کتاب 09-18

18

Allie crouched at the bottom of the embankment with Nick in her arms. She clutched her brother’s face to her chest and buried her own head in his shoulder, the pair of them squeezed together like the two halves of a walnut.

The flame that had once been a woman rose from the black and smoking corpse of Jakob Grayson. She left her kill and walked toward the children. Her heels left bubbling footprints. liquefying the asphalt beneath them.

When she was ten feet from Nick and Allie, she lowered herself with an exquisite grace, hooking her ankles and sinking down to sit cross-legged. Allie lifted her head and peered at her, then squeezed Nick’s shoulder to let him know it was okay to look.

Her golden hair flowed and crackled. The road beneath her was melting, turning to a puddle of tar.

Nick spoke with his hands. He said, “Mom?”

She nodded and said, “I was once,” moving her hands in swirls of fire. “Most of who I was has burned away.”

“I’ve missed you,” he said, and Allie finger-spelled, “Me, too. So much.”

Sarah nodded again. The top of her head was an open chalice of flame. Whatever she was burning to stay with them—the air and a million whirling grains of spore—she was using it up fast now, cooling out, cooling off. When the breeze gusted, she rippled like a reflection in unsettled waters.

“It was all my fault,” Nick told her with his hands.

“You don’t blame a match for starting a fire,” the Sarah flame said. “You blame the person who strikes it. You were just a match.”

“You’d still be with us if I hadn’t tried to teach you how to cast fire.”

With her hands, she said, “I am still with you.” With gestures, she said, “I am always with you. Love never burns away. It just keeps on and on.”

They were crying again. Perhaps she wept as well. Flame dripped from her face and spattered in the road.

The children spoke to her with their hands and she nodded and replied in kind, but Harper turned away from them and did not see the end of their conversation. What they said to each other was for them alone.

Harper came unsteadily to her feet and looked around. Jakob’s charred and withered corpse poured filthy black smoke. Harper walked to the rear of the wreck and dug through dirty coils of hose. She excavated a fire blanket and flapped it over Jakob’s head and shoulder, then backed away, waving the smoke from her face. It smelled like a trash fire.

She bumped into someone standing behind her. Renée put a steadying hand on her shoulder. Renée had made her way down the embankment to join them at last.

“Have you seen the cat?” Renée asked, her voice strained and stunned.

“He—he didn’t make it, Renée,” Harper said. “He was—thrown clear in the accident. I’m sorry.”

“Oh,” Renée said and blinked. “What about—”

“John. Is alive. But hurt. I need help to get him out of the truck.”

“Yes. Of course.” Renée looked back at Allie and Nick and the burning woman. “That—what is that?”

“She came with John,” Harper explained.

“She’s—” Renée began, then swallowed, licked her lips, tried again. “She’s—” Her voice caught in her throat again.

“An old flame,” Harper said.