Fire Fall

by Bethany Frenette

  “You didn’t know,” I whispered. I climbed up onto the couch, curling myself beside him, careful not to hurt his ribs. I pictured Shane’s face, the red curve of his smile. I lay my head against Leon’s shoulder. “None of us did.”

  The last flickers of the sunset slanted in through the windows, turning the room orange and red. I sat on the couch, my knees drawn up, and fixed my focus on the slope of light that lay across the floor in front of me, watching the way it pooled. It was the night after Shane’s attack on the elders, and Mr. Alvarez had arrived at the house to coordinate with Mom—and to pry more details out of me.

  I wasn’t paying much attention to them. I’d been reliving the scene at Sonja’s house again and again over the past twenty-four hours. Much of it had begun to blur in my mind. Images shifted and changed, blending together: A cup shattered against the hardwood floor, spilling blood instead of tea. Fallen books soaked the liquid up into their pages, the words inked in crimson. No, I reminded myself—that hadn’t happened; of course it hadn’t. But I imagined that Sonja’s eyes had been wide and staring when I saw her. Her eyes were a deep brown, almost black, I knew; I had felt that keen gaze often enough. The thought had followed me into sleep. My dreams had been a collection of fragments: Rosebushes wilting, Shane’s skin going silver beneath a sea of red stars. Sonja’s eyes, open and watchful. Seeing me.

  I couldn’t have seen them, I told myself now. Her head had been turned from me. Her face had been hidden. Other details I couldn’t shut out: Her blouse, drenched red. The way she had clenched her arms against her.

  She struggled, I thought. To the last moment.

  “Whitticomb?” Mr. Alvarez said.

  Deliberately, I gave myself a slight shake. I rubbed at my face with my hands, returning my attention to the present. Mr. Alvarez was asking me about Shane. And if the details were confused in my thoughts, Shane’s words were not. They were seared into my memory. Scalding to the touch. “He told me I was going to die,” I said. “He told me—I was a corpse taking air.”

  Mom and Mr. Alvarez exchanged a look. She crossed the room and leaned down to hug me, so long and tight that I wriggled away, pushing at her hands.

  “I don’t think he meant to kill me, though,” I added. “He said I was going to die, but not that day. He didn’t even hurt me. It was Leon he attacked.”

  Mr. Alvarez sighed, turning and running a hand through his black hair—which was, for once, not spiked up, but sitting quite normally atop his head. He looked at Mom. “We should have seen this coming. You always believed he couldn’t be trusted.”

  “But I didn’t think he was a threat. If I did, I’d have taken him out.” She snorted. “Clearly, I should have taken him out.”

  “There has to be some sign we missed. When a Harrower stops being neutral, there’s usually some indication.”

  I was still trying to reconcile in my head that Shane wasn’t neutral anymore. I’d been accustomed to think of him as harmless, if not precisely an ally. “He was acting weird the last time I saw him,” I said. “But not…homicidal weird.”

  Mom and Mr. Alvarez both stopped to stare at me.

  “Weird how?” Mr. Alvarez asked.

  “Saw when?” Mom asked.

  I decided to address Mom first. “Last week, Drought and Deluge. And you don’t need to give me a lecture, because I have more than learned my lesson, believe me. I will be enormously happy to never see Shane again.” To Mr. Alvarez I said: “He told me he hadn’t seen anything recently and that he was leaving town. And then he started destroying the mural of the Beneath he painted.” I thought of him scraping at the paint, shredding the skyline, his hands sliding into claws. It had been unsettling, but he hadn’t seemed hostile then. He hadn’t seemed threatening. He’d seemed almost…sad.

  You are going to die, Kin-child.

  I shivered.

  “What about the other neutral Harrowers in the Cities?” I asked. “Do they know anything?”

  “There aren’t any,” Mr. Alvarez said. “They’re gone. Some of them Drew killed, but most began to disappear around the time Susannah showed up. The rest have vanished since. Shane was the last.”

  That seemed like an ominous portent. “Does that mean none of them are neutral anymore?”

  “I don’t have any idea what it means. Except that we all need to be on our guard.” He sighed again, turning to Mom. “I’ve been in contact with the Kin at other Circles. They’re putting their elders under Guardian protection for the time being, in case the attacks turn out to be more widespread. But we need to figure this out. Why target the elders? Why take their bodies Beneath? What is he after?”

  “I don’t care about why or what,” Mom said. “I care about where.”

  Which meant, I supposed, she was sticking to her Find him, Kill him plan.

  After Mr. Alvarez left, I followed Mom up the stairs to her bedroom and lingered in the doorway as she set about preparing to leave for the night. She exchanged her jeans for black pants and grabbed her Morning Star hoodie, tying her hair up in a bun.

  “Where did the elders send Brooke?” I asked. In the immediate aftermath of the incident with Shane, I’d been too frantic to fully consider his claims about Brooke. But now the thought took hold, tightened its grip.

  “I don’t know, honey,” Mom said. She zipped up her hoodie. “Away from the Circle. Somewhere safe. Are you worried because Shane knows who she is? Her powers are sealed.”

  “He said they killed her.”

  She swung back toward me. Her lips parted. “Then he was lying.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Her forehead knit. “He was probably trying to upset you.”

  I hugged my arms. “It worked.”

  The thought persisted. That night I lay awake, staring into the darkness of my bedroom. I pictured Brooke as I had last seen her: hunkered in a corner of her house, her face streaked with tears. When she’d looked up at me, her eyes had been swollen and red. She’d barely been able to speak through her terror. We’re your Kin, I’d told her. We’re here to help.

  I’d believed that. Then.

  Now, I wasn’t certain what to believe. As a Remnant, Brooke had been a threat to the Kin, maybe the greatest threat that existed. More dangerous than any demon. She’d had the power to tear open the barrier between worlds, and the Harrowers had known that. They’d craved that power, hungered for it. Hunted her. For seventeen years, Harrowers had searched for the Remnant. Verrick had restlessly stalked the Cities as he awaited her birth; the Harrowing he’d begun had led to his blood being sealed—along with my father’s. Iris and Tigue had killed Kin girls to find her. And Susannah. Susannah had had an army waiting, ready for her to cut a passage to the Beneath. Using Brooke’s powers, Susannah would have opened the Beneath entirely. I’d felt it within her, seen it in her eyes: the city overrun, Harrowers in the streets.

  Susannah was only the most recent. She wouldn’t have been the last. Unsealed, Brooke would never have been safe again. And neither would the rest of us.

  But a sealing could be undone.

  Death was a bit more permanent.

  In the morning, I drove to St. Paul to speak with Esther.

  According to my grandfather, she was still feeling under the weather—which the events of the past few days had only worsened. The news of the elders’ deaths had come as a tremendous shock to her. She agreed to see me, however, and Charles led me into her sitting room, where she was resting in her large plush chair, drinking coffee against doctors’ orders. She had a book open before her, and a pair of bifocals sat on her nose.

  She glanced up at me when I entered, removing her glasses and setting the book in her lap. “I take it you are not here to inform me that Lucy has agreed to consider my proposal.”

  I sank into the seat across from her, looking her over critically. Now that she was out of the hospital, she seemed more like herself. Her face was less sunken, her eyes less vague. Her hair was impeccably groomed, and the familiar sc
ent of the rose perfume she wore wafted to me. But there was still a sense of frailty about her that I was unaccustomed to. I noticed how thin her frame was beneath the business suit she wore. When she raised the coffee mug to her lips, her hands had just the slightest tremble.

  “Nor are you here to offer me condolences on the deaths of my associates, I suspect,” she continued, after setting the coffee mug back on the little table beside her chair. She lifted her bifocals to her eyes once more, leaning forward and observing me. “I’m told you witnessed one of the attacks. Are you well, Audrey?”

  Her words flustered me. I supposed I knew, in an abstract sort of way, that Esther cared about my well-being, but she’d never questioned me on it before. Though her voice still had a slight rasp in it, it lacked its familiar edge. As she watched me, her expression was solemn, not sharp. And so what came out of my mouth wasn’t a polite comment or a flippant remark. It was the truth. “I’m scared,” I said.

  “You are not alone in the sentiment.”

  “I need to ask you something,” I said. But I didn’t say it immediately. I waited, biting my lip. I thought of my Nav cards, and how I had tucked them away in my closet, in an old shoebox filled with postcards and handwritten notes. I had set them inside and shut the lid. That was the day I’d lied to Gideon. The day I had told him he was Kin. I hadn’t touched the cards since. I had decided, then, that there were some things I didn’t want to know. Places I didn’t want to look.

  She is with the worms, I heard Shane jeer.

  I hesitated so long that Esther arched her eyebrows and said, “Yes?”

  I had come this far already. The time for retreat had passed. And this wasn’t something I wanted to know; it was something I needed to. I looked up, meeting her gaze. “I want to talk to you about Brooke Oliver. The Remnant.”

  I Knew it then, before she even drew in a breath.

  It didn’t come to me in images or impressions; it wasn’t some memory that crept into my thoughts. I saw it in the way Esther’s eyes flicked from mine, just for a moment, to gaze down at her hands, in the way her jaw tightened. I heard it in the silence that lengthened between us. It crackled in the air around us. My heart stopped. My lips parted, but no sound came out. I wanted to rise from my chair and run from the room, but my legs wouldn’t obey. I sat frozen.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  Esther’s mouth was set in a hard line. When she spoke, her tone was clipped. “There is nothing to tell.”

  “They killed her,” I said. They’d really done it, as Shane had said. They had cut her open and let the poison out. I rocked back in my chair, covering my mouth with my hand. I stared at Esther. This was the secret she’d been keeping, I realized. I had sensed it that day at the hospital—the worry that had weighed on her mind, troubling her thoughts. “They killed her and you knew.”

  Her gaze sharpened. “I didn’t.”

  “But you guessed. You found out,” I accused. There was a lump in my throat.

  Esther didn’t answer. We looked at each other, unspeaking, and now another Knowing came to me, some stray memory that surfaced. It wasn’t an image of Brooke, as I’d expected. It was of a young woman holding an infant, her fingers twining in the soft down of his hair. She rocked him gently, cradling him against her, and though a smile curved her lips, there was an element of sadness about the scene, a sense of mourning.

  I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to Know whatever grief Esther held close. There was a sinking feeling in my stomach. A sense of futility, like I was underwater, being weighed down even as I clawed toward the surface. “You found out,” I repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t stop it.”

  “No.”

  “You let them butcher a girl whose only crime was existing. Do you know how completely messed up that is?” I felt sick. Tears stung my eyes, and I wiped them away angrily.

  Esther didn’t even flinch. Her gaze remained steady. “Are you awaiting some justification? I don’t know that it was justified. Only that it was the decision they made.”

  “Well, you definitely picked the wrong person to succeed you then, because there is no way Mom would go along with decisions that involve murder.”

  “I know.” Esther stood, moving toward the window, where the thin morning light pushed in through the curtains. “I remember Lucy as she was in her youth. A more willful creature I had never known. She wasn’t just rebellious, she was wild. Completely heedless of others. Angry at everyone and everything. But she had so much strength of spirit. She had heart. You could never grudge her that. Adrian softened her edges somewhat, but the steel was always there, underneath. She fought so hard against his sealing. She begged us to wait, to find another way. At the time, I believed there was no other option. The Kin needed protecting. Verrick needed to be stopped. I understood the cost, and so did Adrian. But I look at my son now, and I wonder if we made the right choice. If perhaps I should have fought harder.” She cleared her throat, turning to face me once more. “As for the girl. The Kin are safer for the death of the Remnant. But I cannot say if we are better for it. And it has occurred to me that perhaps we could benefit from a little disagreement.”

  Disagreement was certainly one of Mom’s specialties. “That’s why you want Mom to take over?”

  “I don’t know that the right choice was made. I do know that it was the same choice we have made throughout history, and that it is a choice we’re sure to make again.” Her expression turned wry. “But if there is another path to tread, I have no doubt Lucy will be the one to find it.”

  “Brooke will still be dead,” I whispered.

  “As will the elders, so it appears the question is moot now, isn’t it?” She sighed, rubbing her temples. “I’m tired, Audrey. And I have no desire to discuss morality with you further. We have other matters to occupy us. There will be more death soon enough. The elders were merely this demon’s opening act. I fear there is far worse yet to come.”

  I felt a prickle on the back of my neck. “Worse how?”

  “His choice of targets was deliberate, not random. It was a culling. It was a statement of intent.” She strode across the room toward me, reaching out and gripping one of my hands. I tried to pull away, but she held fast. Her skin was chilled. Her face was grim. “We are not simply being hunted this time. We are being Harrowed.”

  We are being Harrowed.

  The words reverberated in my head as I drove back to Minneapolis. I tried to push them away. I tried to concentrate on the highway before me. I had the windows rolled all the way down, and I listened to the roar of the traffic, felt the wind whipping against my face. I cranked up the radio to drown out the echo of Esther’s voice. I didn’t want to think. If I thought too hard, I would see Shane standing over Sonja, her body being dragged Beneath. I would see Brooke cowering, tears streaming down her cheeks. I would hear myself promising to help her. I would hear We are being Harrowed.

  Eventually, the blur of the highway became the quiet of neighborhood streets. A light rain had darkened the pavement, and all along the sidewalks, lawns glistened. I turned the corner and my house came into view. The windows were dark. Mom wasn’t home, and though Leon and I had plans to train again today, he had class until the afternoon. For a moment after I pulled into the driveway, I just sat in the car, gripping the steering wheel and gazing out toward the house. A strange lethargy had come over me. The radio blared in my ears, but I barely heard it.

  I wondered what they had done with Brooke’s body.

  I wondered what they had said to her mother.

  Finally, I shut off the car, leaning my head against the steering wheel briefly before I stepped out. I shut the door harder than intended and jumped at the sound. I turned toward my house, letting out a low sigh. Warm sunlight touched my shoulders.

  But a chill crawled up my spine.

  My lethargy dissolved. I spun about.

  It happened quickly. One moment, the Harrower appeared: half-human, the g
leam of scales showing through his forearms and face as his pale eyes watched me. The next moment a hand reached out from behind him. Fingers curled around his throat, squeezing. Before he could even scream, there was the sound of a crack. He slid to the cement, limp and lifeless.

  Behind him stood Iris.

  We faced each other across the driveway, the demon’s broken body between us. The Beneath collected him almost immediately. There was a sucking noise as shadows curled around him. The sickening stench of rot filled the air. His body twitched once, all Harrower now, no trace of humanity remaining. A gurgle escaped his open mouth. Then he was gone.

  I studied Iris warily. At first glance, I almost didn’t recognize her. Her long black hair had gone silver, and instead of falling to her hips in thick waves, it lay lank and brittle against her. Her clothing was in rags. The sweater she wore—it may have been blue once, but had since faded to a pale shade closer to gray—was riddled with holes. The hem of her skirt was frayed, trailing threads. Her lips were dry and cracked, and there were scabs up and down her bare legs, some open, oozing. The triple knot still hung from her throat, and on her left thumb she wore Patrick Tigue’s silver ring. In her sunken face, her eyes were once more St. Croix gold, not the blank white of the last time I’d seen her. She was smiling broadly.

  I reached my hand into my pocket, touching my phone.

  Iris saw the movement. “I’m not here to fight. No reinforcements necessary.” Her voice was hoarse, almost hissing. She kept her distance, lifting one hand and idly touching the triple knot. Her smile stayed wide, showing her teeth.

  “So. Iris. Still crazy?” I gripped my phone, removing it from my pocket and holding it near me.

  She tilted her head back slightly and laughed. An eerie, croaking sound that sent a shiver up me.

  “I’m going to take that as a yes,” I said. I fought the urge to retreat a step. “What is it you want?”

  “To talk. We can do that, can’t we? Just a friendly little chat between cousins.”