Nite Fire: Flash Point

by C. L. Schneider

  “No. That is definitely not wise. Let me handle it.”

  “You think I can’t be discreet?”

  His gaze narrowed. “I’ve seen the train depot, Dahlia. Do you realize that building was about to be declared a historical landmark?”

  “I think the del-yun nest in the basement might have held things up. And don’t act like you care about the history of this city. You just didn’t like the extra paperwork.” He made a face, and I gave him a gentle nudge with my elbow like nothing was wrong.

  We fell quiet as the service broke up. Hugs and warm handshakes were given to the family, and the funeral-goers drifted off across the grass in huddled groups. One man veered away and turned in our direction. Tall and thin, his long legs brought him closer with a quick, decisive pace. As he stepped off the grass and onto the road, he raised a freckled hand to block the sun glinting off his glasses. The wire-rims were the same color as his shorn silver hair.

  Pulling a card from his front suit pocket, he said amiably, “Dahlia Nite? I’m Robert Myers, attorney for the deceased. I’d appreciate it if you called my office in the morning. We have some things to discuss about the estate.”

  I took his card with an uncertain squint. “I don’t understand.”

  “There won’t be a formal reading of the will. My client was most insistent each inheritance be distributed privately.”

  I glanced at Oren, then back to the man in front of me. “Inheritance?”

  “Salvatore didn’t tell you?”

  I took off my sunglasses. “No, Mr. Myers, he didn’t tell me. But you’re going to.”

  The heavy creases tightened around his eyes as he chuckled. “Salvatore said you might be like this.” Slipping his hands in his pockets, he leaned in. “The business, Ms. Nite. He left it to you.”

  “The gym?” I said, as he backed up. “No, there must be some mistake.”

  “Not at all. He swore you were the right person for the job. Something about…you alone could ensure his father’s legacy never died.”

  “What about his family?”

  “No need to be concerned. They will be well taken care of.”

  “That was his father’s gym. Sal’s uncle ran it until he was old enough to take over. Isn’t there someone, a son or daughter, a grandchild, anyone?”

  “I’ve known Salvatore for many years, Miss Nite. If anyone were following in his footsteps, he would have amended the will. But his children and grandchildren have their own lives. Most don’t even live in the city anymore. I’ve already spoken to his widow. She plans to move in with one of her daughters out West. All she wants is for the business goes to someone who will care for it as happily as her husband did.”

  Touched, and more than a little uneasy, I thought, do I want this?

  I’d never owned anything I couldn’t leave town with at a moment’s notice.

  Yet how could I turn my back on the faith Sal had placed in me?

  “There is another option,” Myers said warmly. “If you decide it’s too much, you can always sell. There’s nothing stating you have to maintain ownership for a certain period of time.”

  “I can’t believe he did this.”

  Mr. Myers placed a comforting hand on my arm. “If there’s one thing I know about our friend, Miss Nite. He was a great judge of character. If Salvatore chose your family for this, he had a reason.”

  “My family?”

  “Yes, he explained your unusual tradition.” Myers flashed a lopsided grin. “It’s quite progressive; the firstborn girl taking the mother’s name. I rather like it.”

  Understanding how Sal had gotten around my lack of aging, I asked, “So this will was drafted…?”

  “Oh, years ago, before you were born. A provision was written in, that whichever female member of the Nite family attends the funeral, bearing the first name, Dahlia, will be considered the beneficiary. It’s unusual, but not the oddest language I’ve seen in a will.” He smiled, watching me. “You don’t have to run the business personally. Keep it financially stable, hire whoever you need to for the day to day operation, and you’ll never have to step foot in the place. You can be as hands on or hands off as you’d like. It’s your business now.” He took another step back. “I’ll have the paperwork ready. I assume you’ll want to have a look at the bank statements, tax records, insurance, and the like?”

  Not knowing what else to say, I nodded. “Sure.”

  “Then I’ll expect your call.”

  Mr. Myers walked away. As his form shrunk with distance, Oren’s irritated gaze bored into me with the strength of a small sun. Avoiding it, I turned; making him scoot out of the way as I opened my door. I tossed my bag on the passenger seat and got in. For some reason, I felt better than I had all day.

  I closed the door and started the engine.

  Oren didn’t get the hint. “This is a bad idea, Dahl.”

  “You heard him. All I have to do is keep it afloat.”

  “Forever?” he taunted.

  “Maybe,” I shrugged, trying to get used to the idea. “It might make a great front.” Thinking of Evans, I slid my sunglasses on with dramatic flair. “It could be my cool superhero cover story. My secret lair.”

  Oren recoiled. “You’re what?”

  Grinning, I pulled away from the curb. “Never mind.”

  Epilogue

  The weather had finally broken. It hadn’t rained in three days and the moon was nearly full, sitting above me in a clear navy sky. A vigorous breeze tugged at my hair, coaxing it free from the pair of careless braids framing my face. The air was hot for such a late hour. It was a nice night for a walk in the city, or on a beach. Anywhere but here, I thought, breathing in the sour blend of smoke, soot, and mold, blanketing the area.

  Ignoring the stench, and the ‘Keep Out’ signs, I twisted the messenger bag on my hip around to my back, and hooked my fingers into the chain-link fence blocking my path. I gave it a couple of hard shakes. A temporary structure, the fence wasn’t exactly steady. But cutting my way through wasn’t exactly subtle either, so I held on tight and scaled the wobbly barrier as swiftly as I could.

  Jumping down into the sprawl of black rubble on the other side, I landed behind a row of sleeping bulldozers. Sitting lonely and quiet, near the fence, they were waiting to be put to use, cleaning up and disposing of the small disaster I’d made when I torched the old depot. It had only been two weeks. Considering the secrets it held, though, Oren wanted no delays. With his network of lyrriken operatives, he’d ensured top priority was given to the investigation and an order of demolition was already in the works. In a matter of days, there would be nothing to look at but an empty lot. Everything would be gone, except the one thing that needed to be: the exit underneath. The passage linking this world with the del-yun’s home would be there forever, as all exits were. Obstructing, hiding, guarding—burying them beneath a couple tons of dirt—was the best we could do.

  Spinning my bag back around to the front, I opened the flap and pulled out a flashlight. I turned it on as I walked, searching for the spot. Shifting my eyes would negate the need for the extra light, but I’d kept my word to Oren. Hiding in my apartment for a few days, in one form, with no chance of a death-glimpse or empathic twinges of any kind, I was feeling better. My head was pain free. My dreams had fallen back into their regular, shitty, recurring pattern, but at least it was a shitty I was familiar with. All that lingered was the odd notion that seemed to emerge from nowhere after my return from Drimera: I had ghosts of my own.

  Of course I do. Few souls had ever lived without a moment’s suffering, and all it took was one. From that single trauma, it grew, like a tumor, feeding off each incident of violence or pain. And I’d fed the damn thing my whole life.

  With all the death and suffering my empathy had shown me, I wasn’t sure why the idea of visualizing my own disturbed me. But I couldn’t shake the concept that it was possible now, or the anxiety that came with it. Taking down the mirrors in my apartment had been muc
h easier. There were only three. And I didn’t need them. After nearly a hundred years, if I couldn’t put mascara on without a mirror, I didn’t deserve to wear it.

  Moving my flashlight over the dark monochrome heaps covering the ground, I pushed the debris around with the toe of my boot. It was near impossible to distinguish what anything inside had once been. Several collapsed structural pieces were outlining the perimeter of the depot. Finding one with a piece of the sign nailed to the frame of the main entrance, I used it as a reference point. Walking forward from there, I measured the approximate distance to where the skinless bodies had been hanging, above the entrance to the del-yun’s nest.

  My method wasn’t even close to precise. But the hole the creatures had climbed out of was sizeable. All I needed was to find an edge, and hope the rest of the basement hadn’t been compromised in the collapse.

  I sat my flashlight down on a relatively flat pile of waste and went to work pulling pieces off the charred piles. The top layers were easy. The debris beneath was damp and rotting. It clung to my fingers and fell apart as I tried to grab it; crumbling onto my jeans and turning my green t-shirt a grimy shade of black.

  I wiped the grunge off my hands and onto my jeans. “Gross.”

  Spotting something dark and soggy stuck in the buckle of my boots, I was tempted to leave. This wasn’t a job. Oren didn’t even know I was here. But after what I’d seen on Drimera, and Naalish’s apparent obsession with trespassers, the del-yun’s claim of starvation and his ‘dying world’ kept coming back to me. If there was any truth to it, I had to know.

  Taking the two metal pieces from my bag, I screwed the small shovel together, and used it to scrape the wreckage aside. It didn’t keep me any cleaner, but the work went faster. When my shovel dipped below floor level, I knew I was on the right track.

  A half a bottle of water and two broken fingernails later, I was grabbing my flashlight and sliding off the lip of the broken main floor, down into the basement. Jumping onto a blackened hill of rubble, the loose debris slid beneath my boots. I didn’t fight it. Landing on my ass, I rode the slope to the bottom and rolled off onto the floor. Hemming me in was a tangle of charred furnishings and various objects melted and burned beyond recognition. There wasn’t a lot of room to clear a path. I tossed the bigger items aside and trampled the rest.

  A door sat in the center of the far wall, busted half off its hinges and wedged into the frame. I shouldered it open enough to slip through into the next room. I didn’t need my flashlight anymore. The spinning pieces of the exit were light enough.

  A new set of knives were hanging from my belt. I pulled them both and stepped through.

  On my last visit to the del-yun world, I’d been after a young opportunistic male who’d been sneaking into the human compounds on Drimera, collecting their skin and taking it home to sell. Hunting him had been difficult. Their forests all looked the same: vine-infested and overrun, fragrant with a wealth of life that made picking out one lone scent difficult. Many of the del-yun’s nests were in large groups, far off the ground in gnarled hollowed out burls that grew on the trunks of massive red trees. Others were in clusters burrowed deep into caves and wide canyon walls.

  Del-yun preferred the night, which had given me the day to track. Seeing as their days were eighty-nine hours long, time hadn’t been an issue. But with such a wide variety of indigenous species ranging from harmless to incredibly dangerous, moving around undetected at any time hadn’t been easy. I wasn’t going to have that problem now.

  The stone-faced bastard hadn’t been lying, or even exaggerating. Either that or I’d stumbled onto the set of a bad disaster movie. All the popular, end-of-the-world elements were present: muted, overcast sky and acrid scorching air, a hot gusting wind that whipped without mercy, ripping waves of dust up from a ground that was rock hard and broken. Some kind of fungus or mold had stricken the soil, leaving its split pieces parched and black, like over-cooked crust. It was similar to what I’d seen on Drimera, but so much worse.

  I raised a hand to shield my eyes from the pelting sand, and took a few steps into the forest of great trees in front of me. My boots made the sound of broken glass as the baked yellow forest floor snapped beneath my weight. The lush, vibrant vines that had once crept beneath the grassy layer now lay dark and thin on the thirsty surface, like the veins of an old man pushing up against fragile skin. The vibrant red canopy was gone. Trunks whose girth could have hid ten men behind them sprouted nothing but naked, leafless limbs and burls that were dark, rotted, and empty. Bones of all sizes lay beneath the bloated growths. Many were damaged, with unnatural gouges and grooves marring their smooth surfaces. Teeth marks, I thought. Something had nibbled the bones clean.

  Before or after they died?

  Caution pricking at the back of my neck, I peered down through the trees. I listened. I watched, but nothing moved. The forest was as empty and silent as an old graveyard.

  I put my knives away and backed out of the forest.

  Bands of jagged lightning set fire to the distant sky. Thunder cracked behind me, and I jumped. Another round flashed, igniting the purple clouds. Windswept and swollen, the storm front was swirled with the yellow-brown and green of week-old bruises. Each lightning streak charged the air, raising the hair on my arms, even as the heavy weight of too much pain pressed against me. Waves of black sludge-like fog went on well beyond my view. The land was scarred by far more negative emotion than I could fight off for more than a minute. It was also dotted with more exits than I had ever seen in one place.

  There had to be hundreds of them, spread over the abandoned landscape.

  Where did they all come from? Where do they all go?

  The familiar rotating bursts of colored fragments were in the minority. Most were as black and dead as the ground. Their pieces were motionless and dark, reflecting nothing but tremendous amounts of pain. It wasn’t visible, but it radiated from the dull leaden shards: grief, terror, agony, heartbreak, loneliness, rage and sorrow. Their suffocating proportions eclipsed the room where I was held on Drimera.

  Savage and violent, they clawed at me, begging to be heard.

  Ghosts, I thought. They were all that was left of the del-yun world.

  I stepped closer to one of the ‘dead’ exits and stared into its nothingness. It was terrifying, yet intriguing. There was a strange beauty in its unaffected simplicity, a sense of perfection in all that dark pain. The look of it, the sensations rippling off the dull shards, there was a use for them, a function. If I stayed, in time, I knew I would see it. I would see reason in the chaos, a design reflected in the black. A purpose.

  But the air was burning my lungs.

  I turned back to my exit and pushed through the barrier. I squeezed through the crooked door and stood in the small space of the dark basement, bent over, hands on my knees as I coughed out the toxic air.

  I’d been to so many worlds, seen environments and terrain as varied as the species that lived there. Never had I seen a world so ravaged by its own pain. What happened to them? Had the del-yun brought about the destruction? Was it even possible for a people to suffer that much? Or had the pain of one caused the other?

  If I went back, if I let their ghosts in, I could find out.

  I can’t, I thought. There were too many. There was absolutely nothing safe or remotely sane about willingly absorbing the death of an entire species. Still, I had to do something. The mystery went deeper than the death of the del-yun world. I didn’t just suspect it. I felt it. And if the blight that overran their land was the same as the patch I saw on Drimera, Naalish might soon have more to worry about than traitors and trespassers.

  But how soon? That was the question. How long had it taken for the del-yun’s world to die? It didn’t look like a spur-of-the-moment apocalypse. If it were a slow death, it would explain why Naalish had become so overly wrapped up in maintaining the health of Drimera.

  Maybe she has it under control.

  Maybe I’m the on
ly one who doesn’t know what’s going on.

  And why would anyone tell me? I’m the runaway, the traitor. Even Oren didn’t share his secrets with me.

  I threw my shovel up through the hole. Scaling the mound with my hands and feet, I climbed back up to the depot floor. As I knelt, covering my tracks and re-filling the hole, my phone started buzzing. I pulled it out and glanced at the name. Hitting the speaker button, I set the phone on the floor. “Detective Creed,” I said, scraping in shovelfuls of debris. “I see you’re still keeping vampire hours. Doesn’t anyone commit a crime during the day anymore?”

  He grunted. “Not in the Sentinel.”

  I cracked a smile at the rare amusement in his tone. “I thought we weren’t meeting on the Chandler case until Monday.”

  “We aren’t,” Creed said, quickly. Something else was on his mind. “I called you thirty seconds ago and it didn’t connect.” Ever suspicious, he asked, “Where are you?”

  Glancing around the dark depot, I shrugged, “Just doing a little nighttime spelunking.”

  “Whatever. I’m texting you an address. I need your opinion on something.”

  Running an arm over the sweat and soot on my forehead, I grabbed the phone as I stood. “Let me go home and get cleaned up.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “So, when you say you want my opinion on something, you mean ‘grisly unexplainable crime scene’, and not ‘what tie do I wear with my new suit’?”

  “No offense, Miss Nite, but while your work seems to have stretched beyond consulting on fires, it doesn’t include fashion.”

  “Fine,” I sighed. “Grisly, unexplainable crime scene it is, then, Detective. But it’s your turn to bring the coffee.”

  The End

  Thank you for purchasing and reading Flash Point. I hope you are as anxious to continue the Nite Fire series as I am. If you enjoyed Flash Point, please consider leaving a review. I would love to hear your thoughts! Visit my website at www.clschneiderauthor.com, to learn more about my work, including my epic trilogy, The Crown of Stones. You can also sign up for my newsletter, read reviews, excerpts, and teasers. Check my blog for recommendations on a variety of indie books, or search #indiebooksbeseen and #awethors across social media. I’m proud to be a part of the indie author community and hope to continue bringing you quality stories of fantasy and adventure for many years to come.