distorted glass windows. The body of the building was comprised of large gray stones, pieced together around visible support beams the color of the tower. Eight large columns paced down the side, each a swirl of muted green and cream.

  “Magnificent, isn’t she?” he said fondly, clasping his hands behind his back and rocking onto his heels. “Those columns are hollow Connemara green marble from near Galway, in Ireland. They’re only about forty years old. They replaced the original wooden columns when the structure was compromised years ago. The stone is mainly all original, dating as far as we can tell from around two hundred BCE, but the wooden tower and supports have been replaced several times over the centuries.”

  One lone spotlight was trained on a far corner, alternately illuminating and shading the temple. It was at least three stories high, not counting the tower, and as big around as a pro football field. “What is this place?”

  Tucking my hand into the crook of his arm, he led me toward a door hidden in the shadowy walkway behind the columns. “This, my dear, is a very rare temple to the goddess.” He turned to face me, his blue eyes twinkling. “Each night you’ll come to the clearing at ten p.m. and leave your car. Follow the path we just walked to the Temple, where the evening shift guard will meet you at the door, pass off the keys, and then drive your car back to base. When morning shift arrives at 4 a.m.,
you will take that individual’s car to the base, where yours will be awaiting you.”

  He fumbled through several pockets of his coat before locating a small, silver ring. “This ring must be worn when you are at the Temple or on the grounds. We are heavily protected against intruders. It will allow for you to pass through the wards unharmed.”

  Sliding the little piece of metal on my middle finger, I asked, “Wards?”

  “Surely, you know about magic?”

  If I could levitate small children and fly on a broomstick through the night sky, I could certainly believe in magic. Theresa and Dane did. All I could manage was, “Huh.”

  It took three keys to open the giant oak door. What a process. I shifted from foot to foot behind him, alternately raising my eyebrow at him and trailing my fingers over the chill marble of the column beside me.

  As the door closed behind us, the night was silenced. We stood in a large, dim chamber lit only by the flickering of a single torch directly to the right of the entrance. The ceilings soared maybe forty feet, disappearing into darkness where I assumed the tower stood. I felt a presence to my right and whirled in time to see a man conjure fire with his hands and toss it lazily to the walls, where dormant torches lit one after the other until the entire room became visible.

  “Edward. Good to see you,” Flame-man said in a brisk voice, before training his pale gray eyes on me. His pupils were so dark they made his irises seem white in comparison. The corners of his mouth turned down, and I could taste the disdain. “I assume this is the new girl?”

  “Yes, Jordan, this is Vale Avari,” Edward introduced me, patting my back gently. “Vale, this is Jordan Brinkman. He works the shift before yours.”

  I didn’t like the way Jordan was eyeing me, like a bug to be crushed. “Vale. Nice to meet you.” His condescending tone belied his words.