by Nia Arthurs
“Nope.” McKinley watched him reach for a file that had flattened itself against the back of the desk.
Jerry let out an exasperated breath. “Get out of the way then.”
McKinley remained in place. “She’s the Prime Minister’s youngest daughter. Grew up in the spotlight. Belize’s Darling. Dude, you’ve lived here since you were ten. You should know this.”
Frustrated now, Jerry snapped. “Move out of my way, McKinley.”
“Alright, alright. No need to get testy.” McKinley straightened, his eyes glued to the screen. A gasp tore from his throat. “Is that… what’s happening? Is that a part of the act?”
“What?” Deke flew toward them, appearing out of nowhere. He scrambled for the tablet, his chest heaving. “What did I miss?”
“You settled everything in evidence, Rookie?”
“Yes, sir,” Deke said, not bothering to glance up as he replied.
Jerry would’ve raked him through the coals for his insolence if McKinley didn’t look just as petrified. Curiosity got the better of him. Jerry floated closer to the men, leaning over their shoulders to spy on the live concert.
Instead of the woman dancing on the stage, flames engulfed the platform. Smoke billowed from a machine that once spurted fireworks. Screams poured from the audience. The camera shook. The footage cut off.
Everything went black.
“No!” Deke thrust a fist to the sky, his face creased in agony. “What happened? Is Meghan alright?”
“I’m sure she’s fine,” Jerry said casually. “Security probably pulled her off the stage at the first sign of smoke.”
“How depressing,” McKinley grumbled. “I hope no one was hurt.”
Jerry grunted. “Put that thing away, Deke. We’ve got work to do.”
The rookie sank into his chair and tucked the tablet beneath his duffel bag. He held his head and mumbled, “She has to be okay.”
McKinley slapped Deke’s back. “You’re taking this hard. You knew her personally or something?”
“I was in her English class in junior college,” the kid said. “Had a crush on her, but she had so many guys chasing her I didn’t stand a chance. Singing was her dream. Everyone knew that.”
Her dream, huh?
Poor Meghan Slade. Looked like her dreams had gone up in smoke. Literally.
Jerry didn’t know her, but he hoped she would be able to bounce back from this. He’d lost something he loved once.
It felt like crap.
He wouldn’t wish that on anybody.
Meghan, Ten Minutes Ago
United States
“We’ll be chilling… together. Come on! Sing it!” Meghan pointed her microphone to the crowd. She couldn’t pick out any faces in the packed auditorium, but she could feel the energy of the audience like a living, breathing force.
It was exhilarating. A kind of high not even her brief jaunt down the shadowy path of drugs could compete with.
She’d spent her life chasing this dream down. Her parents wanted her to get her education before she ‘tried the singing thing’.
They never called it a career. It was always that ‘thing’—like a monster they didn’t want to name.
Meghan was the type of girl who did everything her parents told her. Or most of the things. It wasn’t like they’d told her to try drugs. She’d gone and done that on her own.
But singing… she couldn’t compromise on that.
Since she was a little kid, Meghan would grab a hairbrush and drape her head with the remnants of her mother’s old weave. She would stand in front of the mirror and dance, pretending she was performing before a camera for a music video.
There was never a school talent show, national anthem or church solo she didn’t participate in. When asked, of course. She didn’t go around begging for opportunities to perform.
That was beneath her.
If only she could tell that little girl with the patchy weave that her imagination would, twenty years later, become a reality.
Music blared from the speakers hoisted in the air. The chorus played again. Meghan put a hand to her ear and leaned forward, her legs spread open as she bobbed to the rhythm.
“We’ll be chilling…” She nodded to the crowd.
Her fans eagerly finished the line, “Chilling together, baaabeeey!”
The music pulsed. She listened for the three distinctive claps that would introduce the musical interlude. The moment she recognized the cue, the bass dropped and Meghan performed the choreography she’d practiced for the past three months.
The crowd went wild. They seemed to cheer louder when she got deeper into her grind. So she slowed down, winding her waist to the beat. Her mind flew to her boyfriend, bringing authenticity to her moves.
She straightened with a smirk and stuck her tongue out, winking at the crowd.
The screams intensified.
Meghan fed off their adoration. Her heart thumped as wildly as the fireworks spurting out of the stage.
Then a spark hit her hand.
She frowned. Wait… the flames weren’t supposed to behave that crazily.
Meghan grew unsure as she grabbed the mike and started singing again. Her concentration faltered when more and more sparks hit her body. They stung like tiny mosquito bites.
The music cut.
Screams filled the air, but they were no longer shrieks of excitement. They were moans of pain and fear. People in the front row shirked back, flinching in the light produced by the malfunctioning machines.
“Everyone,” Meghan said into her mike, “please stay calm. We’ve got everything under control.”
As if her words were a direct challenge, the machine to her right exploded. Meghan stumbled back and tripped, landing hard on the platform. Pain ricocheted through her elbow, but a busted arm was the least of her worries.
Flames filled the stage. Through the haze of black smoke, she saw the auditorium emptying. People scattered like roaches, clamoring to be free.
Meghan coughed. The smoke overpowered her. Filling her lungs. Clouding her vision.
“Help,” she cried weakly. Her voice was swallowed by the alarm bells ringing in the building and the terrified yells of concert-goers sprinting for the exits.
Tall, orange flames sucked the breath from her lungs. They danced, moving with a graceful fluidity that seemed in direct contrast to the destruction it brought. Orange, blue and purple—she’d never known a fire could be that beautiful.
The heat singed the fine hairs on her skin, dragging Meghan back to reality.
The fire was the predator.
Meghan was its prey.
She was surrounded on all sides. The smoke had become a thick blanket that pressed her chest and stung her eyes.
Where was her manager? He would get her out of this. Any minute now, someone would spring over those flames and rescue her from this nightmare.
Any minute now.
But no one appeared. The flames were her only companions, circling her like a band of thieves on a stormy night.
Hope seeped from her body, a balloon losing air. It was the end.
Meghan wanted to be happy. At least she was dying while doing what she loved. How many people lived to their eighties hating their jobs, their bosses, their families, their very existence?
She should be grateful she’d come this far.
But she wasn’t.
Meghan didn’t want to die like this.
She wanted to fight.
A fiery set piece crashed. Her eyes widened. Adrenaline pumped through her veins.
Stop. Drop. And roll, right?
Meghan ignored her throbbing arm and tried to row herself out of harm’s way, staying close to the floor. Her chin scraped the ground and her behind stuck high in the air as she crawled toward a small opening in the flames.
The rafters moaned.
She glanced up and saw a machine teetering toward her. Meghan scrambled to move before she got caught in its path, but she was
n’t fast enough.
The metal piece slammed against her right leg. A scream that didn’t sound quite human slipped off her tongue and shattered the air. The pain was excruciating. Like her skin was being melted off. Dripping from the bone.
Black spots danced before her eyes.
Her parents used to take her to Sunday school when she was little and during the sermon, the preacher would warn them about hell and how much it sucked.
If hell existed, Meghan figured she’d just gotten a taste.
As the flames roared around her, as it nipped at her legs, as the smoke filled her body, she closed her eyes and let the pain steal her away.
Chapter 2
Three Months Later
“It’s a miracle she’s even walking,” Doctor Palacio said. He thrust his tiny, horn rim glasses further up his broad nose. He had a slight accent, the kind that was unique to the Garinagu people in Punta Gorda. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Meghan turned on her side, allowing the doctor’s inspection. She felt strangely removed from these hospital visits, as if the person her parents and the doctors were discussing was someone else.
Someone… whole.
“They said it was a deep second-degree burn.” Her mother’s voice was soft, whispery. “We’re lucky it only scarred her right leg, but we’re hoping there’s a way to fix it.”
“Fix it?” The doctor exclaimed. “What’s done is done. It can’t get any better for her.”
Meghan sat up swiftly. Just that movement sent pain throbbing up her leg. Most of the time, she didn’t feel anything, but the scars acted up every time she went to a hospital.
As if they were sentient.
The papery thin hospital gown slid down her creamy brown shoulder. She grabbed the edges and pulled it up while hopping off the bed. “Mom, let’s just leave.”
“Ms. Slade,” Doctor Palacio stopped her with a hand, “accept the new body you’re in and thank God you survived. I heard about the accident. It could have been so much worse than this.”
He’d heard, hadn’t he?
All of Belize had. The biggest disaster of her life had become nothing but a sensational newspaper headline that squeezed every grotesque detail of her first and last concert.
Anger welled in her chest. Tears pressed against her throat. Meghan opened her mouth to tell the doctor that what she’d been through meant more than what he’d heard. Before she could get a word out, a hand clamped around her wrist.
Her eyes dipped to her mother’s fingers—long and slender, nails trimmed and tipped with classy French tips.
These were the hands that dried her tears when she fell off her bike at age seven, the hands that baked fifty lemon pies for her class bake sale when she was twelve, the hands that soothed her when her boyfriend ended their relationship two weeks ago.
“Let’s go.” Georgina Slade narrowed her sharp brown eyes. A vein popped out of her temple, pointing to her distress. “Now.”
Meghan pushed the rage away, but it was there. It was always there. Simmering in the background. Eating away at her peace of mind the way those flames ate her right leg.
The doctor was right. It could have been worse.
She could have been burned from head to toe. But she wasn’t.
She could have lost her ability to walk. But she didn’t.
She could have died like that girl...
No, Meghan refused to think about that. It would be impossible to wake up in the morning if she gave in to that one regret.
“Change in here. I’ll wait for you,” her mother said.
Meghan studied Georgina’s face—the nutmeg brown skin that boasted a new spring of wrinkles every month since the fire, the dark brown eyes that had lost their sparkle, the full mouth that spent most of its time pulled into a thin line.
She stopped in the middle of the hallway, lured by the hush of the television, footsteps and conversation in the background. Her thoughts fluttered into the air, uninhibited. “Don’t you resent me?”
Georgina blinked rapidly. “What?”
“Nothing.” Meghan shook her head.
It was an insulting question.
Georgina was trying her best. Her dad was too. In fact, her entire family had rallied around her, showing their support, paying for flights all over the world to see plastic surgeons and burn specialists.
Maybe it was because she resented herself, but she didn’t quite understand why they were all holding on to hope when she’d released it already.
“I love you,” Georgina said firmly.
Meghan didn’t know if it was a response to her question or a simple blanket statement to tend to her fledgling self-esteem.
“Love you too,” Meghan said.
She walked away from her mother and slipped into the changing room where her clothes were folded neatly on a hewn shelf painted white. She pulled the curtains and let the hospital gown crumple to the floor.
There was a mirror in the room. She’d forgotten to cover it. Her eyes lingered on the reflection of her right leg. Patches of pink and brown marred her skin like an ugly quilt.
Thanks to the best doctors money could buy, the scars had healed smoothly but the reminder of the flames would linger in the varying pigments of her skin.
Doctor Palacio was their last hope and he had just slammed the door in her face.
Unless she got a chocolate brown marker and colored it in every morning, her leg would forever be stained.
Disgusted, Meghan grabbed her maxi skirt and pulled it over her hips. The cotton was soft against her skin. She yanked on her shirt and then swung her small purse on her shoulder.
Mask of indifference firmly in place, she marched into the hallway to join her mother. Georgina was sitting on a chair in the waiting room. The moment she spotted Meghan, she hopped to her feet.
“Everything okay?” Her brown eyes searched Meghan’s like she expected her daughter to burst into tears any minute.
That… that right there was why Meghan stuffed her feelings deep inside and pasted a smile on her face. “I feel like ice cream.”
“Ice cream?” Georgina’s gaze flickered to the floor, but she brightened soon enough and nodded. “Of course.”
They walked in silence to the exits. The moment the hospital’s doors parted for them, Meghan took in a breath of fresh, Caribbean air.
She’d come to despise the scent of antiseptic and despair that was baked into the walls of hospitals. She couldn’t really breathe until she was free of it.
Her fingers danced out, reaching toward the sunshine that felt warm on her skin. The Medical Center sat in the northern side of the city, nestled between neatly groomed shrubs and an expansive parking lot. Flowers bloomed nearby, sweetening the breeze with the scent of hibiscus.
A car pulled up to the driveway and the driver hopped out, jogging around the side of the bulletproof black SUV to open the door for them.
Meghan slid in first while her mother joined her.
On the way to the ice cream parlor, Georgina prattled on about shallow, inconsequential things—the state dinner next month, Brandon’s work with Doctors Without Borders, and Queenie’s graduation ceremony for her Masters in Law.
Meghan sat there silently, pretending to take in all the latest about her siblings while she secretly watched the Belizean landscape roll by.
Belize was a colorful nation. Known as a melting pot of cultures, it was home to a variety of ethnicities. People of all shades walked the paved streets.
Coconut trees grew in abundance, bracketing the highway with stalwart persistence. Buildings painted in bright colors peppered the stretch, intermingling with the pops of greenery that no amount of man-made invasion could suppress.
She watched a Creole man pedaled past their truck on his bicycle, flitting in and out of the road like he drove a car instead of a thin piece of metal on two narrow wheels.
Meghan almost smiled. Almost.
A few minutes later, their car slowed in fron
t of her family’s favorite ice cream shop. The driver, a broad-shouldered ox of a man named Bruce, turned around. His eyebrows were hiked inquiringly.
Georgina tapped Meghan’s hand. “What do you want, honey?”
“I want to order myself.”
Both her mother and Bruce reacted to her comment with fluttering eyelashes and slightly parted lips.
“Ma’am?” Bruce slipped his dark shades off, revealing a face as rough and dangerous as the name ‘Bruce’ alluded. He’d been her mother’s personal security since she was thirteen. Now he was more of an uncle than a guard.
Georgina looked scandalized. “We can’t just walk in there.”
“I’ll be fine.” She popped the door open without waiting around for their permission.
Traffic whizzed by. She flattened herself against the car and inched around the sides, hoping to make it to the trunk so she could walk freely.
She was almost there when something clunked into the car, a few inches from her head. Her hair whipped her cheek as Meghan spun to inspect the sound. She spotted a crack in the tinted glass window and a small rock at her feet.
Before she could decide how either object connected to the other, another stone hurtled through the air.
This time, it didn’t catch the window.
This time, it caught her.
Bruce hopped out of the driver’s side and sprang toward Meghan. She saw him through a blurry haze. Blood trickled to her shoulder. Her blood? Her fingers tiptoed to her temple. It felt sticky.
“Get in the car!” Bruce yelled. He threw his arm around her shoulder, covering her with his body and shoving her in the backseat.
“Meghan!” Georgina cried, scooting toward her. “What the hell just happened?”
Meghan pulled her bloody hand to her lap and said calmly, “I think someone tried to kill me.”
“He’s killing me.” Jerry ground his jaw as he strode beside McKinley to the chief’s office. “I swear if I didn’t want to qualify for the BSAG so bad, I’d grab my gun and shoot him myself.”
McKinley chuckled, his white smile a crackling contrast to his dark brown skin. “You’re talking about the rookie again?”
