Flame's Embrace

by Pillar, Amanda

  I took off running. I’d been on foot tonight, and I was going to have to race to get to her. The Duna separated the city, Buda and Pest. During tourist season, it would be filled with people getting in my way, but it was freezing right now and it kept people away. For my purposes, that was a gift, even if the local economy suffered for the lack.

  The red would fade soon, which meant I had to make the mile trek swiftly if I didn’t want to search for her once I got there. The locals would know what it meant, and they would say nothing. Like me, they were glad for her existence. Anyone unfamiliar would speak of the beautiful second sunset and get strange looks for their comments. Videos would lead to head scratches. No one would know, and after a time, no one would care.

  Nothing much had changed in humanity.

  I tended to become a philosopher when I ran, and tonight would be no different.

  “Jamie?”

  Only Noel, my brother in all but blood, called me by that name. Only he would dare these days to call me that. I turned to shout over my shoulder as I pressed on. “Going for her.”

  It helped to know that he would if I couldn’t. Like me, he had been inducted into the Knights at the age of thirteen. They did love to take their street rats. No family to complain about the death rates of their young. I smirked. Oh well. If I wasn’t a Knight, I’d never have met her. And for that alone, I would trade nothing to have had a different start.

  The cold air bit at my cheeks, and despite the pump of my muscles, it would help to slow the blood flowing from the slice on my back. It wasn’t deep or particularly threatening. I cataloged its existence as a matter of course and discarded it in the same breath.

  The red had already begun to fade as I slid on the ice-slicked stones rounding the corner. The gray street, with its dull buildings and dreary conditions, was awash in the fading rose-gold light. It had no other opening, the buildings at the end crowded together to form a courtyard, where children would play on sunnier days.

  Three things struck me as I reached the edge of the blast radius, where the grungy stones had blackened and cracked. Ash fell like snow, but only in the center, where the stone had been turned almost pure white and cracks radiated out like a giant’s fist had slammed into the center of it.

  Here, I slowed my steps and embraced caution. Not that I needed to worry. The blast shadows imprinted on the surrounding buildings told a monstrous story of their own. She had been nearly overwhelmed. I studied the various shapes of demons. When I dispatched them, I understood they would find a way to crawl out of hell again. These bastards would never return.

  Primitive.

  Despite the cold creeping in, the air practically hummed with residual heat. The light dimmed, and even the remnants of the rose-gold diminished. Soon, it would be another half-forgotten memory, until it too lapsed into the legends and tales whispered by the locals.

  The whole of the street was littered with these signs. I had to wonder how long it would be for the artists in the neighborhood to add to the painted memories, transforming the ugliness into something more beautiful and palatable for the tourists.

  I’d have to bring Nika back to see it later.

  Stowing my weapons only after I made certain it was clear, I went to one knee at the edge of the central blast. With absolute reverence, I pulled a pouch from my belt and freed the silken purse inside. She laughed at me. Such finery wasn’t necessary by her estimation, but I disagreed. She deserved everything.

  Collecting the dust took concentration and gentleness. I stripped off my gauntlets and used my hands. I didn’t stop until I had every speck of it I could separate from the stone into the silken purse. Once sealed, I stroked two fingers from each hand down my cheeks. The humming in the air climbed as I rose.

  Once the purse was secure, I tucked it inside my armor and below the breastplate. I wanted it next to my heart. Gauntlets on, I pulled my weapons and turned to find Noel guarding the mouth to the street.

  “I will finish the sweep,” he told me as I reached his position. He freed one hand and placed it on my shoulder. “Or would you rather I go with you?”

  It was not an unkind question. But this was not a journey he could make with me. “Stay,” I told him. “Finish.” There was no stench of sulfur here. It had all been wiped away. Elsewhere, though? Smoke rose, dark in some places, white in others. The fight had taken the whole of the night.

  “Be safe, Brother,” he told me, and I lingered only long enough to give him a faint smile and the answer he needed.

  “And you, Brother. Until the next battle.”

  “My sword is ever ready.”

  “And mine.”

  With that, he turned away and headed back the way we’d come and I took my own path away from Varhegy, away from what was left of a battle we—she—had won. I had until sundown. I checked the gray skies for where the light hid behind the gloom.

  I would have enough time.

  I would make it.

  I turned toward the direction of our home. We’d never officially called it ours. We just both lived there, and the longer we went without discussing it, the happier we were about it. I didn’t have to argue with her about whether or not she deserved to have peace in her life, and she didn’t have to be angry at me for pushing the issue. Yes, this was called denial, but not talking about it got me what I wanted—her—and so I was happy to pretend we weren’t both denying the proverbial elephant in the room.

  With the ashes tucked by my heart, I found my car, parked in the middle of where she and I had been. With a little over twelve kilometers to go to get home in the Erzsébetváros, I had no time to spare. Traffic was low, thanks to the weather, but I pushed the speed as fast as I could manage.

  Relief washed through me when I reached our destination. There wasn’t any time to waste. If I didn’t get there in time, what Nika had to go through would be so much worse.

  I parked, locked the car, and rushed through the door. We’d bought the ground floor in a synagogue they’d turned into apartments three years earlier and we—and by that, what I really meant was she—slowly converted it into our homes. This was an old part of town, and the spiritual feeling of being in a building where so many had once come to pray wasn’t lost on us. We could both taste the goodness of this place when we’d stepped inside to look. Some found it too weird, but it was the otherness of it that appealed to us. We could really use all the help we could get from whoever watched what we did.

  Our upstairs neighbors were musicians who minded their own business. I didn’t even know their names. Nika did. She was better with that kind of thing. My phone beeped as it did every night, reminding me we were minutes from sunset. I kept a constant running tab in our life. It was important I know.

  My laptop was open where I’d left it as I’d hustled to get out the door with Nika earlier. There were hours of work to do ahead of me. My clients needed their books managed, and the remote nature of distantly taking care of people I never had to meet appealed to me. Nika was the people person. She spent her days decorating homes in the flourishing homes of the elite in Budapest. She knew how to make things beautiful. Rebirth was in her nature.

  I took out the pouch, pouring the contents of it into a dish I’d found when I’d accompanied her to an antique store on a rare Saturday we’d taken off together. It was artisan copper with burnt umber, the design a selection of crisscrossing x and y marks. I didn’t know why it made me think of her, perhaps it was nothing more than the fact that I’d found it when I was with her, but it had seemed like it should be hers, for moments like this.

  I checked the time. Less than a minute to go. Then she would sleep for hours, unawakenable until she’d healed.

  Stepping back a safe distance, I watched. As I always did. Fear I never acknowledged lodged itself in my stomach, and I ignored the sensation. She would come back. Nika was young. There would come a time she couldn’t do this anymore, when she would stop returning to me. But not yet.
Everything we’d read told us there were years before that was a worry.

  Still, it did nothing to alleviate the anxiety about exactly when that would be.

  Even braced and prepared, the moment the flames began to lick through the ashes and cascade upward in a shower of intense heat and near blind-brightness that I had to blink past tears to see still caught me off-guard. Sweat dotted my brow, but I refused to cede any further ground. I had to be close. I had to be…

  The flames spouted up to the ceiling as they consumed every single ash, and as swiftly as they formed, they faded, drawing back until she stood there, poised, bare-skinned as the day of her first birth with the wild tumble of her radiant red hair clinging to her damp skin. For just a moment, her eyes were open and a smile touched her lips.

  My heart settled, and I caught her as she fell. Cradling her to my chest, I ignored the heat rolling off her as I pressed my lips to her forehead.

  Nika.

  My miracle.

  Born from the flames once more.

  Nika

  Awareness came back to me in inches. It was always the way. When I emerged from the flames, my life flashed through my mind and filled in all the gaps. It brought with it every loss, every wish, every hope, and every scrap of pleasure or pain. Death, they used to whisper, was the kindest kiss of all, because life was always the most brutal.

  Infants do not remember the agony of their birth. That one may be the only one I do not remember. What sustains me through it all is the steadiness in those dark brown eyes, the stern visage that rarely smiles, and the strength imbued in the man who has never failed to find me. Always at my side. Always there when I am reborn.

  I had never fallen where he was not there to catch me.

  James.

  My James.

  The soft hush of his breath told me he was close, even before I forced my tired eyes open. Hours would have passed, sometimes as much as a day. Birth cost me everything. Death was easy. Coming back?

  “Szerelmem,” I whispered, and the word for my beloved barely left my lips before those magificent eyes opened and all that fierce devotion focused on me.

  He took my next breath with his kiss, and I sighed against his mouth. This was why I returned. Why I would always return.

  Until the day we both fell, I would fight through the pain and the burn to come back to him. The heavy callouses on his hand were rough against my cheek. With rebirth came other side effects, intense sensitivity among them, but I leaned into his touch. It could flay the skin from my bones and I would not turn away from him.

  He swore against my mouth and pulled back, but I caught his hand and brought it to my lips to kiss.

  His shudder moved through me. I was the one feeling everything acutely because of the shift, but I swear some days that he did as well. My pain was his pain, my heart also his. He wanted to marry me, wanted to have a family. But if we could barely keep ourselves alive, barely manage to hold the demons back from ourselves, how could we do that for children? He would not make another orphan, and I wasn’t sure it was fair to even consider continuing on the genetics that had formed a creature like me.

  Phoenixes were only beautiful in fiction. I’d only ever met one other like myself.

  “You’re not here with me. Not yet.” He squeezed my fingers in his own. “Take a few minutes to come back. You never have to rush.”

  Endlessly patient. He was a gem forged from flames, and I feared that some of them had been caused by me. He thought I was beautiful. We might need to get his eyes checked.

  “How long?” I rolled against him. One side effect of the rebirth was that I was always cold after. Being with James, or close to him, helped more than anything else. It was like my skin had to readjust to not being on fire, but since James was lit up like the sun with goodness, he shielded some of the discomfort. Oh, my head could get funny in times like this. Suddenly, I was a poet with no sonnet to write in my own head.

  “Just a matter of hours. This time it was fast. How many did you take out with you?”

  He must have been in a hurry. Most of the time, he counted their shadows, the permanent markings that illustrated that they’d once existed when nothing else would.

  “Ten.” They had overwhelmed me. I could fight them as he did. I didn’t have to flame to end their lives unless I absolutely had to.

  James whistled. “That’s a lot. Why so many in once place? What are they doing there?”

  I didn’t want to talk about them. He was right, I hadn’t been fully awake before, but I was now. Wide awake. And the last thing I wanted in this moment was to think any more about them. They were my burden. James was my joy. For now, I would choose him and happiness.

  I lifted myself up to crawl on top of him. He tilted his head, his expression stern. “Nika.”

  “James,” I whispered against his mouth. “I need you.”

  His smile stole my breath. They were so rare and so splendid for their infrequency. “I always, always need you.”

  He kissed me then. James never made me beg or wait. If I asked, he gave to me. Sometimes, I didn’t even have to ask. He just knew. He stroked his hand up my back, bunching my shirt. He always dressed me, as though I needed privacy from him. Or maybe he just liked to take me out of my clothes. James had his ways of caring for me, and I for him. Our routines were part of who we were.

  The touch of his lips to mine offered love and laughter while they demanded wanton pleasure drenched in heady sweetness. James was all of these things, and how he scowled when I described him as such. With sure hands long acquainted with me, he stripped away the shirt and glided them over my skin.

  Rough tenderness had me straining against him as my nipples peaked and my thighs ached. With care, he tumbled me onto my back. Oh, how I loved this bed. The sheers that hung around it moved in a hint of a breeze. Our asylum and our sanctuary.

  Breaking the kiss, James lifted his head to study me as he cupped my jaw. The air around him seemed to shimmer. He brightened my world, and he thought I only meant it as a metaphor. But for all that James whispered I housed a strength he could never imagine, he held so much more within him.

  His love was a tangible force.

  “You are certain?”

  “Always so careful with me, szerelmem.” Adoration filled me.

  “You are precious to me,” he scolded, the lines of his mouth firming. Oh, my beloved… I wrapped my hand around the stiff length of his cock, well aware that he was as affected as I. But where he would give me everything and deny himself even the chance of pleasure if he thought it would harm me, I was not like-minded.

  “As you are to me.” Stroking him along the line of my pussy, I sighed at the wetness already waiting for him. My body knew him, even this newly formed one. How could we not? When I formed again… “I was made for you. I was born for you. I will always be reborn for you.”

  A ragged groan tore from him, the sound primal as he shifted the angle and pushed my thigh up to line himself up and then he sank into me.

  As always for the first time, the pain was minor. The fullness of his possession was what I longed for, and he filled me in one, relentless thrust that had my back arching and a cry falling from my lips. Now, I was remade. Home. He gave me the space of three breaths to adjust to the thickness of him before he seized my lips in another kiss, and I went liquid around him.

  The pound of his hips carried just the sting as he thrust. Pleasure. Pain. Fire. Ice. Love. Lust. The tension within me unraveled too swiftly. I wanted it to go on, but James would have none of that. Every brush of my nipples to his chest, every sharp thrust, every nip, lick, and kiss drove me to the edge and over.

  When I went up in flames this time, they were more passion-drenched than fire. He followed, my beloved, right over the edge. The heat of his release flooded into me, and then he cradled my face, raining the gentlest of kisses on me as sleep and exhaustion pulled me down.

  I didn’t want to leave
him, but he whispered against me, simple words. “Sleep, Nika. I’ll be here.”

  Wrapped around him, sheltered by him, I let his heartbeat lull me to sleep. We had so much to do…

  I woke to the sounds of life outside. Birds. Cars. Laughter in the distance. Stretching before I even opened my eyes, I reached for James but found his side of the bed empty and cold. How long had I slept? I wrenched my lids open and looked around. The light streaming through the bottom of the closed curtains told me it was afternoon. Wow. I wasn’t usually such a late riser, even after being reborn. This one had taken a lot out of me.

  I chewed on my bottom lip. The same could be said for the last three times. I wasn’t going to tell James. He’d worry about it, and there was nothing I could do anyway. This was the life, it was what it was. The other phoenix I had met, before she disappeared, hadn’t understood more about this than I did. We were both constantly grasping in the dark.

  I pulled myself out of bed and picked up my discarded nightgown that he’d left on the chair for me. Barefoot but not cold, thanks to the heat running at a low hum and filling our home, I headed towards the place where he always sat working.

  His attention fixed on the screen, he didn’t look up as I approached. I let myself watch him for a second. Every once in a while, I did this without his knowing. Searching for signs that he was actually unhappy was a hobby of mine. He would swear to everything he believed in that he would never get enough of me, never get tired of the dying and rebirth, but I didn’t know how that could be true. Surely, there was a limit to how much one man could endure.

  Even one as loving as my James.

  I searched, but I didn’t find any answers in the way he looked at whatever spreadsheet he currently regarded. Finally, he lifted his gaze.

  “Good…” He paused as he looked at the clock. “Afternoon. Did you sleep well?”

  I nodded and walked over to him, climbing onto his lap for a snuggle. This wasn’t normal for us. Usually, I was in such a hurry to get back to regular life, I rushed about the morning after a rebirth. Today, all I wanted to do was hold onto him.