Fire Fall

by Bethany Frenette

  I didn’t believe that, but I didn’t have many other options.

  Tink had been talked into continuing her training and patrols, but since she’d learned of Iris’s involvement in the Harrower attacks, she hadn’t asked me to come along again. In fact, she’d asked me not to come along again.

  “If I’m going to swim in the ocean,” she’d said over the phone Tuesday night, “I’m not doing it with blood in the water. And you are a giant gaping wound.”

  “Way to flatter a girl,” I’d said.

  “Sorry, but I’m not the one who drew a bull’s-eye on your back. All I’m saying is, I would prefer not to creep down dark alleys with you just now, okay? We can still see each other during the day.”

  “Tink, are you breaking up with me?”

  I almost heard her rolling her eyes. “Trust me. When I break up with you, you’ll know it,” she’d said. I figured that wouldn’t be anytime soon, however, since she was still traumatized by her near-poultry experience. A few of our friends had organized a barbecue for the following afternoon, and she needed me to drive her to the lake.

  Though thunderstorms had ripped across the sky all Tuesday evening, turning the horizon a sickly sort of yellow, Wednesday morning dawned clear and bright. Droplets of rain still clung to the grass when I awoke, but they’d melted away by the time I loaded up Mom’s car with potato chips and French onion dip—my contribution to the barbecue—and headed for Gideon’s house.

  I hadn’t seen him since the baseball game, but he seemed considerably improved. He looked healthy, and even happy. There was no indication of that panic I’d sensed in him, and his brown eyes were warm and untroubled. He grinned as he hopped into the car, his hands full with a bag of charcoal and a can of lighter fluid. At some point in the past few days, he’d acquired a painful-looking burn on his arms that was already beginning to peel. Since I’d actually remembered sunscreen, I tossed the bottle at him and ordered him to slather himself with it while we drove to pick up Tink.

  “No Leon?” Tink asked as she climbed into the back. Instead of sitting and buckling her seat belt, she shoved bags of food out of the way and draped herself across the seat, propping her feet against the window.

  “He’s working, and then he has class,” I said.

  She wrinkled her nose. “That’s no fun.”

  Tink’s philosophy was that half the point of having a boyfriend was being able to show him off. I laughed. “Agreed.”

  The beach at Lake George was busy enough that we could hear splashing and a low hum of chatter all the way to the parking lot, but Kit and Erica had arrived early and secured a picnic table. They were both sitting on top of it, waving their arms wildly as we approached. Next to them was a much more subdued boy in glasses and a baseball cap, who turned out to be Erica’s cousin from Wisconsin. He glanced up from his phone long enough to say “Hey” and then spent the rest of the afternoon texting his girlfriend.

  Since Gideon claimed that Belmonte children learned the basics of barbecue around the same time they learned the alphabet, he was put in charge of the grill. While Tink made straight for the water, I sat in the grass next to him and handed him the hot dogs and burger patties Kit had packed into his parents’ cooler.

  I pictured a four-year-old Gideon standing next to his father on their patio and decided he had to be exaggerating. I adored Gideon’s family, but I had to admit they weren’t the most graceful of creatures. The majority of his childhood stories involved shrieks, tears, tantrums, and trips to the emergency room. A few years ago, his middle sister had actually had to have her thumb sewn back on after a disastrous incident involving a hayride and a tractor. “How is it that none of you set yourselves on fire?” I asked, sucking on a piece of ice I’d stolen from the cooler.

  “I said the basics,” Gideon replied.

  “And what are the basics of barbecue?”

  He grinned again. “Lesson one: don’t set yourself on fire.”

  I shook my head.

  I was able to relax as the day wore on. The sun was warm, but not blistering, and the water just cool enough to provide a pleasant contrast. The storms appeared to have passed by. A few tufts of cloud drifted lazily above, but there were no flashes of light across the sky, no rumbles of thunder. Tink, Gideon, and I rested in the sand between swims. I lay back on my towel, shutting my eyes and feeling the sun on my face.

  Then I snapped into awareness when Tink asked Gideon, “When’s your next game?”

  I sat up in time to see Gideon tense. He’d been drawing little circles in the sand with a twig, but now he stopped, hunching his shoulders and closing his fist. Around us, the sounds of the beach faded, the peals of laughter and squealing of children suddenly distant. I heard the twig crack. “I quit the team,” Gideon said, tossing both pieces of the stick into the nearby crabgrass.

  Tink and I exchanged a glance. A furrow appeared in her brow, but all she said was, “Oh.”

  Gideon shrugged and smiled, rising to his feet. “Maybe I’ll play again next year. I haven’t decided. I’m going swimming.” Without waiting for a response, he took off toward the water. He paused a few steps in, the current lapping at his ankles, and turned to wave.

  Beside me, Tink had fallen quiet. We watched as Gideon vanished into the lake, propelling himself from the shore with long, sure strokes. Sunlight glinted off the beads of water in his hair, and then he was below the surface, lost among the ripples and waves.

  He was always better at swimming than I was. Quick and confident, even when we were little. Whenever he joined my family at our cabin or I went on lake trips with the Belmontes, he would be gone in an instant, swimming fast and far, all the way to the buoys, while I was still standing near the shore. I would linger there, watching the flash of the minnows darting around me. And then he would come back. He would go out, touch the buoy, and come back.

  “Okay, are you going to say it, or am I?” Tink asked, leaning back on her hands.

  Cautiously, keeping my eyes on the lake, I said, “Say what?”

  She sighed, gesturing toward the lake. “Something is seriously going on with him.”

  I inched forward on my towel, digging my toes into the sand. I hadn’t told Tink the truth about Gideon. And never planned to. “I think he still misses Brooke,” I said.

  Gideon had had a crush on Brooke Oliver for years, as long as I’d even known him. And though I wasn’t certain how much of that was Verrick’s fevered obsession with the Remnant, and how much of it was genuine, Gideon hadn’t taken her absence well. She had occupied so much of his mind for so long, her loss left a gap. A sudden blank space to be tiptoed around.

  Tink wasn’t convinced. She was frowning toward the water. “But you’d think he’d get past that eventually. It’s been months, and he’s getting worse.”

  “Just because he doesn’t get over someone in a week like you do doesn’t mean he’s broken.”

  She turned toward me, squinting against the bright sun. “I’m going to take this moment to point out how bitchy that statement was. Luckily for you, I am unoffended.”

  “Sorry,” I said, meaning it. “That was uncalled for.”

  “Accepted. So now we can turn our attention to the problem at hand. Pining solves nothing. Maybe we should find him a girlfriend.”

  “Because that’s worked so well in the past.”

  Tink had tried to fling girls at him before, with varying degrees of success. Gideon was too friendly and polite to outright rebuff anyone, but sooner or later they’d all been gently rejected. Brooke had remained the sole source of his hope.

  “He was still fixating on Brooke.” She paused, running her finger along the circles Gideon had drawn in the sand. “You know, I’m not even sure it’s about her, though. It started before then. You really didn’t notice?”

  “I noticed,” I admitted, somewhat surprised she had. As far as I knew, Gideon hadn’t discussed his nightmares with her—and Tink had had her own problems to deal with at the time. Like
being called as a Guardian.

  But apparently Tink was more observant than I realized, because she chewed her lip and said, “I think it began when your cousin took him to Harlow Tower.”

  It had, but not for the reason she assumed. “It was a pretty traumatic experience,” I hedged. I saw him lying at Iris’s feet, snow in his hair. “If that’s what’s upsetting him, there’s not a lot we can do about it.”

  “You don’t think it has something to do with her—with Iris coming back?”

  I hunched my shoulders. “How would he know? I didn’t tell him. Did you?”

  “No…I don’t know. But he has gotten worse. It’s not just him quitting baseball. It’s like—he’s afraid of something.”

  I thought of that surge of panic I’d felt from him the day of the baseball game. The sweat beading his brow. He wasn’t afraid of something. He was afraid of himself. And there wasn’t any cure for that.

  “So are you,” I told Tink. “So am I. Demons, remember?” I gave an exaggerated shudder.

  She sighed again. “I suppose therapy is out, since he can’t really discuss demons. Maybe we could…I don’t know, hire a hypnotist. Get him to forget it.”

  “Right. Repression is definitely the answer here.”

  “Hey, I am just trying to help.”

  “I don’t think a hypnotist is going to do the trick.”

  “Fine. Then we’re back to finding him a girlfriend.”

  While Tink went through a list of candidates, counting them out on her fingers, my mind strayed.

  He’s getting worse.

  Tink wasn’t wrong, as much as I wanted to deny it.

  But maybe she wasn’t wrong about the solution, either.

  Not hypnotism. Not getting him to forget what had happened, exactly. But maybe there was a way to reverse the damage.

  I glanced down at my wrist, the tiny notch of a scar just under my palm.

  It went back to Iris. It went back to the knife in my hand, five small cuts. We hadn’t unsealed Verrick, but the process had been started. I had felt him stirring there, poised at the very edge of consciousness, fighting to awaken. I had felt his eyes begin to open. He was sleeping still, but it wasn’t a heavy slumber. He was worming his way through the cracks, clawing them wider. But if my blood could be used to unseal him, maybe the opposite was true as well. Maybe he could be locked away again. Permanently.

  I just needed to figure out how.

  If I wanted information on sealing, there was only one place to go: the Kin elders.

  That was something of an unsettling prospect. I didn’t know the elders well, and I would have preferred to keep it that way. Tink was terrified of them, and I didn’t blame her. You could feel their eyes whenever their gazes landed on you, and the looks they gave were so sharp, it felt as though they could see right under your skin and dissect you. I’d never felt at ease in their presence.

  Not that I’d seen much of them. They mostly chose to keep to themselves. Esther was in charge of the day-to-day management of the Kin, and the elders were only consulted on matters deemed of high importance—or, as Tink had discovered, used to frighten reluctant Guardians into obedience. What they did with the rest of their time, I had no idea. I only hoped it didn’t involve ritual sacrifices.

  But if I wanted to help Gideon, I would need to brave a meeting. And they were marginally less intimidating when encountered separately¸ so on Friday morning I called Sonja Reimes, the least alarming of the trio, and asked if I could stop by her house.

  I’d spent the night coming up with a plan of what to say. A sequence of lies, really. I was curious, I would tell her—because of my father, and because of Iris. I simply wanted to know details of the sealing. What was involved, how it was done. For my own peace of mind, I would say. And hope her shrewd perception didn’t cut through to the truth.

  I took Mom’s car and drove across town, parking a short distance down the road and making my slow way up toward her house as I tried to calm my shaky nerves.

  But as I neared her door, I hesitated.

  I thought of my father.

  Seventeen years ago, he had become linked to Verrick, their lives—and their blood—bound inextricably. Sealing one had meant sealing the other. And so my father had given up everything in order to stop Verrick. He’d gone to the sealing willingly.

  I thought of how he had looked when I’d met him. His image was fixed in my memory: a tall man, near forty, with dark hair that curled like mine and a dotting of freckles on the crooked bridge of his nose. I recalled how I had stood there before him, unable to speak. How the seconds had ticked past, and no flicker of awareness had entered his eyes, no trace of the boy he’d once been had shown in his expression. His voice had been kind but flat, empty of emotion. And though I’d reached out with my Knowing, the only sense I’d gotten from him had been a faint confusion, distant and ambiguous.

  I wasn’t certain I’d be able to reverse whatever aspect of Verrick’s unsealing Iris had begun six months ago, but now another voice whispered into my thoughts. They were tied to each other still.

  And if some part of Verrick was beginning to break through, it was possible my father was also.

  I had felt a glimmer of him, that night on Harlow Tower. Just the slightest sense, at the edge of my perception. He was still there, somewhere. Hidden away.

  Sealing one had meant sealing the other, I thought again.

  The opposite was true as well. If Verrick became unsealed, so would my father. The sleeping heart would wake.

  But Gideon would be lost in the process.

  I closed my eyes. My father had made his own choice. Gideon was innocent in this. And he needed help.

  Sonja’s house was a little yellow square at the end of the street, fringed with flower beds and a tall hedge that hid the yard from view. A lattice archway set between the bushes had vines of morning glories climbing skyward, and beyond it a path of red and brown brick, lined with marigolds, zigzagged its way to the door. The windows were dark, I saw, but Sonja had told me to just keep ringing the bell if she didn’t answer.

  Halfway down the walkway, I paused again.

  The front door was ajar.

  The gap was slight, almost unnoticeable. It could’ve been eased open by the wind. Nothing else in the yard looked awry. No broken windows, nothing disturbed or out of place. The lawn was recently mowed, the smell of the grass mingling with the strong scent of the marigolds. A bumblebee was humming among the rosebushes tucked close to the house. The wind chime hanging nearby sent soft notes into the air. I retreated a few steps, gazing at the street around me. Everything was quiet, serene: a warm summer morning, sunlight filtering down between the passing clouds. A sleepy neighborhood just beginning to rouse.

  But something stayed me. I lingered a moment, considering. I could ring the doorbell. I wouldn’t step inside—I’d seen enough horror films to know better than that—I’d just ring the doorbell and wait.

  Or I could call Leon.

  Mom had instructed me to call him if I felt anything amiss. The problem was, I wasn’t entirely certain I did. My Knowing was silent. If there was some menace here, it had slipped beneath my radar—I didn’t sense a threat, or even a change in temperature, the way I’d always felt a slight chill whenever I’d neared Susannah. There was just that door, the tiniest sliver of space between it and the frame. And calling Leon might require me to explain what I was doing here. Not to mention that it would be rather embarrassing if it turned out nothing was wrong, and Sonja was just sitting inside, playing solitaire and drinking iced tea.

  I stared at the door.

  I took a step forward.

  And then I called Leon.

  He had a shift at the bakery, but he hadn’t yet taken his morning break. I heard him tell his supervisor he was going for a quick walk down the street. A moment later he appeared in front of me, still wearing his apron, a faint dusting of flour in his hair.

  Though I felt relief at seeing him, I also felt
a bit self-conscious. The smile I gave him was wobbly. “Apologies in advance if this turns out to be a big waste of time, which is kind of what I’m hoping.”

  He gripped one of my hands, swinging it between us. “It’s not a waste.”

  “It’s probably nothing. Maybe you shouldn’t have come.”

  “If it’s nothing, then I can be back well before anyone starts to miss me. And if it’s not, then we need to know.”

  “You don’t think I’m being paranoid?”

  “I find caution incredibly hot,” he teased.

  I laughed. “You would.”

  He grinned, dropping my hand. “On that note: stay here,” he said, and vanished.

  “Leon!” I hissed into the empty air, crossing my arms and turning to face Sonja’s house.

  So much for caution, I thought.

  I tapped my foot against the brick of the walkway, listening to the wind chime and the traffic from down the street. I couldn’t see into the house at all, or get any sense of Leon’s movements. I was trying to think of precisely how I was going to explain sending him in to spy on an unsuspecting woman when, all at once, my senses began screaming.

  It didn’t come just as Knowing. It was much stronger than that, like a physical blow almost. It filled my every perception, the open space around me, the air I breathed. It was the sudden taste of blood on my teeth, the odor of decay. My skin felt clammy, my throat dry. Around me, the marigolds appeared to droop on their stems. The roses wilted in the bushes, their petals dead and brown and crumbling; I blinked, and they were blooming once more, lush red and white, no hint of rot within them. Noises flashed through me—a cacophony, harsh and strident at first. I heard the screech of nails against a smooth surface and a long, thin wail rising. Then softer: a rustle of breeze, the flap of bird wings. From far off, the sound of a sob. And then a deep and terrible silence.