He cocked his head. “It’s not coincidence,” he admitted with a disarming smile. “A couple of years after I joined the department, and I developed a measure of control, I had plenty of time to think about things. My thoughts, naturally, led to the assumption, or belief, that I couldn’t be the only person in the world with this power. There have been stories of the strange and fantastic for centuries. There has to be a kernel of truth in them.”
He looked off to the creek.
“I started researching other incidents, stories of drowning, floods, anything to do with water and death. I read a story about a two year-old boy in Illinois who was caught under a frozen river for three hours, and somehow survived. I took some vacation time and went there to investigate for myself. As it turned out, there was a medical explanation: hypothermia set in and he was preserved in the ice water. This has happened in other cases. There was nothing supernatural about it.”
Turning back to me, he said, “But that didn’t stop me: for years, whenever I read a story on the internet or heard the slightest rumor, I would go and find out the truth, hoping one day to meet someone who was like me.
“After a time, I had a revelation that this power might not be limited to the element of water; there could be others out there with the power of fire, earth or air. I expanded my search.”
I asked, “And that led you to me?”
Neil nodded. “Yeah.”
“How?”
He seemed to search for the words. “Now, there’s one thing that I haven’t told you about. As time passed and I was better able to control water itself, another aspect of the power slowly developed in me.”
I blinked. “Aspect?”
He chewed on his lip. “Well, I developed a kind of intuition about things. Like, for instance, if there was a kid trapped in a burning house, I seemed to know exactly what room he was in. I’d be driving down a road and get a sudden urge to take a different route; later I would find out there was construction and I would have been delayed for hours. On long overnight shifts, the guys would play cards; I could always call everyone’s bluff, and I seemed to win more than my fair share of hands to the point where one of the veterans offered to punch my lights out for cheating. That kind of thing.”
I asked, “You mean, like fortune telling?”
“No.” He gave a slight shake of his head and smiled. “I could never see the future in those kind of terms. I’ve purchased many a lottery ticket and I’m still living paycheck to paycheck. No, this is more like an intuition. People sometimes get hunches; I get them all the time.”
“All right,” I said, though I wasn’t clear on what he was leading up to.
Neil sighed. “Well, I told you earlier that it was Chief Hrzinski who contacted my chief…”
“Yeah,” I said, my tone cautious.
“That part was true, but originally, the job was offered to Darryl Lumiere, my lieutenant. When I heard about it, I just had this feeling that I needed to take the job instead. Before I knew it, I convinced Darryl to reject the offer, and campaigned for it for myself.”
Neil shrugged. “I didn’t know why, at the time, but the first opportunity I got, I hit the internet and dug up every scrap of information about Middleton I could find.”
He looked me straight in the eye. “That’s when I read about you, and about your past and imprisonment. It only took a phone call to a friend on the police department in Phoenix to find out you were being released on parole a few days before I planned to come out here.”
I swallowed hard. Coincidence? Destiny? Fate? There were forces at work here I couldn’t understand.
“It was like a breath of fresh air,” he said finally, after I didn’t respond, “having confirmed that you were, indeed like me. Knowing there is someone you can talk to about this, and who would understand.”
An odd thought occurred to me; something that didn’t make complete sense. “Since you’ve done all this research, did you figure out if there was a catalyst for this ability in yourself?”
“You mean, why me? Why you?”
“Sort of,” I said. “I told you my great-grandmother Beatrice had this ability. But it seems to have skipped a few generations. Her journal implied her power was triggered when her husband killed her mother. And for me—” Suddenly, it was very difficult for me to finish that sentence.
“You had a similar trigger event,” Neil guessed, his voice low.
“Yes,” I admitted. “A miscarriage.”
“I’m so sorry.” He fell respectfully silent.
“It’s all right.”
Neil cocked his head. “I never really thought about that. The power being hereditary, I mean. I never heard any stories about any of my ancestors having anything like this. My dad was a fisherman; owned his own boat. My grandfather on my dad’s side was a captain in the Navy, and I think his father was in the Merchant Marines. I guess there’s a seafaring tradition in my family—I’m the first to break that trend. As far as I know, there haven’t been any extraordinary events like mine.”
“So what caused this in us?” I asked aloud.
Neil lowered his eyes. “My brother and I were both drowning; he died and I developed my ability at the same time. For you, your power manifested when you lost your baby. For Beatrice, when her mother died, the fire in her appeared. If I had to guess, this power in us only manifests when someone close to us dies.”
Could that be it?
“When the bond of blood is broken,” I whispered.
Neil looked into my eyes. “Pardon?”
My mind was spinning. There had been so many revelations today, I couldn’t keep up. I wasn’t sure I could process everything; but at the same time, I was like a starving animal—only I was starving for more information.
But Neil interrupted my train of thought. “We should be getting back; your aunt will think we’ve fallen in the river.”
Neil stood, but I grabbed his arm and pulled him back to the bench. “I want to know one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
I gestured to him and then to me. “How did you control it? How do I control it?”
He shrugged. “For me, I stopped resisting it. I let it flow. It’s like balance. The first time you ride a bicycle, you have no balance and fall down. After awhile, I just knew how to ride. You can’t really explain how to keep your balance; you just learn to do it by giving yourself over to your body’s own natural instincts.”
I embraced the flame.
…And I did not end.
Was that the secret, after all? Give myself over to the fire? Surrender to its power?
I didn’t know if I could do that. I had caused so much pain and destruction in the past ten years; how could I consciously open myself up to more?
On the way back, I struggled with that thought.
Chapter Twenty-One
Aunt Martha had the apple pie cooling on the kitchen window sill when we got back. She spotted us, clucked with delight and corralled us back to the table.
“What took you so long?” she demanded. “Ten more minutes and I would have had to put it back in the oven.” She put the pie on the center of the table and searched for a knife. “Edward, you bump,” she hollered into the living room. “Come and help me serve. Scoop the ice cream for me.”
Uncle Edward was sitting on an armchair trying to read a magazine; he would alternately look at the page through his reading glasses, and then try reading it without. Neither method proved successful. That’s what happens when you pick a random pair of glasses from a pharmacy without consulting an eye doctor. At his wife’s summons, he tossed the magazine on the settee, folded the glasses, slid them into his shirt pocket, and then pushed himself to his feet.
I didn’t think there was room for another bite of food after the enormous meal earlier, but the moment Aunt Martha put the pie in front of me, I dug in without hesitation. Neil also had no problem finishing his dessert.
“My, oh my,” Aunt Martha said. “You mu
st have found your appetite on that long walk.”
I reddened. “I guess we did. Thank you, it was delicious.”
She smiled with delight. “All right, now who’s up for a cup of coffee?”
Neil raised a restraining hand. “Oh, no, I can’t. I’d love to, but I have an early day tomorrow. My first official day,” he explained. “I start at five. Thank you so much for the supper. It was perfect.”
“Don’t worry yourself about it at all.” Aunt Martha waved him off. “It was my pleasure.”
“I’ll walk you,” I offered, trying hard not to blush at the knowing look Aunt Martha shot me.
* * *
Neil’s motel room was only a couple of hundred feet from the bungalow, but we took our time walking the distance.
“I want to thank you,” Neil said.
“Me?”
“Yes.” He nodded. “For trusting me, and opening up to me. And believing me. I’ve never told another soul about myself. It’s not as easy as it looks.”
“You can say that again. So,” I added, “what do we do now?”
“I don’t know, really. If there’s a reason for this, it’s beyond me. These powers didn’t come with an instruction manual. I guess, maybe, if you want, we can figure it out together.”
I felt a flush go through my body. The thought of having a kindred spirit gave me a sense of purpose that had eluded me all my life. I had a lot of emotions running riot at the moment, and I needed time to sort through them, but I felt like I was at the beginning of something wonderful and positive. I needed that.
I didn’t want to rush into anything, though, no matter how fantastic I felt at the moment.
“That sounds good to me,” I told Neil. “But I just … I don’t know how to say this…”
“You need some time?”
“No. Yeah. I mean, listen, I don’t want it to sound like I’m not happy to find you, but…”
He smiled. “No worries. Baby steps, right? It’s been a very long day. And tomorrow is going to be long, too. My shift ends around two in the afternoon. You start at three?”
“Yeah.”
He said, “Why don’t we meet up at the Finer Diner around two, then? It’ll be a late lunch for you, and early dinner for me.”
I smiled. “All right, that sounds good.”
We had reached his room, and he paused at the door.
“Look, I don’t want to scare you off or anything, but—” He leaned toward me, his motions awkward and uncertain, and gave me a gentle kiss on the cheek.
I didn’t know how to react. At the same time, I felt giddy, and everything in my body seemed to dance with excitement. Then Neil spoke again. “No more secrets, I promise.”
He gave me a light laugh and a wink. I smiled back, but icy fingers of guilt ran down my spine.
Neil had completely opened up to me, but I had not been totally honest with him. It was something I wanted to take to my grave, and it was the main reason I was frightened by the thought of surrendering to the power.
There had been one incident in my life where I had called on the power on purpose.
I could barely wait for him to disappear inside. The moment his door closed, I turned and headed as fast as I could to my own room before I completely broke down.
All this time, I had tried my damndest not to think about the one and only time I had deliberately summoned the power.
* * *
I was originally sentenced to five years in prison for manslaughter; more specifically, negligence resulting in death. They couldn’t prove I had any intent, and I didn’t have a track record of any arson-related offenses prior to the fire. That I had a juvenile record for minor incidents led the jury to believe that it was in my nature to be reckless, and the judge added that I was headed down a path that would lead to more and more serious crimes. He had passed sentence without batting an eye.
My court-appointed defender had assured me I wouldn’t do more than three years as long as I attended counseling, toed the line, and did my best to be a model inmate. But sometimes, you could make every effort to follow the rules in prison, and still end up in deep trouble.
They don’t send nice people to prison, and when you wrong someone inside, they tend not to forgive you. As a matter of fact, they can hold a grudge for a very long time.
Cindi Peterson had held her grudge against me for nearly three years. She had been my cellmate that first night in prison, when I lost control of the power, and it was she who I had nearly killed. It had frightened her to the core. When people are scared, they can react in different ways. For Cindi, she carried that fear deep inside her and she waited for the opportunity to make the world right again. The only way she could do that was to make me suffer physically as she had suffered mentally. In order for her to feel safe, I had to die.
During the first three years inside, I had no idea that she was waiting and planning her revenge on me. Prison life is a life of routine, and the days and years can blend in to one another as time passes. We performed the same chores every day, shared the same gossip, ate the same bland food. The structured schedule of an inmate is designed to deaden the mind.
Even still, arguments happened, fights were not uncommon, and sometimes, when the loneliness crept in, people found solace in the embrace of whoever was closest. And sometimes, because there was a higher ratio of male guards, the female prisoners occasionally attempted to entice one of them into an intimate circumstance for various reasons: trading favors, special treatment, access to outside goods and contraband; or even simply for mutual company or pleasure.
The guards were under strict orders against fraternizing with the inmates, but more often than you would care to believe, indiscretions happened. When Cindi found a younger, very naïve guard who had recently undergone a divorce, Donny Riker, she homed in on him and worked her own brand of magic. A little flirting, a few dropped hints, and the two began a year-long tryst. After awhile, he was so whipped and confused by her head games, she could easily play him like a marionette. She was getting out in six months, and she made promises and plans with him for after her release.
I found this all out afterwards. The prison rumor mill goes into overdrive when anything extraordinary happens, and among the dozen or so stories I heard through the grapevine, one core line involved Cindi getting Donny to follow and corner me in the storage room one night.
The plan was for him to make it look like an accident, but when he followed me inside and closed the door behind him, I didn’t gasp, scream or try to run as he expected. I merely stared at him. He hesitated, uncertain what he had gotten himself into.
Truth was I was far too surprised to react. My thoughts had been elsewhere, and I couldn’t figure out what unspoken rule or protocol I had breached to get a guard to come after me.
“It’s time to die,” he said finally, and pulled out his baton.
My power immediately kicked in and I felt my skin burning.
“My eyes can see!” I shouted at him. This was the first time I had used the mantra, and I was far too panicked to recite it in a calming manner.
My reaction took him aback. “What?”
I continued yelling. “My tongue can taste!”
I clenched my fists, and I could feel the heat in me rise as I continued shouting the mantra. “My mouth can smile!”
I was scared, but I don’t think that’s how I came across to Donny.
“You really are some kind of crazy,” he yelled, eyes wide like someone who’d had far too much coffee and not nearly enough sleep. “Cindi was right; they should have given you the needle.”
With that, he raised his baton over his head and advanced, his eyes wide with apprehension.
Before he crossed half the distance between us there came a rattling at the door. Through the small frosted glass window, I saw a shape.
Donny turned just as Cindi, expectant and elated, burst inside. I have no idea who she bribed to get there, but I had a sudden sinking sensation deep in t
he pit of my stomach.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Donny demanded.
Cindi glared at me. “I had to watch. I want to make sure the bitch dies.”
“It’s too dangerous. Let me take care of it.” He turned back and leveled his eyes at me, and I could see the commitment in his gaze. Barry had had that same look in his eyes whenever he was about to throw a heavy beating on someone. There was no going back from this. No one would hear me if I hollered at the top of my lungs. If I just stayed there, Donny would bludgeon me to death in front of his lover.
For the first time in my life, I purposely did not restrain the power. I stopped shouting the mantra, and instead I willed the fire to come forth.
If I were going to die, I would take Donny and Cindi with me.
The dry papers and folders inside the cabinets ignited like tinder. The overhead fluorescents exploded in a shower of sparks and chemical powder. Windows shattered as my would-be assailants screamed when thousands of shards and splinters pierced their skin.
The walls buckled and the roof groaned. I became an inferno, and the heat radiated out from me with such power that the flesh on Donny’s face melted before he died. He didn’t even have time to scream.
I was horrified, but at the same time, I felt an overwhelming sense of release that made my knees shake. The power coursed through my veins like a wild beast.
I was so completely out of control that I didn’t even know who I was anymore. It was almost as if I were a different person, and the thing inside me was an entity all on its own. I had succumbed to its desire to be free, and now I couldn’t harness it.
Cindi tried to run from my rage, but she was not fast enough. Her scream was cut off as a wave of my fire washed over her.
That scream was the last sound I heard; as with the first time the fire had taken control of me, I passed out. The building continued to burn around me.
The next day, when I woke in the infirmary, I was completely unharmed. The administration building, I found out from the orderly, had been reduced to ash.
The Complete Book Of Fallen Angels Page 14
