Midnight Burning

by Karissa Laurel

  My throat closed, and I swayed on my feet as all my blood drained from my head. I knew that voice, had heard it in so many nightmares. “H-Hati,” I sputtered. My brother’s killer, here… now.

  Hati was as pale skinned as death, his eyes were as hollow as a grave, and his hair was the salt-and-pepper color of a gray wolf’s pelt. He grinned, and something unmistakably lupine showed in his expression. “I heard you’ve been dreaming of me,” Hati said, his voice rough like a dog’s growl. “It’s about time we met in the flesh.”

  I opened my mouth to respond, but loathing stole my words; nothing existed in my vocabulary to express the depth of my hatred. Hati saw my animosity in my face, though, and chuckled. He kept laughing until I took a step toward him. Skyla followed.

  “Whoa there, ladies.” Hati slid the knife higher up Inyoni’s neck and pressed the tip into her flesh. A red tear of blood welled from the cut and slid down Inyoni’s throat. Inyoni whimpered, but her face was oddly passive. “You’re about to bite off more than you can chew,” Hati said.

  “Where’s Kalani?” I asked.

  Skoll yipped and then coughed a doggie noise that sounded vaguely like laughter.

  “Ripped to shreds,” Inyoni said. She struggled halfheartedly against Hati despite the knife he held at her jugular. Where was her training? Where was her fight? The Inyoni I knew would have thrown her attacker on his back and had him disemboweled in a manner of seconds. I took another step forward. Hati moved his knife. Another thick drop of blood rolled down Inyoni’s neck, and the glistening rivulets caught the light of Skyla’s flashlight.

  “I told you not to move,” Hati said.

  “You can’t hurt me,” I said. “It will interfere with Helen’s plans.”

  Hati sucked his teeth and then bared them at me like a wary dog. “But I can hurt this girl, and if you don’t stop right there, that’s exactly what I’ll do.”

  A foot scuffed over the gravel behind me, and I spun to find Nate creeping closer. “These women are all so noble. No doubt they intend to sacrifice their lives for you if necessary. Tell me, Solina, are you prepared to have their blood on your hands?”

  Skyla put a hand to my shoulder, stopping my reply. “I was willing to die for my country. You think I won’t sacrifice myself for my best friend?”

  Nate tilted his head and smiled pityingly. “You might just get your wish.” He looked to Hati and pointed at Inyoni. “Kill the bitch,” Nate said. Then he jerked his thumb toward Skyla. “And kill this one next.”

  “But she said I wouldn’t get hurt if…” Inyoni’s voice gave out in a croak as Hati slashed his knife across her neck.

  Skyla and I screamed and lunged forward, but so did Skoll. He let loose a threatening snarl, and Skyla and I froze in place. Inyoni fell to her knees, clutching her throat. Blood wept between her fingers and dribbled into the dirt. She tried to speak again, but her voice was gone. Inyoni sank to the ground, slumping onto one shoulder. Her dark eyes stared into mine, full of surprise and pleading for help, but Skoll had moved another step closer and I dared not lose track of him.

  “Who said?” Skyla demanded. She glared at Inyoni, her face full of fury. “Who did you talk to? Was it Helen?”

  Inyoni shook her head. Her mouth formed the shape of something, a name perhaps, but she didn’t have time to utter it before her last breath departed her chest in a pitiful gurgle. The answers she might have known faded along with the light in her eyes.

  “You asshole,” I snarled at Hati. “She was just a kid.”

  “You’re all just children,” Nate said. “Infants, trying to engage gods on a chessboard made for immortals.”

  I closed my eyes and focused on the heat building in my chest. I let it out, and fire spilled over my body, enrobing me in a gown and cowl of flames. Skoll and Hati tensed. “How’s this for engaging?” I asked.

  Skyla stepped back, repulsed by my flames. She swung her head around between Hati, Nate, and Skoll, uncertain who she should fight first.

  “She burns out fast once she gets to this point,” Nate yelled to his associates, who had stepped away from my fire. “It must use a great deal of energy. She can’t maintain it.”

  He was right. I would pass out from exhaustion in a matter of minutes unless I pulled it back or did something more proactive. I waved a hand in Skoll’s direction and imagined flinging fireballs from my palm, but nothing like that happened. Tori and I had developed my fire into a useful shield, but as an offensive weapon, it still sucked. I had to do something or risk complete vulnerability when my power bankrupted. I pictured my oven knob and imagined turning it down, but maybe I was too far gone, or too mad, or too afraid, or all of those things, because my power did not respond, and the fire only grew.

  Running out of time and lacking another option, I hurled myself at the wolf. Skyla cursed, and someone, possibly Hati, yelled a warning. Skoll did not retreat from me as I had expected in executing my plan of attack—plan of attack of course being a euphemism for idiotic impulse. The wolf met me, teeth bared, and he swiped his paw in an excruciating swath across my chest, knocking me back. I fell to my rear, gritting my teeth and wheezing.

  Skoll yelped and rolled away, limping and favoring his burnt foot. He shook it off, came around to face me again, and crouched, ready to attack the moment my inferno inevitably went out. Skoll’s eyes mirrored my raging flames, reminding me of some sort of hound of hell. Not some sort. That’s exactly what he is. This wolf was an agent of Hela, the Nordic deity whose name was synonymous with the legendary place where damned souls suffered eternal punishment.

  No way was Skoll going to drag me somewhere like that. Not if I could help it. I swallowed my pain, rose to my feet, and took an unsteady step toward him again.

  “Solina,” Skyla called out. I turned in the direction of her voice to find her backing away from Nate and Hati, who both advanced on her. She wielded her knife before her, but there were two of them and she had only the one weapon. She was the toughest woman I knew, but two against one were unfavorable odds, even for her. “Get out of here,” she said. “You have to save yourself. Nothing matters more than that.”

  “Yes,” Hati said, turning to look at me over his shoulder. He chuckled in a wolfish way. “Leave this one with me. I’ll devour her the same way I devoured your brother. It will be kind of poetic, don’t you think?”

  Like a spark set to a fuse, Hati’s words set off a chain reaction within me, a self-amplifying series of events, triggering a release. My fire erupted as if it had breached my skin and found a core of hydrogen beneath. A corona of light and flame exploded from me, and the three figures before me fell back, scrambling to escape my conflagration.

  “Solina!” Skyla screamed, but I was incensed and beyond reasoning, beyond restraint. My field of vision narrowed until lake and forest vanished. Skyla, Nate, Skoll, Inyoni… they all fell away. There was me, there was Hati, and that was all.

  I threw myself at my brother’s killer, surging forward in a burst of light and molten energy, and Hati fell beneath me.

  He screamed.

  He howled.

  He burned on the bonfire of my wrath.

  “Solina,” someone said in a voice full of awe and amazement. “What are you doing?”

  “That is not Solina,” said another, a voice deadened by defeat.

  “Then who the hell is she?”

  “Look at her. She is the sun. Sol, fully incarnated. She is light—pure and absolute.”

  Light is not a stagnant thing. To see it is to see continuous movement. The moment I realized that truth, the me that was Solina went void, and the world disappeared.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Tension tugs, pulling, stretching, expanding until taut and pulsing–one instant, one breath before annihilation. The universe shudders, but no, it is merely the spirit of a woman, writhing against pain.

  A snap. A rush. With the energy of a tsunami sucking waves from the shore, the expansive substance retracts and compresses
into a pinprick of matter, a single photon. The star winks out, and darkness takes its place.

  I swam up from the crushing depths of an ocean of blackness to find that, while I was unaware and out of commission, some unnamable force had crushed my bones in a compactor before tossing my remains into an incinerator. That same force retrieved my ashes, reassembled them into the vague shape of a woman, and screamed at me until I woke up. The shrill voice echoed through my head and stabbed into my brain, and bright stars exploded behind my eyelids.

  Ash and charcoal coated my tongue. A desert lined my throat. Only an ocean of purified water would quench my thirst, but at least I was alive.

  Maybe.

  When I opened my eyes, a night sky greeted me. I tried sitting up, but my muscles protested. A cool breeze blew across my skin and brought the realization that while the rest of me had managed to solidify into something resembling my usual body, my clothes had not survived the transformation. Of course not.

  I lay on the muddy bank of a huge body of frigid water that lapped at my ankles and calves. I might have been content to lie there for the rest of the night, but then my stomach growled. The longer I maintained consciousness, the more my old self returned. I am Solina Mundy. Sister of Chapman Mundy. I am a baker. Also, apparently, I’m the goddess of the sun.

  The sharp pains in my muscles dulled to a throbbing ache, but the migraine refused to relent. My teeth chattered, and a shiver ran over me, head to toe and back down again, until my whole body vibrated in an effort to resist the cold. I reached inside and searched for my fire, but my well was empty—utterly depleted.

  I shifted my weight, rolled onto my belly, and pushed myself onto my hands and knees. My head dangled between my shoulders as I waited for the world to stop spinning. When the vertigo eased, I rolled onto my feet and, a few inches at a time, pushed myself into an upright position. My head tried to roll forward again, but I caught it and held it in place.

  As I stood, wracked by shivers and waiting for the migraine to stop screaming at me, I scanned my surroundings, searching for a hint of anything familiar. A nearly full moon shone on a boat ramp and pier jutting into a lake about a hundred yards away. A boat ramp signified civilization, so I started toward it, barefoot and shivering.

  Mud, cold and slimy, sucked at my feet. I swallowed my discomfort along with my fear of ankle-shattering holes hidden in the shadows, shin-bashing stumps, pinecones, splinters… snakes. I shuddered again, and my stomach growled. It cramped, protesting its emptiness. Food, water, clothes, shelter—the basic necessities of life—I needed them fast. Like, yesterday fast.

  With careful steps, I hiked to the boat ramp, stumbling a few times along the way. I paused and caught my breath before climbing the concrete slope. It led to a parking lot that dumped me onto a slim, unmarked road.

  The exercise warmed me and the shivering relented, but my gut cramped again. I bowed, almost to my knees, and panted until the spasm eased. I was still huddled over, wheezing like a sick dog, when a beam of light fell over me. I looked up. Headlights.

  Concern for my modesty flashed through my thoughts, but at best, I could pull a Lady Godiva and hide underneath my sopping hair. The headlights belonged to a truck. The truck was the kind that had a light bar attached to the roof—the kind law enforcement used. Out here, on the road leading to the marina, chances were pretty good that it was a park ranger or a game warden.

  Road grit crunched under the truck’s tires. Brakes sighed as its wheels rolled to a stop a few feet away from me. I crossed my arms over my chest. Load of good it did me.

  “Ma’am,” the officer said after stepping out from behind the driver’s door. His voice sounded young. “It’s kinda late in the year for skinny-dipping.”

  I didn’t laugh. I didn’t blush either, but my heart beat like a trapped and frightened bird’s. It wasn’t the embarrassment of my nude discovery that unnerved me. After everything I’d been through, I doubted I possessed the capacity for embarrassment anymore. Man-eating wolves and metamorphosis tended to put things in perspective that way. No, it was the threat of identification that had my heart skittering. Call it paranoia, but identification equaled threat in my strange new world. Anonymity meant another chance to run away, another chance for escape. Another chance to fight again when the time was right.

  The officer’s shadow cut through the headlights as he approached, but the contrast in dark and bright made it impossible to make out details, and no way was I surrendering the hands tucked over my breasts to shade my eyes. “Is everything all right, ma’am?” he asked.

  “Obviously not,” I said.

  “Are you out here alone?”

  “Alone and freezing to death. You wouldn’t happen to have a blanket, or a towel, or anything, would you?”

  The officer jumped to and scurried to his truck. “Oh, excuse me, ma’am. I was just a little… uh, surprised, finding a lady out here on the road in the middle of the night in nothing but her birthday suit. We see that kind of thing in the summer sometimes, but…” His voice trailed off as he dug through the interior of his truck. The dome light illuminated his brown Smokey-the-Bear hat and green uniform jacket. He returned and presented me with a T-shirt and a towel. “They’re from my gym bag. I usually work out before I come to work. Sorry if they’re a little funky.”

  “No,” I said, squirming into the huge T-shirt. “It’s a big improvement.”

  “You sure you’re all right? You haven’t been… assaulted?”

  I pushed my hair out of my face and looked up at the officer’s shadowy face. His concern came across as genuine. “No, I’m not hurt, just a little lost.”

  My stomach grumbled and cramped again. I pulled a face, and the ranger noted my discomfort. “Listen, why don’t I take you to the ranger station?” he said. “I’ve got to fill out an incident report. We’ll get you some coffee and something to eat, and you can tell me what happened.”

  “An incident report?” I said, following the ranger to his truck. Reports meant evidence of my whereabouts. It meant paper trails and clues for anyone who was looking. Oh yes, I had watched those Jason Bourne movies with Mani. Maybe Helen Locke wasn’t the CIA or DHS, but then again, maybe she was worse.

  The ranger opened the truck door for me, and I climbed into the vinyl seat. “It’s just a technicality. I radioed in that I was making a stop for a, um, distressed pedestrian. They’ll expect paperwork to back it up. Make sure I’m not out here goofing off. I’ll need to get a statement from you.”

  I buried my face in my hands. “Could this night get any worse?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am,” he said. “But if I were you, I’d probably be afraid to ask.”

  Ranger Terrence Holt poured me a mug of coffee. I cupped it in my hands and imagined the pleasure of soaking in a giant pot of the stuff. He and I had introduced ourselves after settling at the ranger station, and he insisted I call him Terrence. I told him I was Sabrina Moody—a random and fake name I thought I could remember long enough to get through this interview—and prayed that doing so wouldn’t turn around and bite me in the rear.

  After finding me a pair of passably clean sweats from a lost-and-found bin and a dry towel for my damp hair, Terrence set a bowl of steaming carbs—microwaved ramen noodles—before me and ordered me to eat. He studied me as I piled food into my mouth, but I didn’t mind him watching. I was so hungry I didn’t care about much of anything except filling the hollow place in my belly.

  “So,” Terrence said as he took a seat across from me at the table. “You’re still going to insist you don’t know how you came to be wandering around the park in the middle of the night, disrobed and soaking wet.”

  I shook my head. “Maybe I bumped my head. Got a concussion.”

  A muscle in his jaw worked, but otherwise he appeared unimpressed. “You’re going to try to tell me you were skinny-dipping and you, what? Knocked your head on a rock?”

  “Sounds feasible to me.”

  Terrence grunted
disagreeably. “No way you were swimming out there at night. Not this time of year. Not without catching hypothermia. If you do have a concussion, then we need to get you to a hospital and get you checked out.”

  I forked up a wad of noodles and shook my head. “No hospital.”

  “Sabrina, I can call in another officer, a woman, if you’d feel more comfortable.”

  “No,” I said, meeting his gaze. Terrence was a young man, probably close to my age. He looked uncomfortable, and I guessed he spent more time checking fishing licenses than dealing with difficult situations like mine. I set my jaw and leaned forward. “I know what you’re thinking, and that’s not what happened.”

  “Then tell me what did happen.”

  What could I say? I was a terrible liar, and the truth was even more unbelievable than any story I could make up on a whim. “I don’t know,” I said.

  Terrence huffed and frowned at me. “That’s your story and you’re sticking to it?”

  Figuring his question was mostly rhetorical, I refrained from answering and slurped at the broth in my bowl. Terrence watched me for another few moments of awkward silence, then he exhaled and looked away. He sipped his coffee and stared, eyes unfocused, at something behind me.

  “Where am I, exactly?” I said in an effort to change the subject and ease the stifling tension between us. I figured I had wound up at some campground on the other side of Lake Oneida. Maybe I could get Terrence to drop me off at the cabin so I could grab some clothes and figure out what had happened after I lost consciousness. Where was Skyla? My heart thumped a heavy bass beat of despair. Had she survived?