Bump

by S.J. Finch

  ***

  The night air sent a biting chill through Ryan’s body as he swung the car door closed behind him. Autumn was slowly passing into winter, and although tonight the sky was clear and the breeze was slight, the iciness hung still in the air.

  Ruby had sent him to an old observatory a few miles out of town, stuck on the edge of a nearby mountain. It had been built by the university in the fifties, but had since been shut down due to lack of funding. No serious attempts had been made to reopen or revitalize the building, and it had sat empty and unused since the college had pulled out all the equipment and boarded up the doors nearly twenty years ago. It was the sort of place that most people knew about, but no one ever visited. At this elevation it was too cold to have parties there and too far from town for the vagrants to stake a claim, so it had remained largely untouched. According to Ruby, this was where Ryan was most likely to find Evelyn.

  The high white walls of the building gleamed pale blue in the starlight. The raised dome of the observatory itself stood out like a beacon amongst the dark, swaying pine trees that surrounded it. The windows on the building that weren’t boarded up were dark and foreboding, and Ryan doubted that Evelyn would be in there; not with a view like this.

  The entire city stretched out before him in a bright latticework of twinkling yellow and orange lights. Even at this time of night, headlights and taillights still dotted the crisscrossing streets and snaked between skyscrapers. The roar of the city was muted and distant. In fact the only real noise was that of branches swaying and brushing against one another, which sounded to Ryan like waves of a placid sea breaking upon a rocky shore.

  He found the red motorcycle parked near the wide double doors of the building. The doors however, were still padlocked with a heavy chain, so Ryan made his way around the outside of the building until he found her.

  She was standing on a cobblestone terrace that jutted away from the building and hung out over the side of the mountain. The steep slope fell away beneath them with dense trees covering the ground all the way down to the base. The trees stood tall on either side, but a swath had been cut directly in front of the terrace to give an unobstructed view of the city.

  The breeze picked up momentarily and Evelyn’s hair flicked and danced upon the wind. She stared out over the city as she reached up to move the hair from her face.

  “I suppose I have Ruby to thank for you showing up.” She said, not shifting her gaze from the lights below.

  “Does that mean you’re glad I’m here?”

  “I doubt it, but I guess that depends on why you’re here. If you want to chew me out for botching the operation or nearly getting you killed, you better have brought the Colt with you cause I’m not in the mood.”

  “I figured.” Ryan replied. “But no, that’s not why I’m here at all. I don’t blame you for what happened. Daniel doesn’t either, he defended you. He said we wouldn’t have the intel we do if not for what you did. And he’s right. I’m here because I can’t go back to the warehouse…and because I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  “What do you mean you can’t go back?”

  “Aaron Grayle is off the chain and he’s after me. I’ve got amulets and bracelets and doohickeys, but I can’t hang around the one place he knows I’m likely to go.”

  Evelyn sighed. “Because of me…”

  “No. Well yeah. But it was going to happen sooner or later. I don’t blame you at all.”

  “And pretty soon you won’t be able to. After he kills you and it’s my fault.”

  “Well, I appreciate the vote of confidence,” Ryan replied, “but this has got nothing to do with you…and I’m not here to talk about it. Like I said, I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  “I’m fine. That wasn’t the first time I’ve been yelled at.”

  “Can’t say I’m surprised.”

  “And what would surprise you?” Evelyn asked as she turned to face him, her eyes gleaming in the night.

  “The truck fireball was a pretty good start.” He replied.

  A small smile played across her downturned lips.

  “Is that why you’re never cold? The whole fire thing?” Ryan continued.

  “It’s not a fire thing.” She replied.

  “It looked like a fire thing.”

  “It’s a temperature thing. The white coats call it pyrokinesis. The human mind can’t just create fire, but it can…I can…agitate the molecules, raise the temperature of things. Do that to a gas tank and you get-”

  “A fire thing.” Ryan finished.

  “A fire thing.” Evelyn agreed.

  “Can you change things the other way? Decrease temperatures?”

  She shook her head. “Some people can raise temperatures, some people can lower them. No one person can do both.”

  Silence fell between them. Ryan stepped to the edge of terrace and rested his hands on the waist-high stone wall. Evelyn joined him. The breeze picked up, then died down. Ryan shivered, Evelyn remained still.

  Ryan took a deep breath. “We almost died tonight. Like, four times. And I was terrified. When we were in the trailer, I could barely move. Tell me it gets easier.”

  Evelyn stared out over the city and remained silent for what felt like a very long time. Finally, she spoke.

  “When I was a kid, I was prone to night terrors…really horrible nightmares that it was almost impossible to wake up from.” She began quietly. “One night, when I was five years old, I had a bad one. The worst one. Nobody knew it at the time, but my brain wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to threaten and trap, even on a subconscious level. The whole house was up in flames in a matter of seconds. My parents had barely woken up by the time the smoke had filled their room; then it filled their lungs. I didn’t even hear their screams, I was still trapped in the night terror. When I did wake up, I thought I was still dreaming. Furniture, stuffed animals, my whole bedroom engulfed by fire.

  “Then when I was twelve, I got found out by a group of backwoods fanatics who chased me for two weeks over three states. Last year I got cut off from Daniel during a job and got myself captured by a mid-level alchemist. His vampires chewed on me for three days before I escaped.” She took a deep breath. “So no, it doesn’t get easier. It gets harder. Every day you run into something more terrifying than you saw yesterday. Every day they keep throwing scarier crap your way. I know that wasn’t in the recruitment brochure, but that’s the way it is.”

  “How do you deal?” Ryan asked.

  “Some…a lot…don’t. They give in or give up or get killed.”

  “That’s not what I meant. How do you deal?”

  She sighed. “Blowing stuff up helps. And I owe a lot to Doc, too. But I decided a long time ago that if this life is going to kill me, the one thing I’m going to make sure I do is go down swinging. Doctor Webster yells at me for being impulsive and over-aggressive, but the truth is if I ever slow down, I’m afraid I might not start up again. I’ve outrun the fear and the padded walls for this long, and I’m not out of breath yet.”

  As she finished the heat from her skin grew almost unbearable to Ryan, whose unprotected hand rested a few inches from hers. They stood for a moment in silence.

  Ryan wanted to tell Evelyn he was sorry about what had happened to her parents. He wanted to tell her that it wasn’t her fault, and that she deserved a better life than she had gotten. He wanted to tell her she didn’t need to carry around this weight on her shoulders, and that he wanted to be there to help. Still, no matter how much he wanted it, Ryan simply could not find the words.

  Instead, he acted. Without thinking, or perhaps, without overthinking, Ryan’s hand moved slowly, deliberately onto Evelyn’s. Her slender fingers were dry and soft and very warm. After a moment, his heart racing, Ryan squeezed her fingers and tried to infuse into that squeeze every ounce of compassion and gratitude he felt for Evelyn. And she squeezed back.

  The tiny embrace felt so good and so right that at firs
t Ryan didn’t even notice the temperatures Evelyn’s skin was reaching. In fact, Ryan’s mind didn’t register the pain until her hand became unbearably hot and he, simply on instinct, had to recoil.

  “I’m sorry.” She said, embarrassed. “I can’t really control it, and I don’t much notice it, so if I hurt you…”

  “Not at all.” Ryan said softly.

  The wind picked up again and Ryan couldn’t help the shiver that rattled through him. Evelyn slid closer to him, as close as she could without touching him. Their fingers too, though no longer intertwined, sat within millimeters of each other as they rested on the white stone of the balcony. Ryan felt the radiating heat that pulsed off her in waves and he let it envelop him. They stared out into the night and over the city they had chosen to defend with their lives. Tonight however, the two teenagers weren’t thinking about that. They weren’t thinking about the horrors that no doubt awaited them in the coming days, they weren’t thinking about the pain they would probably be asked to endure, nor the plans and plots they would have to foil using nothing but blood and sweat. Instead, they were thinking about the starlight, the midnight blue of the trees, and the pale yellow of the sleeping city.

  No words passed between them. They stood so close that there wasn’t room for anything else. And that’s how they stayed.