Nite Fire: Flash Point

by C. L. Schneider

  We reached the floor with Dan Chandler’s room, Detective Creed opened the door. He pulled my wallet out of his inside jacket pocket and handed it to me. “We can put off your statement until morning. But I’m sending over a sketch artist tonight. Maybe even getting a partial face on paper will help you remember more.”

  “I’ll do my best.” I stepped out into the hall. He didn’t. “What’s wrong? Think you missed something down there?”

  “Can’t hurt to look around again on my way out.”

  “Do you mind if I take the claw home? I’d love to run some tests.”

  He laughed. “Why not ask for the necklace, too?”

  “I didn’t want to be pushy.”

  “Asking to take my evidence home, before I’ve even logged it in…that’s not pushy?”

  “Whatever this guy used to burn his victims, there might be a trace of it on the claw. I can drop it off to you in the morning. I just need a small sample.”

  “Then take the sample here and run the test at home.” His searching gaze was unwavering. “Unless there’s some other reason you need unrestricted access to my evidence, Miss Nite? Something you haven’t shared with me?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Good.” Creed pulled out the bag containing the claw piece and handed it to me. “I’ll send someone up for it shortly. And humor me, will you?” His lips played with a slight grin. “Find an aspirin or something? There has to be one around here somewhere.”

  “One? I was thinking ten. And some tequila. Or scotch. Maybe some ice cream.”

  “Booze and ice cream?” He pondered the idea as he stepped back into the stairwell. “You’re an interesting woman, Miss Nite.”

  The door swung closed between us, and I smiled to myself. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  Eleven

  My fire was the only light. It danced on the tip of my finger, a flickering yellow-orange tongue that licked the dark, chasing it back, stabbing the veil of gloom. It was barely a spark of color through the heavy forest branches. Yet my tiny fire flared loud like a promise: if I’m here, you’ll be dead soon.

  But he already knows, I thought. He’s been waiting for me.

  Standing in his dark house, peering from behind the half-closed curtain, through the dirty panes of an upstairs window; whatever the human had done to earn the ire of the dragon elders had been warning enough.

  In a flash, his body was gone. He was on the run, and so was I.

  Dropping to all fours, my ears tracked his panicked breath as I crossed the open yard. Traces of colored heat passed swiftly by the window glass. The soles of his shoes slapped against the floor, then the stairs, as he descended.

  His steps were hasty, desperate, as he struggled to find a hiding place.

  There was none.

  Yet the echo of his foolish endeavor was more than it should be.

  He wasn’t alone.

  I recalled my orders, knowing Naalish had been clear. She was never one to hesitate in her words, never one to be wrong. So when the Queen told me of the human who had consorted with one of my kind—a renegade partial plotting against the Guild—I’d given her my full attention.

  Her massive body had loomed above me, scale-wrapped and strong. Her feminine voice had whispered unequivocally in my mind. “Humans serve a purpose. They have been allowed a place in our world. But in that place they must stay. History has shown us what happens when the balance is tipped. We must all do our part to prevent it from ever tipping again.”

  I’d posed only one question. “And if he is not alone?”

  Her long neck straightened. “You are an executioner, Dahlia. Kill them all.”

  I stepped forward now to fulfill her command and sound drifted in from the woods behind me. Pausing, listening, to the sudden heavy gait of bodies bursting through the forest; steel and lyrriken scales winked through the leaf-covered shadows. High above in the distance, great wings flapped against the silhouette of the double moons. Long, muscular bodies hung like encroaching black clouds in the sultry air.

  The dragons were coming.

  No…

  That’s…

  That’s not possible.

  That’s not how it happened.

  Why are they here?

  Elders never left their lair for something as lowly as the execution of a human.

  Their shapes closed in and the night darkened. Sheets of blinding fire engulfed the sky. Embers fell to ignite the treetops. A blaze of orange tore down the moss-coated trunks. Fire illuminated the shadows, revealing hundreds of nageun as they crawled from the undergrowth.

  I spun as more of the vile creatures emptied from the house, jumping out windows and crashing through the door. Pelted by glass and wood, misty streaks of shifting dark bodies surrounded me. My fire-heated claws scored their flesh as they attacked. But there were too many. A flurry of teeth bit into me from all sides.

  My screams were lost beneath a great rumble of the land as the dragons descended. Their massive clawed feet sunk inches into the soil. I couldn’t fathom how so many fit into the tiny clearing as representatives arrived from all tribes. Taking measure of their surroundings, their graceful elongated heads danced. Forked tongues flicked in annoyance.

  A female approached. Two stories tall, red-blue scales glinting; she smacked the swarming nageun aside, clearing them off me like the sturdy beasts carried no weight.

  What is this? I thought.

  It didn’t happen this way. This isn’t my ghost.

  The female looked down at me lying before her, shaking and blood soaked; wrapped in pain. Judgment gleamed in her eyes as her thick, plated tail swung round to rise above me. It descended swiftly toward my chest. The barbed end hovered.

  “Do it,” I dared her. “Take my heart. Burn it. Kill me. But it won’t erase the past. It won’t change what I’ve done.” Overcome, I cried out, “Do you think this is what I wanted?”

  A breath of disappointment fled the dragon’s snout. “None of us wanted this.”

  Rain streaked the dark glass of my bedroom window. I watched the droplets slide, letting my breathing slow and the dream’s disturbing images fade from my mind.

  Except, they never truly fade. My empathy made sure of that.

  Though, it wasn’t wholly to blame. Even before my sensitivity manifested itself in the woods of Drimera, my mind had processed trauma in much the same way; replaying my worst moments over and over, night after night. Back then, it had a narrower focus, but the emotional scars left behind by my youthful ordeal in the nageun den had been more than enough fodder.

  I’d been merely an initiate, a youngling full of enough recklessness to land me in their burrow. In seconds, their fangs had punctured. Their toxic saliva had dripped into the wounds. It ate through my scales as they nourished themselves with my blood.

  When the Guild found me, I was emaciated and manic. I was called weak and fragile. My training was put on hold. My progress monitored for potential rejection from the program. Trauma and my sustained exposure to the creature’s hallucinatory toxin had left me labeled ‘unlikely to mature normally’.

  I showed them.

  Not only did I recover, I was the first of my den mates to receive my own squad. I became fierce, aggressive, and driven. I rarely partook in the free hours we were given. Instead, I trained. Stealing away up into the mountains or down into the blue canyons beyond the patrols. I practiced with blades and fire and my bare hands. I hadn’t been trying to impress anyone. I’d been making sure no one would ever mistake me as weak again. And if they did, I had the means to kill them.

  Still, it was many years before the tactics the Guild taught me took hold, allowing my mind to let go of the ordeal enough to sleep. Then my ability surfaced. And I had new ‘worst moments’ to relive.

  The house in the woods, my arrest, my sentencing, my escape, the human child and the instant things went wrong. They were my last hours on Drimera. They were my ghosts. And my empathy churned them out in my sl
eep, feeding them to me in bits and pieces; never starting in the same place, never ending in the right order. On rare occasions, other dreams swept in to distort the facts. Memories, missions, and faces overlapped. They were always true events, until now. This was an ending I had never seen before.

  It was one that never happened.

  There had been no dragons present the night I killed the human child. If there had, I would never have spoken to them with such defiance. So why would I dream it? Why would the pattern suddenly break after ninety-seven years? If I’d suffered some new trauma to push out the old, it would make more sense.

  Sitting up, I tossed the pillow. As I reached for my phone on the nightstand, I knocked over the pill bottle beside it. Righting the bottle, as I sat it down, I thought about opening the lid. I’d come close earlier when I got home from the hospital, when the idea of being knocked out for a few solid hours, by something other than a kick to the face, had been appealing. It still was.

  I glanced at the clock. It was only midnight.

  Except pills weren’t a cure. They were a mask, a cover up. The occasional thought that they might work was nothing but a weak hope. I trusted Oren to look out for me, but if his long-ago diagnosis was right, and my nocturnal visions were an involuntary byproduct of my empathy, how could the pills control one and not stifle the other?

  Leaving the bottle where it was, I checked my phone. There were two missed calls and a voicemail from Detective Creed. “Damn,” I muttered, knowing I should have left the ringer on.

  Throwing off the blankets, a chill hit my legs. I yanked my t-shirt down over my hips as I stood, and brought the phone with me into the hall. I flipped on the light as I crossed the living room, making sure I had no unexpected visitors. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Ronan had been sitting on my couch. Though he’d come for my advice, I didn’t think he’d actually listen.

  Opening the fridge, as I scanned the meager contents, I cradled the phone in the crook of my neck and listened to Creed speak.

  “Miss Nite? It’s Detective Creed. The sketch artist I sent over said you didn’t answer your door. I hope that means you’re resting. I’m also hoping you found something on that claw sample. I need your full statement, too, which I would have gotten last night if you’d waited for me to come back to the hospital instead of ditching me and the doctor and taking a cab home. Anyway…” he sighed. “Call me.”

  I smiled at his irritation. I knew Creed was concerned about his case, not me, but I didn’t take it personally. He was handed a crap case with an impossible solution. I did feel bad, seeing as he probably thought he’d hit the jackpot with the evidence in the stairwell. But it would yield no clear results. I’d already let Oren know to have someone with access to the forensics lab deal with their results. Mine would be accordingly fabricated, and the origin of the claw would prove inconclusive.

  I hadn’t wanted the thing to test it, anyway. I knew exactly who it belonged to. My interest was in what could be done with it. As my wise, dead, del-yun friend had pointed out, mystically speaking, dragon parts had a use beyond the obvious; shavings of claws, horns, scales, and dried pieces of heart, even the eyes. Less could be accomplished with bits of lyrriken, but the small amount I’d shaved off the claw at the hospital would do nicely. Especially once I placed it in the hands of a centuries’ old Guild trained mage with knowledge of human science and dragon magic. Beyond that, all I needed was a little luck that the claw’s owner hadn’t already skipped town.

  Disappointed at the empty shelves of my fridge, I rolled up three slices of bologna and shoved them in my mouth. A glass of milk followed as I opened the message app on my phone. Assuming he was sleeping, I kept my message short and typed three words to Oren: I need you.

  Twelve

  A tight hand on my duffel bag, I hopped the guardrail. The soles of my shoes made contact and slid down the scrub and litter-strewn embankment. Rain shook from the leaves as my jeans disrupted the long stalks. A storm had moved through in the two hours and twenty-two minutes I’d managed to sleep after I went back to bed. The air should have smelled fresh and clean. It stunk of death.

  Reaching the bottom, a three-legged metal stand flanked both sides of the darkened running trail. Round spotlights sprouted from their tops like bulbous silver eyes, all pointing to illuminate the interior of an arched tunnel beneath the overpass. Above it, on top of the multitude of squad cars, a constant flux of bright red and blue spun against the dark.

  A female officer was enclosing the scene with yellow tape. I skirted her with a polite smile as I approached. Fractured concrete crunched under my step as I walked the edge of the trail. Ducking under the water-resistant fabric of a blue pop-up tent, I avoided the numbered evidence tags positioned beneath it on the ground. One marked a torn piece of cloth. Another; a clump of blonde hair with a bit of scalp attached. Number three was a thick splatter of dried blood. Number four: a charred severed finger. There was no shortage of coverall-clad forensics specialists, photographers, and uniformed officers. Several gave me grim nods, recognizing me from the previous crime scenes. The officer I’d seen guarding the Chandlers’ front porch stood off to the side. Evans was at the back end of the tunnel, talking to a female officer. Her black ponytail bobbed as she nodded in response.

  Creed was in the midst of all the spotlights, in the center of the tunnel with his back to me; crouching beside a body. My view partially obstructed, I couldn’t see the victim clearly, but the shape indicated female. She was dressed in running clothes, and like Ella, a good portion of her was missing.

  I approached slowly, straining to identify how many ghosts lurked in the dark. I didn’t want an unexpected peek at the violence that had claimed our latest victim. Not with such a large audience around. I was too exposed.

  I should have stalled. I should have put him off.

  I could have feigned an excuse and arrived after the scene had cleared out. But I’d turned my ringer on case something came up. And Creed’s call, when it woke me, had been urgent and insistent. And here I was.

  Hearing my advance, he stood and turned around. He’d changed out of his wet clothes from the hospital, but I had my doubts the man had gone home. Hair still flat, fatigue ringing his eyes, his tie was off center and his gray button up was barely tucked into his black slacks.

  I walked over and righted his tie before he had a chance to protest.

  Stepping back like I’d crossed some invisible line, Creed nodded. “Thanks. Sorry to wake you,” he threw in. “Radio said another storm is on the way. And this is recent. I want to get whatever we can out of this before the rain moves in.” He paused. I waited for him to comment on my swift recovery, but he was too distracted to look at me that closely. Instead, I got a passing, “Feeling better?”

  Before I could answer, he squatted back down; already moving on.

  I smiled to myself. I liked his intensity, even if it did make him look like a prick.

  Pulling my hair back, I rounded the body and crouched on the other side. “No restraints.” I glanced at the patch of missing scalp on her head. The charring on her hand and arm were imprecise and hasty. “She put up a fight.”

  “For what it was worth.” His gaze fell to the cauterized edge of her torso and the blackened ashy remains of her legs. “If she was being trailed, maybe the killers got impatient. Or she was more than they bargained for.”

  “Why risk attacking her in the open, then? Why not do it at home, when she’s sleeping, like Ella.” Like Carly.

  “It’s a dark, unpopulated area. It’s unlikely any drivers on the overpass would hear her scream. And this trail is full of curves. Even if anyone else was out here, there’s no clear line of sight.” He shrugged. “Looks like an easy place for a quick kill to me.”

  I snagged his eyes. “You said things are rarely what they look like.”

  Holding my gaze, a twitch of approval tugged at his mouth. “I did.”

  “Ella and her children were planned. Controlled. Flas
hy. Burning Dan in the hospital was brash, but he was a loose end. They didn’t have much choice. This…this feels like they wanted us to find her.”

  “Okay, but why?”

  “I’m not sure. Who called it in?”

  “A man walking his dog. So far, he checks out.”

  “Do we know her name?”

  “Not yet.” He gestured at the medical alert bracelet on the woman’s wrist. “That’s all she had on her. Once we get an ID, we can try connecting her to the Chandlers.”

  “You mean with something besides spontaneous combustion?”

  Creed ran an impatient hand over his face. “There’s no residue. Think the rain washed it away?”

  I forced back a frown. Covering up a lyrriken-on-human crime was infinitely more important to the Guild than punishing the guilty party. Making the scenes consistent, planting the residue to confuse and stifle the investigation had been a part of that cover-up since the beginning. The urban legends it spawned had only helped out cause. Modern advancements had clearly made SHC a less than convincing explanation, but to suddenly break protocol after so many years… It didn’t make sense.

  I glanced at Creed and cleared the confusion from my voice. “There might still be some trace amounts. It depends on how hard the rain was coming down.”

  “Want to take a stab at cause of death?”

  Creed was watching me expectantly, so I played along. “Her visible wounds are all defensive and superficial. The exposed flesh, organs, and veins of the torso were all neatly cut and cauterized; preventing her from bleeding out. It was a clean job, possibly done post mortem if she was a fighter. Either there’s something internal or…”

  But why burn the bodies if the victims had already drowned? Such excess (and the lack of residue) not only called attention to the smokescreen but potentially exposed it.

  Were they mocking tradition? Did they simply not give a damn? Or were they shoving it in my face, wanting me to notice the discrepancies?