Fire Sacrifice

by David J Normoyle

  “For giving me this body? You’ve just been waiting to hold that over my head, haven’t you?”

  “No, I haven’t,” Persia said. “I did it because I thought it best for Noah. And perhaps because Rune asked me to. And because I thought it was the best move in the war against Beacon. But you didn’t deserve it; you don’t deserve to be walking around with Noah’s legs, eating and drinking with Noah’s mouth, thinking with Noah’s brain. You never offered thanks, and I never asked for anything for what I did. Until now. You owe me, and, what’s more, you owe Noah.”

  “You can’t take back what you did,” Jeroah said. “You can’t force me to do what you want, to do what Noah would have wanted.”

  “I can’t,” Persia admitted.

  “You can’t.”

  “I can’t,” Persia repeated, holding Jeroah’s gaze with her own. Though she was practically half his height, the intensity of her gaze meant that her presence overshadowed Jeroah’s.”

  Jeroah blinked first. “I don’t have to. This once, though, I will,” he said.

  Persia nodded. “Good.”

  “Is that all?” Jeroah asked. “Good?”

  “Yes. What do you want, a cookie?”

  “A little appreciation, maybe. Is it too much to ask that you and his lordship”—he gestured at me—“don’t look at me like I’m garbage for every second of the day?”

  “Let’s see what you do first.” Persia stepped away from him to address the room. “We are agreed then. Rune, Jeroah and I will join up with Harriet Ashley in the morning. Jo and Alex will coordinate from here.”

  “Shouldn’t we know more about Harriet’s plan before we jump in feet first?” Jo asked.

  “You are the one who brought Ashley down upon us,” Jeroah. “Now that we are agreed, you pull this reverse.”

  “It’s not a reverse,” Jo said. “I just don’t like going anywhere blind.”

  “Whatever her plan, it’s better than ours,” Persia said. “We can adapt as we go.”

  “So our plan is no plan?” Jeroah went through the connecting door and slammed it shut behind him. “Wonderful!” he shouted. “What idiocy possessed me to agree to go with you?”

  Chapter 20

  Wednesday 06:30

  The next morning, I was lying awake staring up at the darkened ceiling when Persia’s alarm clock went off. I had slept little, my night full of waking dreams in which I was forced to stand defenseless while fireballs flew at me from hidden attackers who had me surrounded. The images from the nightmares faded faster than the feelings of terror and powerlessness.

  Persia switched off the alarm and turned on the light, and Persia, Jeroah, and I dressed in silence. The tension between us hung heavy in the air, and I was glad when Jo opened a door and summoned me outside with a twist of her head. I had dressed but hadn’t yet put on my shoes and socks, so the tiles in the corridor felt icy against my bare feet.

  “I wanted to go over comms.” Jo held up an earpiece-and-microphone combo. “I have one for each of the three of you all connected up with my computer. Now, you’ll have to tell me the plan as soon as Harriet lets you in on it. Once I know that, I can research floorplans; additionally, I’ll check the police frequencies, keep an eye on news reports, and see what else the internet can help us with.”

  She offered it to me, but I didn’t take it. “Jo, what are we doing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “These heist-like plans made sense when I had my power. Now…” I shrugged.

  “It’s the same. We don’t have any magic; they don’t have any magic.”

  “Beacon.” He was the proof that magic still existed even if all the sorcerers, shadiers, sentinels, and shifters in the world no longer wielded any.

  “Believe it or not, I’m glad Beacon still has power.”

  “Because of Alex?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Because of Alex.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “You see him. You know. Day by day, he continues to deteriorate. I don’t know how long he can keep going like this.” She lowered her face into her left hand.

  I stepped forward and gripped her shoulder. “What about surgery?” I asked. “Non-magical. Maybe Harriet Ashley has contacts with heart surgeons.”

  “It’s deeply embedded inside in the heart wall, but it’s my belief, and Alex’s too, that the connection between Alex’s body and the crystal isn’t just physical. Are we going to find a surgeon with experience in extracting magically-infused crystals?”

  “If this mission succeeds, and we kill Beacon, what then?” I asked. “Wait. You didn’t try to get us on this mission so we’d prevent Beacon from being killed?”

  “No, of course not.” Jo shook her head. “Nothing like that. But if there’s a chance of taking Beacon prisoner instead of killing him, maybe you’ll remember Alex.”

  I grimaced. Given Beacon’s ability—the power to persuade, to change enemies into followers—any plan that involved capturing Beacon was a surefire loser. “Beacon’s power is different than before though. Maybe it’s nothing to do with Brimstone. Maybe even if we knew his secret it wouldn’t help Alex.”

  Jo frowned. “All my experiments show that the connection between Brimstone and Earth has been permanently broken, but we know of no other sources of magic.”

  I sighed. “I wonder how he’s doing it. I know Beacon is a great planner and also resourceful, so he may have prepared for the eventuality of the connection between Earth and Brimstone. He may even have—No.” I shook my head. It had occurred to me that Beacon had planned all this, but that didn’t make any sense. It was true, though, that a leader using the subtle power of magical persuasion fit his style more than the grotesque power-hungry creature of fire than had been born in City Hall.

  “We’ll figure it out.” Jo smiled at me. “We always do, right?”

  I nodded. “I guess so.”

  “I’ll give the other two their comms devices.” She opened the door to her and Alex’s room. “While I do, go in and talk to Alex.”

  I hesitated. “I don’t want to disturb him so early.”

  “Alex rarely sleeps anymore. Go in.” Jo stared me down until I walked in. “Also, find time to talk to Persia.”

  I swiveled back toward her. “What does that mean? We’ve been living in the same room for three weeks. Plenty of time to talk.”

  “And yet?”

  “We talk.”

  “You may be fooling yourself, but you’re fooling no one else.” She shut the door behind me.

  Alex lay unmoving on the bed, facing away from me. His body was so still that, for a moment, I feared he was dead. Then he turned his head sharply toward me, and I hopped back a step.

  “You look like you saw a ghost,” Alex said.

  “Just you.” Alex’s face was pale and cadaverous, his skin wrinkled up like a bleached prune. It was hard to believe he was still a teenager.

  “Indeed.” Alex nodded. “I am well on my way to ghosthood. Practically there.”

  “I hope it’s not me you intend to haunt.”

  “You’ve enough things haunting you, is that it?”

  I shrugged.

  A silence stretched out between us.

  “I never thanked you,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “The house at Ten-two Fenster Street was a total dive, but it was also a home. You made it into a home for Jo and me.”

  “I had no choice. After what I did to you two.” My mind went back to that night long ago when I had gotten into a fight with a wolf shifter on the grounds of Collier mansion, where my powers had first revealed themselves causing a fire that had killed Jo and Alex’s parents. My life had spiraled downhill from there.

  “Of course you had a choice,” Alex said. “And you chose the toughest path when you took on the responsibility of two orphans, and you not much older than us at the time. And I know I didn’t make it easy on you. I was an awful shit to you for much of the time we lived together.”<
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  I shook my head. “No, you weren’t.”

  “I was. The benefit of being sick is I’ve had plenty of time to lie here and think back on my life. Time to regret all the crappy decisions I made. I don’t know how Jo has put up with me all this time.”

  “She loves you.”

  “Even with love, there are limits to what should be put up with. Or there should be,” Alex said. “I’m been lucky with those who have chosen to love me. You’ve had my back from the moment we first met, and I want to make sure you to know that I’m grateful.”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “We’re family, you, Jo, and I. That means we help each other without obligation. I better go. Persia and Jeroah are waiting for me.”

  “Rune, I’m not ready to die.” Tears welled up in his eyes.

  “There’s no need for any dying talk,” I said. “I haven’t given up on you, and more importantly, neither has Jo, and she never fails once she sets her mind on something. Be strong.”

  I snapped the door shut; I probably should have returned to comfort Alex, but I didn’t know what to say. Because, in the moment he said that he was ready to die, all I could think about was that I was ready. What a thing to think and a time to think it. Alex needed comfort, we were about to try and save the world, and the thought that shone brightest in my mind was that I was ready to die.

  Chapter 21

  Wednesday 07:55

  Jeroah was driving the station wagon, and none of the three of us had said much over the course of the journey. It was approaching what should have been rush hour morning traffic, but the city was only beginning to stir. The supernatural war that had raged through the streets of Lusteer wasn’t long over, and people still didn’t quite trust the peace. Beacon claimed that the mayoral elections, due to take part in a week’s time, would herald the return of normality for the city. Polls indicated that Beacon would win Lusteer’s mayorship in a landslide—though his focus on nationwide media indicated that one city wouldn’t contain his ambitions for long. What use was democracy when one person had the power to magically persuade everyone who heard him speak?

  The address Harriet Ashley had given us proved to be a locked-up warehouse on the outskirts of the city. The whole area was dead quiet, and, for a brief moment, I wondered if the location we’d been given was fake, and that Harriet had wanted to sidetrack us. But that didn’t make any sense. What could Harriet have been trying to deflect us from—hiding in our hotel room?

  “Jo, we’ve arrived,” I announced. “Any updates?”

  “There’s little activity on any emergency channels.” Jo voice crackled through the earpiece. “No one seems to be expecting anything unusual. The property you are on is owned by a shell company; I haven’t been able to establish who owns the shell company.”

  “It hardly matters,” Jeroah said. “Let’s go.”

  We all got out of the station wagon, and Jeroah led us to a side door. Before he even had a chance to knock, the door was pulled open by a burly man in military fatigues. Like us, he wore an earpiece and mouthpiece combo, though his electronics looked a bit sleeker and more professional. He gave a nod, and Persia took that as an invitation to enter. However, when she tried to get past, he blocked her path and shouted out a word in a language I didn’t understand. Spanish? French?

  “I’m Persia, this is Jeroah and Rune,” Persia said, gesturing toward each of us in turn. “Harriet Ashley invited us.”

  From the look on the man’s face, he didn’t have much English. However, he included our names, though mangled by his pronunciation, when he next spoke into his mouthpiece. I gave Persia a quizzical look.

  “He’s speaking Portuguese,” she whispered.

  Harriet Ashley used to travel to Rio de Janeiro, so it made sense that she’d have resources in that part of the world. Perhaps, after the long war in Lusteer, Harriet had lost most of the fighting men that she could call on from this part of the world.

  After the soldier had finished speaking, he paused, listening to a reply from the other end, then opened the door wider for us. When Persia moved to go past him, however, he held out his arm to block her once more. He pointed at Persia’s earpiece and shook his head.

  “We have a friend who is helping coordinate,” Persia explained. “Harriet Ashley knows and trusts her.”

  The soldier simply grabbed the comms device, ripped it off her, dropped it on the ground, and stamped on it.

  “Hey!” Jeroah protested. “What do you think you are doing?” The soldier yanked Jeroah’s comms device off him, and he stamped on that too.

  “Listen, Jo, we’re going to have to go off—”

  That was all I managed to say before my comm device was also taken and destroyed. The soldier pointed down a corridor behind us.

  “You can’t just destroy our property,” Persia said. “You can’t treat us like that.”

  He shut the door behind us, put his back to us and, with a scowl, gestured once more down the short corridor.

  “Let’s just go,” I said. “No point in arguing when we speak different languages.”

  “Speaking different languages is the basis of most arguments,” Persia said. She caught the soldier’s gaze and pointed down at the destroyed electronics. “Not okay,” she said with an angry shake of her head.

  She didn’t press further though, and we left the soldier behind, following a short corridor out into a well-lit open space. Several black vans were lined up alongside tables overflowing with military weapons. Dozens of armed soldiers, most with dark hair and tanned faces, were purposefully equipping themselves. All the talk was in a language I couldn’t understand, though with the same lyrical inflections as the soldier guarding the door. Were they all Brazilians? I wondered. By the far wall, several large tents were being taken down—from the look of things, these soldiers had been here for several days at least, and they were moving out today.

  We didn’t get as far as the vans before we were intercepted by another soldier. This one had three stripes on his sleeve, indicating that he was a sergeant. He guided us toward a table where three machine guns were lined up.

  “AK47,” the sergeant said in heavily accented English.

  “We’re just supposed to take them?” Persia said. “How do you know we even know how to use them?”

  “AK47,” the sergeant repeated. Beyond, on other tables, various weapons and ammunition were being handed out, mostly machine guns with spare clips like the ones in front of us, but some rocket launchers and flamethrowers too. A large box of grenades was being quickly emptied as soldiers clipped them to their belts.

  I raised my damaged hand, then showed the sergeant my attempt to grip the butt of the machine gun with it. He frowned, then drew a handgun from his holster and placed it down on the table. He added two spare clips, then he took away one of the AK47s and left us.

  The handgun had a wooden grip. With my left hand, I reached down and picked it up. The weight felt all wrong. Still, it was something I could wield with one hand, so I checked the safety, then put it in the left pocket of my jacket. I took the two spare clips and put them in my right jacket pocket.

  “They’re handing out guns like candy at a pedophile convention,” Jeroah said, picking up one of the AK47s. “I wonder if they’d mind me taking a fistful of grenades.”

  “What do you know about grenades?” Persia asked.

  “I’ve played first-person shooters,” Jeroah said.

  Persia picked up the remaining AK47. “I’ll feel lucky if I don’t die via friendly fire before the fight begins.” She threw a sideways look Jeroah’s way. “Though friendly might be overstating things.”

  I spotted Harriet Ashley emerging from one of the tents, making her way rapidly toward the vans, one of her men in tow. I pointed her out to the others. “Why would she bring us here only to ignore us once we arrived?”

  “Hey, Harriet, over here!” Persia shouted.

  The woman didn’t slow. She either didn’t hear or pretended not to.<
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  “Harriet, we need to talk!” Persia shouted again, this time loud enough that a moment of stillness came over the soldiers as everyone paused what they were doing to look across at us.

  Harriet Ashley halted mid-stride. “I don’t have time!” she shouted back. “What do you want?”

  “You have to tell us what the hell is going on.”

  Everyone was now watching Persia and Harriet, looking from one to the other like they were watching a tennis match. Ashley said something in Portuguese to those watching, giving a rapid clap to punctuate her words, and the soldiers resumed their preparations. She then spoke to the man beside her—who hurried off—before approaching us. “What the hell I’m doing, you ask? Is it not obvious?”

  “Launching an attack with soldiers who don’t speak English so they won’t be drawn under Beacon’s spell,” Persia suggested.

  “Exactly,” Ashley said.

  “What are we for?”

  “Plan B, I guess.”

  “You guess? You were the one who came for us,” Jeroah said. “Our comm units were destroyed at the door, and we haven’t been given replacements. We have no idea what the plan is.”

  “The plan is to attack the Liberty News Network Building in force,” Ashley said. “Beacon has made his headquarters there, and he rarely leaves. The security on site is limited. One sudden sharp strike,”—she chopped her right hand against her left—“and we can end Brimstone influence on Earth affairs forever. We’re leaving in the next few minutes, which is why I shouldn’t be wasting time with you. As for comms, we are going in with several small teams each with their own secure comms network. The last thing I want is for Beacon to be able to communicate with the whole team through a single device.”

  I nodded. That made sense. Beacon’s strength was his ability to persuade those who heard him, and several comms networks prevented Beacon from co-opting Harriet’s entire team simply by capturing a single comms device.

  “And us?” Persia asked.

  “Joining us at this late stage, it’s best that you three don’t have any remote comms. Maybe try to stay together.” Harriet slapped Persia on the arm. “Now, I’ve got to go. Good luck.”