by Laura Bickle
Anya smiled at him. She would have questions. She clucked for Sparky, walked to the edge of the train platform. Ghosts stood on the edge, hopped off into the roar of wind like grasshoppers for a lawn mower.
Anya steeled herself for the journey, taking Sparky into her arms. She waited her turn, got ready to step off…
… when she glimpsed a familiar face a few yards down, and her heart plummeted to her stomach.
Ciro.
He wasn’t in his wheelchair, and she nearly missed him. Instead, he was walking, dressed in a sharply creased suit, with a starched shirt and red bow tie. A beautiful young woman dressed as a flapper was on his arm: Renee. Renee stood on her tiptoes to kiss Ciro, and her face shone like the moon.
Together, Renee and Ciro stepped off into space. The ghost train sucked them up an instant before it took Anya.
Anya woke, not to the rushing darkness of the train but to a blinding white light.
“Ow,” she muttered, tried to turn over. But she was tethered by a stinging sensation in her arm. Her fingers closed around plastic IV tubes, and her vision cleared to reveal harsh fluorescent light. She smelled disinfectant and heard the beeping of machines.
A hand lay heavy across her brow. She blinked up to see Brian leaning over her.
“Hey, you,” he said.
“Hey,” Anya whispered. Her throat was dry, raw as if she’d swallowed bleach. She wondered if that was from swallowing the spirits, but guessed that it could have been from the scrape of a breathing tube. She looked down, saw that Sparky was lying beside her in the hospital bed, between her hip and the rail. He stared at her with his head between his front feet, his tail twitching slightly. She scrubbed his gill-fronds, and his tongue snaked out from his mouth.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Renee told us that you’d gone to the astral plane, so we watched, waited. For hours. And then… you stopped breathing. We got you started again, but you were gone for a good five minutes.”
Anya scraped her hand over her hospital gown. Her chest ached, and she could feel the scrape of bandages taped to her skin. “What’s all this?”
Brian frowned, and she could see the circles under his eyes. “We smelled something burning after you went away. Max searched the bar, but we discovered… it was you. Your skin was blistering, burning.” He took his glasses off, rubbed the bridge of his nose. “We poured water on you. Jules hit you with the fire extinguisher, but you kept… smoldering. Then… then you stopped breathing.” His voice crackled a bit.
Anya reached for his hand. “It’s okay. I’m back.”
He opened his mouth to say something more, but the pastel curtain surrounding Anya’s bed got pulled aside. Marsh, wearing a slightly rumpled dress shirt and loosened tie, nodded at her. Anya wondered how long he’d been waiting. That was positively disheveled for Marsh.
“Kalinczyk. The duty nurse said you were awake.” His voice was as crisp and businesslike as ever.
“Thanks for coming, Captain,” she croaked.
“Thought you’d want the news. We found Hope.”
Anya’s fingers clutched the rail. “Where?”
“Found the truck outside her headquarters, found her in the basement. Found her dead, crammed into Pandora’s Jar.” Marsh’s mouth turned. “We’ve got no idea how she got down there, or how she got the jar down there.”
Anya swallowed. The jar had been a funerary jar. The irony of Hope being trapped in the bottom of the jar was not lost on her. “How did she die?”
“Gina at the ME’s office thinks it was a stroke. But we can’t figure out how she got crammed in there.”
Anya’s nails bit into her palm. “Did the jar get back to DIA?”
“Yeah, but they’re not happy. It’s been damaged—got a crack in it like the side of the Liberty Bell. I imagine that they’ll be suing Miracles for the Masses for repair costs.” Marsh leaned forward and awkwardly patted her shoulder. “Get some rest. I’ll give you the reports when you get back.”
He ducked behind the curtain and vanished.
Brian watched him go, his expression pinched. Anya tugged his sleeve, wanting to wipe that expression from his face. “It’s okay, Brian. Everything’s going to be fine.”
He shook his head, blew out his breath. “No. No, it’s not.” He clutched her hand. “Ciro… Ciro had a heart attack.”
Anya’s heart plummeted, and she suddenly remembered seeing the old man’s face at the train station. “Is he—” She knew the answer already, but couldn’t force herself to say: Is he dead?
Brian shook his head. “He didn’t make it, Anya. I’m sorry.”
Anya pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. The sob that snagged in the back of her throat sounded for all the world like a devoured spirit trying to escape.
“Ciro said he never wanted to leave this place.”
Jules stood before the bar at the Devil’s Bathtub, head bowed. The mirror behind the bar captured his reflection: the creases in his forehead, the sport coat that he couldn’t button around his middle, the Bible in his hands. The mirror reflected Anya, Brian, Katie, and Max. It reflected the blue funerary urn perched in the center of the liquor bottles, the urn containing Ciro’s ashes.
“Anya… do you sense him anywhere near here?” Katie asked. She was dressed in a floor-length black thrift-store dress for Ciro’s memorial service. The attempt at somberness made her seem even more the witch.
Anya bit her lip, buried her face in Brian’s shoulder. His suit jacket smelled like mothballs. She wiped her nose on the back of one white glove from her firefighter’s dress blues, her cap tucked under an arm. “No. And I don’t see Renee, either.” The lack of music made the place eerily silent.
Sparky leaned against her side, chirping softly. She knew he felt the loss of Ciro, as well as the loss of the newts. She’d woken in the middle of the night to see him moving his feet as he dreamed, calling for the newts like a mother cat who’d misplaced her kittens.
Jules sighed in relief, closed his Bible. “He’s in a better world now. So’s she.”
The remains of DAGR stood in awkward silence. Anya looked up at Brian. His left hand dipped in his pocket to graze the surface of his iPhone. She knew that he’d lost ALANN—he said that the neural network supporting the intelligence had “spontaneously dissolved.” Anya hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell him yet what had really happened… that she’d set him free.
Somehow she doubted that she ever would. He didn’t—wouldn’t—understand. And she had no idea how far the chasm of his lack of ethics dug into his character. She hoped it was simply a superficial blemish… but she wasn’t able to get past those doubts. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.
“What’s gonna happen to the Devil’s Bathtub?” Max asked, digging at the tie around his neck. It was one of Jules’s ties, and was too long for him.
Katie laced her hands behind her back. “Ciro had a will. From what his lawyer said, the Devil’s Bathtub goes to Anya.”
Anya jerked her head up. “What?”
“He said that Anya was family. That we all are.”
Anya blinked back tears. That crazy old man was more a father to her than her own… whatever it was. She’d been trying not to think of it, but her thoughts kept returning to the flaming man in her mother’s bedroom… and what that meant.
Jules pressed his thick hand to the top of the bar, watched the steam form around it on the high-gloss finish. “He shouldn’t have died,” he growled.
“He was an old man, Jules,” Katie said.
“He shouldn’t have died.” Jules glared at Anya. “He was too fragile for this shit. For all of this shit. He should’ve been upstairs listening to his old record albums.”
Brian spoke over the top of Anya’s head. “The old man did what he wanted to do, Jules.”
“I’m sorry he’s gone.” Anya’s voice tremored, and her eyes glossed with tears.
A thick silence descended over the room. Katie moved behind the b
ar and began pulling glasses and pouring drinks. Anya stared at the ice crackling in the tumblers, wishing there was something she could do to bring Ciro back. But where he had gone, she didn’t think he’d want to come back. She remembered the sublime look on his face when he and Renee were waiting for the train. This world could offer him nothing like that.
“And what about us?” Jules asked, climbing onto a bar stool. “What about DAGR?”
Anya shook her head. “I don’t know, Jules. I can’t see the future. For any of us.” She looked up at Brian, squeezed his hand. “All we can do is keep fighting.”
Anya slowly drove the Dart back to what remained of her house. She parked on the curb while staring at the street, refusing to look over into the yard, at the scene of the fire. Brian had insisted on coming with her, but she wanted to do this alone.
She took three deep breaths. Christ, she could smell the char from here, with the windows rolled up. In the passenger seat, Sparky whined. DFD had ruled the fire at her house to be an unfortunate electrical fire, brought on by a wiring defect in the new HDTV. Anya knew better but kept her mouth shut.
She popped open the door, tucked a box of garbage bags under her arm. She walked up the sidewalk, staring down at her feet, heart hammering. Finally, she forced herself to look up.
The house was a complete ruin. The scene was cordoned off by yellow fire line tape and a movable chain-link fence to secure the scene. She had Marsh to thank for that. The hulk behind it was a charred, soggy black mess of broken brick, burned timbers, and curled shingles. Puddles of ash and gluey muck extended into the yard, blackening the white feet of her protective Tyvek suit. Blades of new green crabgrass poked above the sludge.
Anya unlocked the padlock holding the chain around the fence, pulled the creaking fence aside. Sparky wiggled in before her. He planted himself on the front step and whined.
Anya sighed. The little guy deserved to say good-bye to this place, too. She shoved open the charred ruins of the front door. Sparky bounded inside, mewled piteously when he saw the jagged roof timbers collapsed onto the living-room floor. The refrigerator still stood, though blackened, and the copper pipes could be seen reaching through the walls.
Anya kicked through some glass to the kitchen. She opened the fridge door, wrinkled her nose. Nothing worth salvaging there. She pawed through the cabinets, finding a couple of pots that might still be usable, if cleaned. Cast iron survived anything, she told herself, and dropped them into the garbage bag.
She opened the hall closet, where the washer and dryer stood. She rooted through them for clothes. They smelled like smoke but could probably be cleaned. She stuffed them in another garbage bag, headed to the bathroom, where Sparky’s nest had been.
The tiles had blackened, Sparky’s mobile was charred to its wire armature, and the linoleum was scorched. But she could see the mass of crystal inside the tub. Except for a carbon film over the quartz, it was largely intact. She fingered a fracture in the geode formation, pulled a piece of it free. The size of her fist, it still managed to glitter in the gray light from the sky above. She threw it in a bag. Anya made a mental note to call an excavator to get the rest out of here. Sparky’s nest didn’t seem like the kind of thing that should go to the dump.
Her rubber ducky collection sat on its shelf, watching. The ducks had warped and blackened in the heat, but she couldn’t leave them behind. Anya stuffed them into the bag.
Sparky howled from the bedroom, and Anya came running. He paced in the corner of the room, where his salamander bed had stood. The bed was a soggy ruin, but he was still digging at it, like a dog trying to dig a hole under a fence.
“Sparky…”
Something glinted in the ruin of his bed, a yellow gleam that blinked off and on in response to Sparky’s pawing. Anya pulled apart the bed to find his Gloworm, a little stained but still intact. Its cherubic face lit up when she squeezed it, and Sparky chortled with glee.
Anya carefully wrapped it in a clean garbage bag, smiling. These things were relics of a former life. But like the salamander collar that had survived the fire at Anya’s childhood home, they were worth saving for the future.
