Firewalker

by Josephine Angelini

  Except—no, it can’t be. Who would be insane enough to use elemental energy—the energy of the stars—as a weapon? But the shards of elements, crashing through all organic life in this world, are huge cell killers. They are the product of this kind of energy, and no other. You can’t see the elemental shards in a spirit walk, but now I understand. That’s what makes a cinder world. That’s what destroys what life remains on those worlds after the initial firestorm has cooled. I never understood until I came and saw the cause with my witch’s eyes.

  I have to find unburned wood or I will be stuck here until I die of thirst. Or worse. I could be found by someone ruthless enough to survive in this place for however long it’s been since the holocaust. The longer it’s been, the more animalistic the people here will have become. I’ve seen things on my spirit walks, even though the shaman told me not to dwell on the cinder worlds or wonder what caused them. I’ve seen what the survivors do to one another in the years of never-ending winter that follow the great burning.

  Enough.

  Stop crying.

  Pull yourself together and find fuel for your pyre, Lillian …

  Lily felt herself being evicted from Lillian’s memory, despite wanting to see more. Whatever happened next, Lillian either didn’t want to share with Lily or didn’t want to relive herself. Lily looked across the raft at Lillian.

  What happened, Lillian? How did you find enough fuel in that cinder world to build a pyre?

  The answer to that is what made me who I am now. You think I’m a monster, but I think if you could see what made me who I am, you’d agree that my choices, as ruthless as they seem, are justified. The only question is, are you sure you really want to understand me?

  Curiosity dug at Lily, but so did distrust. There was a reason Lillian had only showed her a fragment of a memory, and a half-truth could be more manipulative than any lie. Lily knew this, but she still couldn’t say no outright because to understand Lillian’s story would be to understand something huge inside herself. They were, after all, the same.

  I honestly don’t know, Lillian.

  * * *

  Juliet turned her head to the side, gagging.

  “Easy,” Rowan said in his low, steady voice. He reached out to brace Juliet by her elbow and stopped. His hands were covered in the charred skin he had just peeled off Lily. “Do you need to go outside and get some air?” he asked kindly. Not that there was any difference between the outside air and the air inside the living room at this point. Rowan had insisted they keep all the windows open and it was colder than a meat locker in there.

  “No,” Juliet said, shaking it off. “I got this.”

  Rowan narrowed his eyes for a moment, weighing Juliet’s resolve, and must have seen more strength in her than she was feeling because he nodded once and bent his head over Lily.

  The jewel at his throat throbbed with that eerie dark light and he went back to his task. He directed a tendril of light under a small patch of necrotic skin and even though his burned hands were bandaged, he used the light to ease Lily’s skin away with a precision that no scalpel could ever match. She barely even bled.

  It had been a full day since they’d brought Lily back home, and Juliet had seen Rowan do amazing things. Things Juliet could not explain in a rational way. All she knew was that these things Rowan was doing were keeping Lily alive.

  “Spray the tincture here,” he directed.

  Juliet misted Lily’s exposed muscle and sinew with the combination antibiotic and analgesic potion they had made that morning in Samantha’s second-best copper-bottomed pot.

  “Good,” Rowan mumbled as Juliet sprayed the proper amount of tincture, and then stood back to survey the gruesome landscape of Lily’s body. He went to the fire, over which hung Samantha’s best copper-bottomed pot, and deftly lifted out a strip of something that looked like a thin film of gauze about three inches square with the flat of one of his silver knives. This was not the first time Rowan had done this kind of surgery, of that Juliet was quite certain.

  “Is that really Lily’s skin?” Juliet asked. She was fascinated now, rather than disgusted. She watched his stone’s mercurial light dance around the edges of the skin graft as he eased it down over Lily’s raw bones with infinite care.

  “Yes,” Rowan mumbled, finally answering Juliet’s question after a long pause. “It’s not hard to grow from a culture—not even in inferior conditions.” Rowan paused to shoot Samantha’s pots a resentful glare. The cast-iron cauldron he insisted on hadn’t arrived yet, and Juliet had endured a full five minutes of his swearing before they went ahead and began the skin-growing ritual in one of Samantha’s “inferior” pots a few hours ago. “But skin patches are hard to align,” he continued, still focused on his task. “Every border cell must link to its neighbor seamlessly, or it will leave a scar.” He leaned back again to inspect his work and smiled.

  “Will this?” Juliet asked anxiously, looking at his injured hands. “Scar, I mean.”

  Rowan shot Juliet a cocky look as if to express how beneath him the notion was, even with his hands burned and bandaged. She almost laughed. He had a way about him that inspired confidence despite the desperate situation they were in, but before Juliet gave over to a moment of levity she stopped herself.

  She didn’t know what to feel about Rowan. She was starting to trust him, but how could she trust someone with such an outlandish story about where Lily had been for the past three months? He claimed that Lily had been in a parallel universe, and that she had been burned in a battle against an evil witch. Juliet looked down at her sister’s three strange stones—willstones as Rowan called them—and grew even more confused. They winked and roiled with a light that looked almost alive. Seeing them and the eerie way they sparkled even in the dark told Juliet that something otherworldly had happened to her sister. And Rowan was undoubtedly using magic to save Lily’s life when not even the best medical attention in the world could have done so, whether Juliet wanted to believe it or not.

  But what Juliet really needed to know had nothing to do with magic or willstones. She needed to know whether or not Rowan had any part in what had happened to Lily. But little things he said, and the way he seemed to feel so responsible for Lily, made Juliet suspect that Rowan had had a hand in burning Lily.

  Rowan and Juliet worked straight on through the night, with Rowan peeling off and replacing Lily’s skin in three-inch squares, and Juliet spraying and dabbing and keeping everything Rowan needed within his reach. By dawn Juliet could hardly see straight.

  “You should sleep,” Rowan said as he stood, appraising the last patch of newly applied skin.

  “So should you,” Juliet said through a yawn.

  “I’m still breathing for her,” Rowan said, fingering the stone at the base of his throat. She watched the light in his willstone subtly rising and falling in tandem with the rise and fall of Lily’s chest. She didn’t know how he was doing it, but Juliet could see that somehow Rowan was putting air in her lungs, and drawing it out again in a long, steady rhythm.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. She hadn’t seen Rowan eat or sleep since he’d gotten here.

  “Yes. Rest, Juliet.” He sank onto the floor next to Lily, never once taking his gaze from her. Juliet didn’t know what was holding him together, but she was too tired to try to argue with him about who needed to rest more.

  “Wake me if you have to,” she said, too tired to think about it anymore. She pulled a quilt over her against the freezing cold and collapsed onto the couch.

  She shut her eyes and, unfortunately, it seemed as if only seconds had passed before she felt Rowan shaking her arm.

  “I need your help,” he said. Juliet sat up, still dragging her brain out of sleep. Rowan looked terrible. His eyes were sunken and his cheeks were tinged with green. “We need to wrap her before your mother comes downstairs,” he said.

  Juliet followed him back to Lily’s body and understood. The patchwork of new skin was livid and swollen. Lily
looked like some hellish ghoul straight out of a slasher movie. They went to work wrapping Lily up mummy-style before Samantha could see her like that. While they worked, Juliet heard the phone ring and heard her mother answer the call upstairs. Samantha’s tone became increasingly agitated as the conversation dragged on. A few moments later, she joined them in the living room as Rowan hurriedly passed at least one layer of gauze over Lily’s injuries.

  “That was your father,” Samantha said. She was pacing and wringing her hands. “We have to tell him.”

  “Tell him what?” Juliet asked carefully.

  “About your sister. That she’s back. The nosy FBI agent won’t leave him alone. She really thinks your father might be involved with Lily’s disappearance.”

  “Mom, we can’t,” Juliet replied incredulously. She gestured to the living room. There were basins of bloody water and buckets of discarded skin on the floor. “We can’t let anyone see this.”

  “He’s worried about her, Juliet, and I feel awful letting him think she’s still missing. Maybe dead.” Samantha gave her daughter one of those disturbingly sane looks. “You don’t know what it is to be a parent. He loves you girls, even though he’s not the fathering type.”

  Juliet shot Rowan a look, and saw that he was as against involving their father as she was.

  “That’s understandable, Samantha,” Rowan said equitably. “But right now our main concern has to be Lily, not James. If he knows she’s alive he’ll want to see her and she’s too weak to be exposed to another person and risk infection.”

  Juliet shook herself and stifled her question. No one had told Rowan her father’s first name, and she already knew that if she asked him, Rowan would say that he knew James from this parallel world he claimed to come from.

  “You’re right, Rowan. Of course you’re right,” Samantha said. She reached out and put her hand on Rowan’s shoulder, taking comfort. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

  The phone rang again. “That’s probably that FBI agent,” Samantha said. The hassled look on her face started to cloud with confusion as she went to answer it. She was losing it.

  “Mom can’t handle this,” Juliet said under her breath.

  “I know,” Rowan replied. He looked just as worried about Samantha as Juliet was. There was true concern on his face, and it irritated Juliet.

  “Who are you, really?” she asked, her chin tilted down and her eyes narrowed in distrust.

  Rowan sighed. “I don’t blame you for not believing me.” He smiled suddenly, as if remembering something bittersweet. “When I first saw Lily I couldn’t believe it either, and she has a double in my world, another version of her named Lillian. I’ve known Lillian my whole life, and I could sense that Lily wasn’t her, but I just couldn’t accept it. Not for a long time. So I don’t blame you for not believing me. Actually I consider myself lucky that you’re helping me instead of turning me over to your city guards.”

  He sounded so genuine. Juliet wanted to believe him, but how could she? Samantha believed him without question, but Samantha’s illness was tailor-made to believe in parallel worlds. In fact, Samantha seemed to live in a parallel world most of the time.

  “I’m trying to understand all this in a rational way,” Juliet said, spreading her arms wide to include the silver knives, the salt and vinegar, and the strange symbols Rowan had painted on a square of black silk. “I’ve seen magic work, and I’m trying to make sense of it, but I can’t shake the feeling that you’re involved. Rowan—were you the one who burned my sister?”

  Rowan looked down, a pained expression on his face. “I was a part of it, yes. I shackled her to the pyre. But, Juliet—you don’t understand.”

  Juliet backed away from him and he grabbed her arm, stopping her. She hadn’t feared Rowan until this moment, but now that she did she couldn’t help but notice how strong he was and how quickly he could move. She straightened her back to look up in his eyes.

  “What was it? Some kind of Satan worshipping?” she asked breathlessly. Surprisingly, he laughed and let go of her arm immediately.

  “Magic has nothing to do with any of that nonsense. It’s about power, and fire is how your sister gains power. I burned Lily because she asked me to,” he said simply.

  Juliet stared at him, trying to find a lie in his eyes, but she couldn’t. “I don’t know what to believe, Rowan.” She suddenly smiled, all the tension and fear gone, and shook her head. “Sometimes it feels like I know you.”

  “There’s a version of you who does,” he said, and went back to Lily’s side, leaving her to mull over the disturbing notion that there were other Juliets out there somewhere.

  * * *

  Lily smelled snow and cedar smoke. She heard logs popping in a fire. She opened her eyes. She was lying on the floor in her living room, back in Salem, Massachusetts. All the windows were open and a fire was going in the hearth. Rowan sat beside a huge cast-iron cauldron that was suspended over the flames. The soot and blood that had covered him had been washed away—soot and blood from the battle against Lillian, Lily remembered. Lily hoped that her army had fled and that Alaric, Tristan, and Caleb had gotten safely away with the scientists.

  She took a deep breath in and let a deep breath out. Steam billowed from between her lips. The room was sub-zero. Rowan’s head spun around at the sound, and he scooted across the floor toward her when he saw that she was awake. She reached out to him and saw that her hands and arms were wound in bandages. A square of black silk was stretched out beneath her and strange symbols, drawn in salt, surrounded her. Silver knives were arrayed around her in a pattern—their lustrous blades flashing brightly in the firelight.

  No, don’t move! Your skin is too fragile, Rowan said in mindspeak.

  He was wearing a thick wool sweater against the cold. Peeking out from the bottom of the sleeves and above the cowl neck were bandages. Lily could see the thin pink color of watery blood starting to seep through the wrappings on his hands.

  You’re hurt …

  I’m getting better. So are you. Rest now, Lily.

  Lily let her eyes close and kept them closed. Maybe a second, maybe forever passed as she floated on her raft of pain. She heard arguments swirling above her like a cloud. People danced in and out of her fever dreams. More often than not, she felt Lillian joining her on the raft—but only when Rowan left her side. Lily could feel Lillian waiting for Rowan to go and then she’d move closer to Lily through the Mist, asking for shelter on her raft. Lily let her come. She needed someone there with her in the dark.

  Time passed. The pain started to itch around the edges. Lily heard her father’s voice. Demanding. Impatient. She heard her mother’s voice. Pleading. Desperate.

  “James, I told you because I believe you have the right to know that your daughter is alive,” Samantha was saying in a shaky voice, “but I only let you come and see her on the condition that you allow me to care for her as I see fit.”

  “You let me come and see her?” James sputtered. “Have you lost your mind completely? I may not be around much, but I still own this house and I have every right to see my daughter—who’s been missing for three months—whether I agree to your psychotic conditions or not!” He made a strangled sound in the back of his throat as he paced around Lily’s prone body. “I’ve been questioned by the police and the FBI since she disappeared, Samantha. We all have. If she dies on our living room floor because I didn’t make you take her to a hospital, we’re going to be charged with her death. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “Stop fighting,” Lily said. Her voice was weak, and the effort to speak left her lightheaded. She heard Rowan in her head.

  I’m sorry, Lily. Your mother thought it was cruel to keep your father in the dark, but he wants to take you to a hospital and I can’t let him. They have no idea how to heal you. Your mother understands, but your father is difficult.

  “You’re taking her to the hospital this instant, and I’m calling Special Agent Simms tonight. I’m not
going to jail because you’re insane, Samantha,” James said with finality. “And you, Juliet. How could you—”

  Let me handle him, Rowan.

  Lily sat up in one lurching motion and looked directly at her father. He was red-faced and the lines on his forehead were etched deep from anger. As soon as he noticed her, his words died in the back of his throat. Lily had never initiated mindspeak with him before, but she knew it was possible because, despite their many differences, he was still her father.

  Dad. You’re meddling in things you don’t understand. Stop pretending you’re in charge here. Do as you’re told or get out.

  His red face blanched and his jaw dropped. “Did you hear that?” he asked Juliet.

  “She didn’t. That was just for you, Dad,” Lily replied in a papery voice that broke twice before she could finish.

  “Lie back, Lily,” Rowan whispered urgently in her ear. “Your skin is splitting apart. You need to be still.”

  Lily refused and stayed staring at her father. Her left eye went cloudy and started stinging as blood oozed into it, but she didn’t blink. Lily waited until she was sure her father’s will had faltered before she continued.

  “We’re going to take care of this privately. Is that understood?” she whispered. Her father nodded slowly. He was terrified of her. “Good.”