Nite Fire: Flash Point

by C. L. Schneider

  The scales I’d summoned retreated. They couldn’t compete with the pain, as my body writhed in the tendrils of a black inky fog and a flame that wasn’t there. The invisible fire consumed my lower half and I thought: breathe.

  You can breathe.

  Let it go. Let the flames go.

  Distantly, I heard the door open. Someone was in the apartment.

  I tilted my head to watch a police officer with a bald head and worried eyes rush into the kitchen. I recognized him. We’d spoke not an hour ago. His tone was much sharper now as he tried to get my attention. Just as urgently, I tried to respond, to tell him I was all right. It wasn’t serious. I’d be fine in a minute.

  But my body wouldn’t push the words out. It couldn’t pull any air in.

  Liza’s ghost was in the way.

  Her trauma was crawling on my body, pressing down and sliding in.

  So cold… How can I be so cold when I’m burning?

  With an anxious scan of the corpse, the officer pulled me back from the body. Kicking an ill-placed chair out of the way, he cleared a space on the floor. Though his words were reassuring, there was tension in his jaw as I wheezed in his grip. He rested me on the floor, but he kept glancing at Liza’s remains like he’d never seen anything so shocking.

  He hasn’t, I thought, reminding myself that not everyone lived as I did: a constant witness to carnage and pain.

  His efforts not working, the man checked panic attack off his list. Assuming I was choking, he tilted my head back and pulled my chin down. He was looking for an obstruction, when his body jerked. He shrunk back, grabbing his chest. Pain and confusion contorted his face. Anxiety pumped his lungs in a vigorous rhythm.

  Gasping as badly as I was, the officer fell back onto the floor. He tugged at the front of his uniform like it was too tight. Sweat emerged on his flushed face as his frightened eyes focused on mine. “My…heart…” he panted.

  Shit.

  Motivated by the man’s distress, I wrestled back my control. Liza’s phantom trauma couldn’t compete with the real thing, and her ghost lost its grip. I could suddenly move. My breathing returned to normal. I remembered his name. “Officer Clemmons.” I scooted over beside him. “Can you hear me?”

  He looked worse than before. Seizing, his eyes fell closed.

  Hollering for the other officer outside in the hall, I grabbed my phone and called for help. As I knelt beside the man having a heart attack on Liza’s kitchen floor, an odd tingle crept up my spine. It gave birth to an uncomfortable and unwanted thought.

  Did I do this?

  Twenty-Four

  I pulled a paper cup from the tray in my hand and placed it on Creed’s desk.

  His face was buried in an open file. He didn’t look up.

  I pushed the coffee closer. “I emailed you my initial report on our latest victim.”

  “I saw it.”

  I took my cup and tossed the tray in the trashcan beside his desk. “How’s Officer Clemmons?”

  “Besides having a heart attack this morning at age thirty-eight?”

  Deciding not to take the bait, I waited.

  “It was minor,” he said. “Clemmons will be fine.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “About what?”

  I worded my question carefully. “About what might have triggered it?”

  “Barnes just got back from the hospital a few minutes ago. You can ask him.”

  “Come on, partner. Are you really going to make me do that?”

  Creed glanced up. He grunted at my pleading smile. “Clemmons said he heard something strange in the apartment. He went in to check, and it’s all blank after that. It’s only been…” he glanced at the clock on the wall and hissed, presumably unhappy with the time. “He’s only been awake a couple of hours. It might come back to him. Guess it’s a good thing you were there.”

  “Glad I could help.” But I wasn’t sure that’s what I did. Liza’s body was shocking, but what happened to Officer Clemmons felt like something else.

  Abruptly, Creed closed the file. Taking it and his coffee, he stood and walked off. The scent of shampoo and aftershave trailed behind him. Though he hadn’t actually shaved, or put on a tie, his crisp dark blue shirt and black slacks fit him nicely. I wasn’t sure going home to clean up had done much for his attitude, though.

  Stopping, he glanced back. There was something on his face resembling patience.

  He’s waiting for me? Huh. That’s an improvement.

  Catching up to him, we walked together past the vending machines to a series of windowed conference rooms. All had doors closed and shades drawn. Creed opened one of the middle doors and stood aside, letting me go first. He filed in behind me and closed the door. The lights were already on, reflecting off the recently buffed white tile floor. A line of corkboards and whiteboards stood against the back wall, their surfaces crowded with notes, pictures, evidence, and reports. Three of the four tables in the room held an abundance of files, boxes, and a few scribbled-on notepads. The remaining table was home to an open box of donuts. Two were missing.

  I eyed what was left in the box. The sugary aroma called to my empty stomach.

  Tossing his file carelessly next to the donut box, Creed leaned against the edge of the table. He sipped at his coffee with arms crossed as he glared at the bulletin boards like they were his lifelong enemies.

  I hopped up onto the table beside him. Scooting back until my boots were dangling, I reached behind him, set my coffee down, and plucked a donut out of the box. White powder trailed off onto my jeans as I took a bite. “So…” I said, taking another. “It’s been four days and we have four crime scenes.”

  “Five.”

  “Does that mean you officially linked the gas leak to our killers?”

  “Not yet. But you know I’m right.”

  I glanced at the boards again. There were more pictures than we had bodies, even with the deaths at the apartment building. “What’s all that?”

  “Zoe Tate, Jerry Conklin, Katelin Shane, Maria Renaldo, Abby Jackson, Kuri Yamada, Marcus Stewart, Terrance Martin…”

  On my third bite, I swallowed fast. “Who…?”

  “I’ve been doing some digging.”

  “Into what?”

  “Spontaneous combustion. I found cases all across the country dating back over a hundred years. Some are more carefully disguised than others. Overturning cause of death on any of them won’t be easy. Whoever covered them up did a damn good job.”

  I felt guilty criticizing his find, but it had to be done. “Sorry, Creed, but you’re reaching. Our female suspect is in her early twenties. The man is his mid-to-late thirties. Add the two together and they don’t even make a hundred.” I ignored the face he was giving me and went on. “And they haven’t exactly been covering up, either, so that rules out copycat. Unless they’re really bad copycats,” I added.

  “Descendants, then. Someone carrying on the work.”

  “What work? We have no viable link between the victims. And there are actual documented cases of spontaneous combustion. Some go back a lot farther than a hundred years. It doesn’t mean they have anything to do with this.”

  “Right. It makes more sense that it’s all a coincidence, or that our government has been quietly covering up an epidemic of spontaneous combustion for over a century.”

  I frowned at him with my powder-ringed lips. “Any drownings in this epidemic?”

  “None. At least not that’s in the reports.”

  “What did Barnes say?”

  “Not a lot.”

  “Because you haven’t told him yet?”

  Creed turned to me, somber and intense. “They’re connected.”

  “Are they? Or do you want them to be?”

  “I’m not crazy, Nite. There’s something not right here. You know it. You just won’t admit it.” Creed took off his glasses and dropped them on the table.

  “Anyone on your team have an opinion? I assume Barnes ass
igned you one.”

  “He did.”

  “But they don’t know what you’re looking into, either?”

  “They can’t. If one of them goes to Barnes before I have something solid...” Creed closed his eyes, pressing a firm hand against his forehead.

  “Have you had any sleep?”

  He glanced at me beneath his hand. “About as much as you.”

  “Well, this city’s fucked then.”

  A grin twitched across his face. It got lost in his cup as he lifted it and drank.

  I popped the last of the donut in my mouth, slid off the table, and went to have a closer look at his evidence. Each crime scene had its own board, displaying pictures of bodies with untouched halves and burnt pieces, as well as autopsy photos and reports. All were signed with immaculate penmanship by a Dr. Samantha Winters. I scanned lists of personal effects, timelines of the victims’ last days, and witness statements. There had to be a pattern I hadn’t noticed, some way to track our suspects or warn potential victims. If I didn’t find one, and the current rate of homicides continued, Creed was going to have to bring in another corkboard before the week was out.

  At the last board, I studied the cluster of black and white pictures that were severely out of place among the rest. The images were of parties and parks, restaurants, even a ribbon cutting at a construction site. All were occupied with people smiling, eating, working, and dancing in fashions that were popular when I first arrived in this world. “These are far from recent,” I said, running my finger over their curled, faded edges. “Sentinel City hasn’t looked like this for about a hundred years.”

  “Those were all the pictures I could find of Aidric Cole. He was the original purchaser of—”

  “The property where the Chandler house sits. I remember.” I looked at the pictures again. I had no doubt that Elwood, the current owner, and Aidric, were the same person. That still didn’t help me identify him. While elders were known to be handsome and unnaturally charismatic in both their forms, I’d only seen Aidric a handful of times and always in his natural dragon state. As a human, I had no idea what he looked like.

  I glanced over my shoulder. Creed was rubbing his head again. “Which one is Aidric?” I asked.

  “The one in the hat with his back turned.”

  “In which picture?”

  “All of them.”

  I searched the photos again. There was at least one man with a hat on and his back to the camera in every picture. The height, build, and posture were close enough to all be the same man. “Guess he was a little camera shy.”

  Still leaning on the table behind me, annoyance gripped his voice. “It’s a family condition, apparently. Keep going,” he added, but I was already moving to the lower rows of pictures. Becoming progressively newer, they were all of a similar type of venue; lavish affairs, fundraisers, and ceremonies. In each one, a man of similar build had his back to the camera. If Creed was right, Aidric and Elwood had attended nearly all the major galas or events in the city for the last hundred years.

  I turned around. “Aside from liking to party, and being exceptional at avoiding a camera, what else do you have on them? In fact, how do you even know it is them?”

  “Guest lists, newspaper clippings. The Cole name has been attached to about half the corporations and non-profit organizations in the Sentinel. You know the story of how the city was founded on the spot of some kind of old watch tower or guard post?”

  “That’s where the name came from. I read a poem once about the tower standing like a sentinel in the night, or something like that.”

  “Do you know who established that guard post?” He didn’t even wait for me to shake my head. “General Ethan Cole. Yet, strangely enough, no one can identify a one of them. Birth certificates and school records are either illegible or missing, or ‘destroyed in a fire’. Apparently they don’t drive, because I can’t find a driver’s license for any of them. Not even a goddamn address that checks out.”

  “So Elwood’s a rich recluse. That doesn’t make him a killer. And he’s clearly too old to be ours.”

  “Then Elwood hired our suspects, or the man we’re looking for is Elwood, Jr. Whatever it is, that family has something to hide.”

  “All families have something to hide.”

  “Is this your idea of helping, Miss Nite? Shooting down everything I say?”

  “I’m not shooting it down, I’m grounding you. Isn’t that what partners do? Watch each other’s backs? Keep each other in check? I’m a little rusty at this so if I’m wrong…?”

  He grunted.

  I took that as a yes. “Elwood clearly has connections,” I said. “He’s smart and slippery, if these pictures are any indication. If he is a part of this, building a case against him won’t be easy. And if it isn’t airtight, you’ll never get a conviction.”

  Releasing a dismissive breath, Creed went back to glaring at the board, and my empathy flared to life. For the first time, I saw the ghost of the trauma the man had been collecting all his life. It trailed off, hovering around him. Except instead of the usual varying shades of black, Creed’s ghost held an odd tinge of red. Working hard to keep the shock off my face, I watched the line of color pulsed around the edges of his ghost like a frayed hem. It was an anomaly I’d never noticed on any species before now.

  Whatever Detective Creed had gone through, the experience had touched him in some unique way. More than that, I thought. It had damn near taken over his life.

  It’s why he’s the way he is. Why he’s so wrapped up in these cases.

  I wanted to know more, but he wouldn’t open up to me. Not without a push. “That is what you’re after, isn’t it?” I said, abruptly. “You want an arrest, a conviction? A closed case.”

  “That’s what we all want.”

  “And you think obsessing will help?”

  “I’m not obsessing. This is how I work.”

  “Showering at the station, rummaging through hundred year old case files, living on coffee and a couple hours of sleep? All so you can ensure justice for the victims?”

  Creed took a fast drink. “Of course.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Abruptly, he stood. “What did you say?”

  “You may want justice, but that’s not why you’re doing this. That’s not why you keep letting Barnes throw you these ‘fucked up’ cases.” I stepped toward him. “These investigations are like torture for you, but you can’t stay away.”

  “So I’m a workaholic. It comes with the job.”

  “It’s more than that. You dwell on the impossible. You take every setback, every brick wall, and unsolvable case, personally. You need to know what no one else does. You need answers. Not finding them eats at you more each day.” I moved closer, obliterating the last of the space between us. “If I’m going to help you, Detective,” and keep you off the Guild’s radar, “there’s one answer I need: why?”

  Creed’s jaw pulled tight. Anger darkened his eyes, making them look small and dangerous. But he didn’t move, didn’t look away. Neither did I.

  Finally breaking my gaze, he chuckled as he stepped back. “You’re a real bulldog, Nite, you know that?”

  “Someone has to keep the reckless loner cop in line.”

  Not appreciating my joke, Creed scowled and glanced away. He ran a hand over his hair, momentarily pushing the layered strands flat against his head. I didn’t think he was going to answer. There was too much strife in his stare. But he must have sensed something in me—a willingness to listen, an eagerness to understand—because when Detective Creed turned back to face me, I knew I’d gotten to him.

  Pain riding beneath the resolve, he said, “An asrai killed my brother.”

  “Asrai don’t kill.” Damn, I thought, as his dark brows shot up at my quick reply. I shrugged and retreated. “That’s what I read. Folklore and mythology are a hobby of mine.”

  “Really? Mine too.” Leaning back, he crossed his arms. He put on a textbook ‘cop face’
and didn’t even pretend to believe me. “So what exactly did you read?”

  I hesitated answering. I’d been camouflaging suspicions, tracks, bodies, and everything in between for years. This time, concealment wasn’t my goal. What I wanted was for Detective Alex Creed to stop doubting his sanity. To stop beating himself up for failing at something he never had a chance of succeeding in. I wanted a consequence-free way to tell him. Not all creatures born in the shadows are meant to be pulled into the light.

  Only, my first instinct still held true. The man wouldn’t simply live with the truth. He’d poke and prod and dig. He’d draw attention until the Guild sent someone to deal with him. A long time ago, that ‘someone’ could have been me.

  “Well,” I said, throwing some doubt into my tone, “from what I remember, asrai were fabled to be these shy mermaid fairy things. Touching them isn’t good, but overall they’re afraid of humans. They certainly don’t go around killing them.”

  His pondering expression broke with a laugh, as if I’d finally given him the juicy piece of evidence he’d been waiting for. “You realize most people would have said, what the hell is an asrai? And that was after they were done laughing at me. Then they would have gotten this concerned, uncomfortable look on their face and told me to lock it down before I ended up in front of the department psychologist. But not you. You, Miss Nite,” his tone sobering, he pointed at me, “act like all this crazy shit is perfectly normal.”

  “What looks crazy on the surface is usually normal underneath.”

  “You knowing all about the obscure mythological creature that killed my brother, is normal? You know how they act. What they look like. Hell, you just defended one.”

  “I defended the legend of the asrai, not their species.”

  “Do you believe they exist?”

  “I believe something sparked the legend. But I can’t tell you if they exist until I see one.”

  “Well I’ve seen one.”

  I feigned a mix of surprise and skepticism. “Here, in the river?”

  He shook his head. “The Sentinel has more than its share of the unexplained. But if you know where to look, if you know how to look, you can find it anywhere.”