Fire Fall

by Bethany Frenette

  And then, predictably, his phone rang.

  Once again, he released me so rapidly it was almost dizzying. I was dizzy, at any rate. While Leon turned to answer his phone, I wobbled to the edge of his bed and sat down, forgetting that my shorts were still drenched from the rain.

  “It’s Mom, isn’t it?” I said.

  Leon didn’t reply.

  “I told you: kiss radar,” I groaned, flopping backward onto the bed. His bedspread was dark blue, striped with gray. Warm cotton. I closed my eyes, taking a slow breath. For just this moment, I thought, everything was okay.

  “She’s at your house,” Leon said after he’d finished the call.

  I crashed back to Earth. “Is Gideon…”

  “Verrick is gone. Lucy’s packing you a bag. You’re staying with Esther again.”

  I lifted myself up on my elbows, watching Leon. He’d finally pulled on dry clothes and was once again avoiding my gaze. There was a tightness in his jaw that I recognized. I could never read him very well with my Knowing, but now he’d grown even more closed off than usual. He appeared to have remembered that he was mad at me. I sighed, rolling to face the wall, where through his window I could see the lights of Minneapolis pushing back the dark. Outside, the rain had finally stopped.

  At the St. Croix house in St. Paul, I was given the same guest room I’d had the last time I stayed there. That had been three months ago, after Susannah had appeared in my living room, injured and angry, her human disguise fading into scales. The night she’d taken Mickey Beneath. Relocating to St. Paul hadn’t made me feel any safer then, and it didn’t make me feel safer now. But Mom wouldn’t hear any arguments. Verrick had been in our house; that meant it was now off-limits.

  “Gideon knows where Esther lives,” I said. “He’s been to this house before. If he really wanted to come after me, he wouldn’t have any trouble finding me here.”

  Mom only tightened her lips. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she said, and then turned away, leaving the house to head off into the dark of the city. I lingered on the porch, watching her drive away. The sky had cleared, but far off on the horizon I could still see the edge of the storm, pulses of lightning shooting from cloud to cloud. The rumble of thunder was low and distant.

  Mom had packed two suitcases for me and placed them on the floor of the guest room, along with my purse. I flicked on the overhead light and stood in the doorway, staring at the old cherrywood dresser and night stand, the gauzy drapes open to the night air, the pale green bedspread with tiny pink roses embroidered along the edge. The room had once belonged to my uncle Owen, who had died beside his wife in a car crash one rainy evening and left his daughters, Iris and Elspeth, orphans—but there was no trace of him here. His belongings had long since been packed away, furniture replaced. There was just that clinging hint of sadness that lived in the walls of the house, a sense of mourning that never fully eased. The St. Croix family had known its share of grief, I thought. I felt it now, as I pulled out the dresser drawers one by one and slowly set about filling them; a subtle weight between my shoulder blades. The memory of footfalls and shrieks of laughter that echoed through the halls. Mom had sent me from the silence of our house to sleep among ghosts.

  Leon had returned to his apartment almost immediately after delivering me to St. Paul. He’d only stopped a moment to speak with Esther. Then his eyes had met mine, and his brow had furrowed. He hadn’t spoken, not even to demand his shirt back again. I was still wearing it. I wore it to bed that night, curling up tight beneath the green-and-pink bedspread and listening to the drone of traffic out my window and desperately hoping not to dream.

  The next few days were tense. Every time my phone rang, every time I saw Esther’s grim face, or Charles worried and frowning, I expected news. When it came, it was never good. Another member of the Kin had vanished, and then another. No bodies were recovered, but the crime scenes matched. Houses found trashed, furniture broken. Blood on the floor.

  And then came the words I’d been dreading.

  “Verrick attacked another Guardian,” Esther informed me Thursday evening.

  My throat was so tight, I had to fight the word out. “Who?”

  “Anthony.”

  I nodded. I knew Anthony, peripherally. He’d been injured during one of Susannah’s attacks. “Was he hurt?”

  Esther’s answer was a succinct: “He will live.”

  She didn’t offer many details beyond that. Gideon had retreated once more, after wounding Anthony—but he was growing bolder.

  More like Verrick. Less like Gideon.

  I was still trying to find a solution of my own. Iris’s warnings rang in my ears, loud accusations that it was me, my fault, that I had to kill Gideon. I’d been puzzling through her words, dissecting them. If she was right about the reason the Beneath had woken up—that it was the Astral Circle’s power that was feeding it, through Gideon’s link to both of them—that didn’t mean Gideon had to die, I reasoned. It just meant we had to somehow break his connection to the Circle. After that, I could figure out some way to help him.

  Not that I had any idea of how to do that. But there had to be some answer, I told myself. The connection between Verrick and my father was severed, but maybe there was still some way of sealing Verrick himself—the Harrower part of him. It had been sealed before. He’d spent seventeen years sleeping, while Gideon smiled and laughed and grew, all unknowing.

  But since my attempt to get information on sealing from the elders had been rather horrifically interrupted, I wasn’t certain where else to look.

  It was Tink who suggested we try Dora Hutchens.

  Tink had been haunting the St. Croix household since I started staying there. She’d stopped going on patrol. She was afraid of running into Gideon before we figured out some way of helping him.

  “That old woman,” she said Friday morning when I mentioned that my search for information had come to a standstill. “The one with all the hats. She keeps records, doesn’t she? I remember hearing about that.”

  It took me a second. “Dora Hutchens?” The hat reference baffled me, but I remembered Esther’s friend who kept Kin histories. Though Dora was more of a hobbyist—her records weren’t extensive or official—she was something of an expert on Kin lore. “It’s worth a shot,” I said.

  When we arrived at Dora’s house that afternoon, she ushered us in and offered tea, but she didn’t have any detailed information on how sealing was done. She found a few relevant journals to look through, however, and we spent the day skimming through them for anything that might help.

  “What should we be looking for?” Tink asked.

  “Anything about the Circles. How they were created, or anything about their power…being tapped into, I guess. And anything about the blood of the Old Race. It was used to make the Circles.”

  Tink wrinkled her nose. “Just how I wanted to spend my summer. Searching through old journals to read about blood.”

  “This was your idea,” I reminded her, flipping through one of the books Dora had brought me.

  Most of the information I knew already. The Circles were thought to have been made, in some way, from the blood of the Old Race after they crossed over from Beneath. The Old Race hadn’t been able to close the Beneath behind them, so with the last of their power, they’d formed the Circles—barriers that protected our world from the Beneath. The energy that created them was the same power that gave Guardians their strength and abilities; it was the blood that made someone Kin, and had been sealed away within my father. There was no evidence that the Circles had ever been bound to anyone before, at least not before me. And there was no information, anywhere, on if sealing had ever been tried directly on a Harrower.

  Tink was having less success than I was. “My eyes are beginning to glaze over. I can’t make sense of any of this.”

  “There has to be something here,” I argued. “Something we’ve overlooked.”

  “If Iris wants you to use the Circle to kill
Gideon…can’t you use it to just, like, disconnect him?”

  “How? If there’s a plug to pull, I can’t find it.”

  In the end, we thanked Dora for her help and headed home with a few more of the journals to look back over that evening. Tink dropped me off back in St. Paul, telling me she’d call if she found anything in her stack of books.

  When I wasn’t looking through documents, I spent my time texting Mom for updates, or training with Elspeth whenever she was home. Which wasn’t often. She was spending as much time with Iris as she could—probably, I thought, because she wasn’t certain how much time they would have. The Guardians were too preoccupied to search for Iris, but she couldn’t remain in the Cities indefinitely. Eventually, she would have to leave, or go back Beneath.

  If Esther was aware of Iris’s whereabouts, she didn’t mention it to me. I wondered if she knew that Elspeth was hiding her, or if she was being willfully ignorant. She’d told me before that she believed it had been Iris’s own choice to betray the Kin—but I’d never been certain she meant it. Iris was still her granddaughter. And if there was one thing Esther believed in, it was family.

  So I didn’t ask her about Iris. I asked about my father, instead.

  “Have you heard from him again?”

  “Briefly,” she said. She was in her sitting room again, in her plush chair, closing her eyes as she spoke. “It’s going to take him some time. Elliot is with him.”

  “Does he remember everything?” I asked, biting my lip.

  “He hasn’t told me what he remembers.”

  “You and Charles aren’t going to go see him?”

  “There are matters to deal with here.”

  “He’s your son,” I said.

  She sighed. “To be honest, I never expected to see him again. Not as he was. For now, I am granting him a little time to rediscover who he is.”

  When I asked if the Kin leaders had come up with any solutions for how to deal with the Beneath, she shook her head—but she informed me they had sent reinforcements. Though they were wary of weakening their own defenses, each Circle had sent three Guardians to Minneapolis. They’d started arriving that evening, and were going to coordinate their efforts with the Cities’ Guardians.

  But when I called Tink later that night to see if she’d found anything in her journals and asked who was currently leading said Guardians, the answer was apparently no one.

  “Mr. Alvarez is still on a break from the Kin?”

  “No one has even seen him. Camille says he hasn’t been on patrol.”

  “I wonder what he’s doing,” I said.

  “Sitting in his apartment and eating french fry pizza would be my guess.”

  Since we’d had a pizza party in Precalc at the end of the school year, I knew she wasn’t making that french fry thing up. Mr. Alvarez was lucky that Guardians had such high metabolisms.

  The following day, Esther looked worried at dinner, and the shadowy circles beneath her gold eyes seemed to have deepened. I cornered her in Charles’s study later that evening. The study smelled of paper and leather and the lingering scent of cigar smoke; it was the only room where he indulged in the habit, even though it clung to the books and yellowed the walls. The tall windows behind the desk showed the falling dusk outside, the darkened lawn. I trailed my fingers along the top of Charles’s armchair and asked Esther what she’d learned.

  She glanced up at me, then walked around the side of the desk after closing the drawers she’d been snooping in. “Learned—nothing. It is simply a disturbing report.”

  “About what?”

  “Seers,” she said, in that familiar clipped tone. “Which I would normally ignore. You recall the trouble a few months back. The Seer who was killed.”

  “Valerie,” I said.

  “It would appear we haven’t heard the last of this vision she had.”

  I wondered if Elspeth had spoken to her, or somehow managed to convey Iris’s warning. “The future isn’t fixed,” I replied. “That’s what you told me. You said not to worry about Val’s vision. That it wouldn’t come true.”

  “Correct. One Seer having one vision is not something I would normally put much stock in. However. Every Seer throughout the Kin having the same vision—that is potential cause for concern.”

  Goose bumps rose on my flesh. “Every Seer?”

  “Yes, well. That isn’t a fantastic number,” she said. She folded her hands in front of her, tightening her lips. Despite her calm bearing and the brisk tone of her voice, I caught the hint of something I’d never felt from her before: a slender thread of fear. “There are maybe a dozen true Seers throughout the entirety of the Kin. Beginning last week, they all began to have the same recurring vision.”

  “What exactly are they seeing?”

  “A Harrowing at our Circle. The Beneath breaking through. Permanently.”

  She didn’t have to say the next part. The end of the Kin.

  “I hope that means the other Circles are sending more reinforcements,” I said.

  But before she could answer, a sudden sense came to me. A deep chill that started in my bones and sent icy tendrils through my veins, climbing up toward my heart. That high, keening sound—a sob or a scream—at the very edge of my hearing. Knowing that squeezed at my lungs.

  I turned to Esther, reaching for her arm.

  “We have to go. We have to run.”

  Her eyes met mine. Her lips parted.

  And then the Beneath stood before us, dressed up in Shane’s human skin.

  Shane appeared near the window, the fading dusk outside making him into a dark silhouette. But I knew it was him immediately. His hostility filled the room, and there was that faint scent of decay again, turning my stomach. He took a step forward, then another, until the lamps in the study illuminated him, sending sharp yellow light across the angles of his face. His blond hair was matted and sticky with blood. His shirt hung in tatters, and his jeans had collected more stains.

  I backed up, shifting my gaze and trying to measure the distance between us and the door. Too far. I looked back toward the figure standing before me. “What did you do with Shane?”

  “He is mine to do with as I wish.”

  “I don’t think he’d agree with that,” I said. I retreated another step. For half a moment, I considered trying to amplify, to share his powers and fight him the way I had fought Susannah. But I dismissed it almost instantly. Sharing Susannah’s powers, even for a short time, had made me feel like something savage and vengeful had been thrashing about inside of me, hunting for an escape. I had felt her corruption, her loathing, and in the chaos I hadn’t been able to separate her thoughts from my own. I didn’t want to know what it would be like to touch the Beneath, even for an instant. Revulsion crept over me.

  “His agreement wasn’t asked,” the Beneath answered. “It is my will.”

  Esther stepped in front of me. She raised her left hand, and though the colors that began to shine at her wrist were weak and dim, her posture was alert, ready for attack. “Go, Audrey,” she said. “Warn Charles not to come home. Run.”

  “He’ll kill you,” I said.

  “I am aware of that.”

  “No,” I said. She was more at risk than I was. Even now, the unseen Guardian bond that warned Leon I was in danger would be threading through the air, waking the instinct within him. He would appear; he wouldn’t ask questions, he’d just take me away—and leave Esther here. And I couldn’t let that happen. I couldn’t let her be dragged Beneath, like Sonja and the other missing Kin, for it to squeeze the blood from her. For it to feed. I reached toward her. “Come with me.”

  But before either of us could argue, or even speak another word—before I could attempt to amplify her powers—Shane was in motion. He crossed the room so quickly I almost didn’t see it, and then he was there, near, his hands in talons and slicing toward Esther.

  She evaded him at first. Her own arm whipped up, thrusting him backward with enough force that he
stumbled back several steps. It seemed to take him by surprise. He hesitated, watching her intently. The glow at her wrist was slightly warmer now. With one quick motion, she shoved Charles’s leather armchair toward Shane, forcing him to back up once more.

  Then she charged.

  She was graceful in motion, much faster than I’d have believed possible. She flew toward him, feinting and then sidestepping as he moved to counter. But Esther was out of practice. She hadn’t acted as a Guardian in years, and her powers had been diminished with age. When she tried to grip his neck, he ducked out of reach, and though she managed to deflect his second attack, the third time he caught her. His talons sank into her shoulders. He lifted her into the air and then hurled her across the room.

  A scream tore from my throat.

  I ran to her, my eyes fixed on the crimson that began to spread across her pale lavender blouse. The lights in her hand didn’t even flicker. They simply vanished. I grabbed her wrist, felt for a pulse. It was there, faint and erratic. Below the thick ooze of red, her chest rose and fell.

  Shane stood watching me, but he didn’t attack. “Leave her,” he said. “Let her life soak the ground. Let her give no more gasps.” When I didn’t move, he took a step toward me.

  Leon appeared in front of me then.

  His back was to me. His tall frame blocked my vision of Shane, so that all I saw was the slight curl to his hair, the taut line of his shirt across his shoulders. And his arm, wrapped around someone much shorter. My eyes caught the shine of blond hair. A black sweatshirt and a white, eight-pointed star. He’d brought my mother with him.

  Mom paused only long enough to glance at me and assure herself I was all right, and then she flung herself toward Shane, colors swirling out from both wrists and glimmering at the base of her throat.

  Leon turned and knelt beside me, pulling me against him.

  “She’s not dead,” I said quickly. “She’s still breathing. We have to get her to the hospital.”

  “I need to get you out of here.”

  “Mom has Shane distracted. I can wait. Esther can’t.”