I fought not to roll my eyes. “Yes that.”
“Well?”
“I haven’t looked, it’s game day.”
“Yeah but…I mean, doesn’t being a cop come first? Before football?”
Clearly, I’d underestimated Lucas. He was one of those buy a trinket with the team colors on it but nothing else fans. I sighed loudly. “Fine, one glance, a look, but then the pre-game show is almost on.”
I spread the photos out on the counter, taking care to move aside chips and dip. The posed shots showed a colorful tableau of a work crew standing in front of earth movers and equipment. A sea of faces stared up at me, heads barely reaching the top of the wheel of the oversized tractor except for one man who must have been half giant.
He towered over everyone, a sledge hammer on his shoulder, Paul Bunyan. The rest of the workers were unremarkable. Sure, one of them could have left behind that taste of summer-time magic, but in the flat glossy photo there wasn’t anything close.
“Anyone I know?” A voice behind me asked.
“Nope,” I replied turning to find Ethan looking over my shoulder. I hastily stuffed the photos back into the folder. “And no one I know,” I told Lucas before switching back to Ethan. “So where’s Phoebe?”
“On the balcony taking bets.”
“What?”
“She decided since she doesn’t like football, running the gambling side of things would give her something to do.”
“Great.” I drew the word out to show my disapproval. So far, a handful of guests had arrived and none of them seemed to care enough about my Saints.
“So why are you looking at photos of people you don’t know?”
“Oh it’s a work thing,” I said, distracted.
“Really?”
“Uh, yeah, construction site vandalism, the perp left behind a magical trace but I can’t figure it out, so the pictures.”
“Huh, a magical trace?”
“Yeah see there was this dog and—” The doorbell rang saving me from telling the story. Isa and Ben blew into the room, and thank all the gods above, Ben adored football. We got caught up in the pregame show, discussing stats and arguing with the commentators. Lucas redeemed himself by having the life history of almost every player memorized; he joined the conversation with perfect facts.
While the rest of the party went on around us, the three of us focused on what mattered. Jakob hung out with us, mostly deflecting the non-fans who would have interrupted our game talk. Pre-game turned into kick off and I looked up to find my house nearly filled with people but only a few of them watching the game.
The game lasted long into the night, too long because in overtime the Giants won. I hated them and everything about their team but I couldn’t blame the refs; they’d played better. Of course, we’d also been playing in the rain on an unseasonably damp day. If it had been eighty-five and sunny, I suspected the Giants wouldn’t have succeeded so easily.
I said my goodbyes to everyone with a brave face, but Phoebe must have caught my mood since she offered me half of the money she’d won. When I glowered at her for betting against my team she only laughed, took Ethan’s hand and practically skipped out of the apartment.
I shut the door on the last of my guests ready to say goodbye to Jakob and mope in peace. He surprised me by offering to stay the night, in case I wanted someone around. I thanked him and as we cleaned up plates and dishes my mood lifted. We’d made it to the Superbowl; sure we hadn’t won, but it was a damn good game. Between the high of the game, the cheering, the shouting, and the final bitter end I was pretty beat. I fell into bed sure I’d sleep like the dead.
****
I was dreaming. I had to be. There was no other way to explain the primeval forest around me, filled with sounds of animals I didn’t recognize and dark with the limbs of trees taller than most buildings. It was night in the forest, a night alive with sounds and the rich scent of earth. Dirt, trees, leaves on the ground, the smell of flowers, so much to take in, so much that was just earth. It wasn’t a garden, wasn’t pruned and clipped; this was a place without man, a place apart from man’s influence. This was raw nature, life without civilization.
The thought scared me enough for the forest to know. The ground rustled beside me and I took off. I’d been running at a pace I was proud of but running in a dream is a different matter and while my heart raced and my legs pounded I went nowhere.
Branches grabbed at my hair, tearing at my arms and legs while the roots reached out to trip me. I went down, planting my face into thick dark dirt. It threatened to choke me, somehow growing into my mouth. I rolled over trying to get myself up but couldn’t move.
The forest stopped playing normal; it was alive and it wanted me to hold still. A vine wrapped around my other leg, then another around my waist until finally I was wrapped too tightly to move, a mummy encased in green.
My head was free but only for the moment. I tried to steady myself, to take a deep breath. It was a dream. It was my dream. Whatever else was going on, I should be able to control it. A vine snaked across my face, over the bridge of my nose and I panicked. All thoughts of control left me; what I needed was help.
I tried to call out to Jakob, to say his name or go to his mill, but another vine gagged me. I bit down and tasted green liquid, the blood of the plant seeping into my mouth. I panicked more, desperate for someone to help or some way to wake up.
“I’ll help you, death witch.” The voice was strange, a whisper of flames, a crackle of fire and the woman standing in front of me was stranger still, a body, a human shape made of orange fire. She knelt down to touch the vines around me and they sizzled and burned. “We can help each other.”
Her voice was seduction with a hint of demand but I wasn’t worried about that now. My thoughts were on her poor choice in places to start. She began burning at my feet, hands made of red fire turning the plant to ash but glowing blue on my skin. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation but she started too far down; I wanted my mouth free. I wanted to turn my head. Being able to wiggle my toes was cold comfort.
“Not cold, never cold,” she whispered and reached up to my waist. Oh yes, that touch was defiantly erotic. If she hadn’t been a woman…actually it was erotic enough that human would have been enough, but a body of fire, a flame shaped into a woman? I couldn’t get aroused by that.
She crouched over me, her hands drifting up my waist, freeing me with her touch, reading my mind. “Would this be better?” she asked but the voice changed. It was E’s voice and she was E above me, short, thin, boyish E with her dark hair cut so close to her skin. E’s hands covered my breast, coating them in blue flame. My body responded; it liked the feeling but my mind balked. I didn’t like girls the way E did, and worse my head was still tied down with vines.
“No?” it asked. The thing that had been fire, shifted again, putting its hands on either side of my face, finally freeing my mouth. I took great gulping breaths, desperate for air but she ignored my need and kissed me. Her lips pressed onto mine and her tongue teased my mouth, seeking entry, wanting to explore. She pulled me up, kneeling over my waist, her hands spreading blue fire along my body. When did I get naked? What was happening here? Even as I thought it I knew. I opened my mouth and her tongue searched for mine.
I pulled back, breaking the kiss. It wasn’t E I was kissing, not now. Now it was Anna, her long red hair draping over my shoulders, her tall body somehow wrapped around me. Anna who had a crush on me. Anna who held the fire goddess once because of me. The realization came to me even as she kissed me again. It wasn’t either of them; it was Her, Raya, the goddess both of them told me liked me.
I’d wanted help and I’d gotten it, in a very big way. A warmth spread through my breast as a hand filled with blue fire began to caress me there. It felt good but looking at another woman canceled the feeling. I pushed back.
“I’m sorry, it’s…I don’t…” There wasn’t really a good way to turn down a goddess, was there?
Her features melted from Anna back to flames, a face without eyes only dark sockets. “Maybe there’s something else we could share?”
The scene shifted, the forest was gone, and we were in front of a house. More importantly I was dressed. She held my hand but it was chaste, unerotic handholding. She smiled at me. “Maybe we could share this?”
The house exploded into flames. Red and orange licked out of the windows of the second floor. It had been a farm house, two stories, white paint, shutters decorated with cheerful flowers. Now it was an inferno. A dog barked inside and someone screamed, no doubt waking to catastrophe. I tingled, not with sex or fire, but with death. The dog and the screaming faded as my world narrowed. Five people were in the house in front of me and soon they would all die. The magic began to gather inside me, bringing pleasure with it. They would die and I would feel it, savoring the magic of their passing, the miracle of a person going from this world to the next.
I let the magic leave me and come back in whispers. This one was older, a grandmother maybe; she’d been close to death before the fire reached out for her. She fought it now, though, struggling to get to a child down the hall. Another child was taken in the flames; he slipped out of life without a whisper, dead before he woke up. The magic abandoned that side of the hallway to find more death. The master bedroom gave it.
That’s where the blaze had begun. Some other magic, some force I didn’t recognize told me there had been a candle on the bathroom sink, too close to a bottle of perfume. That didn’t explain the fire in front of me but I didn’t really care. I cared about the two people dying in that room. They were between death and life, lingering in terrible pain. I took them, willing the magic to help them pass, and they did. Flowery language aside, I killed them, my magic finishing the job the fire started.
“Oh yes, that’s precisely what I wanted us to share.”
I didn’t pay any attention to Her. Already my magic was racing back down the hall, searching for the other two, the last two who should have belonged to death. But I’d lingered too long enjoying the clean pleasure that had nothing to do with the physical world. I’d wallowed in the way it felt so very good while grandmother and grandchild picked their way down blazing stairs and out the front door. They spilled onto the wide wraparound porch, the old woman carrying the child who looked at us wide eyed.
“Can they see us?” I asked.
“What does it matter? This is only a dream for you,” the voice of fire and flame, a crackling noise that sounded like speech replied and I didn’t trust it. Caught between the house and the flame the old woman looked at us. Finally, she walked forward. My palms itched to take them both, to keep the high I was feeling going, but it was done, the moment was gone. They weren’t close to death anymore.
Magic interrupted I might as well wake up. There was a crash and the top story of the house collapsed inward. It turned the old woman from us to watch it. The child in her arms stared at me over her shoulder. The little girl pressed her lips together, tear tracks down her face. She was in shock, but it didn’t change the way she looked at me with such malice.
“I’m done,” I said to my companion.
“Oh no, just done here,” She whispered in Her breathy fire of a voice. The scene changed again; it was clinical, clean, no more wind, no more flames. I took a deep breath to clear my head. This new place was loud, and it smelled. Machines beeped, people laughed in the hall, and the room reeked of disinfectant and air that was too clean. There was no magic here, nothing to keep me from sensing everything around me. As always when the magic left me the world was too loud.
“There’s no death here,” I said, ready to be done with it, to wake up next to Jakob and start a day that would be a thousand times less interesting and better for it.
“There could be though.” She turned me from the doorway to the bed. We were in a private hospital room, the florescent lighting dimmed for sleep. The man swathed in bandages in front of us in a narrow hospital bed. He was half a face, a shoulder, and then a foot; everything else was blankets and gauze, covered. Naked, his foot looked almost sensual, clean and smooth. I wanted to touch it. “Go ahead, he won’t mind.”
Why not? Why not do what she wanted? I wanted it too after all, wanted to know if the figure was close to death. I let my fingers trail along the sole of his foot, walking along the pale skin there and back to the darker flesh on the top. I gave it my attention in a way I hadn’t before, my fingertips tracing the smooth skin. It looked almost like he’d had a pedicure, his toenails neat and trimmed, his skin free of callous. What kind of a man had feet like that? What kind of a man was in a hospital bed, so covered in bandages?
“A man who wants death,” she whispered. “Wouldn’t you? He’s horribly scarred. Going to be gawked at and shunned for the rest of his life. It would be a great kindness to release him.”
I wrapped my fingers around his foot. There was no death there. “Nothing I can do, he’s not going to die.”
“But you could make him, you can take a perfectly healthy person and wish them dead. You’ve done it before, haven’t you?”
“With Blue, with drugs and sugar maybe I could.” I hesitated, remembering the time I used Blue, a drug that made anything supernatural a thousand times more powerful. It nearly killed me, but afterward magic felt easier, like the drug opened a door I didn’t know was shut. Still… “I don’t have that much power on my own.”
“You don’t think so? Hamm.” Her voice trailed off, the fire-crackle sound was getting closer to human. “Such a pity for him to live so terribly. Maybe I could help?”
She came behind me, putting Her hands on my hips, embracing me. Power, raw magic flooded my system, waking the death witch part of me. Magic came to me without being called sometimes but never with that much force. It was like I was a glass and She poured the magic-water into me.
It was enough, enough to take him, and everyone else around him. He wasn’t meant to die for a very long time, decades at least, but I could help him along the way she asked. If that was what he wanted, and looking down at him what She said made sense. It made sense and She was offering so much power.
“Lady Raya,” the thing in bandages croaked. “I thought I felt you there.” Her hands flew from my hips but the power stayed. “I know I pissed you off, but this must sting even worse. Not a single spark, not a candle, nothing you can work with. How you gonna kill me now?”
I looked at Her, feeling betrayed, toyed with, and angry. “That’s it I’m waking up now,” I said and mercifully I did.
Chapter 14
I looked at Jakob, sleeping in the way that wasn’t dead, a state that wouldn’t last much longer. In another hour, the sun would rise and it would be impossible for me to wake him without magic. And what was the rule? We didn’t use magic on each other. I took a deep breath, looked at him and wondered. Should I share what happened with him?
I knew how much he hated Pagan gods, Raya in particular. His stories of watching E grow up tormented by the goddess were always filled with revulsion. Jakob had no use for gods that toyed with their followers. I wasn’t a follower though, I was…well…She’d made me an offer…maybe? I didn’t really understand the dream. I knew some of it was real.
Shaken, and still too confused to talk about it, I headed for my personal place of solace: the shower. From the minute the water started beating on my skin things got better. The fire goddess liked me, I’d known that but I hadn’t realized She liked me enough to come find me. Except, I caught myself, it wasn’t really about me, was it? It was about what I could do. It was about that guy, the one from the end, the one She wanted me to kill. I finished my shower, kicking myself for having gotten into it because now I wanted to go running with E so I could find out more, and I hated running with wet hair.
****
I knocked on E’s door remembering the magic and music coming through my walls on Saturday night. We’d left the party early, but not too early. I wondered who stayed behind,
how it all played out. None of them had come to my Superbowl party yesterday. E opened the door wrapped in a bathrobe, her eyes only half open.
“We’re running before work on a Monday?” she grunted.
“If you’re up for it.”
“Hell, I’m up, might as well.”
We started outside our front door. “Three?” she asked.
“Sure.” Our feet started to fall into a good rhythm. “What’s it like being thirty?”
“Same as twenty-nine pretty much.”
“Huh. What’d I miss at the party?”
“The crazy sex part.” She grinned widely and though I was curious she picked up the pace until I didn’t have the breath left to ask.
She kept the fast pace up for the rest of the run. I hadn’t eaten. My twisted dreams didn’t do much for sleep, and I’d woken up earlier than usual. My body was running on empty and with the magic I’d done the night before I should have been miserable. I wasn’t though and it pissed me off; Raya had given me power. Power I didn’t want and should have turned down. Still grappling with the dream that wasn’t a dream I stopped at the water fountain for a long drink. When I finished E stepped in after me.
“Hey, can I ask you something?”
She nodded, panting.
“Know any fire witches who’ve been horribly burned lately?” It was a long shot but there was a chance E knew the guy from my dream.
“Gillian, but don’t ask me about it. It pissed me off.”
“I sort of need to know.”
“He served us well for years but then She asked him to do something and he said no. Son of bitch made a nice living off our gifts but then, just no.”
I hated the way she mixed up her pronouns when she talked about Raya. I liked to think I was talking my friend E and not the vessel of the goddess. I sure as hell didn’t want to talk to the vessel of the goddess this morning. “Don’t you get a choice when She tells you to do something?”
“No. Gillian knew the rules, She says burn, you burn. Your mother, your house, it doesn’t matter. And then the bastard has the arrogance to call in healers and take Her scars off his skin.” E shook her head, clearly furious.
Blood, Dirt, and Lies Page 20