Fire

by Angelina J. Steffort

  “Claire, move away from him,” he hissed, his cold tone meant for me, not for her.

  “He won’t hurt me,” she objected but did as he had instructed, clearly as fearful of the creature’s anger as I was. She didn’t release my gaze as she slid further down to the end of the bed, out of my reach—technically. In reality, it would cost me less than a fraction of a second to get to her.

  The others who had been observing our conversation radiated discomfort. All of them were more than just concerned about the girl, maybe even about me a little.

  “That’s enough for today,” my alleged father decided as if he wanted to protect both the girl and me.

  “It’s late at night. We all need some rest.” The guardian angel eyed the girl as he spoke.

  I didn’t move when the older one laid his hand on my shoulder again and gently pushed me back into the pillows. I was not ready to break free and leave. I wasn’t done with that family—my alleged family—and the strange conglomerate of emotions around me. Those were feelings none of the demons had ever shown toward me. Beyond the fear and the worries, all of them seemed to like me in a different way, even love me, if I could dare to name that emotion. Even the intimidating guardian angel seemed to see something within me worth keeping me alive, or he would have ended me the instant he’d had the chance. I was still wondering about why, despite the danger I was in, this little gathering was so intriguing to me, when my limbs got heavy and everything disappeared in a haze. Their voices were a distant hum, incomprehensible, when I finally drifted off to sleep.

  15

  Interconnected

  A whisper was the first thing I perceived. It was distant at first, like the hum that had accompanied me to sleep. Something soft touched my hand. Skin. Another hand. Then, before my inner eye, I saw her, as if she was right there with me.

  “You have no idea how much I have missed you these past months,” her voice came through the haze.

  I tried to lift my eyelids, but they were still too heavy. Unlike the first time, there was nothing I wanted more than to continue the conversation with the strange collective of angels and human.

  Her eyes mirrored pain as she stared at me from behind the haze. Something was going on with her, was I hurting her? I was unconscious, wasn’t I? Was this a dream? Or was she really there, holding my hand? Was she that fearless? Brave?

  There was a wave of heat running through my body. Not the pleasurable heat of desire or the wave of energy after feeding. It was a sensation I had never felt before. Right there in my chest, something seemed to burn, warming my cold, demon heart.

  I was so focused on the spot, that the touch of her lips on my forehead came as a surprise, and I jerked upright, still fighting to open my eyes, and ripping the ropes on my wrists and ankles as I prepared to defend myself. She was really there, shrinking away from me as my hands grabbed her shoulders. I hadn’t decided if I wanted to talk to her, or end her…or make her repeat that touch to my skin. When my eyes finally opened, she was staring at me, wide-eyed, and looking exactly as she had in my mind.

  Before I got the chance to decide what it was that I wanted, the guardian angel attacked me from the side, but I was alert, ready. He didn’t even need to pull my hand off the girl, it was there, waiting to strike when he reached me. He dropped to the floor at the impact and remained still.

  The girl tried to comprehend what had happened. Of course, our movements had been too fast for her weak, human eyes. I glanced around, readying myself for the other angels to come at me, but there was no one else in the room but us. The girl and I, and the unconscious guardian angel.

  “Is he dead?” she finally asked when she found the angel beside the bed.

  Wasn’t she a bright soul? Deliciously shining right at me. How easy it would be to feed…just a little… Her eyes tried to read me, making me self-conscious in my hunger.

  “Just knocked out,” I hid my struggle behind a voice I hoped to sound confident.

  There was recognition in her gaze. She knew exactly what was going through my mind. The hunger…the uncontrollable ache for energy…the hollow feeling in my stomach… If I could only try a little taste of it and then let go. I didn’t need to kill her….

  She didn’t flinch away from my murderous gaze this time. Her arms didn’t struggle in my grasp. Somehow she stepped closer, ignoring the demon I was, surprising me again with a touch of her hands as she laid them on my chest. Her fingers curled as if she was going to pull my own soul out of my chest… just my chest was a dark hole, void of any light anyone could pull. Her eyes lit up with excitement, almost as if she was preparing to feed…

  Scared by the unpredictability of our touch, I yanked her hands away from me. She was human, wasn’t she? How could she act as if she needed to feed? She had practically just mirrored my own desire for her soul.

  “Who are you?” I wondered aloud, not at all ready for an answer. Whatever it was Volpert had said about the girl, that she was dangerous, that she would try to manipulate me…it all came back to my mind now.

  “Claire,” she said.

  She looked as innocent as she sounded, with her beige blouse, her cascades of sand-colored hair, all bundled up behind her neck, a somewhat smile—subconscious but still a smile—on her lips. But she was nervous. The longer I kept staring at her, the longer we were alone, the stronger the emotion hit me from her direction.

  “I know that. Everybody keeps telling me, you are Claire—” One strand of hair had escaped her hair-do, caught on one of the purple buttons along her sternum. It was distracting me so much that I couldn’t help but reach out and put it back where it belonged. She didn’t flinch or shrink away this time. It was as if we were caught in a timeless moment, just gazing into each other’s eyes. It was almost too easy to forget we were fighting on opposite sides of this eternal war. “—but who is this Claire?” I finished my thought, unable to remember why again there were opposite sides at all. If it wasn’t for Volpert and the others, there would be no need to even think of us as enemies… “Why do they want you dead? What did you do to upset them?” Maybe there was a resolution of some sort. Wasn’t there something called diplomacy? Maybe we could figure out something to appease Volpert and I wouldn’t need to eventually kill her.

  “You won’t believe me if I tell you.”

  “I have no memories of my past, Claire.” And then, she wasn’t just part of my past it seemed. She was part of my present, appearing in my visions, in my sleep. “But your face has been haunting my dreams.” It was all I could say to help her understand how much I needed to comprehend what was going on. Maybe it would make sense to her.

  Apparently, it did. To some degree at least, because she froze as if I had triggered a memory of her own.

  “You keep showing up and my dark dreams become bright and colorful. It’s like you own the key to a different me. Someone I might have been, but cannot find inside myself anymore.” Her eyes glistened as I spoke. Was there a tear caught on her lashes? “Help me figure out who I am by telling me who you are,” one last time I tried to get her to tell me. This time, I pleaded. Maybe a plea would work better than a demand.

  She sat and stared and pursed her lips, probably a million thoughts behind those blue eyes, and showed no sign of having heard me. There was doubt in her, struggle, for whatever reason.

  “Adam, it is not important who I am,” she eventually said. “What is important, is who you were.”

  She took a deep breath, pulling up all the courage from the depth of her human heart, and let her facade slip. And there I caught a glimpse of what she looked like when all the fear, the worry, the panic, and doubts were gone. She was beautiful.

  “Adam, you were born a hybrid,” she explained. Not that it made any sense to me. “One of your parents was part-angel, the other one part-demon.”

  Now it was my eyes that widened. Hybrid. Part-angel, part-demon.

  “Not too long ago, you were hit in a fight and part of your hybrid-being died. T
hat’s when you lost your memory. And when you lost your memory of your angel-past, you lost all memory of me.”

  Surprisingly, what she said made sense. It explained why I had dug myself out of my own grave, why I had no memory. If the part that had died had all my memories of her…

  “I was part of that angel-past.” She paused for a second, holding back some emotion. “I used to be an important part of your life.”

  The way she said it made me feel uncomfortable. Why couldn’t she just tell me? What was so hard about it?

  “How important?” My words came out a bit harsher than intended.

  “Very important.”

  “Most important,” I assumed by the look in her eyes.

  She gave me a smile, not that subconscious crooked line, but a real smile, meant for me. My cold, demon heart echoed with the sensation of seeing her like that. How again was it possible she was the enemy? I had to make sure my recent memories didn’t fall victim to our attempt to bring back my premortem-self. I ran my hand through my hair, just to have something to do while I was thinking. I wondered if she was aware why Volpert and the others were after her.

  “Why do they want to take revenge on you?”

  It seemed she did as her smile disappeared, leaving me wanting to bring it back onto her face somehow. But I knew the topic demanded my full attention. No slips, no making the human feel comfortable with the demon. Me being nice, sociable, was a facade. We both knew it and it was only a matter of time…

  “I got away twice. The first time I got away, another demon was killed.”

  “You killed him?”

  “No,” she laughed at my reaction. “I am not that strong. I was being held and tortured to get to you. Someone else made sure I got out safely and disposed of Alabaster on our way out.”

  Tortured? The way Blackbird and I had? I shuddered. Did this girl truly deserve torture? And I had been the reason they had taken her to begin with. What had I done? For the first time in my demon existence, I felt guilt. Not just a bit sorry for what had happened, but raw guilt.

  “The second time?” I buried the emotion under curiosity, trying to get the full story before I gave in to the burning in my conscience.

  “You stepped in before they could kill me.”

  I had? They had said I’d died protecting her.

  “I wish it had been me.”

  I couldn’t deal with her conscience right now. She had just said I had stepped in before demons had been able to kill her.

  “That’s how that other part of me died?” I concluded. Killed by demons. I had been killed by my own kind.

  She nodded, caught in a memory that seemed to keep haunting her. From this day on it would haunt me as well. A new feeling, I had experienced only through others so far, made its way into my chest. Betrayal. They had told me she was responsible for my death, that I had to be the one to kill her after what her family had done to Volpert’s. That I deserved to end her. I had seen it as a reward. And now I’d just learned that this ‘enemy’ of ours, I had died protecting her—from them, my own clan.

  My former self had found her worthy of my protection, worthy to give my own life for her. And from the way she was looking at me, it appeared she would have done the same.

  This time, I couldn’t hold back my hand when it reached out to touch her arm. It was almost as if I needed physical proof that we were really having this conversation, that I wasn’t hallucinating, making this up to justify it had been okay that I had failed Volpert.

  “You would have given your life for me?” I verified.

  Again, she nodded, and the tear detached from her lashes and dripped onto my shirt.

  “Who are you, Claire?” One more time, I asked, hoping that this time she was ready to tell me the truth.

  “I was your soulmate.”

  The moment she mentioned the word ‘soul’, hunger flared inside my stomach, and all I could see was her bright shining light, becoming clearer by the second. My self-control was slipping, little by little, until I was almost ready to feed on her, but I couldn’t. Not now after everything I had learned. And there was so much more I needed to ask her. But not today. Right now I needed to get out of there before I could do something I would regret. I needed to clear my mind, understand all the connections in this puzzle…

  The guardian angel stirred. There was no time left, I had to go. Now.

  “Goodbye, Claire.”

  The clearing was my refuge, at least for now. There was no sign of Maureen when I returned to the tree trunk and let myself fall to the ground. What had just happened?

  The cold night air was a welcome change to thick layers of emotion in the bedroom—my alleged bedroom. It was still hard to comprehend this might be the truth. Those winged creatures might be my family. The more I thought about it, the more schizophrenic I felt. If the girl wasn’t lying, then I had to entertain the thought that there was more to my past than just the darkness of the demon caves. If it was true, I’d had wings myself. My hand reached over my shoulder, slid under my shirt, fingers searching for any sign of scars. My shoulder blades were smooth as always, no sign of former attachments.

  Something rolled over in my stomach, a twist of how I felt about all of this. Where at first I had felt reluctant to even consider the possibility, now there was a yearning for it to be true. After all, those angels, scary as they may be, were beautiful. Their lights were unlike any dull, human flicker I’d ever devoured. Had I once been a light like that, self-sufficient, independent of others’ energy? It almost sounded like a dream.

  A rustling in the trees made me jerk around. There was a deer staring back at me from between the firs. She didn’t look scared, just curious. Her dim light was even lower than the dog’s, probably not even worth the effort.

  “Hello,” I addressed her instead of attacking. She stood frozen at the sound of my voice, but she didn’t run.

  “You are a pretty one, aren’t you?”

  Her ears twitched as if she was confirming she’d heard me.

  “And a brave one.”

  She didn’t move as I advanced toward her, slow for even human eyes. The same as the girl had simply waited for me to take action, the doe remained still, as if she was planning her own thing.

  “Aren’t you scared of me at all?”

  Another twitch of ears.

  “You know I could crush you and you wouldn’t even realize what’s happening to you.”

  She blinked.

  “Are you that reckless? That naive? Don’t you have any sense of self-preservation at all?”

  As I kept talking to the doe, I realized those were questions I should be asking the girl, not the animal.

  “Why aren’t you running?”

  “Because she can’t.”

  The doe dropped to the ground and Maureen stepped out of the trees.

  “Not a human, let alone angel, but better than nothing…”

  For a moment, I tensed to run, but she broke into a smile. There was no murderous emotion coming from her. With a painful pinch in my guts, I remembered that my own kind had ended me before. Had she been part of the plan?

  “I see you got away in one piece,” she noticed, relief on her face.

  “You knew they had me?” I asked, assuming she would understand what I meant if she actually knew what had happened.

  She nodded and lifted one eyebrow. “Actually, I am surprised they let you go.”

  I chuckled. “They didn’t.”

  “Are you serious? How did you ditch four angels and one annoyingly-observant little human?”

  Her eyes popped as she spoke, impressed by my escape.

  “I didn’t.” Again I had to disappoint her imagination. “There was just one angel present when I escaped and I didn’t defeat him, I simply teleported out when he attacked me.”

  It sounded cowardly. Was that what I was? A coward? Not according to the girl’s story. I was a hero in her perspective, having given my own life in order to save hers. What h
ad she said? She had been my soulmate? Was that why she kept appearing in my dreams, my visions?

  “Maureen, can I ask you something?”

  She nodded again and settled down on a stone, playing with her hair absently, as if trying to fill in the blanks.

  “You knew me before I died. Was that before or after I became an angel?”

  Again her eyes widened.

  “You remember?”

  “I wouldn’t ask you if I did.”

  We both grinned.

  “They told me—” Well, the guardian angel had told me before, but I hadn’t actually believed it until the girl had told me how I had died. “—convinced me,” I corrected.

  “Was it Volpert who killed me?”

  “What?” she coughed, surprised by my knowledge of what had happened. “No. Even though he was definitely there. He never does the dirty work himself.”

  If it hadn’t been him… “Did you—?”

  “No!” She cut me off before I could even finish the thought.

  “Then who killed me?” I asked and sat down beside her. “I know it was one of our own.”

  She remained silent for a long time, just watching the twigs move in the cold breeze, pondering whether or not to answer my question.

  “Blackbird,” she confirmed that it truly had been my own clan that had killed me.

  Pain welled up inside my chest, a flash, strong and sharp as if being hit by lightning. A glimpse of a scene played in my mind, Claire’s face, shocked and terrified, frozen, half hidden behind a red, iron door, the loss of ground under my feet. And then darkness. It wasn’t a vision this time. It was a memory. I actually remembered something. Even if it was just a fraction of a second, it was a fraction of my past.