Child of Fire

by Harry Connolly

  “He’s alive. I saw-“

  “Bullshit. I took his head off.”

  I shook my head. “Just before we got out of there,” I said, “I saw him standing by the desk. His clothes were soaked in blood, but he was whole and alive.”

  “Shit. It fits, I guess. I just hate it when they won’t stay down.”

  “Do you think Charles Hammer has someone behind him, pulling his strings?” I tried to imagine him with his own Annalise sending him out to fight and die.

  “It’s possible, but the spell I touched to him shot sparks. That means predator, and a powerful one.” After that she was quiet.

  I thought about that column of fire on the stairway, always striking where I had just been, never anticipating me. I mentioned it to Annalise.

  “Some of the predators don’t have concrete understanding of time, or three-dimensional space. It can be a weakness for them sometimes.”

  She fell silent again. I didn’t press her for more information. I didn’t want to push my luck.

  We arrived at the motel. I fished Annalise’s key out of her jacket pocket and opened her door. She collapsed onto the bed, exhausted from the effort of walking into the room.

  I fetched the meat and cutting board from the van. The room had a small, round table, where I put the supplies down. I locked and barred the front door, then made sure the curtains were fully closed and began cutting the meat.

  This time I fed Annalise with a plastic fork. It was more dignified than using my fingers. She watched me the whole time, her gaze wary and measuring. Obviously, she expected me to betray her again.

  “Will this be enough?” I asked after she had eaten the first ten pounds I’d bought. I couldn’t believe she’d eaten so much. Her stomach should have been swollen, but it wasn’t. I assumed her body was using the meat to heal her injuries. I glanced down at her hands. It was a slow process.

  “It should be,” she said. “It had better be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve never… this should have been enough already. My hands should have been back to normal by now. Hell, a couple of years ago I only needed eight pounds to regrow an entirely new left foot. But we’re past that now and I can still barely use them. Something’s wrong.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. I kept cutting. “That was the same kind of fire that burned the little boy. I’m sure of it.”

  “I know what kind of fire it was,” she snapped. “And we should have been protected. That spirit fire should not have been able to get past our iron gates.”

  We. I had run into Annalise’s iron-gate spell before. It had once protected me from her green fire. I put my hand on my chest, just below my collarbone. That twinge I’d felt…

  “That’s right,” she said. “I put an iron gate in the tattoos on your chest. It’s supposed to protect against certain kinds of spirit attacks.”

  “Like the pressure waves that make people forget the dead kids?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Or fires channeled from the Empty Spaces.”

  “So why didn’t it work?” I speared a piece of meat on a fork and offered it to her. She glared at me, then accepted the food without answering my question.

  I kept cutting meat and offering it to her. I didn’t ask any more questions. Eventually, she was able to flex her hands into claws, then into fists. I could see that they still hurt, but she could move them. After I’d fed her eighteen pounds of beef, her skin looked healthy but still pale. That’s when she took the fork from me and began to feed herself. She didn’t ask me to stop cutting the meat, and I didn’t.

  She ate all of it. It was a little more than twenty pounds of beef, and she’d eaten it in a little less than three hours. She sat on the edge of the bed and flexed her hands. Her face was stoic, but I knew something was wrong. She kept testing them, moving them, staring at them. I suspected they still hurt her, and that she had expected them to be fully healed by now.

  “I need to sleep now. And I need time to figure out what’s happened to me.”

  She looked like she was about to say more, but she hesitated. I didn’t care. “No problem,” I told her, and started toward the door.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  I knew it wasn’t easy for her to say, and that it didn’t mean she was ready to trust me. I didn’t care. “You’re welcome.”

  “Before you go,” she said, “there’s something I want you to leave behind.”

  I stopped and turned around. “Is that right?”

  “Leave it, Ray. Give it to me.”

  “It’s the only weapon I have.”

  “Do you think I can’t take it? Right here and now?”

  “I know you can,” I said. “I just don’t understand-“

  “Give it to me,” she said. She lifted the corner of her pillow.

  I took my ghost knife from my pocket, crossed the room, and slid it under her pillow. Annalise watched me closely, her whole body tense. I got the message. I should have left her in the parking lot.

  I went to my own room. There was next to nothing there that I had bought myself, except the jacket in the trash can. This wasn’t my room; it was hers.

  I took a shower, then changed into clean clothes. I kept expecting the local cops to kick down the door, but it didn’t happen. They must have had their memories wiped, too. Neat trick. I opened my wallet and saw Annalise’s debit card inside. Good. I was hungry again. At least I wouldn’t have to sit in this room and starve.

  I had the keys to the van, too. I considered driving it to a secluded spot and thoroughly searching all of Annalise’s gear. She hadn’t worn her ribbon-covered vest to the toy plant this morning, so she must have stashed it somewhere.

  And there was the matter of her spell book. I knew she had one, but I didn’t know where she kept it. Would it be nearby, so she could create more ribbons as needed? Or would it be hidden away somewhere back in Seattle, in a safe-deposit box, or buried beneath a concrete floor, or sealed in a crate and sunk in Elliott Bay?

  Or it could be stashed in the back of the van.

  I didn’t believe it. Annalise wasn’t careless enough to leave it lying around.

  And while I didn’t know much about this society of hers, I knew they had rules about their books: reading another peer’s book was a killing offense. If I did find the book in the van, it would be because Annalise had left it there to tempt me. It would be the perfect excuse for her to break my neck.

  Inside the night table was a phone book. Hammer Bay was small enough that the white and yellow pages were combined into one book, but no one with the last name of Hammer was listed. Figured. That would have been too easy.

  I left the motel and walked past the van without peeking inside. I was too hungry for games. I went to the office and asked the nervous manager where I could get a bite to eat. He recommended a place.

  It was only a couple of blocks down the road. I strolled over to it. The misty drizzle had lessened, but the heavy clouds still obscured the sun and dimmed the town. It was only about six in the evening, which meant I had another two hours of sunlight, at least. The thought lifted my spirits.

  The place was a bar, but that was fine with me. I went inside and sat on a stool.

  After a few moments, my eyes adjusted to the darkness. The bar ran the length of one wall, with a wait station near the door. The rest of the room was divided into booths. There were no dartboards or pool tables. There was no jukebox. The place was pretty empty. An elderly man sat at the bar, head bowed over his tumbler. Three men sat at the other end of the room, arguing in the relative privacy of a booth.

  The bartender approached me. She was tall and lean, with glossy black hair that hung long past her shoulders and dark eyes that suggested she was at least partly Hispanic. Her long face had a no-nonsense friendliness that I liked immediately. “I didn’t see you come in,” she said. “What can I get you?”

  I glanced down at her left hand. She wore two rings. Oh, well. “Let’s s
tart with a beer and a glass of water.”

  “That’s fine,” she said. “What kind of beer?”

  “What do you recommend?”

  “We have a terrific Elephant Stout on tap.”

  That sounded like an up-sell if I’d ever heard one, but what the hell, Annalise was buying. “Sounds great,” I told her. She went back to the taps, and I looked around.

  The older man looked over blearily and then turned back to his drink. He wore a modest suit that bulged at the middle, and he had carefully combed his hair over his bald spot.

  Victim, I immediately thought. I could have rolled him for his wallet if I was desperate for chump change. A couple years back I’d have rolled him for his car keys, then driven his car straight to the chop shop.

  That chapter was closed now. I didn’t steal cars anymore.

  I killed people. People like Carol the receptionist.

  I wondered what was going to happen to the bodies of those women. Was it a crime scene now, with police tape, coroners, and witnesses who couldn’t remember a thing? Or had those dead women been erased from the memories of everyone around them? I imagined the surviving office workers moving like automatons as they carried the corpses away. Or worse, walking past them like they weren’t there, the same way people ignored the black streaks.

  A gray-haired woman walked into the bar. She had a sensible work-and-church vibe that made her seem instantly out of place. She went over to the old man with the comb-over and set some papers on the bar beside him. They exchanged terms of endearment in a tone that suggested it was a habit for them and little more. The man tapped the papers. “What’s this?”

  “Financial papers and a birthday card for Paul,” she said.

  For a moment he looked as if he was going to ask for details, but instead he shrugged and picked up the pen. When he got to the card, he said: “Ten years old already? Is he coming home this summer?”

  The woman sighed. “His scholarship covers a summer program in Atlanta, and he’s going.”

  The man sighed, too, and signed the card.

  As the woman walked out of the bar, the three men in the booth burst out laughing. They sounded loud, raw, and somewhat drunk. One called another a “fucking moron.”

  The bartender was just about to place my beer in front of me. She turned toward them, bared her teeth, and said: “Keep it down or take it somewhere else!” She didn’t have to raise her voice.

  They quieted down. The bartender set the beer in front of me, then served up a big glass of ice with a splash of water. “Sorry about that. Sometimes it’s like a chimp house in here.”

  “I like noisy chimps. You know where they are. It’s the quiet chimps you have to watch out for.”

  She smiled at me. “I’m Sara,” she said.

  “Ray.”

  “New in town?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I guess you came to apply at the toy plant?”

  I shrugged. “Everyone keeps suggesting that.”

  “Well, don’t,” a man behind me said.

  One of the three men from the back booth had come to the bar with an empty pitcher. Sara took it from him without comment and began filling it from the cheap end of the tap.

  He was tall and rangy with a small scarecrow’s head, and he stood closer to me than he needed to. I guess he wanted to look down on me while we talked.

  “You’re the first one to suggest I stay away,” I said. “Something wrong with the company?”

  “Not a thing,” the scarecrow said. “I just don’t want to see some stranger blow into town and take something that belongs to a local.” Sara set the pitcher in front of him. “Thanks, little lollipop. If you get tired of these two, I have some prime lap space reserved for you back at the booth.”

  “Boy, you are one word away from being tossed out like trash. Don’t make me call the Dubois brothers.”

  Brothers? Thinking back to the cops I’d seen at Harlan’s shooting, they certainly could have been brothers, with Emmett the oldest. I filed that information away.

  The scarecrow winked and sauntered back to the booth.

  Sara grimaced. “I ought to ban them for good.”

  “Is this your place?”

  “Yep,” she said. She absentmindedly twisted the rings on her left ring finger. “Ever since Stan died.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Nearly two years now,” she said. “He was a good man. We worked hard. But lately the whole town’s been going to hell.”

  “Why? It sounds like there’s lots of work up at the toy factory. My boss and I were up at the offices this morning.” I watched Sara and the old man closely. Neither reacted to that last statement at all. Neither said, This morning? When all those women burned to death? Apparently, neither knew about it, hours after it had happened. “They bring a lot of jobs here, don’t they?” I continued. “Shouldn’t the town be thriving?”

  She shrugged.

  “We’re a timber town,” the victim at the end of the bar said. “We’re not a toy town.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “A job isn’t just a job,” he said. His voice was thick and his words slow. Sara stayed close to him, listening just as closely as I was.

  “A job is an identity,” the man continued. “You don’t put down a chainsaw and then pick up a sewing machine. Making doll clothes isn’t the same as clearing trees. If you switch from one job to the other, you turn into a different person.” He stumbled over that last word, but he was at least making sense.

  “Why don’t you guys cut timber anymore?”

  “Lots of reasons,” the man said. “The main one is that we’ve cut pretty extensively on our land already. There just aren’t that many trees out there worth harvesting anymore, where we can get them.”

  “And there’s the environmentalists,” Sara put in.

  “That’s right. Charlie Junior knew what to do about them. So did his father. But the latest Hammer doesn’t care about any of that.”

  “To be fair,” Sara put in, “Junior had let the whole thing slide the last ten years or so.”

  “It was his health, I think. When times got tough, he had breakdowns-“

  “More like seizures,” Sara said.

  “Yeah, seizures. He worked like crazy to get through tough times, and he paid the price. But for the last ten years or so, he had the tough times without the working like crazy.”

  “Not that you can blame the man. He would fall on the ground and thrash like a flounder in a boat.”

  “Really,” I said, just to contribute something.

  “Yes,” the man said. “Charlie Three seems to have inherited the family condition.”

  “And he’s a helluva success, too,” Sara said.

  “I’ll give him that,” the man said. “Now, Cabot has a clean bill of health. No seizures, near as anyone can see, but he did get the family timber business, and it’s sinking fast.” The old guy slid off his stool and moved closer to me. “My name’s Bill Terril. What’s yours?”

  “Ray Lilly,” I said. We shook hands.

  “Lilly, huh? That’s kind of a girly name.”

  “Sure is,” I said. “I’m the delicate type.”

  Bill chuckled as he looked me over. “I’ll bet.”

  “So, this Charlie Three,” I said, “he live in town?”

  Sara and Bill were instantly suspicious. “Why do you ask?” Sara said.

  “Whoa. It was just a question.”

  “We’re pretty protective of our own around here,” Sara said. “Especially of the Hammers. We look out for them. I don’t know a body in this town who wouldn’t. So, again: Why do you ask?”

  I shrugged. “I dunno. Rich guy, little town. It sounds like he could live wherever.”

  “Nope,” Bill said. “The Hammers created this town, and they stick by it.”

  I wondered how deep and widespread the support for the Hammer family extended. If Charles Hammer’s memory wasn’t wiped after this morning�
��s fight-and I’d have bet it wouldn’t be-he’d have gone into hiding. He might be tough to find without local help. I needed a way to drive a wedge between our target and the town.

  Amazing, really, how quickly I’d gone over to Annalise’s side.

  “Huh.” I didn’t know what else to say. “So who’s Cabot? Another one of the Hammers?” I asked.

  “He…” Bill paused. He thought about how he wanted to answer.

  Sara chimed in. “He’s Charlie Junior’s little brother. See, this town was founded by their grandfather, also named Cabot. He came out here with a crew of men and started cutting trees. He decided that the little Chimilchuk Inlet ought to be larger. He dredged it, widened it, and called it Hammer Bay.

  “He had a lot of people rushing here to find work. Built the town right up. He ran a tight ship. He owned the newspaper, the grocery, the speakeasies, all of it. If he could have paid everyone in company scrip, he would have.”

  “But he was fair,” Bill interrupted. “Everyone respected him.”

  “None of them were fair,” Sara said. “None of them. All they cared about was themselves and what they’d built. The only one who’s any different is Charlie Three.”

  “Dammit!” Bill snapped. “Charlie Senior was a great man! He brought down governors and senators, and gave jobs to men who needed them. Men like my father.”

  “Don’t go all wacky on me, Bill,” Sara said. She waved as though he was a puff of smoke she didn’t want to smell. “Charlie Three is trying to put a foundation under this town. He could do it, too. We’d have decent incomes without having to worry about what happens when the trees are gone. Charlie Three is bringing us into the next century.”

  “I don’t much like it.”

  “Well, you’re pretty much the only one.”

  The old man laughed. “Ain’t that the truth. Most of the people in this town won’t even talk to me anymore. Criticizing Charlie Three around here is like badmouthing the pope in Vatican City, even though he ain’t a patch on what came before.”

  “Don’t talk to me about Senior and Junior,” Sara said. “You know how hard they made things for Stan and his own father.”

  “I… I’m sorry, Sara.” Bill swirled his drink around in his glass. “You know how much I liked Stan.”