Inside the Flame (Elemental Mages Book 2)

by Rose O'Brien

  “I decided to carry on without him. But it was really hard to make rent on the condo on a reporter’s salary and without Trevor paying half. Mom was in the hospital around that time, so I moved in a ratty motel near the hospital.”

  Her mother had been thrilled about the pregnancy, and, in characteristic fashion, had told her that she never liked Trevor and that she could do much better.

  “When I was about two months along, I told my bosses I was pregnant. I wanted to give them as much time as possible to arrange for coverage while I was going to be on maternity leave,” she said. “About two weeks later, I got called into my editor’s office. They were very suddenly unhappy with my performance and were putting me on an ‘improvement plan.’ The next three months, I worked like a crazy person, barely slept, convinced that if I put in a hundred twenty percent, I could save my job.”

  That three months destroyed her confidence and had jacked her into dangerous levels of depression and anxiety, all while trying to deal with horrible morning sickness, hellish fatigue and insomnia from the pregnancy.

  “I didn’t realize then that it wasn’t about my performance at all. They were just dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s so they could fire me without a lawsuit. I was five months along when they fired me.”

  Jen couldn’t believe that she was letting all of this spill out. No one alive knew this story, but at this point, she couldn’t stop. The words just kept coming.

  After she’d been fired, Jen had been incandescently angry and suicidal for a hot minute before resolving that, fine, it was her and kid against the world. The economy had been in shambles at the time. Jobs had been scarce. Reporter jobs had been nonexistent. She considered looking for reporter jobs in other cities, but she wasn’t about to leave her mother during the final weeks of her life and her mom couldn’t be moved by that point.

  Her mother had been unable to help her financially as the medical bills had eaten everything she’d had and then some. Unemployment checks had barely paid for the motel room.

  The few friends she had eased away from her after she lost her job. The three-hour brunches and the yoga classes were no longer in her budget. Her emotions hadn’t been something they could handle. They just stopped returning her texts and calls. Those friends had never been what she’d call close, mostly because her job ate up all her free time, but it hurt to look around and find no one had her back.

  The day after she’d been fired, she started applying for writing jobs, public relations jobs, social media jobs, anything she might be remotely qualified for. At that point, her baby bump had already been showing. All the potential employers who had been so excited during the phone interviews turned cold during the in-person interviews. Jen could see them mentally crossing her off their lists the second they saw her swollen belly.

  She’d quickly started applying for any job, convenience store clerk, stocker at Target, and janitorial crews, despite the fact that she wasn’t supposed to be around strong chemicals while pregnant.

  A magna cum laude graduate from UCLA, she couldn’t get a job scrubbing toilets. She’d sold her expensive shoes and clothes on Craigslist to pay the bills. When that money was gone, she’d had to go to the food pantry.

  Stupidly, she’d thought that was the low point. She’d lost the job that had been her identity and her whole life and no one else wanted her. She’d felt worthless. If she hadn’t been pregnant, she would have seriously considered losing herself in a bottle for a while.

  After she’d held a pity party for a couple of days, she’d resolved to hold out until her mother passed, then she would have the kid and land a reporting job in another city. Her great comeback, her moment of redemption was still ahead.

  Her mother had passed away the day she’d hit the seven-month mark on her pregnancy. The funeral went by in a blur. A handful of her mother’s friends had shown, but it had been a pitifully empty service.

  “I remember lying in my fleabag motel room afterwards, just thinking that it was going to be the same way when I died. My kid would be there to mourn me and no one else. In a way, it was oddly comforting,” Jen said, her voice surprisingly steady and her eyes miraculously dry. “I started bleeding that night.”

  The bright red blood that trickled from her had been like a scream amid dead silence. It hadn’t been much at first, and she stupidly waited a couple of hours. She’d had no medical insurance at that point and her Medicaid paperwork hadn’t gone through. An unnecessary hospital bill at this point would put her on the street.

  But the contractions had hit like a wrecking ball around midnight on a cold and rainy night. The doctors at the hospital had done everything they could, pumping her full of drugs to try to stop the pre-term labor, but it had been too late.

  “I still remember the look on the doctor’s face when he knew. It’s frozen in my mind. His eyes were so kind and he had this sympathetic, thin-lipped frown. He held my hand and told me the baby didn’t have a heartbeat anymore,” Jen said, her voice dropping in volume the further she went. “My heart might as well have stopped, too.”

  She’d still had to deliver the fetus. The labor had been the most horrible experience of her life. The only thing that made any labor bearable was the knowledge that you got to hold your beautiful new baby at the end.

  For so many months, the baby had been her light at the end of the tunnel. Jen had poured all her hope for the future into the tiny thing growing inside her. The baby was supposed to make everything worth it, her redemption in human form. But it wasn’t meant to be.

  “It was a girl. I named her Madison. And she’s still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

  With the kind of dawning realization that slams into you like a speeding car, Jen realized that she hadn’t really thought about that time in her life in the past five years. The thoughts and feelings and images had cropped up like weeds every now and then and she’d yanked them out by the roots, using the stressful world around her to always keep her mind on something else. When that didn’t work, there was always the bottle of Blue Label she kept around.

  After all this time, it was the faces that stuck in her mind, frozen like photographs. There was her mother on the day she’d told Jen about the cancer, her face drawn in lines of despair and resignation. There was Trevor on the day she’d told him about the pregnancy, his face distorted with anger and hatred for her. There was the doctor who told her the baby was gone, concern and sympathy filling his eyes. There was her daughter, all her potential written in the curve of her little cheek, the tiny fingers that would never grasp hers, and the life they should have had together wrapped up with that perfect, lifeless body.

  Theron’s good arm tightened around Jen and he pressed his cheek against the top of her head. Her voice was steady as she continued.

  “I was still in the hospital when I started making arrangements to come to Iraq. An old editor of mine was running the Baghdad bureau for a wire service and had emailed me right after I got fired and offered me a job. I’d had to turn it down because of the pregnancy.

  “After I lost the baby, I felt like I had died, but somehow my body was still walking around. I wasn’t about to kill myself or anything, but I suddenly didn’t care if I died either. I knew the Baghdad assignment would be dangerous, but it meant I could be a reporter again, do some important work, and maybe the warzone would take out my walking corpse,” she said. “I scattered my daughter’s ashes at Redondo Beach and got on a plane to Baghdad two hours later.”

  ***

  Theron knew he was staring at Jen, but he didn’t really care and he didn’t want to stop.

  As a storyteller, she was riveting and had him hanging on her every word. Her voice was clear and steady, but he still heard the little pauses, the subtle catches and the emotions that bled in around the edge of her story. She still carried a lot of anger over the way her former bosses had treated her. There was a well of grief about her mother and her child that she had locked away behind some pretty thi
ck walls. It was clear she’d never really dealt with it.

  The surprising part was the near indifference about her fiancé leaving her when she had needed him most. Anger surged within him again at the thought of what the man had thrown away. Theron didn’t even know the sapien, but he hated him.

  Her story had explained so much. He finally understood what had created the fierce creature that lay next to him.

  “Dear gods,” he said, the words slipping from him as understanding hit him.

  All of that pain, all of that struggle had been the immense pressure that turned an ordinary piece of carbon into a diamond.

  “Aren’t you sorry you ever asked me?” There was a note of wry bitterness in her voice. She was trying to pull away, to diminish the weight of what she’d told him.

  “No.” He kept is voice soft, trying to stem her retreat.

  She looked up at him then, her black eyes locking on his. The flickering firelight played over the planes of her beautiful face, the reds and yellows catching in the glossy black hair she’d left loose around her shoulders.

  “I shouldn’t have told you all that,” she said. He had the feeling she was talking more to herself than she was to him. “If I catch even the barest hint of pity from you…”

  She trailed off, not finishing the threat.

  “Pity? Not likely,” he said. “I’m actually feeling pretty intimidated over here.”

  One skeptical eyebrow shot up. “Intimidated?”

  “You must be a warrior goddess to still be on your feet after all that.”

  She almost laughed at that, but stopped. Could she hear the respect in his voice? It was there. It took strength most people didn’t have to come back from something like that.

  “Not hardly. It wasn’t strength that kept me going,” she told him. “I think I went more than a little crazy after it all went down. It was some combination of insanity, self-destruction, and sheer stubbornness that got me here. By the time I came to my senses and really thought about what I was doing, I’d already been in Iraq for several weeks. To my messed up brain, living in a warzone was better than going back stateside because that world reminded me too much of what I’d lost.”

  It occurred to him that she’d probably never told anyone about what happened. They’d known each other three days and she’d bared that scar for him. The silence stretched between them, his chest rising and falling beneath her hand, but he wasn’t sure what to fill it with, what to do with what she’d shared. Her voice broke the silence first.

  “The blues,” she said.

  “Huh?” Theron wasn’t following the abrupt change in subject.

  “Yesterday, you made fun of my musical tastes. My iPod is not actually full of the ‘break music between NPR segments.’ I like the blues. The older the better. I really like the female artists from the thirties,” she said. “No one understands pain like a black woman living in 1930s America.”

  Theron laughed, making the muscles in his chest bunch beneath her hand. She smiled at him.

  “I also really like classic country. Willie Nelson. Johnny Cash. No one writes or sings sad songs like they do.”

  “I never pegged you for a country fan, Jiang.”

  “Yeah, not many Asian former-fashionistas from LA in the Willie Nelson fan club, so it’s an honest mistake.”

  She had managed to bleed the tension out of them both and he was glad for it.

  “Tell me a story,” she said softly.

  “What kind of story?”

  “Well, since I brought us down with my story, tell me a happy one.”

  He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, the motion shifting her closer to him.

  “Don’t have too many of those,” he said.

  “Come on, you must have one.”

  She glanced up at him. He wracked his memory, trying to fish something funny out of the muck of his life.

  “You’re a heck of an interviewer, princess.”

  “That’s why they pay me the mediocre bucks. Now, spill.”

  “So this one time…” he began.

  ***

  They’d been about twelve, little mages with shiny new powers. The instructors had wisely taken them to one of the training grounds far from the Academy. While the school was built deep within the Rocky Mountains and constructed to withstand the budding abilities of a bunch of teens who could move water and earth with their minds, it was standard operating procedure to take the kids out to the training grounds in the foothills until they had a basic handle on their abilities.

  The training ground had once been a cattle ranch, it’s former pastures in the rolling hills west of the mountains still marked with barbed wire fences. The old ranch house was the only structure on the property and the sole domain of the instructors. Cadets slept in tents. It was safer.

  “There was this one kid, Bren. He was an earth mage and cocky as hell. He was one of the first kids in the class to get his powers and one of the first to get a real handle on them. He used to levitate small stones and hit me in the back of the head with them.”

  “Sounds like a dick,” Jen said.

  “He kind of was back then,” Theron said, memories that he hadn’t dared to take out and examine in a long time flooding back to him now. “He thought he was hot shit and took every opportunity to pick on my best friend Jas and me.”

  The torture had gone on for weeks. Neither Theron or Jas were a match for Bren in the sparring ring. Jas, an air mage, had been able to muster stiff breezes and Theron had just about mastered lighting a candle with his mind and only occasionally set his tent on fire while trying. Bren, on the other hand, had been able to levitate rocks the size of his fist and shift patches of ground about two feet across just enough to send his opponents stumbling.

  “We couldn’t beat him head to head, so we plotted our revenge,” Theron said.

  The ranch house had always been a spooky place for them, and not just because that’s where their intimidating, hard-ass instructors roosted for the night. The place must have been about a hundred years old by that point, it’s weathered old boards looking like the scales on a diamondback rattlesnake. The place had never been wired for electricity and had no running water. At night, when the instructors put out their kerosene lanterns, the old house squatted among the trees like a goblin, watching, waiting.

  Beside the house was an old wooden grave marker with a single name carved into its cracked surface. Wallace. Every class of cadets that graduated from the training grounds made up scary stories to tell the incoming class about that grave. The most common one was that Old Man Wallace (no one knew his first name) had been a rancher a hundred years before and had lived in that house. Cattle rustlers (or bandits or bank robbers depending on the story) broke into the house one night and murdered Wallace. Someone, and the stories were never clear on exactly who, buried him beside his house, but his spirit was still around, restless.

  “The older kids told us that if anyone disturbed him, Old Man Wallace would rise up out of that grave and get us.”

  “And you believed them?”

  “We were twelve,” Theron said defensively. “And remember, some of our teachers were elves and fairies, so ghosts and zombies were not outside the realm of possibility to our imaginations.”

  “No self-respecting ghost would haunt its grave. That’s boring. Maybe the house. Spirits are drawn to people or to places they have an emotional connection with.” She could have been describing the weather, her voice matter-of-fact.

  Chance of rain, partly sunny, ghosts don’t hang out at graves. He almost laughed at the absurdity of the conversation.

  “Anyway, we were all convinced if anyone messed with that grave, the old man would crawl out of it, believed it deep down in our bones. So we dared Bren, being the cocky ass that he was, to piss on it.”

  A laugh burst out of Jen, startling them both. If sunlight had a sound, it would be that sound, Theron thought. It was only the second time he had heard her genuinely laugh
with something other than sarcasm or derision in her voice.

  He looked down at her to see her covering her mouth with her hand, her dark eyes wide. A slow smile spread across his face at the sight. She was magnificent. He realized he would do anything to hear that laugh again.

  Pushing that dangerous thought away, he continued the story.

  “One afternoon, Jas and I managed to sneak away from lessons. We dug a shallow hole next to the grave. We were very careful, mind you, not to disturb that grave.”

  They’d managed to put a plastic tarp over the hole and covered it with dirt and dead leaves. Jas had hidden beneath the tarp for hours in preparation for their ultimate revenge. Theron issued the dare around the dinner fire that night and Bren had no choice but to accept or risk looking weak in front of the other kids.

  “I caught just a flash of fear in his eyes, but he was able to hide it from everyone else.”

  As a group, the twenty or so cadets had followed, laughing, joking, and jeering all the way to the grave to make sure that Bren completed the dare.

  “So, there he is, midstream, and Jas reaches out from under that tarp and grabs his ankle. Bren jumped about six feet straight up in the air and hit the ground running when he came back down,” he said, unable to hold back his own laughter. “There was a barbed wire fence a few feet from the grave and Bren didn’t stop running until he was about a quarter mile away. We never did figure out how he didn’t cut himself to ribbons on that fence. He either jumped it or dove through it somehow because he didn’t have a scratch on him when someone finally caught up to him and told him to stop running.”

  Jen was vibrating with laughter, clutching her sides. And he loved it.

  “What happened?” She asked. “Did he try to kill you guys when he got back?”

  “He didn’t speak to us for a week, but after that we were good friends, him and Jas and me.”

  In his mind’s eye, he could see Bren’s smiling, young face. They’d been so stupid back then, with no idea what was coming at them.