I peer over his shoulder. “Is that Latin?”
“Yup.”
“Since when can you read Latin?”
“Since I’ve been stuck in the middle of nowhere for seven months and my mom’s an ancient Greek and Latin scholar.” He laughs at my stunned expression. “Most of the Order’s key texts are written in those languages, so you can’t really study keeper lore without some knowledge of them.”
“It’s like I don’t even know you.”
“Daniel Rodriguez.” He holds out a hand, beaming. “A gentleman and a scholar.”
I shake my head sadly. “You, my friend, are never getting laid.”
“Ouch.” He gives me a look. “Hey, weren’t you supposed to start your training in Firemagic this morning?”
“Yes. Only nobody knows how to train Firemagic.”
“Not even Ingrid?”
“She wants to drill me.”
“Holy crap.”
“Yeah. Not happening. Fortunately, Gunn and your mom are backing me up on this one.”
“What does my mom think you should do.”
“Study old manuscripts.”
“Figures. And Gunn?”
“Calm my mind and meditate on the marvels of fire.”
“Oh boy.”
“I know. This is probably not going to end well.”
In the end we decide to go with Gunn’s method, mainly because nobody has a better idea that doesn’t involve torture or poring over ancient manuscripts written in dead languages. Which means that come sunset, Gunn and I are sitting next to each other in the lotus position, staring at a fire he made in the sand about a hundred yards from the house.
In some ways things are a little different from the way it was when he tried to teach me how to control my magic last year. It’s night instead of day, we’re surrounded by rocks and sand instead of flowers and greenery, we’re staring at a fire instead of a blade of grass. Other things haven’t changed though: I feel awkward and intensely self-conscious; I’m struggling to concentrate with Gunn’s body so near mine; it’s a bit boring; it’s a bit frustrating; it’s more than just a bit weird. For the most part, the experience is almost exactly the same as it was last year.
Except that this time it works.
As the sun sets against the desert sky in a spectacular, streaky explosion of red and orange and pink, Gunn gives me a lecture about the role of fire in the history of life on this planet, the idea being, and I quote, “to really think about fire, to understand it as a kind of everyday magic that happens all around us all the time.” (I know.) And so I stare at the fire, relaxing into the beauty of the evening and the hypnotic motion of the flickering flames, while Gunn talks science at me, explaining that humans have been shaped by fire, and that we, in turn, used fire to shape the world. Because we prefer our proteins cooked, he says, over millennia our bodies and minds have been changed by this element, subtly but completely, and even while fire slowly altered us, we used it to alter the world, creating new ecosystems to make the earth more suited to our lifestyle.
Once the sun sinks beyond the horizon, I become aware of the brilliant white of the crescent moon and the stars coming out, slowly at first and then all at once in a rush, thousands of them. We sit staring at the flames while Gunn tells me about the ways in which this small chemical reaction in front of us is similar to the enormous ones high above us in space, billions of miles away, and how it differs from them too. He talks about chemical elements and combustion processes until his voice becomes part of the night around me, dark and deep and comforting.
Last year I watched our school burn in a magnificent inferno that was violence in its purest and most profound form. I remember staring at the flames that night, mesmerized by their power, their clearly destructive intent.
In contrast, the energy coming from the small fire in front of us is so gentle, so welcoming and unthreatening that it hardly even warms me. Now that night has fallen, the air is suddenly cool, and I’m starting to shiver in Sofia’s light sweater.
Without even really thinking, I make the fire bigger, warmer, until it roars with noise and flame, the wood now burning up in a silvery blue rush of intensity to throw bright yellow sparks into the inky night sky. It’s only when Gunn stops talking, his voice cut off like a dripping tap suddenly closed, that I realize what I’ve done.
I keep my eyes on the raging fire, too scared to move, afraid to ruin it. “Did I do that?”
“You did.”
“Wow!” I give a little thrill of disbelieving laughter. “What do I do now?”
“See how much control you have. Can you make it smaller again?”
I can.
It’s easy.
I play with the fire for a while, making it smaller, and then bigger, bigger, bigger, until there’s no more wood left to burn.
“I did it!”
Gunn is grinning from ear to ear. “Yes, you did.”
“It was easy!”
“That’s good to hear.”
“I’m going to be a firemaster!”
“Easy tiger,” he laughs. “We’ve got a few bridges to cross before that happens. But this was a really good start.”
Over the next week I play around with my brand new firemagic skills, honing it until it becomes natural, almost instinctive. Gunn keeps giving me nerdy science talks about the nature of fire, trying to guide me, but in the end the process turns out to be completely unscientific. Mainly I just, I don’t know, think about the fire, and about what I want it to do.
And then I do it.
“What I don’t understand though,” Daniels asks, one afternoon while we’re trying to cool down in the small swimming pool built into the patio, “is exactly how you get the fire to do what you want it to do.”
I float on my back, careful to keep my head above the water. “I don’t know how to explain it.”
He splashes some water in my direction. “Come on.”
“I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”
“Try using an analogy.”
I smile. “Okay. Let me think.”
I float around for a little while longer, trying to get myself to enjoy the feeling of being in the water again. But the memory of the drills is still too raw, so after a while I wade through the chest-deep water to sit on the sunken step next to him.
“You know how you can type as quick as lightning?”
“Yeah?”
“Where is C on a keyboard?”
He starts typing on the water. “On the bottom, left. Just above the space bar.”
“Okay. Now answer the next question without moving your hands. What’s right next to C?”
His eyes glaze over as he tries to think. “I have no idea.”
“So, basically you’re telling me your hands know where to go on a keyboard, but when you actually think about it, your brain doesn’t have a clue where the specific keys are.”
“I guess so.”
“Well, that’s how my firemagic feels. If I had to stop to analyze it, I wouldn’t have the faintest notion of what to do. But somehow, when I focus my mind on a fire, it just comes naturally. Just like your fingers can type on a keyboard without you consciously knowing where the keys are, my thoughts can manipulate fire without me consciously knowing how I’m doing it. If that makes sense.”
He rubs his chin. “Actually, for a first attempt, that’s a pretty good analogy.”
“Damn right it is.”
At first I need a small flame to start a fire—from a match, or a lighter, or a candle—but soon I can create an enormous blaze out of thin air without as much as a spark. It’s a heady, delicious feeling, and every time I do it, I feel stronger and more powerful.
I set fire to a pencil on my desk. I set fire to a magazine in the bathroom. Then a book on the dining room table. A chopping board in the kitchen. A carpet in my room.
Everybody is delighted at my progress, and nobody seems to mind the small trail of destruction I leave in my wake.
<
br /> I don’t either.
As time goes by, however, my initial sense of triumph turns into something a little darker, a little more worrying, mainly because it becomes harder and harder to stop.
The sheer sensory delight of starting a fire—the small spark, the rush of heat, the whoosh of oxygen, the flicker of flame and then that wonderful blast—becomes increasingly difficult to resist, and what seemed like a fun and exciting game at first slowly becomes so compulsive that I begin to experience a vague sense of discomfort whenever I can’t set something on fire.
And then, almost overnight, the impulse to set fire to things becomes more than just an urge; it becomes a need, as overwhelming and powerful as the need to breathe. I look at everything around me and I see it burning—as if every object has a secret heart of fire, and my job is simply to let that fire loose, to set it free.
Gunn tries to help by making me spend more time in the desert. He explains that the desert sand can’t burn because it’s already “burnt”: the elements it consists of have already combined with the oxygen in their crystal structure. I can let my guard down out here, he tells me. I’m in a place where I can’t do any harm.
But he’s wrong.
It’s surprising how many things will burn in a seemingly empty desert. A forgotten packet of cigarettes. A tuft of grass. A single desert marigold. A small shrub. An entire sage bush. A man-sized cactus. A lone bird, circling in the sky.
And then everything, all at once, for as far as the eye can see.
After that my training changes, its focus shifting to one thing only: controlling my arsonist impulses.
Gunn spends a lot of time meditating with me, which helps a bit. When I calm my mind, focusing on nothing but my breathing, the siren call of fire becomes noticeably harder to hear and easier to handle. Daniel makes me laugh, which also helps, and his dad feeds me, which helps a lot. Somehow the simple act of eating grounds me, reminding me that I’m a person who needs sustenance instead of a fire-hungry demon whose only wish is to burn the whole planet to ashes.
Ingrid believes I’m facing this problem because the practice of my firemagic is so unbalanced. According to her, my mother struggled with a very similar problem when she first came into her power. She tells me that my mom gained Control of water, the shallow skill of seamagic, almost immediately after she entered the ocean for the first time, and that this gave her so much power that she once accidentally buried an entire island underwater. (The island was uninhabited, but still.) It was only once my mom began to master the deep skills of seamagic, Ingrid says, that she fully mastered her magic, and if I want to control my firemagic I must now do the same.
Which sounds like a great plan, I guess, except for the part where nobody knows what the deep skills of Firemagic are.
Daniel’s mom (it still feels a bit strange just to call her “Sofia”) is the one most frustrated by this lack of knowledge because she’s convinced, based on her study of its historical artifacts, that the existence of firemagic has been part of the Order’s secret history all along, and that the highest initiates of the Order deliberately expunged the existence of firemagic from keeper lore.
Her words ring a bell, faintly at first, and then louder.
“Jack Pendragon said something similar,” I tell her one morning, “that night at his home. After wiping my mind, he made a woman read something to us from this strange old document. I remember he said the Order had always hidden the last part, which was about firemagic, because they wanted to pretend it didn’t exist.”
She gives me a sharp look. “Can you remember what the document was called?”
“Nah. But it seemed ancient and really valuable from the way they were treating it. It was, like, a scroll, you know? And it was kept in this old, cracked clay pot and—oh wait. He said it was the Codex something. Ingrid seemed shocked that they had it.”
She closes her eyes for a moment, as if she’s saying a quick prayer, and when she opens them again, there’s a definite edge to her voice. “We should probably discuss this with Ingrid and Gunn present.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Gunn’s eyes are blazing with anger.
“I had no way of knowing if it really was the Codex,” Ingrid says calmly. “It might all have been a cheap Pendragon trick.”
“Just tell us what it said,” he snaps at her.
“And even if it was the original Codex,” Ingrid continues unperturbed, “I wouldn’t put much trust in the translation. Genevieve did the reading, and she admitted that her ancient Aramaic was terrible.”
Daniel’s mom’s mouth falls open. “Genevieve was there?”
“Yes. She must be working for the Pendragons now. Jack called her his librarian.”
“Just. Tell us. What it said.”
Ingrid sighs theatrically, as if giving in to an unreasonable demand, but recites the passage word perfect (as far as I can remember). When she stops speaking, there’s a long moment of stunned silence. I get the idea that everyone in the room is counting to ten.
Then all hell breaks loose.
To me, the passage made about as little sense as it did the last time I heard it, but it must mean more to these two because they both start yelling at the same time, accusing Ingrid of being undermining and unreasonable and deceitful and impossible.
I listen to them scream at each other for a while, captivated by the force of their emotions. The anger in the room is almost palpable: it’s as if the frustration and disappointment and distrust inside them are tiny sparks that flash from the one to the other, igniting embers of buried emotion.
And then, suddenly, I can actually see the sparks of their anger, as clearly as anything else in the room. More clearly. It’s as if those sparks are lighting them up from the inside, awakening the hidden fires inside each of them.
Fires that sing to me, loudly and irresistibly.
Fires trapped inside them, that want to be free.
Fires that want to burn.
Gunn is the first one to notice there’s trouble. He’s in the middle of an angry outburst when he catches my eye and immediately goes quiet.
“Are you okay?”
It’s all I can do to shake my head. I look away from him, afraid that one look from me will be enough to set him alight. “I can’t stop it. The fire. I can’t contain it.”
“That’s okay. Just take a deep breath and –”
“You don’t understand! It’s inside you. You need to get out of this room now. All of you.”
I am looking down, staring at my balled fists, aware that I’m starting to hyperventilate but unable to stop it.
Nobody leaves the room, in spite of my warning.
I hear Gunn taking a step closer to me. “I want you to look at me now, okay?”
“Stay away!” I focus on my white knuckles, desperately trying to calm my breathing. “You don’t understand. It wants to burn. I can’t stop it. You need to go.”
“Sweetheart. Please. Let me help you through this.”
His calm, reassuring, familiar voice is too much to resist. I look up at him.
A mistake.
Every part of Gunn can burn. Every single part. All it takes is the faintest of sparks. The fire wants to be free. It wants to live. I close my eyes and clamp down on my power, refusing to listen to the secret, seductive song the fire is singing to me. I clench my fists so tightly that my nails pierce my own skin, drawing blood. But even so, the song becomes louder, the compulsion stronger…
“Run!” I scream.
“Jess, please –”
“Your hair will burn! And your clothes! Your face! Everything will burn and you will be…” I see Gunn’s face melting from his skull, his flesh liquefying into an unspeakable mask of horror. Ohgodohgodohgodohgod.
Is this happening now? Am I making it happen?
I crumple to the floor, closing my eyes and curling my body up into a ball.
This is not happening.
Nobody is burning.
I can hold the fire inside.
I can hold it in.
All I have to do is to block my ears to its call and my heart to its pull and my body to the burning. All I have to do is resist the delicious, delicious power that wants to consume me. To consume everyone else around me.
I can hold it in. I can hold it in. I can hold it in.
Vaguely, from somewhere above me, I hear the sound of voices. They still don’t understand. Why don’t they understand? I need to warn them, but I’m afraid to speak, afraid to move.
My control is hanging by a thread. If I let go now, I will torch this place, and everyone in it, to the ground.
“Jess.” Ingrid’s voice is cool and commanding and not at all afraid. “Little one. Can you hear me?”
“Go!” I grind the word through my clenched teeth, and yet the effort it takes is almost too much. My self-control is dangerously close to snapping. By now my entire body is drenched in sweat with the effort of restraining the magic roaring inside me, its flames licking through my body, the power exquisite and thrilling and unstoppable. “Run!”
“I am going to touch you now, little one.”
“No! Get away from me!”
“You need to brace yourself. This might hurt a little.”
“You’ll burn to death!”
“I won’t burn. I am your keeper, and you cannot harm me.”
And then she puts her hand on my shoulder, and at her touch I feel my control finally snapping as the spark ignites and the fire inside her breaks free at last.
Chapter 14
The ability to perceive a so-called ‘aural fire’ inside those around them, however, usually disappears after a strict regime of rigorous drilling—an unfortunate yet unavoidable effect of the proper disciplining of an uncultivated and disorderly magic.
Nonetheless, it is tempting to speculate what advantages the Order might gain from learning how to peer into the colored emanations emitted by each soul, for it is said that such emanations reveal a person’s most deeply hidden thoughts, emotions, and intentions…
From Elements of Knowledge: An Instruction into Selected Wisdoms of the Black Clan (1823);
Fireborn (The Dark Dragon Chronicles Book 2) Page 14