Burning in a Memory

by Constance Sharper

  Adelaide walked to it, and opened it without looking through the peephole.

  “I knew you’d come,” she said.

  Adam didn’t answer. With the help of Angie, he lumbered inside and dropped down on the squeaking springs of the bed. While he staggered, his skin held color and his hazel eyes held fire. Angie released Adam and positioned herself in the dimly lit corner. Adelaide reached out for the switch to illuminate the room in a florescent glow.

  “You guys have to tell me what’s going on here,” Angie spoke first but Adam’s gesture silenced her.

  “What did Adam tell you?” Adelaide asked of the female mage regardless.

  “Nothing. But something tells me that whatever it is, there’s a reason it’s hidden from me. Adam shouldn’t be out of the hospital, racing here, to follow some undisclosed text you sent,” she said.

  Adelaide stole another look at her phone on the bathroom counter. She knew that Adam would respond when she hit the send button and the envelope icon disappeared into digital space. Adelaide’s inclusion of her hotel and room number had been a calculated risk she hoped didn’t hurt her now.

  She gathered her nerves.

  “I know where the Hawthorn coven stronghold is, and it’s likely the place they’re taking Preeti and Leon now. If you expect to find them in time, you need me to do it. I’m offering my help,” she repeated the important part of the text message.

  Adam visibly fidgeted but she ignored it.

  “How do you know this?” Angie slowly asked.

  “Adelaide is a mage,” Adam said before Adelaide could.

  “Not possible,” Angie whispered.

  “It’s true,” Adelaide seconded. Angie shook her head vehemently.

  “But you have no aura. Not even a weak one. For fuck’s sake, Tony looked you up. He couldn’t have been wrong. Human, human family, human birth—everything,” Angie rambled now.

  Despite her apparent disbelief, she backed away from Adelaide. Bumping into the bed, she reached out blindly for Adam. He took her hand and squeezed it, but that did little to calm her down. The female mage looked like she was still a second away from flipping out. Adelaide hurried to explain.

  “I know it’s weird but I never really developed an aura like everyone else. I never grew up with mages. The coven I was born into was destroyed when I was very young and I barely remember them. But I do remember a family member, my cousin, Mistel. During the shade attack, she put me in bushes outside of a park and then a human family found me.”

  Adelaide paused when old memories threatened to overwhelm her. She always hated picturing that park. As a child, she sat on the curb near those bushes for hours while her coven was massacred.

  “The human family had just lost their daughter named Adelaide while they were outside of the country. I’m not sure why they took me in, or if they knew anything about magic, but I grew up with them. When I finally got old enough, I started to look for people like me. I found Mistel eventually, but she’d changed by then.”

  Adelaide paused during her story to steal a look at Adam. She’d laid her world raw and he still sat like a stone on the bed with a scowl permanently etched into his face.

  “Impossible,” Angie kept muttering. “Not growing up with mages doesn’t mean you wouldn’t have an aura. It’s just part of the gig. It could be weak maybe but it would always be there.”

  “I can’t explain it then… It’s just always been like that. It only shows up when I use magic.”

  Angie still didn’t look like she believed anything that was said, but she did have other questions.

  “Okay, assuming most shades never found you because you had no aura, why didn’t your cousin kill you?”

  “I got lucky I guess.”

  “How did you meet the Hawthorns?”

  “I kept looking for more information and found them. But unlike Mistel, the Hawthorns didn’t recognize me and I passed as human,” Adelaide lied through her teeth. The Hawthorns might have believed she was human until they caught her sneaking around. It was hard to pretend after that.

  The redhead frowned. Adelaide could sense her discomfort but couldn’t tell if Angie bought anything yet.

  “Okay, moving forward. Why are you here? I’m getting the feeling it’s no accident. I’m getting the feeling that rockslide wasn’t an accident either.”

  Adam twitched violently, suddenly failing to mask anything. His head snapped toward Adelaide.

  “That was fake too, huh?”

  Adelaide was too afraid to answer so she only nodded. She’d given the rocks above her a gentle push at the time. The resulting rockslide was a bit of an accident and more than Adelaide expected.

  “Why are you here?” Angie repeated, demanding an answer.

  Adam cleared his throat.

  “She’s here because she wanted to save her cousin,” he said smoothly. “She’d heard of Leon’s miraculous recovery and thought she could save her cousin as well, but thought we’d never give her answers if she asked outright. She wanted to hang around to learn more. It was a dumb move but I don’t think that makes her evil.”

  Angie bought it, hook, line, and sinker. The doubt finally left her face and she nodded.

  “You should have said something!” Angie exclaimed.

  “I-I know I didn’t come here on the best terms, but it’s all I knew at the time. I’ve never dealt with mages before. I wasn’t sure how…” she said when she slowly overcame the surprise. Her voice sounded light and flighty, just like her head felt. Angie smacked a hand to her forehead.

  “This is too much to absorb. Adam, how are we going to convince Tony and Priya to help us? Tony will lose his shit about her before he even thinks about your crazy mission to go straight into the shades’ lair,” Angie said, turning on him. In a lower voice, she tacked on, “and we’re assuming that Adelaide is not leading us into more danger. Can you trust her? Can you trust where she’s taking us?”

  The room was so small that Angie’s whispers carried. Overhearing it, Adelaide answered the questions that weren’t meant for her.

  “I’m not leading you into a trap. If I went with you then I’d also be in danger. The shades aren’t going to help me.” Especially not when she led the Coltons straight to their lair.

  “Give us a moment alone,” Adam snapped at Adelaide.

  With a glare and a firm gesture, he sent Adelaide outside. She obeyed but in the hall she wondered how she was just kicked out of her own hotel room. She wondered why Adam lied for her and what he had deciphered about her true actions. It seemed unbelievable that Adam would trust her now. Her mind raged with the inevitable concerns.

  She paced the hall, desperate to expel some of her anxiety through her feet. It felt like an eternity before Angie reopened the door. Instead of allowing Adelaide entrance, she slipped into the hall and sealed the door shut behind her. Once Angie appeared certain that the two women stood alone in the long hall, she spoke quietly.

  “I really don’t know what’s going on here, but just looking at you and Adam, I know it’s something bigger than it appears. I’m willing to go with you both, to work with you, but you two need to work with each other first. You need to hash out whatever’s going on with him before we leave.”

  Adelaide’s jaw dropped. The feeling from the hospital room returned and the door a few feet away stuck out in her mind.

  “Adam won’t talk to me.”

  Angie arched an eyebrow as if the inquisitive notion answered all. She produced an iPhone from her pocket and headed down the hall. Adelaide watched her go before taking the hint. She reluctantly opened the door and let herself back in.

  “Are you feeling all right?” she asked. Adam’s body was hunched over and he was breathing heavily. When she spoke, he straightened up right away.

  “Now that I’ve felt your aura, I know you’re not very strong. I can still kill you,” he hissed.

  “Yea, I think you said that already,” she said, trying to sound as unaffected as poss
ible. She did pick the farthest corner away from Adam to stand in, though.

  “I just want you to remember it. Whatever evil intentions brought you into our lives, I will not let you succeed in them twice.”

  Adelaide’s face fell. Adam may not have known anything but he knew it was bad.

  “Why did you make up that story for Angie?” she asked quietly.

  “Because Angie wouldn’t think it’s worth the risk if she knew the truth. Plus, if she told Tony, I’m sure he’d downright kill you. I need you to help me find my brother.”

  Adelaide’s heart threatened to beat out of her chest.

  “Adam, I owe it to you help you, but you know it will be insanely dangerous. We’ll be outnumbered and the shades are terribly strong. And, as you pointed out, I’m not very useful.”

  He folded his arms.

  “Yes, I bet you owe it to me. Now where is the Hawthorn coven hideaway?”

  “Washington. I’m don’t have the exact location memorized, but I can lead us back there.”

  “Of course you couldn’t just tell me,” he snorted.

  “It’s not like they use addresses in the woods. And it’s not like they’re trying to make it easy to find either,” she pointed out quickly.

  He shook his head stubbornly.

  “Well, you better be sure. We need to be on the road by tomorrow because we don’t have much time.”

  “Adam, you can’t rush there that quickly. You just got out of the hospital! As if it wasn’t bad enough that you are going, its worse that you’d go while injured!”

  He tilted his head.

  “How long do you think Leon has left in the Hawthorns hideaway? Or Preeti, for that matter? Assuming they’re both still alive.”

  “I bet they are. The Hawthorns didn’t want Leon dead or he would have been killed at the house. They captured him because they wanted him alive. The same is likely true with Preeti.”

  “Which means they can only want him for one other thing. They’re going to try to turn my brother into a shade again.”

  He sounded so calm but she knew Adam well enough now to know that it hurt him. Everything about this hurt him. Despite his attitude, she’d betrayed him and he’d lost his brother because of it. Stomach in knots, guilt descended heavily on her. Trying to kill Leon had been bad enough—helping him be turned into a shade was even worse.

  Nothing made sense about what she did anymore. If she helped Adam, they’d be charging into almost certain death. But she found herself unable to runaway from him now either. If she backed out, Adam would almost certainly die and she’d have to live with it being her fault.

  “We’ll get to him before they do. The shades at the house weren’t Hawthorns, which means they are probably going to Washington to bring him to the Hawthorns directly. Dragging Leon along might make them move slower. That will be the only way we can catch up.”

  Adam scoffed but said nothing. Angie paced by the room in the hall and her muffled voice slipped through the door. Adelaide understood it only as a sign that the redhead would rejoin them shortly. She jumped on her last moment with Adam alone.

  “Adam, if you believe me on nothing else, believe me on this. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t mean to become so far involved with you, but…”

  The door clicked and opened. Angie finished the loud parting words of a conversation and clicked off the phone.

  “Are we good?” Angie asked.

  Adam stood by himself as if in an act of defiance. He managed to walk out the door on his own, but he still had a limp in his step. Angie chased him and Adelaide trailed after. Her unspoken words lingered on her tongue, but with every passing second the words tasted sour. She barely knew what to say to him but, she knew, when she left with them she was risking everything by helping him. She’d succeeded in her life-saving pact just to throw out the results. And it was all for Adam.

  Adelaide possessed no way to voice that sentiment. Or convince her crazy mind that this man was worth dying over. She followed him then without saying a thing.

  Twenty-five

  The blast rattled the windows and the glass cried out. The house’s structural foundation joined in the moaning.

  “Damn it,” Angie called, nose pressed against the front window. “He’s trying to pick off the shades in the street. We’re in a community now! Does he think the neighbors won’t find that strange?”

  Adelaide sat back down on the bar stool before her blood pressure could go through the roof. After the most recent attack, Adam’s rampant use of careless magic put them all on edge. It was the quintessential crying wolf every second so they were overly calm when some bigger threat came barreling through the door.

  Angie returned to the kitchen where Adelaide sat and returned to work on the task at hand. Before them sat crinkled paper wrappers of rations—power bars, dehydrated snacks, protein packed dinners. Once organized, they would join the bottles of water and the carefully packed first aid kits. Everything would have to fit in a backpack and all the backpacks in the trunk of a car. With her finger, Adelaide smoothed off the worn labeling on one of the square packets to determine its usefulness. Pickled salmon. She made a face.

  She pushed it off to the side, grabbed her other pile, and made a beeline over to the bags. The busy work helped keep her antsy mind distracted, but Adelaide still wondered what the point was. This gear was only good if they survived long enough to use it. They needed a perfect plan, but that seemed to be the one thing no one ventured to talk about.

  “Is he going to hurt himself?” Adelaide asked while she stuffed the packets into the last remaining bag. She could hear Adam’s incoherent grumbles from the porch and his loud footstep as he paced.

  “I hope not. He might not have internal injuries but he’s going to rip his stitches out. I wish he wouldn’t exhaust himself, considering he’ll really need his health in a day or so.”

  Adelaide made a face. He needed his health and they all would need a miracle. Adelaide fumbled with the zipper and closed the last bag. Angie watched her while she did.

  “So I have a million questions, but I’ll save them for now. Answer me just a few. What are we expecting in Washington? Is this something that you’ve seen before?”

  “I remember the highway, I-90, after we passed the state line. We pulled off the highway and followed a trail for half mile after that. It’s fairly remote and probably the only house out there. In fact, its more of a mansion than a house.”

  “Hmm… Maybe I could find it on Google Earth if it’s as big as you say. Unless there’s too much tree coverage.” Angie pulled out her phone, tapping incessantly on the blue screen. Adelaide agreed that it was worth a shot. Meanwhile, she finished the bags and carried them back to the front door.

  They returned to the first home they had on the outskirts of Denver, officially the last home they had left. No one took time to clean it when they’d returned and the air smelled stale. After she dropped off the bags, she stole a look at Adam through the window.

  Angie underestimated Adam’s demeanor. Every few steps, he stretched, growled, and made a gesture to pick off another shade. His aura made the grass overgrow and weeds tangle almost knee high. The streetlights flickered even in broad daylight. At this rate, they’d be lucky if the Denver police weren’t called. She returned to the kitchen.

  “Any luck?”

  Angie already set the phone back down on the counter. She shook her head with newfound dismay.

  “There’s too much vagueness. I can see buildings but I can’t tell any details. We run the risk of kicking in some human family’s door by accident.”

  Adelaide regretted more and more not having exact details, but her mind had been on other things. At the end of her journey, she’d never actually expected to return to the Hawthorns. She figured they’d have to find her first.

  “I remember the signs and the potholes in the road. I remember the way the deformed trees looked.” She shook her head at her own words—they seemed so juveni
le now, so poorly planned.

  “I know they’ll move slower with Leon, but it’s going to be tough to catch up before they arrive. I suspect that the Hawthorns will be bundled up in a tactically advantageous place just as we were. Unfortunately, we don’t have the power or the numbers to drag them out or take it by force.”

  “What did Adam say to you? Why is he convinced we’re on a suicide mission and is still going? Does he even have a plan?” Adelaide asked.

  Angie shrugged.

  “He might be making a plan, but I doubt it can be a good one. I think the only thing that he has in his head is finding his brother. Adam blamed Leon’s first capture on himself. He thought that he should have been there to stop it. He thought he should have been able to make Leon well again. I just don’t know.”

  The redhead sounded convinced which led Adelaide to her next point.

  “So how did he convince you to go with him?”

  Angie stopped her packing to look up.

  “Because I care about him. As I’m sure you do too.”

  Adelaide opened her mouth, but the woman broke eye contact. She talked to the floorboards.

  “You wanted to save your cousin Mistel, but you failed to learn Leon’s secrets. And now you believe running into a shade nest will do it for you?”

  Adelaide shut her mouth with an audible click. The front door opened and Adelaide maneuvered away from the hall. But instead of Adam, Tony and Priya stormed the room.

  “Oh, you have no idea how happy I am to see you two!” Angie squealed.

  Angie barreled past Adelaide and nearly tackled the two in the hall. Even Tony held his arms up expectantly, and firmly embraced Angie. Adelaide turned quickly and sized them up. Tony’s had purple bruising on his face but no other visible injuries. Priya limped lightly.

  Adelaide gave them a wide berth and space for their frantic, mindless chatter. Another thump at the door and Adam surfaced. He stood on the opposite side of the group. The group finished the pleasantries and went quiet. Tony strode into the kitchen and sized up the place. The energy clearly drained from his body, he turned on Adam slowly.