Kiss of Fire

by Deborah Cooke

  He spared a glance up and down the arcade, well aware that Sara was watching him. People wandered its length, considering the merchandise in the shop windows and appearing harmless. He couldn’t smell any other Pyr. He met Sara’s gaze, not troubling to hide his concern. “You know where to find me.”

  “Will you hear me if I scream?” she said, teasing him slightly.

  “I’ll hear you decide to scream,” he said with conviction and saw her surprise. “I just hope that’s good enough.”

  She didn’t flinch, though, and didn’t recant. Sara just nodded, then shut the door firmly. Quinn smiled in relief when he heard her turn the lock. She flipped the sign to read OUT FOR LUNCH, then pulled down the blinds.

  It was a start. Quinn summoned his will and breathed a trail of smoke. He couldn’t protect Sara’s person with his smoke but he could mark a location as being his territory. Her shop would be his territory, just as her home was.

  That would protect Sara, so long as she remained within the store. He walked back to his booth, focusing his effort on his task. Quinn breathed smoke and wove a protective cocoon around The Scrying Glass, hoping that what he could do would be enough.

  He had his doubts.

  Sara leaned against the locked door of The Scrying Glass and heaved a sigh. She didn’t like Sigmund Guthrie’s book and didn’t want to read any more of it, despite Erik’s advice. It was a vicious and bloodthirsty volume, the author a bit too interested in carnage and cruelty to make it an enjoyable read.

  Sara felt a headache dawning and wondered whether low blood sugar was the real culprit. Maybe she had been hallucinating when Quinn turned into a dragon.

  And when the mermaid gleamed.

  And when his nail changed to a talon.

  Or maybe it was all true.

  There was something a bit too appealing about the idea of a mating sign with Quinn Tyrrell. He was incredibly sexy and she liked being in his company. She liked his sense of humor and how easy it was to talk to him. He made her feel feminine and precious, which wasn’t all bad.

  But casual sex was not her thing, even dressed up with talk of destiny. Sara had made the mistake of confusing the patter with the truth once before and she wasn’t going to do that again. And counting on other people, well, that always led to a letdown. She could count on other team members professionally, but emotional reliance was another thing altogether.

  She had only to look at the last year of her life to see the truth of that. It would have been easier to face her parents’ accidental death followed by that of Aunt Magda if Tom hadn’t chosen to bolt from her life at the same time.

  The only good thing was that she hadn’t married him. The break had been quick and clean: he’d been there one Sunday when she flew out and vanished from her apartment and her life as surely as if she’d never known him by the time she returned on the subsequent Friday.

  If wanting more from a man than one night of sex made her an idealist and a romantic, well, Sara could live with that. She wanted a long-term partnership, a commitment that continued after a weekend of sex, and she wanted it enough to wait for it.

  She would not think about Quinn and chocolate.

  Not now.

  Besides, she couldn’t be Quinn’s destined mate since she wasn’t a seer. That was that, and it was nonnegotiable, even if it did leave her feeling a bit down.

  What she needed on a more immediate basis was lunch. Sara headed to the back room and the small fridge where she’d put her sandwich earlier that morning. At least the fridge was still working—the shop was as hot as a furnace.

  Again. Four service calls and four miraculous self-cures. Sara knew the repairman had just parked his truck on Maynard Street when the unit recovered.

  Even though that made no damn sense.

  But then, nothing else did on this day.

  Once in the back room, Sara glared at the control for the air-conditioning unit.

  This had no discernible effect on its operation.

  The unit itself was on the roof of the building. There was a control in the back of the shop, with a thermostat, and a fan housed in the ceiling. There must have been ductwork above the plaster, because there were several vents in the ceiling of the shop. Sara thought they looked ugly in the beautiful plaster, but she’d finally appreciated them when the weather turned hot.

  At least when the air conditioner had worked. There was also a hot air intake at the back of one side wall, which was no less ugly, but it was less visible due to the shelves of books.

  The repair guy from Malone’s had put a sticker with their phone number on the thermostat. As if Sara would call them again, when they hadn’t been able to fix the unit before.

  The strange thing was that this back room was much colder than the shop. Sara assumed that was because it was farther from the windows and door that would be letting the heat in, but she shivered all the same.

  She poked at the thermostat, having no idea what she was doing but needing to do something. She set the temperature lower, hoping the unit would begin a cycle.

  It sputtered, momentarily inspired, and fell silent again.

  Sara pushed the needle below fifty degrees in her frustration. There was a brief rumble overhead, then nothing.

  “Stupid thing,” she muttered. “It’s not that cold even in this room.” She shoved the indicator down to thirty degrees.

  The fan whirred for a moment, then something rattled all the way across the ceiling of the shop, as if a bolt were being tossed across the length of the ductwork. It pinged on the far side and the fan slowed to silence.

  “I’m not calling for service again!” Sara told the thermostat and gave it a smack with her hand. Of all the irrational things that had happened, this was the worst. An air-conditioning unit was mechanical, a machine, that should work or not work according to perfect logic.

  Sara thought about a sexy man who remained sexy even when he changed into dragon and back, the chance that she had a stalker who wanted to kill her, the fact that everyone she’d loved was dead, how hungry and hot she was, and smacked the control again in frustration.

  The thermostat cover popped off.

  It fell to the floor and Sara swore. She used every one of the words she’d learned as an army brat, stringing them all together into one long cuss.

  It was a very satisfying monologue.

  And it changed nothing.

  So, she scrambled after the thermostat cover, which had disappeared under an ancient chair of Magda’s. It was the one Sara had been meaning to donate to Goodwill to make more space, but she hadn’t yet figured out how to get it there without a car. She stretched to reach underneath it and her fingers brushed against an army of dust bunnies as well as the thermostat cover.

  They also touched velvet.

  Velvet?

  Sara got down on her hands and knees to peer under the chair. There was a little bit of velvet tumbled against the wall, as if it had fallen from the chair.

  Well, that wasn’t implausible. There was so much stuff stacked in this tiny room that anything could fall and not be found again. And she’d even ditched a bunch of it. Sara reached in and grabbed both the thermostat cover and the velvet.

  It proved to be a small drawstring bag, of the softest and reddest velvet Sara had ever seen. It was heavier than she’d expected and Sara opened the drawstring.

  There was a deck of dog-eared tarot cards inside.

  Sara stood up in a hurry. Were these Magda’s cards? She’d been wondering what had happened to them, but had assumed she’d inadvertently pitched them in her cleaning of house and shop.

  Had Magda ensured that Sara got these?

  The air conditioner whirred to life, as if agreeing with that whimsical thought.

  Again.

  “Don’t mess with my mind like that,” Sara said crossly and the unit fell silent again.

  Coincidence. Sara was sure of it. There must be faulty wiring at root and the last thing she needed was a fire. She c
licked the cover back onto the thermostat, then opened the electrical box. She flicked the circuit breaker for the air conditioner, cutting the power to it until she got it serviced again.

  She returned to the cash desk, only realizing when she got there that she still held the velvet bag of tarot cards. She looked around, checking for witnesses, then surrendered to impulse.

  What was the worst thing that could happen?

  Sara drew a card.

  It was called “The Lovers” and it was faceup in Sara’s hand.

  She had a pretty good idea that she knew what that meant, but she grabbed a book on tarot cards from the appropriate section and looked it up, just to be sure.

  “A destined lover appears in your life,” she read. She ate her sandwich without tasting it, maybe because she was thinking more about chocolate than tuna salad. “A romantic relationship comes to physical union.” She closed the book and stared at the cards. “That was a fluke,” she told them and drew another.

  It was the same card, in the same orientation.

  After she drew the card six times, Sara had an idea. Maybe it was a whole deck of the same card. She flipped the deck over and spread it across the counter. She checked it carefully, but there was only one card called “The Lovers.”

  She took a deep breath, shuffled, and drew another card.

  “The Lovers.”

  “All right!” she said to the store. “All right, Magda. I give up! What if I admit that there’s something to all of this weird stuff?”

  The air conditioner whirred to life and ran with quiet efficiency.

  But that was impossible! Sara ran to the back room and confirmed that there was no electricity running to the unit. The circuit breaker was just as she had left it, but the unit was running more smoothly than it ever had.

  So, it was an air-conditioning unit that didn’t actually need electricity. On this particular day, that actually seemed reasonable.

  Plus, it was as green a solution to summer heat as Sara could imagine. If she could somehow distribute ghosts to every household in America, so that appliances ran without requiring electricity or creating emissions, she could save the planet for everyone.

  Now she did sound crazy.

  Sara leaned her forehead against the wall. “If you can fix it so I don’t get an electrical bill for this, that would really convince me,” she whispered.

  The air conditioner kicked up to a higher power.

  Sara remembered that she had turned the thermostat really low. She adjusted it to a moderate temperature and the unit purred happily.

  Just when it seemed that things couldn’t get weirder, the book fell.

  Sara pivoted slowly, the hair rising on the back of her neck. There was no one in the shop but her. She knew it. She’d locked the door.

  But there was a book on the floor in the aisle that led from the cash desk to the back room. It was bound in red linen.

  Sara left the back room with a certain caution. She looked into the back corners of the store, then down the adjacent aisles. “Hello?” she called, feeling stupid when no one answered her.

  She was alone. Of course. She eased toward the book, looked down at it for a minute, and then realized what had happened.

  Someone had just left it on the edge of the shelf. Gravity had won. There was nothing spooky about that. She picked up the book and put it back into the gap at eye level where it must have been.

  Then she returned to the front to eat her lunch.

  She only made it to the end of the aisle before a book fell behind her again. Sara glanced back, her heart skipping a beat when she saw that it was the same book.

  Impossible was starting to sound like a relative term.

  She strode down the aisle, picked up the book, and shoved it back on the shelf. This time, she stayed and waited. She had just long enough to feel dumb before the book started to move toward her.

  It was as if a finger was pushing it off the shelf.

  An invisible finger.

  The book was apparently shoved the last increment and Sara jumped back as it fell to the floor in front of her. She peered into the gap but there was no one there.

  The hair on her neck stood up and saluted.

  “Aunt Magda? Are you messing with my mind?”

  Was it Sara’s imagination that the air conditioner began to run even more smoothly?

  She picked up the book and looked at the spine. She hadn’t gotten to this section in her reading yet.

  Awakening the Psychic Within.

  Sara laughed. She knew when to take a hint.

  Quinn marched back to his booth. Prepared to brood, he threw himself into his lawn chair. He thanked the volunteer, who scurried away from his dark mood with obvious relief. Maybe Sara hadn’t run when he’d shifted shape, but things couldn’t be said to be going well. He had to respect her choice, but he didn’t have to like it.

  He had three days left in Ann Arbor.

  He didn’t want to think about how long it would take the Slayers to make another attempt on Sara’s life.

  But he didn’t want her to think she had a stalker named Quinn Tyrrell, either. He buttressed the protective smoke that he had exhaled to surround her store and worked on the cocoon around her house for good measure. Maybe he could ensure that he was with her when she moved between the two locations.

  A guy could only hope.

  “It’s enough to make a Pyr yearn for the good old days,” a voice murmured in old-speak.

  Ambrose?

  Quinn blinked in shock. No, it couldn’t be Ambrose. Ambrose was dead. It would be too good to be true to have Ambrose beside him again, offering him advice and knowledge, but Erik had killed him. Ambrose was dead, and Quinn regretted that fact for the umpteenth time.

  The old-speak had to be coming from Erik. Only a Slayer would mess with another Pyr’s mind like this. Quinn should have anticipated the game.

  The voice continued, low and persuasive. “Ah yes, there was a time when a princess could be captured and seduced at leisure, well away from the assistance of well-intentioned, if somewhat misguided, suitors.”

  The voice could have been Quinn’s own thoughts. It was in his head, but not from his head. The old-speak was heavily threaded with guile. There was an intruder, thinking in Quinn’s head, meshing his ideas with Quinn’s own. The voice sounded like Ambrose, who had been dead a good seven centuries. Quinn felt a reluctant surge of admiration.

  Erik was good.

  Quinn couldn’t detect any recent sign of Erik’s scent and doubted that the other Pyr was close by. There was no one else who looked Pyr, although it was difficult to tell with human forms. No one was even looking directly at him.

  The mermaid, he knew, was stone cold, so Sara wasn’t in danger.

  Quinn decided to lure the speaker. He might learn something. He sent out the whisper of old-speak, broadcasting it since he didn’t know the location of the other Pyr.

  “These days, any given princess would just call the cops on her cell if she was abducted,” Quinn said. “And authorities are unlikely to have a sense of humor about dragons in their precinct.”

  He heard an exhalation of surprised laughter, one that he was quite sure came on a puff of smoke.

  He looked, but couldn’t see it.

  “How right you are,” the voice acknowledged. “Women, although delightful, can be so troublesome.” The voice became fainter, although whether that was due to distance or the speaker weakening, Quinn couldn’t be sure. “Unpredictable.”

  He spoke again, hoping to lure the speaker closer. “That’s not part of their charm?”

  The chuckle sounded like the tumbling of old rubble. “Oh, I take great delight in Sara’s choices, I assure you.” Quinn’s heart clenched at the other Pyr’s ready use of his mate’s name. “Which of us, do you think, is watching her more closely?” There was another throaty laugh, and then silence.

  It was more than silence: it was the absence of another being.

 
The other Pyr was gone.

  Although he’d left Quinn with plenty to think about.

  Quinn didn’t doubt that Erik had planned it that way.

  It was close to her usual closing time when Sara got to the end of the book on psychic powers. She glanced at her watch and decided to leave the store early to avoid a repeat of events of the night before. She wanted to push her way through a crowded arcade instead.

  The book was interesting, as it suggested that everyone was psychic on some level: the trick was opening one’s mind to perceive what was already there. Many people used tools, like crystal balls, more to focus their thoughts and impressions than as instruments per se.

  Sara’s gaze fell on Magda’s tarot cards. They were as good a focus as anything. She shuffled the deck and chose a card, flipping it over and placing it on the counter.

  “The High Priestess.”

  And it was upside down.

  Sara pulled out her reference book and smiled when she read that the card concerned matters of intuition. She already knew that cards that were inverted were interpreted as being negative versions.

  So, this could be about her denying her own intuition.

  But Sara had had that message a couple of times already and although she was still skeptical, she thought the cards could have coughed up something a little more compelling. On a whim, she stared at the card, trying the meditation technique mentioned in the book she’d just read.

  It was a pretty card, with a woman sitting like a queen on a throne, a heart at her feet and a scepter in her hand. Even upside down, it was attractive. Sara focused her attention on the card and felt everything around her slip away. The hum of the air-conditioning unit faded to nothing. The sound of footsteps and voices in the arcade slipped into a fog. The colors of the books and posters surrounding her disappeared from view. Even the oak edge of the countertop seemed to dissolve beneath her fingers.

  There was only the card. The colors of the woman’s garments seemed to become more vivid. Sara was certain that the background had changed: she didn’t remember the woman being seated in a dark cave. She’d been sure there were fields and sunshine on the card. The woman pictured on it smiled back at Sara.