Fire Fall

by Bethany Frenette

  “Is that why you’re here?” he asked, looking up at me. “To open the Circle?”

  “To cut your connection to it,” I said. I swallowed, feeling other words there in my chest. I had come to kill him. I didn’t say it, but it seemed that Gideon could hear it anyway, in the thickness of my voice, maybe, or in the way I held back. I closed my eyes briefly. “I saw what happened. You couldn’t hurt Tink.”

  “I chose not to.”

  “Because you remember her. Because you know she’s your friend. She wanted—she asked me to thank you.”

  “Don’t lie. You didn’t come here out of friendship.”

  I didn’t speak. I wanted to step forward and reach out toward him and tell him he was wrong. I wanted to remind him of memories we’d built between us: of baseball games and barbecues; of winter mornings; of long, sleepy hours spent together. And I wanted to shout at him. I wanted to grab him and scream that he was Gideon, not Verrick, that he had a family, worried and waiting. But he was right. I hadn’t come out of friendship. I had come out of need. I had come because this was the moment that every moment before had been leading toward, the completion of the pattern that had been woven seventeen years ago.

  “I came because we’re bound,” I said. “We always have been. We can figure this out, okay? We just need to think. Just—help me think.”

  “Cut my connection to the Circle,” he scoffed. His speech seemed to shift with every word, every syllable. Now he was Verrick; now Gideon; now both. “That’s what Iris told you? It’s not a connection, Audrey. The Circle is part of me. It made me what I am. It’s what allows my lungs to inflate and my heart to pump. Its power. The light that I took from it. You’ll have to unmake me if you want the light back. You’ll have to rip it right out.”

  And that would kill him. Just as Iris had said.

  “There has to be some other way,” I said.

  He jumped to his feet, and with quick strides stood before me, grabbing my shoulders and letting his hands turn to talons. I felt them slice into me, breaking the skin.

  “Perhaps I’ll just kill you,” he said.

  “You won’t. You’re Gideon,” I replied. “And Gideon would never hurt me.”

  “That’s what you want me to be. It’s not what I am.”

  “That’s what you wanted to be,” I countered. “You wanted to be Kin.”

  “You’re wasting time. If you want the light, you’ll have to take it. Do what you came here for.” His grip tightened painfully.

  I told myself not to hesitate. I told myself that the city was dying all around us, that every second the Beneath was taking hold. Even now the people I loved were fighting, maybe dying.

  But I loved Gideon, too. And love changed the rules.

  I thought of Brooke Oliver, hunched in her house, afraid. Dying so that the Kin would be safe. I don’t know that the right choice was made, I heard Esther say. 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.

  I looked at Verrick. His eyes met mine. He didn’t release his hold on me. I could feel my blood oozing out, steaming in the icy air. But though the anger that wrapped him was still present, below it I sensed something else—a weariness, deeper than his rage, more potent than his hate.

  He was going to let me kill him.

  He wanted me to kill him.

  He wanted to heal the corruption inside him, Shane had told me once, to leave the Beneath behind forever.…

  My lips parted.

  “You wanted to leave the Beneath behind,” I said.

  He sneered at me. “Wouldn’t you?”

  That was it, I thought.

  It wasn’t his connection to the Circle that needed to be severed. It was his connection to the Beneath.

  He needed to not be a Harrower.

  He needed to be human. To be Kin, like he’d wanted all along.

  The Old Race had done it. They’d crossed over. They’d taken human form, and then they’d left the rest of their power behind in the Circles. The Circles they’d built from their blood.

  And the Circle itself had altered Verrick. It had made him into Gideon.

  It just hadn’t finished the process.

  I had done it before—I had released the Circle’s power. And now I would do the opposite. I would take it. But I wouldn’t keep it.

  If the Circle’s power was what Gideon needed in order to be human, I would give it to him. All of it.

  The Circle would die, but once the connection was severed, the Beneath would sleep again. And Gideon would live.

  Slowly, I detached his hands from my arms, holding them in my own—those talons dripping with my blood, digging into my skin. His eyes met mine. I saw into them, into the ancient dark that moved behind them, into the wrath and corruption that ate at him. I saw the faces of the Guardians he’d killed, their bodies broken, their final sighs escaping. But I saw Gideon as well, a flicker, a hint of warmth within the chill.

  I felt the connection to the Circle, a quiet burn. I reached out with instinct, with intuition, just as I had that night six months ago.

  “What are you doing?” Gideon gasped.

  “Just trust me,” I said.

  Light gathered around us, rippling, rising, so bright I couldn’t see anything beyond Gideon’s face. With everything in me, I willed the light into him. With Knowing, with the speeding of my pulse and the fear that clenched my heart, with each breath I exhaled, with the last hope I held.

  The light burned away the air between us. It seared my skin. Panic kicked into me, telling me that I was on fire, that those were real flames crawling up my flesh; the Circle was melting away my bones, and in another moment I’d be nothing but ash, blown away and lost in the swirling gray sky above us. But the moment passed, and then the light was shining and clean, and it didn’t burn at all, it was just light. It guttered, fading, as it wrapped about Gideon.

  I felt my connection to the Circle break.

  Verrick’s wrath began to recede. His rage abated. That malice that wormed within him was charred into cinders, nothing more than dust. The grief was soothed, the hunger fed.

  He fell to his knees, and I fell with him.

  His hands were still in mine. Warm, human hands now, not claws. When he looked up at me, his brown eyes were rich and clear. Gideon’s eyes. I couldn’t see the Beneath. The connection was severed. His corruption was healed.

  He smiled at me.

  I smiled back.

  Knowing surged into me, quick impressions, memories we channeled between us: the day we’d met, the sunny classroom and the sound of footsteps, the opening door. Camping trips we’d taken, out in the country where the sky was thick with stars. I saw other images that lingered in his mind—the soar of a baseball overhead, the bright glossy sheen of Brooke’s hair. He was Gideon again, I thought. Just Gideon. My Gideon.

  And then his hands released their grip.

  He slumped to the ground.

  I grabbed his arms, his shoulders, trying to lift him back up. The light was pooling around us once more, but this time it seemed to be spreading outward, away. Pulsing out in ribbons and waves. Leaving him.

  He was reversing it. Sending the light of the Circle back.

  But the light was what had made him, I thought frantically.

  He would die without it.

  “No!” Desperately, I reached out once more. But I was no longer connected to the Circle. I’d given the last of its light to him. I couldn’t call it back. I clutched at Gideon, wrapping my arms around him, holding him against me, trying to stop him. “You can’t,” I said.

  “You gave the Circle to me,” he said, still smiling weakly. “It’s mine to give back.”

  The light flooded away from him, out across the streets, the buildings, pushing back the gray of the sky and the harsh red glare of the stars.

  “But I’m saving you,” I said.

  His lips curved up in that crooked grin of his. “Maybe we’ll
meet again.”

  The last of the light fell away. I turned my face toward the horizon, where I could see it ripple beneath the blue, the faint glimmer of light of the Circle, throwing back the Beneath. The decay had vanished. There were no whispers, no low rasping hiss. The air was warm, untouched by rot. But Gideon was no longer there to breathe it. I rocked backward, closing my eyes.

  That was how they found me a few minutes later, my arms still wrapped around Gideon, clutching his body against me.

  Gideon was laid to rest on a sunny afternoon, beneath a sky so blue and clear it hurt to look at. He would have liked that, I thought; he wouldn’t have wanted rain.

  His official cause of death had been heart failure. Mom and Leon had taken me from Gideon before his body had been found, so that there needn’t be explanations—but I wished there were some explanation I could offer. At the service, I sat on the pew with my own hands folded in my lap, listening to voices that didn’t connect. I felt distant, outside of myself. I could only think how strange it was to be there, in that big room that smelled of flowers and polished wood, noticing little details and not being able to point them out to him. I’d found myself searching the room, scanning faces. Remembering, finally, that he was there, at the front of the room. The dark wooden casket.

  At his wake the night before, his casket had been open. His body had looked so cold, not like Gideon at all, but a statue carved in his image. I’d stood there a long time, trying to find some trace of him. Then I’d slipped an envelope in beside him, next to the pillow that cushioned his head. Within it, I’d folded the piece of paper with his name on it. Gideon David Belmonte. One soul.

  “I kept this safe,” I told him. “But you should probably take it with you.”

  Tink stood beside me at the cemetery, crying silently. I wasn’t crying. I hadn’t cried since the second I’d felt him leave. If I started crying now, I doubted I’d ever be able to stop.

  When the casket was lowered, I looked at the open ground that surrounded it, the neatly tended grass. He had died human, I thought. The Beneath hadn’t been able to claim him. He belonged to the earth now, to the soil and everything that was bright and growing.

  I spent the following days in a numb fog, walking and speaking, eating when I was reminded to. My sleep was dark and dreamless. My Knowing seemed to have been shut off. For a time I sensed nothing from anyone, and then when I did it was only noise on the periphery, like static or the distant buzzing of bees. I wondered, vaguely, if that should alarm me, that maybe the power was gone for good, that my frequencies had been permanently disconnected and all my perceptions would remain just out of hearing; but I couldn’t work up the effort to care.

  Leon did what he could to comfort me. In spite of who Gideon had been, in spite of what he’d done—he knew that Gideon had been important to me. At night he’d leave his apartment and come lie beside me as I fell asleep, not kissing or touching, just there. He was usually gone by the time I awoke, but sometimes I’d open my eyes to find his head on the pillow near me, his breathing even. Then I’d take his hand and feel his fingers curl around mine, and just stay, watching him sleep.

  Tink had officially joined the Guardians—who were once again being led by Mr. Alvarez—though she would still be in training with Camille. “I figure, since I survived literal hell on earth, a few Harrowers shouldn’t scare me,” she told me one night, sitting beside me on my porch steps while the thick heat rose around us, July steadily slipping into August. Above us, the stars were blinking through the glow of the city, and not a single one was red.

  “We never did come up with a costume for you,” I said, smiling faintly.

  “I don’t need a costume.”

  “You could borrow one of Mom’s hoodies.”

  “Did you miss the part where I just said I don’t need a costume?”

  “If you say so.”

  She smiled back at me—then bit her lip, looking down at her feet. “It’s going to be really weird, going back to school.”

  Without Gideon, she meant. I’d been trying not to think about that. I just nodded, resting my arms on my knees, and watched the insects gather around the porch light. School was a month away, and I was measuring time in days. Seven days since the warm afternoon at the cemetery, since Gideon had been lowered into the earth in that bright casket covered in roses.

  Eight.

  Twelve.

  Then, two weeks after Gideon’s funeral, Mom told me we had a visit to make. If I wanted to.

  My father had flown in that morning.

  “If you’re not ready, if you want to wait, we’ll wait,” she said.

  We were in the kitchen, where the early sunlight crisscrossed the table. I didn’t respond at first. Before, I wouldn’t have hesitated. I’d wanted to know my father, even when I’d known it wasn’t possible—that the person he’d been was locked away, and whatever emotions he had were unable to reach the surface. But now he was awake and unsealed, and I felt like I was the sleepwalker.

  “How long is he staying?” I asked.

  “A few weeks, for now. He’ll be taking some time to figure things out.”

  According to Esther, I assumed; I knew Mom hadn’t spoken to my father yet, either. Esther was continuing her efforts to get Mom to succeed her as leader of the Kin. The decision to evacuate the Kin had saved lives, Esther claimed—and when Mom had replied that anyone would’ve made the decision, Esther just said the point was not what anyone would have done, but what Mom actually did.

  I glanced up at Mom. “You’re not going to dump Mickey, are you?”

  She snorted, and then set about eating her own pancakes until she saw that I was frowning. “Oh, that was a serious question?” She sighed, stretching backward in her chair. It took a moment before she began speaking. “I’ll always love Adrian. I told you that. But I’m a different person than I was back then. And even unsealed, so is Adrian. Mickey is the man I want to be with. That hasn’t changed.”

  “But you’re going to go see him, too, right?”

  “When you’re ready.”

  I nodded. “Okay.”

  Three days later, we met my father in the St. Croix house. Esther had greeted us at the door and walked with us up the stairs, reminding us that my father was still adjusting, and the process would be ongoing for some time yet. But she was clearly thrilled. She looked happier—and healthier—than I’d ever seen her, and before she turned to let us enter the room, she actually hugged me.

  In the study, my father was standing near a bookshelf. Physically, he appeared much the same as the last time I’d seen him. He wore a charcoal business suit, and his curly brown hair was still unmarked by gray. When he turned to face us, I could see the gold of his eyes, and the bend where he’d once broken his nose. But his face was no longer expressionless, his gaze no longer blank. He looked nervous. He was frowning a little, and he kept moving his hands. He stuck them in his pockets and then withdrew them. The smile he gave us wavered slightly. He didn’t speak.

  My mother entered the room first. She didn’t hesitate. She just strode right up to him.

  “Lucy,” he said.

  She pulled him into her arms, and then stood on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek. She was crying, but she was smiling through her tears. “I’ve missed you, kid,” she told him.

  I hung back, suddenly shy, now that it was real, now that it was really him.

  But it was too late. If I were going to flee, I should’ve done it earlier—before Mom and I had gotten into the car that morning, before we’d arrived at the house and walked up those long flights of stairs. He’d already seen me.

  I stepped into the room slowly, concentrating on the sound of my footsteps, keeping my gaze on the room around me. I drew in a deep breath and then lifted my gaze to my father. He was looking back down at me.

  Knowing came to me then. Vibrant and shining, not the static I’d been sensing—everything open and clear. I could see through those long years he’d spent sleeping, to th
e laughing boy he’d been. That boy was still there, though he’d long since grown into this somber, sad-eyed man. He lingered at the edge of my father’s memories, in stray impressions I caught now—lying in the grass as a thunderstorm rolled overhead, watching the sky spark and crash; grinning beneath the sunlight, waving to someone beyond my view. And there was the flicker of something else. Something quiet, understated. The sense that while I was Knowing him, he was Knowing me, too. That was his gift, as well, I recalled. The Nav cards Esther had given me had once belonged to him. Inverted Crescent. The card we shared.

  He didn’t seem to know what to say. But that was all right; I did.

  I smiled. I was crying, I realized. For the first time since Gideon had died. Not hard, but I could feel tears sliding down my cheeks. “It’s really nice to meet you,” I said. “I’ve been waiting a long time.”

  I found Iris in her bedroom, sitting near the window, her fingers pressed up against the screen. The window was open, letting in the breeze. The wind stirred against her silver hair, making wisps of it graze the hollow of her throat, where the triple knot still hung. Her face was tilted, her eyes closed. She didn’t move when I stepped into the room.

  I remembered the first time I’d been here. Iris and I had come with my Nav cards to search for the Remnant. We’d sat on the floor, and for the space of a second I’d had a glimpse of that image she’d tried so hard to hide: the night Patrick Tigue had found her sitting in the rain and given her his hand.

  I felt a flicker of pity. Iris and I had never been friends, exactly. But we’d been family, for a time.

  “Iris,” I said, taking another step forward.

  She turned from the window. “What do you want?”

  I wasn’t certain. I watched her, the way she toyed idly with the ring on her thumb, noting the thin, fading line of the wound on her neck. Her fingernails were bitten short and ragged. I thought of the girl she’d once been—the inky shine of her hair, the grief that had weighted her. I thought of her standing before me on Harlow Tower, clutching a knife.