Firebloods

by Casey Hays

  While Frankie skims the letter, I scoop up the envelope and slide the final item into my palm. A necklace. The pendant is flat, oval shaped, and hangs from a long, thin, gold chain. And right smack in the center is a ruby, slightly darker than my own. I let it dangle from my fingers.

  “What do you think this is?”

  Frankie takes it. “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

  “Jewelry doesn’t mean anything to a Fireblood?”

  She shakes her head. “Not that I’ve ever read. But this must be important. Maybe this letter gives a clue.”

  “Well then, I guess you’d better hurry and sign up for Rosetta Stone.” I laugh. She doesn’t find my comment funny.

  Okay… take this seriously, Jude.

  My eyes fall over the items laying side by side on the dishtowel, and I really have to step back and take a minute. If these things aren’t fakes—and at this point, I’m not ruling that out—but if they aren’t, what then? Could Frankie actually be onto something here?

  I shake that thought away. No. These things prove nothing except that Dr. Melmack is just as eccentric as his daughter.

  My phone buzzes to life on the table next to me. I glance at it. It’s Devan. I sweep it up.

  “Hey.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Frankie’s. Where are you?”

  “At your house. No one’s here.”

  I pull back and check the time on my phone. It’s nearly four o’clock. I place the cell back against my ear.

  “Mom isn’t home? That’s weird.”

  “Why is that weird?” Devan asks. “She’s hardly ever home.”

  “Except on Sundays. She’s always home by three on Sundays. Always.”

  “Well, she isn’t here.”

  That can’t be right. I stand and motion to Frankie that I have to go.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” Frankie says. “I need to get this crate back in the basement before my parents get home, but I’ll take pictures of anything of interest.”

  I give her the thumbs up and head to her room for my bag. “I’ll be there soon, Dev.”

  I chew on the inside of my cheek as I end the call and slide through my contacts for Mom’s number. See, there’s one thing about Mom I’ve always been able to rely on: in nearly five years, she’s never strayed from her Sunday routine. I press the phone to my ear on the way to my car.

  Something doesn’t feel quite right.

  Interlude

  Bad News

  Sleep and I used to be good friends. That was a long time ago. We’ll just call it “back then” for reference purposes.

  Back then, when I was a kid, I looked forward to bedtime. Every night, Dad read to me. I can still remember the colors of his voice, the inflection as he mimicked each character. He was good with voices. He even had a nice, high-pitched female tone that sent me into fits of laughter every time he used it. Sometimes, he sang my bedtime song: “Hey Jude.” He said I must have been pretty special to have caused the Beatles to write a song about me before I was even born.

  Afterwards, Mom came in with a full glass of cold water and set it on my nightstand. She had this habit of checking the end of my bed. She pulled the tucked sheets free and examined my socked feet, even tickling my toes in the process. She claimed she was checking to ensure I had plenty of leeway for stretching because a good stretch never hurt anyone. In reality, I know she was looking for scorpions, which like to hide in the folds of your blankets and nibble on your heels at night. A fatal game. In my bed, she never found a single one. Thank goodness! Afterwards… lights out. And I disappeared into my dreams.

  Life was safe back then. It was safe to close my eyes, to let Sleep swoop in and take me off to Dreamland. And on the nights I didn’t dream, I still knew it was safe to enter the comforting darkness. My parents were one cry away, tucked into their king-sized bed down the hall. I had nothing to fear.

  As I got a bit older, I cherished sleeping in on Saturday mornings in the middle of the school year. And Sundays? They were the best.

  Mom cooked on Sundays. The smells of breakfast were announced late morning, swirling up the staircase and teasing me out of bed before I was ready. Every week, I skipped down the stairs to find Mom at the stove flipping pancakes or cracking eggs into a cast iron skillet, an apron wrapped around her robe. Dad sat at the kitchen table, the Sunday paper spread before him, a steaming cup of coffee near his elbow. His face was dark from lack of shaving, and he ran his hand over the stubble while he read. The radio was always on with Neil Diamond or the Bee Gees filling the kitchen with their lyrical wisdom. Sometimes, I stood in the doorway and just watched my parents. My dad would say something funny, and Mom would throw back her head and laugh as if she’d never known anyone so clever. Sometimes, she left the eggs to cooking and came up behind Dad to rifle his hair or lean in for a kiss. And more than once, he took that as an invitation to swing her by the hips into his lap for a real moment before he pulled her to her feet to two-step around the table. Back then… our house seemed full of that magic called love.

  The way my parents looked at each other—not just on Sundays, but every day—was a true testament to why my mother still mourns so deeply. Is there such a thing as soulmates? I can’t say for certain, but if they don’t exist, something must. What my parents had makes me a believer.

  It was a Sunday in mid-December when two police officers came to our door with the news. Daddy had been missing for a few days, and Mom was frantic.

  “Mrs. Gallagher, you might want to sit down.”

  “No, I do not want to sit down.” My mother’s lower lip trembled out the words. “Where is my husband?”

  The older of the two officers removed his hat to scratch at his head, looking anywhere but into Mom’s eyes. It was the younger officer who finally answered.

  “He was found… just inside the park entrance, ma’am.” His voice filled with guarded sympathy. “We’re going to need you to come down to the morgue to identify his body.”

  I sat frozen on the bottom step of the staircase, my face pressed between the rails and my tears ready to spill over as I watched the officer’s lips move. I couldn’t process the news. These officers must have come to the wrong house to tell the wrong wife that her husband—her strong and beautiful and invincible husband—was dead.

  “We’re very sorry for your loss,” the officer added, but with all the softness in his tone, the words were too shallow. Just a formality out of duty. Something he’d said half a dozen times to half a dozen other wives. They pinged off and bounced away from Mom’s pained expression.

  The officer’s hair was bright red when he removed his hat. I’m not sure why this detail has stayed with me all these years. I suppose people just notice things when their emotions are heightened. At any rate, I kept my gaze glued to his red head—a central focal point—as he offered the same focus to concentrating on my mother.

  She blinked once, and then she shook her head, slowly at first, and then faster and faster. She crumpled to her knees, her shoulders heaving with her sobs. I wanted to go to her, but I couldn’t. I was frozen to my spot on the stairs, my heart slowly cracking. The officers exchanged uncomfortable glances, fumbling with their hats, until the younger one again took the lead and knelt to comfort her.

  Until then, I never felt such sorrow in all my life. Right there in our living room, I watched as my mother’s whole heart was dug from her chest in one piece. I felt every ounce of her pain. Oh, her heart was still beating, taunting her. It sang into her ear—and in mine—a heart-wrenching tune of doom. It said things that twisted my ribcage into a tangled mess. My daddy was gone.

  As for my mom, the song promised her a life without Dad by her side.

  We went to the morgue, but Mom didn’t let me see him. In fact, it wasn’t until two years ago that I learned how my father had died. Beaten, slashed, burnt. Almost unrecognizable. But my mother knew it was him immediately, and I knew she knew the minute her garbled sob echoed down t
he dull, gray hallway with its flickering lights.

  Who could do such a thing to another human being? Who could do such a thing to my brave, strong, handsome daddy? Those were my thoughts.

  It was a newspaper clipping on microfilm at the library that shared the cause of my dad’s death. I’d never been allowed to know it, and I was angry for the longest time after this. Angry at my mother for not telling me. Angry at my father for letting it happen. My anger was unfounded, of course. I was so young; Mom did what she had to for my own good, and in the end I had to be grateful. Fresh truth was always much harder to swallow.

  At his funeral, I finally resigned myself to the fact that he was never coming back. Up until then, I’d held out hope. Perhaps it was all some terrible mistake, and we’d go home to find Dad sitting in his favorite recliner reading the paper or plucking his guitar at the kitchen table. But something about the black earth swallowing up the shiny, ebony casket added the final punctuation mark to the whole affair. Mom was brave, standing tall and proud at the front of the small gathering of people who’d come to pay their respects. She clung to my hand almost too tightly, but I didn’t complain. When the time came, I stepped up to the casket and laid a blue rose right in the center where I thought Daddy’s heart was situated.

  “I love you for all time, Daddy,” I whispered. And just like that, I accepted that he was gone.

  I don’t think about it much anymore. No sense in contemplating a past I can’t handle and a future I’ll never have. Overnight, Mom changed. I became my own guardian the minute the last shovel of dirt was flung onto Dad’s grave.

  I dreamt about my dad that night and every night for a week. Sometimes, I still dream it. The same exact dream. Not often, but enough to make me wonder. In fact, on the nights when Sleep comes to visit, you can bet there’s a fifty-fifty chance my dad will show up.

  They scared me at first, those dreams. Mom was no comfort. Heck, she could hardly comfort herself without a bottle of wine for the first year after dad’s death. The one time in my life out of all the times I needed her, she couldn’t deliver.

  That dream? It feels alive in my bones somehow, like a deep cough that won’t let go of my lungs. It stays with me for hours after I wake, and it grows like a fungus every time I enter its realm. A new detail here, an old one I hadn’t noticed before there. It’s full of music that I can’t remember once I wake. But each time it’s more vivid and disturbing, more real and haunting, and I have this hazy impression that one day, I’ll know the whole song. I wonder if I’ll like it.

  I’d never say this aloud, but I honestly have a growing fear that this dream may follow me out of my head. The thought alone makes me physically nauseous.

  Maybe one day, I’ll tell you my dream.

  Eight

  Worry doesn’t set in until after my call goes to voicemail for the sixth time. I’m not saying it’s ever easy to get ahold of Mom. And believe me, I make a much greater effort to keep in touch with her than she does me.

  I don’t find her at the cemetery or the church, and a drive by the hospital proves she didn’t take an extra shift.

  Where the hell is she?

  I’d be angry if I weren’t so worried. In fact, at the moment I’m having a hard time distinguishing between the two emotions. It’s a fine line. But if I have to hear “This is Ellen…leave a message” one more time, I might pull every single hair out.

  This obviously isn’t the first time Mom’s pulled a disappearing act, but she usually has the courtesy to send a text letting me know she’s falling off the face of the earth for a few hours. This feels different.

  “Maybe she met someone.”

  Devan leans a hip against the edge of the countertop in my kitchen, a bottle of water in one hand and her cell in the other. She shrugs up a shoulder in her best effort to convince me that I shouldn’t worry.

  “At the cemetery?” I bite my bottom lip and send another quick text.

  “You never know. Some cute gravedigger could have sauntered by.”

  She attempts a weak laugh, but I’m just not feeling it.

  “I know my mom.” I yank open the refrigerator for a can of soda. “For almost five years she’s come straight home on Sundays by three. She watches home videos of my dad until midnight, drinks three bottles of wine, and crashes on the couch.”

  Devan frowns. “Well, darn.”

  I pop the top on my soda and take a long swig. The doorbell rings.

  “That’s Jonas.” Devan drops her phone into her open purse and scuttles out to get the door.

  I hop up onto a stool at the bar and slump against my fists. Irritation hovers nearby, and I feel the growl. I also feel, once again, like the parent. For once, I wish it was Mom at home fretting over me instead of the other way around.

  Devan and Jonas tromp back into the kitchen.

  “Hey.” Jonas drops Devan’s hand and gives my shoulders a quick squeeze. “Still nothing?”

  I shake my head, down the rest of my soda, and crush the can, tossing it in a perfect arc toward the sink. It hits the stainless steel with a resounding clash of metal on metal.

  “She’s done this before.” He dons his best soothing tone and takes the seat next to me. “She’s fine.”

  “Yeah.” I wipe the back of my hand across my lips.

  He smiles, but it comes across more as a grimace. He eyes Devan and shrugs. I get it; he’s at a loss. “Well…”

  While he grapples with his words, I peer at the time on the microwave. It’s nearly seven.

  “I’ll order a pizza,” Devan offers, already speed-dialing. “We’ll just wait with you until she shows, okay?”

  “Thanks.”

  She wanders off into another part of the house to place the order. Jonas grabs a soda from the fridge and returns to his seat.

  “Devan told me about you and Kane.”

  My heart escalates at the sudden subject change. I just can’t get away from it, can I?

  “Told you what?”

  “That he finally got you to dance.” His smile is easy, teasing. “Interesting.”

  I do my best to play it cool with a nonchalant shrug. “It was just a dance.”

  “Right…” He takes a casual sip of his drink before he hits me with his true thoughts. “And when’s the last time you danced? I can’t even remember.”

  I shrug off the question. Devan turns on the television in the living room. I concentrate on the dull noises for a minute.

  “Do you like him, Jude? Because lately, it kind of seems like you do.”

  I swing my head, stunned and blinking at him like an idiot. This isn’t Devan goading me with her opinion of my relationship status with Kane. It isn’t Frankie using every source of her reason to prove or disprove my feelings. This is my oldest friend asking, his cool, blue eyes full of sincerity. Jonas has never asked me. Jonas has always respected my wishes and defended my stance anytime Kane’s flirting turned romantically vicious. And Jonas never poses a question if he hasn’t put some serious thought into it first. This makes me doubt my own convictions.

  I focus on the outline of the oak tree barely visible in the setting sunlight. “Why do you ask?”

  “Okay, look.” Jonas’s hand falls on my knee, giving it a gentle squeeze. “We’re not kids anymore. As much as Kane pretends his flirting is all in fun, he’s in a different place now. He’s—”

  He stops short, struggling to find the right words and failing epically, but I get what he says. We’ve all changed. We’re more mature, more prepared for intimacy… blah, blah, blah. I pry my eyes from the window and focus on his face, my arms folded over each other on the bar.

  “I kissed him,” I whisper, and I see the slight jolt in his shoulders as he takes the news. His eyes widen. Just a smidge.

  “Oh.” His hand falls away. “Then… ohhhh.”

  I tug nervously on my ring, sliding it toward my knuckle and back down again. Once… twice… Because I know myself well. I told Jonas for one reason only. And it wa
sn’t because I wanted him to talk me out of it. I sigh.

  “Could you say something else?” I quip. Jonas runs a hand through his blond hair.

  “Well, that explains a lot.”

  I straighten, dropping my hands into my lap. “What do you mean?”

  He thinks. “Did you kiss him at the club?”

  I cringe. “Yeah.”

  “Well, let’s just say he wasn’t himself when I got there last night.” He props an elbow against the bar. “And then he left.”

  His words penetrate like hot irons fresh from a fire. Here I was, thinking I’m the only one agonizing over my little misstep. I should have known better, especially after Devan sent me all those texts. How could I think Kane could just blow it off when I can’t? I did this. That kiss was my fault. It’s seared into our souls.

  Okay, maybe that’s a bit much, but… ugh.

  With a heavy sigh, I slump, veering my eyes toward Jonas. And I can tell… he sees every bit of my misery as if my face were a piece of stone with the message etched glaringly across the surface.

  “What do I do?”

  “You answer the question.” His response is so matter-of-fact. “Do you like him?”

  Everything inside me tightens at what I’m contemplating. I never, ever intended to cross this bridge. But here I am, standing at the end of it, probing the first step. Darn you, Kane O’Reilly. Darn you and everything about you that got me here.

  “Maybe.” I study my hands. “I—I don’t know. I guess lately… I’m confused by how he makes me feel.”

  “Okay,” he nods once. “So when you figure it out, then you move on to step two.”

  “What’s step two?”

  “We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves, don’t you think?” Jonas pinches his lips together until the pink turns white.

  “What’s step two?” I’m not playing this game.

  A grin pricks at his lips. “He likes you, Jude. He’s liked you for a while, and he likes you a lot more than he puts on. So step two comes with dual choices, depending on what you decide: hold on tight or let go. But don’t linger in the middle. It’s not good for either of you.”