by Dia Reeves
Still:
“That was you on the phone, wasn’t it? You sent those fat winged things after me.”
“Yes.”
“They tried to eat me! You couldn’t come up with a better escort?”
“No one else here will talk to me. And what do fingers and toes matter as long as we’re together?”
The tunnel emptied out from the side of the volcano, overlooking land that was less fiery than he remembered. The sunlight touched on his unreasonably pale skin. As pale as Fiamma’s. The sun was much smaller now. Farther away. The faint green haze below…was that grass?
“It’s working. They’re really changing the world.”
“Let’s go to the right toward the fissures,” Fiamma said, uninterested. “The thermals will help us save energy.”
The heat was vampiric; the seers hadn’t changed that yet. The higher Jimi flew, the more the dearth of oxygen affected him, draining the little energy he had. But Fiamma urged him on and taught him to let the hot air do the work while he rested his wings.
“This is nice,” he panted, struggling to keep up. To find some common ground. To make friends, as was his way. “I could never take my other mother flying with me.”
“Because she has no wings.”
“Because she doesn’t like me.”
Fiamma looked back sharply, hair band rippling. “Nonsense. I don’t give birth to the type of children people don’t like. You are my most perfect creation.” She opened her arms.
Jimi flew into them. He never could resist a free hug.
Immediately he felt a sting. He pulled away in time to see Fiamma’s blue stinger retreat into her back.
“You asked about a door out of the world? It’s below. In the flames.”
She’d stung him?
Paralysis answered the question, an iciness spreading from the back of his thigh that froze the rest of his muscles. Then he was falling with no way to stop. She hovered up there watching him, ribbons of volcanic smoke masking her face.
He toppled and twisted then steadied as he found himself head-down and speeding toward a white hot crevasse. Brimstone in his lungs. Lead in his veins. Still far from the spitting lava, but the heat was already killing him, cooking him. A tragic Hansel who hadn’t been clever enough to escape the oven. His eyes boiled away first. And then—
Jimi lay on his back, a smell of cooked meat and burnt hair frightening him. But it wasn’t his body he was smelling. He was still, body still squashed beneath the venom’s foot. Bones aching as though they’d been smashed apart and then hastily reassembled. He was damp, like when he was a kid suffering from night sweats and paralyzed by his own nightmares.
Paralyzed.
Fiamma had stung him. He’d fallen. His eyes…
His lids squeezed shut remembering, but when he opened them, he could see. He was inside the temple, pulsing eyeballs peered back at him.
Light from the circular entrance fell upon the body next to him. A cold light over melted skin and charred bone, painted in blues and purples: corpse colors.
Fiamma’s corpse next to him. Scarf still tied around her skull. Blackened wings in fractured curls around her, crisp as pork cracklings. That’s what he’d been smelling.
He’d been buried alive with her corpse. Maybe that was the tradition here.
“This isn’t a tomb. It’s customary for revivals to occur in the temple.”
Her jaw remained motionless. Lipless. But in his mind, Fiamma’s voice echoed and boomed, thick as blackstrap molasses and twice as bitter.
“They should not have been able to interfere; that would mean that I was a person. That I mattered. So they tricked me. After I killed the other vessels who’d come of age, they performed a ritual—performed it on you—so that any weapon I wielded against the All Seeing would twist and be turned upon me. Your life was spared. My life for yours. The All Seeing is very literal. And very eager. For you.”
The corpse light snuffed out along with the syrupy cranial pressure, leaving his head empty and dark. Alone with his dead mother and a deep insecurity about his own existence.
When the paralysis lifted moments later and he was able to stand, a burst of applause and cheering greeted him. In the center of the pupil opening hovered the speaker and several seers.
Jimi’s resurrection had not been so certain, he guessed, or they would have treated his appearance much more mundanely.
“Your treacherous mother’s mischief has ceased at last,” the speaker said, eyes lighting the temple. When light touched the eyes of the temple walls, they rotated away in self-defense, revealing the less sensitive whites.
“Fly into our arms; let us embrace you! The very sight of you gladdens our hearts.”
Jimi gazed at their adoring faces and turned away, from the seers, from Fiamma, feet squeaking against the soft bed of eyeballs.
Wondered whether there was a place he could go where people wouldn’t die because of him.
Chapter 29
The bees had taken over the purification room—hundreds, thousands in neat rows between Jimi’s corner and the heated pool. During feeding time, Lillane had to hand feed him because Jimi wouldn’t stop; he worked on the bees obsessively. During bath times, Jimi had to squish through some of the bees to get to the pool. The stuff they were made of never hardened like real clay, and so as he made his way back to the corner, he was careful to repair any he’d damaged. Since he still bathed several times a day, he was constantly making repairs.
So many bees. Jimi had used up most of the clay veins in the walls, especially the wall where Fiamma had stood lying to him. The skeletal frame work he’d left behind no longer hid secrets like birth mothers who wanted him dead.
“You shouldn’t take it personally.”
Dez flitted against the ceiling, a giant freak of a moth. Fungal light filtered through her wings and cast a fairy blue glow in the room.
The sight of her should have done it. This girl he’d loved and lost. Lost twice, in a sense. Before him now, bold as life and twice as bright. Too bright.
Jimi focused on his bee.
“Fiamma didn’t hate you,” Dez said. English. He’d forgotten about that. “She hated the All Seeing. You were just a a tool of vengeance.”
She sounded so far away, this wall between them.
Jimi added the finished bee to his buffer zone, and pinched what remained of the clay from the wall.
“People behave terribly when they’re full of hate. Like you, cowering in here because you hate yourself.”
Jimi glared at her. Couldn’t help it. But he looked away quickly; she was more light than he’d experienced in a long time.
“You hate yourself more than you love Ophelia.”
“You’re not even real.” He smacked the wad of clay between his palms. A lot easier than smacking fake fairies out of the air. “Don’t talk to me.”
Dez flew closer but not too close. No one could get really close, not ever again. Her light spilled over him, wings fanning him. Her smell, like she’d been out picking blackberries all day, made her real to him in a way she hadn’t been for a long time. Memories filling him after so many things had drained away.
“Nothing is real or unreal,” she told him, speaking the seer language as he had. Just to spite him. “There are only possibilities.”
“I don’t hate myself. How could you say that to me?”
“You left her behind.”
“I didn’t! I was pushed out, and”—Jimi had to force himself to say—“no one came for me. If people I loved needed to be rescued, I’d find them. Go in with a tank if I had to. I actually know a guy with a tank who owes me a favor. But I can’t make people want to find me. The longer I’m left here, the more I realize I did the right thing.”
“They’d come.” Her fairy blue light had dimmed and become restful. Jimi relaxed. “If they knew where you were.”
“All of them?” Jimi placed the finished bee with its sisters on the floor and hugged his knees. �
�Even…”
“Of course.”
Hope circled, waiting for a moment to pounce and devour him. He held perfectly still until it passed.
“Could you tell her—”
“No.”
“What do you mean no? The real Dez did what she was told!” But Jimi was too tired to put any heat behind the words.
“You tell her. Why should I have to get involved in your love life?”
“You’re jealous.”
“You’re sleepy.”
“No, I’m not.” Jimi closed his eyes, her fairy-blue light pressed against him like a blanket. Of ice. “It took me a long time to get over you.”
“Time’s up.”
Jimi tried to turn away from the ice but couldn’t move. A weight had settled across him, around him. He thrashed, arms and legs barely under control.
“César.” Concern in his ear. A hand on his arm. “You’re having a nightmare.”
Jimi opened his eyes as the lamp switched on. He was in bed.
With Giselle.
“Were you having a bad dream?” Belly enormous beneath her nightgown, short hair mussed. Retainers he’d never seen her wear before imprisoned her teeth. “Wanna tell me about it?”
No control over his limbs because they weren’t his to control. Peering through his dad’s eyes like a little boy inside a giant robot.
He was in his dad’s body.
“Sorry I woke you.” César’s voice. He ran manicured hands over his stubbled face. “I had the weirdest dream about Desiree. About Jimi. I was him, in a room surrounded by bees. What do you think that means?”
“That you miss him.” Giselle looked sad. “Baby, I miss him too. The nerve of that kid, pushing him outta the world just because Ophelia was in an accident. As if people didn’t have accidents every day. I still think we should go to the Mayor with the tip we got from Tiggy. She could open a door—”
“No!” That wasn’t César. That was Jimi. The little boy watching amazed through the window of his dad’s eyes grew and grew, filled the vast space in an instant. Had to. César had nearly agreed with Giselle.
Jimi pushed his stepmother away. “The Mayor’s the reason I’m in this mess. She killed Ophelia. Or nearly did. Either way, leave me where I am.”
Giselle rolled out of bed, quick-footed for a hugely pregnant woman. A charm immediately in her hand, a mouse skull painted green. The eye sockets aimed at him.
“What are you?” Voice shaky, eyes murderous. “You’re not César. Not my César.”
“I’m Jimi.” English felt weird in his mouth, but he fought the urge to fall back into the seer language. Now that he was no longer in panic mode, words in any language didn’t come as easily. Neither did movement. César was fighting the invasion, and Jimi felt like a cork in a bottle that had been shaken too many times. The pressure was unbelievable. Not only in his head but all over.
“Prove it.”
“Honey.” Jimi’s voice distorted through César’s vocal cords was unlovely. “I gave you Honey for Georgina/Janis.”
“So you are dead.” Giselle lowered the charm. “I knew it. I didn’t want to know it, but anyone who knows you, knows you’d never turn your back on your family, your friends, Knows you would always come back to us. If you could.”
“I can’t.” But the words stuck in his throat. César’s throat. César everywhere. Pushing.
“Poor César. He’ll be crushed. Completely. How can I tell him? How—”
Giselle bent over in pain, and a splash of fluid stained the carpet red. She sucked in a huge breath, frantic. “The baby,” she whispered. Then louder:
“César!”
His dad took control with a violent push that sent Jimi flying at warp speed.
He came up splashing, spat up a glut of water.
Into the purification pool.
He had no memory of entering the pool or being bathed, but his skin stung as if from a recent scrubbing. The seers stood above the pool, brushes held forward as if to ward off demons. Ward off Jimi. When he looked down at himself, he understood why.
Strong light blazed from his torso as if he’d swallowed a disco ball. It brightened the room and revealed colors he hadn’t known were present—greens and oranges. The floor streaked with gold. Like his bees—they weren’t dull at all; they were gold. Even his toenails glowed beneath the water, frightening the delicate fish that lived there into immobility.
“You…do you see it?” Jimi asked, unsure what was real and what wasn’t.
“We feel it. The sacred heat of it.”
Lillane said, “Your flesh has been made clean.”
The same thermonuclear light that had flashed from the speaker’s eyes was now stored within Jimi’s torso. He really was radioactive. Maybe that was why Alexis had lost her baby.
And now Giselle.
Jimi, ignoring the towels by the water’s edge, splashed out of the pool and hurried to his corner. Surveyed the squashed bees he had left in his wake and fixed them. One by one.
✽ ✽ ✽
Lillane and the other purification seers preceded Jimi down to the temple level of the volcano. As they flew, more and more people joined them, drawn by the light he created, fascinated by the heat, even as it burned their eyes. Jimi and the others landed before the temple. The only light, aside from the glowing fungus along the walls, came from Jimi’s torso and the speaker’s white-hot eyes.
A stone chair with a low back to accommodate Jimi’s wings had been placed far behind the crowd, opposite and on the same level as the temple door. After the audience had settled on the bedrock, Jimi flew to the chair while Lillane and his group lined up before the speaker, who solemnly snipped the stitches from their eyes, revealed the empty sockets. They knelt on either side of the temple entrance as the speaker addressed the audience.
“A great blessing has come to us this day, a day we have long awaited. The vessel has been successfully purified and awaits to be emptied”—he nodded to the seers at his back—“into these blessed few. You are here to witness, to take heart and know that soon you too will be made whole, will fully participate in our bid to be free of this rocky tomb and take our place once again among the stars. Stars as bright as the vessel above us. But there is one who shines brighter. Bright with truth. With glory. With possibility.”
A light beamed forth from the temple doorway and shone directly upon Jimi, who was too lethargic to even squint.
The speaker said, “Even now the vessel’s light calls forth the All Seeing. Even now it speeds to us!”
Excited murmurings swept the audience, and then:
Beep beep.
Something long and white oozed from the temple door. Snaked past the speaker and the kneeling seers behind him. Came free with a louder beep, facing the audience.
A Rolls-Royce Phantom V.
The driver’s side door opened and Ophelia jumped out.
Jimi didn’t know how to feel at the sight of her. The feathery coat, the beanpole legs. The same red mouth.
Happy? Something like that?
But he couldn’t feel it properly. His soul had grown so large, it crowded out everything else, especially feelings.
Jimi could barely even see her through the glare of his own soul, but the absence of her wings was clear enough. The awkward crook of her shoulders, the off-balance stride as she constantly adjusted for a weight that was no longer there.
Crippled.
The other car doors opened: César and Alexis. Carmin and Lecy. Sugar Lynn. And Rishi?
The seven of them looked around wildly at the stunned crowd. The grotesque temple. Their eyes passed over Jimi but, in the darkness, he was just a big lightbulb.
But Ophelia knew the difference between a soul and a lightbulb.
“Jimi!”
The speaker blocked Ophelia’s way. “Who are you? Where’s the All Seeing?”
“What did you do to Jimi?” she said, horrified. “He’s like glass. His soul is…” She didn’t have words
. “What did you do to it?”
Neither of them understood the other, but when the speaker yelled, “Stop them! Don’t let them touch the vessel,” they all understood, the intent if not the meaning.
Jimi had expected Lillane and company to lead the charge since it was their meal ticket that was being threatened, but they remained kneeling, as lethargic as Jimi.
The rescue squad wasn’t immediately overwhelmed and stung to death by the hostile audience. They knew about the stingers, knew how to dodge, to stay out of range. Because they were Porterenes, they knew other things as well.
Rishi channeled Bruce Lee and dislocated an arm here, a knee there. Snapped a wing so violently that even Jimi winced, despite his torpor. Sugar Lynn twirled a cane as only an accomplished majorette can, smashing intrusive fingers and a couple of noses for good measure. All in spite of the cast on her foot. Carmin blew smoke weasels from his favorite silver pipe that leaped and attacked ankles and prevented the seers from flying off. Lecy, who had a number of poisonous hairpins threaded through her waist-length braid, left a score of Carmin’s captured seers twitching helplessly on the ground. Alexis, stylish as always, had found a new use for her black diamond necklace; wrapping it around other people’s necks for a change, but only long enough to throttle them. César, in his lucky be-bop hat, sprinkled a powdery charm on the seers and put them to sleep as efficiently as the real Sandman might have. But it was Ophelia’s Rolls that did most of the damage. She sat on the hood of the car and sicced it on people, grinding them beneath her wheels.
They worked hard to cut a swath to him, were really making an effort, and Jimi found himself hungry for the first time in ages. For popcorn. Appropriate since he had the best seat in the house. Such a great seat, he could see that his highly skilled rescue squad would inevitably succumb to the sheer numbers. Like in the House of Pain, it was up to Jimi to even the odds.
Minutes later an army of bees swarmed into the great room, filling the air as suddenly as a summer rainstorm. Their soft stingers weren’t a threat to anyone, but their squishiness was devastating. They clogged noses and ears, plastered eyes. The seers hated that—having their eyes messed with.