Wildcat Fireflies

by Amber Kizer

  I floated in the creek until the water felt warm and the air temperature balmy. My eyes kept fluttering closed and it was tempting, oh so tempting, to drift off, float away down the creek, float toward sleep and the oblivion of nothing.

  “Juliet.” My name was accompanied by a stinging slap. “Juliet!”

  I opened my eyes. Nicole dragged me through the water toward the shore, where Bodie and Sema huddled together, their faces pure fear.

  I tried to get my legs under me, but they wouldn’t cooperate. “Wait, I can walk.”

  “Some half-assed guardian angel I am,” Nicole muttered.

  I was too busy trying to move my anesthetized limbs to contemplate her words, or her anger.

  Bodie held out a blanket. Nicole went back into the creek and grabbed my costume, which had snagged on tree roots and flotsam. She stashed the fabric remains along with my shoes under a log, while I watched, trembling. My skin burned with pins and needles as blood and heat rushed back in.

  I opened my mouth. Closed it. My throat was raw and felt swollen from the smoke.

  “We have to get her inside.” Nicole spoke to Bodie as if I were the youngest child; they talked above my head. I didn’t even have the energy to bristle with indignity.

  In the distance, helicopters circled spotlights. It seemed as if the night was alive with sounds of pain and suffering. Sirens echoed in all directions, bouncing back and around. Or maybe the sound track from the Feast replayed, stuck on a loop in my head.

  Mini escorted us across the lawn, one labored step at a time. We made it back into the kitchen. Nicole rubbed the blanket over my body briskly, painfully. Bodie grabbed a towel from the laundry room and worked on my hair with childish, fumbling fingers. Their expressions were serious and attentive. I would live.

  We heard a car pull up in the driveway. Not just any car, but Mistress’s.

  “Crap,” Bodie muttered.

  Nicole helped me toward the stairs, not so that I could go up them, but so I could dive under and pull on clothes. The only saving grace was Mistress moved slowly; all that bulk needed momentum to maneuver.

  “Hurry.” Bodie closed the crawl-space door on my back. I imagined him scurrying around and behind the wall to hide.

  I heard the front door.

  “What are you doing standing there?” Mistress shouted.

  Forcing myself to move quickly, I dragged a dirty T-shirt over my head and stepped into flannel pajama bottoms that used to belong to a man who passed through the Train Room. Then I pulled on thick socks from another departed guest. I dragged my hair up into a ponytail to hide any clinging debris. I smelled the fire, but I had the feeling that’s all I might smell in the weeks to come.

  Nicole answered, “I’m getting warm milk for the lady upstairs. She can’t sleep.”

  “Don’t be wasting that. The other one dead yet? I’m ready to go.” Mistress sounded like she was in a particularly foul mood.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Have you seen that snake of a social worker tonight? She come by?”

  I paused, listening attentively.

  “Ma’am?” There was a tremble in Nicole’s voice.

  “You know who I’m talking about. That lying bitch, has she been here?”

  “Ms. Asura?”

  “Yes, her!” Mistress sounded as if she was fast losing the patience she never had enough of.

  “No, ma’am,” Nicole said clearly.

  There was a long silence, but neither one of them seemed to move. No sounds on the stairway or toward Mistress’s quarters. I pictured the expression on Mistress’s face. I’d stood silent and frozen so many times waiting for an arbitrary punishment or the decision of one.

  “The old bat can’t sleep, huh?” Mistress’s voice traveled as she moved.

  There was a pause as Nicole seemed to try to catch up. “No, ma’am.”

  “I’ll help ’em sleep.” With that the floor echoed and shook. The stairs argued as the footsteps disappeared up above my head.

  Bodie opened the little door. “Clear.”

  “You need to get to sleep, buddy.”

  “You tell us a story? About the Feast?”

  “Not tonight. I need to go see what’s going on.” A bad feeling hovered over my gut, icy fingers of dread tightening my bowels.

  I didn’t have time to cuddle or comfort Bodie. I took his hand and pulled him and Sema up the backstairs, pushed them up to the attic. I headed toward the Green Room.

  Mistress stood above Enid, holding out a little packet of pills. “You need to take your medication.”

  “But it’s not time.” Distressed, Enid sank deeper into the pillow.

  “It’s prescribed by your doctor. You will take this and I will stand here until you do.” Mistress was calm. Too calm. There was a wild, whacked-out crazy in her eyes.

  I watched Enid fight against her own helplessness. She wanted to argue. She wanted to, but she didn’t. With a shaky hand, Enid took the pills in her mouth and Mistress motioned to Nicole to hold the water glass so she could suck down the pills.

  I tiptoed into the room, trying to be present without catching attention.

  “Your sister looks like she’s in pain. We can’t have that.” Mistress unlocked a small cabinet that contained vials of medication and pulled out a little glass bottle. “Juliet, get me a syringe.”

  I blinked, then fumbled around in a drawer until I found the right size for the IV.

  “Today!” Mistress barked at me.

  I watched Nicole put the water glass down. Enid’s wide eyes were mesmerized by Mistress. I knew by the quiver in her lips that she was scared. There was nothing I could do in that moment to comfort her or change what I feared might happen next.

  It didn’t happen often, but with that unhinged glint in Mistress’s eyes, anything felt possible.

  I shared a look with Nicole; her expression said her fears echoed mine.

  I stepped between the beds, squeezing myself up and around the equipment, while Nicole grabbed Enid’s hand. Mini appeared and wrapped herself around my legs.

  As if in slow motion, Mistress prepared the injection and slid it into Glee’s IV. She unlatched the oxygen monitor from Glee’s finger and turned off the machine. “Wonderful. She’ll feel much better now.” Mistress didn’t look back, just left the room like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. Over her shoulder she said, “You girls best get to bed. Tomorrow is a big day.”

  Tears freely flowing, Enid spit out the pills as soon as the door closed, keening grief.

  “Please, please be quiet.” I threw myself over her. The last thing we needed was Mistress deciding to come back and finish Enid, too. “She’ll come back. Please, please.”

  Nicole turned Glee’s machine back on. When I glanced up, Nicole shook her head sadly, tears streaking her cheeks. The three of us hugged and held each other while sobs deflated our souls like a chilling soufflé. Mini wiggled her way into our embrace.

  “Why? Oh why?” Enid’s fingers tightened around my shoulders and in my hair. Pulling, smacking, as if her pain forced its way to the surface even as she nodded her understanding and tried to muffle the noise.

  Mini yowled and kneaded the old woman’s belly.

  The helpless and hopeless sounds she tried to stifle in my embrace reminded me of dying animals who’d crawled up onto DG’s porches and steps.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I kept repeating.

  Hiccups racked my stomach, so I stood.

  Enid seemed like one of my littlest charges, shriveled and pitiful in a bed that looked four times too large. “Did she just kill my sister?” I clasped her free hand while tears continued to trail down her cheeks, soaking the pillow and hair on either side of her face.

  “I think so. That’s a lot of morphine,” I whispered.

  “But why? She wasn’t doing anything. We can’t do anything or go anywhere.” Baffled and bewildered, she picked at her covers and played with the tube in her arm.


  “I’m so sorry. She’s still breathing a little.”

  Nicole picked up all the pills Enid spit out and pocketed them. Mini sat on my feet, then leapt up onto Glee’s feet.

  “Can you …,” Enid began to ask, then broke off.

  “What?” I leaned down, smoothing her hair.

  “Can you help me?” Enid tried to scoot closer to her sister. “Into the same bed?”

  I nodded. Nicole and I helped Enid settle closer to her sister in the same bed. She held her, talked to her in hushed, whispered tones and patted her face and hair. Nicole turned the machine’s volume to mute. The alarms were more jarring than the death sometimes.

  In unspoken agreement, Nicole and I moved over to the beautiful window seat I had always wished for time to sit in, and waited. Mini lay on the bed and kept her own kind of vigil. Nicole and I sat twined together.

  I looked out at the night around us until the fingers of dawn began to creep up. Nicole touched my shoulder. Glee was dead, had been for a while.

  When Enid was ready, we moved her back into her own bed. “I know it seems impossible, but she’s here in spirit, dears. She’s going to wait for me. We’ve always done everything together—passing over will be no exception.” Enid appeared surprisingly peaceful and okay. She even smiled up at me before we left the room. I wondered if the trauma had broken her grasp on reality. Dead was dead.

  I hoped to God, or whoever wasn’t listening to my prayers, that Glee wasn’t still stuck in this place.

  She, we, deserved better.

  The dead outnumber the living, who dwindle aboard that Hades ship. I find myself near expiring trying to bring Light into such Darkness.

  Cassie Ailey

  May 5, 1855

  CHAPTER 35

  The bombing of the Feast was not the work of international terrorists, no matter what the FBI might feed to the news crews. The perpetrators were Nocti through and through. There was not a doubt in my mind, nor Tens’s. Outside the cocoon of the bathroom the world felt a hell of a lot less cozy and safe.

  “Did you see the burn scars on her forearms?” I couldn’t get the image of Juliet’s stricken expression and the glimpses of her wounds from my mind.

  “Cigarette butts,” Tens confirmed.

  “What?”

  “Those are caused by cigarettes burned into the skin.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Tens gave me his I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-this shrug.

  I let it drop, for the moment. Both of us were ravenous, so he cooked up a batch of “bachelor eggs,” saying his grandfather’s recipe was merely an excuse to use everything in the fridge. Onions, garlic, peppers, chopped-up bacon and breakfast sausage, all sautéed. Eggs were scrambled into the mixture and cheeses of several kinds were melted over the top. This time, I squeezed the orange juice.

  “What’s the connection to Kirian? And that woman?” I told him about the conversation Minerva had made me eavesdrop on. Yes, I know how ridiculous it sounded to say a cat made me eavesdrop, but the ridiculous was our normal now.

  “We should warn her.” Tens served up plates.

  “Because that worked so well.” I’d watched the crowds for Nocti, but realized at some point I was merely looking for hooded black robes like Perimo and his believers wore. A few costumed priests mingled, but didn’t come close enough for me to get a sense of them. Unless I saw his or her eyes, that blank void, lightless and empty, I didn’t know if I could recognize one. “She didn’t believe us.”

  “Would you?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “If your mother had sat you down and given you the 411, would you have believed her?”

  We both focused on food while I considered. Anger was my knee-jerk response.

  She could have tried. She should have tried.

  Tens pushed Sammy’s artwork across the table toward me. He didn’t say anything more. He didn’t need to.

  By punishing my parents, was I also punishing my brother? He’d done nothing but love me unconditionally.

  “I can’t promise anything.”

  Tens nodded. “I get that.”

  “I’ll call.”

  He placed a disposable cell phone on the table and began to clear the table.

  “Can you please try to find an entry in the journal from 1943, talking about, or written by, a Prunella?”

  “You sure?”

  “It’s something Auntie said.”

  “Okay.” Tens shrugged and unwrapped the journal from the lap quilt of Auntie’s I’d concealed it in.

  I picked up the disposable phone and dialed. I felt sweat bead my forehead and my mouth dry out listening to the chimes.

  “Hello?” My mother’s voice shook across the line. She sounded older.

  “Hi.” I couldn’t call her Mom, not yet. Mothers protect and defend and guard. She had done those things in her way, but rather than protect me from the Fenestra destiny, she should have stood in front of the taunts and nicknames and abuse I took from people around me. She should have guarded my heart against believing I was a freak, a girl who could cause death with a thought.

  “Meridian. Honey, are you okay? Where are you? How is Auntie?” Her words were filled with relief, concern, and questions.

  “Auntie’s dead.” I didn’t try to soften my pronouncement. I wanted her to hurt.

  She gasped. “But—”

  “Is Dad there?”

  “Oh, Meridian, I’m sorry. You can’t imagine how—”

  “Is Dad around? Or Sammy?” I cut her off. I wasn’t ready to listen to her guilt speak to me.

  “Your brother misses you.”

  “You don’t?” I bubbled up and over. “Why didn’t you tell me? How could you let me just believe I was a freak?”

  Tens came behind me; I grasped onto him. He tightened his hold to match my need.

  She didn’t hesitate. “I waited for you to ask. To open the conversation.”

  “How could I ask? You never let me think … you never acted like you saw.” My anger burned brightly. I wanted to call her names. I wanted to tell her she was a terrible parent. I wanted to demand that Sammy come live with me because they weren’t fit to care for a child. Any child.

  “Meridian?” Dad’s voice filled the line. I heard my mom’s heaving sobs move farther away from the phone.

  “Dad.”

  “I know you don’t want to hear this, but she did her best.”

  “That’s not an excuse.” How could he forgive her so easily?

  He sighed. “I would change things. But we can’t. I miss you, honey.”

  “Can I talk to Sammy?”

  “Sure. Sure.” I heard a door close and Dad holler, “Sammy!”

  There was a pause, like he was trying to figure out what to say. “Are you okay? Do you need money? Anything?”

  “We’re covered.”

  “We? You and Auntie?”

  “No, um, my boyfriend. He’s special, too.”

  “Oh. Does he treat you well?” Dad asked.

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “Good. Good. Can I talk to him?”

  “I don’t have much time.”

  “Okay, maybe next time. Here’s Sammy. He was in the bath. I love you.”

  I didn’t remember ever hearing my dad say those words before. I didn’t answer him. If I had tried, even to lie, I knew I’d lose what teeny bit of composure I had left.

  “Mer-D!” Sammy squealed into the phone. “Miss you. Miss you.”

  “Hi, Sammy.” My shoulders relaxed and my soul smiled. I pressed the speaker button so Tens could hear my brother too.

  “When are you coming home? We get to share a room! It’s got a view of the dolphins and the manatees. And we can walk to the beach every day.”

  “Wow, that sounds fantastic.” I knew they were in Miami from the area code.

  “I miss you.”

  “I know. I miss you too.”

  “Did you get my letter? Jo said he’d give it to you.” />
  “I did.” I giggled, thinking of Sangre Warrior Josiah answering to the nickname Jo.

  “Are you coming soon?”

  “I don’t think so, kiddo.”

  “Daddy told me you’re a superhero now. Do you have a cape and mask too?”

  Tens cracked up into silent guffaws.

  “Um, well,” I stuttered.

  “ ’Cuz that’s so cool. I miss you.”

  “I miss you too.”

  “We have to move soon. I hate moving. Maybe we can come to your house?”

  “I know, I’m sorry.”

  Now I understood why Josiah let me have a contact number for my family. They were leaving this address, so no Nocti would be able to use them against me, us, again.

  “I get a new name.”

  I glanced up at Tens. New names?

  “Sammy, that’s enough.” Dad’s voice cut in. “Say goodbye.”

  “Bye, Mer-D. Come home.”

  “I love you, champ.” I blinked tears out of my eyes and let them swim down my cheeks.

  Tens rubbed them clean for me.

  “Meridian?”

  “Yeah,” I answered my dad.

  “We’re going into a protection program of sorts. Josiah’s setting us up.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s for the best. Safest for your brother to start over. Without knowing about you.”

  “I understand.” Were they wiping me out?

  “We will remember you but be unable to say your name. When Sammy is ready, Josiah has promised to unveil Sammy’s memories, too. Josiah says when Sammy sees you again he’ll remember everything.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s the only way to protect you and us.”

  To go back to being a secret? That was the only way?

  “I’m sorry.” He ran out of apologies.

  “I know.”

  “Let me talk to her,” Mom yelled.

  “Goodbye, Dad.” I hung up the phone as my mom’s voice continued to plead in the background. I couldn’t handle more. I didn’t need her to feel better right now. I wasn’t ready to absolve her.

  “I’m gone?” I looked up at Tens and crumpled.

  “I’m so sorry. So sorry. I didn’t know—” Tears dripped down his face and mingled with mine. “I wanted you to have them back.”