Child of Fire (7 page)

I watched the ambulance drive away. “Where are they taking him?”

The cop eyeballed me, as if trying to decide whether answering my question would undermine his authority.

“County hospital,” he said. “You planning to visit?”

“Yep. I’m a Good Samaritan.”

“Fine. That’s fine.” A brown, rusted Dodge Dart parked at the intersection, a little too close to the police car already there. A fourth cop, this one tall and slender, moved out of the shadows to intercept the driver. As he stepped into the light, I saw bright red hair on the top of his head.

“That’s our local paperboy,” the cop said. “You better go now if you don’t want to be here all night answering his questions. But stay in Hammer Bay for a couple days, understand?”

“I intend to.”

Annalise stood on the sidewalk a few yards away, the broken windows of the diner behind her. Her eyes were hooded and her face expressionless.

As I approached her, the cook stepped up to me. “You cost me a door,” he said. “Harlan busted my glass door
because you wanted to be a hero. What if one of my customers had been shot, huh? What then?”

“Don’t you pay any attention to him,” the waitress said. “Anytime you want, you come back and have another burger. On me.”

The cook turned on her. “What about my window?”

She told him that’s what insurance was for, and the cook grumbled that all the different kinds of insurance in this town were going to put him in the gutter.

I edged away from them and stepped up to Annalise. I could feel the ghost knife on her somewhere. Good. I didn’t want it to fall into just anyone’s hands, and I didn’t want to stick around here any longer.

She held out her hand. “Keys,” she said. “You’re not driving my van until you wash your hands.”

I hesitated, hoping she would offer me the ghost knife. She didn’t. I could feel that it was nearby, probably right in her pocket. I wondered how long she was going to keep it, because I sure couldn’t take it from her. I dug the keys from my pocket and gave them to her.

There was a change in the noise behind me. I turned back toward the crime scene.

New people had arrived, and Emmett Dubois was speaking with them. They were four men: one was very tall, very lean, and somewhere in his late fifties; beside him was a younger man, also tall, also lean, with a thick head of dark hair. Another was a short man with a shaved head, and the last was a fat man with long, graying hair. Dubois’s body language had altered. He didn’t look imposing. I only caught a glimpse of them before they moved out of view behind a parked van.

Then I felt a twinge under my right collarbone. There was no wave of force this time, but I knew what that twinge meant. Another kid had caught fire somewhere.

One of the men talking to Emmett Dubois fell to the
ground and flailed around. My view was partly blocked by the wheels and fender of the van, but I could see he was having a seizure. It was the tall young one with the dark hair.

Dubois bent down to him. “Medic!” he shouted, his voice worried.

“Let’s go,” Annalise said.

“Look,” I told her. “At the same time that I felt the—”

“I know. Let’s move.”

She dragged me toward the van and drove away from the scene. I glanced back and saw the little reporter trying to climb back into the Dart. The officer was blocking his way.

“Well?” Annalise said as we pulled into the street. There was very little traffic. Men walked down the street, guns in their hands. They didn’t look like citizens protecting their own. They swaggered and looked bored.

I told Annalise what I’d learned from Harlan. I mentioned that he had a black mark on the floor of his home, too. Annalise asked a lot of questions I couldn’t answer, like where he lived and how old his kids had been. She didn’t like that I hadn’t gotten those answers, and his punctured lung wasn’t a good enough excuse.

I knew she was just riding me, so I let it pass. I was too tired to be angry anyway.

I said: “Sorry I didn’t get killed.”

“There’s always next time,” she said.

Annalise drove around until we found a motel. She had to circle the block twice before she turned down the right street, but we got there eventually.

It was a small place, one story, just a parking lot ringed by rooms, all their doors facing inward.

My shirt was speckled with blood and my jacket had greasy black smears down the back. Annalise made me wait in the van while she rented our rooms. While I sat, I saw that one of the rooms had a black streak on the front walk. It came from under the door, turned forty-five degrees to cross the pavement, and disappeared at the muddy lot.

That was interesting. Going that direction, the worms had to travel farther before they could tunnel into the earth than if they’d gone straight—at least ten feet farther. Were they being drawn toward something in the west? Maybe it was the Pacific.

Annalise emerged with the room keys. Thankfully, I didn’t have the room with the black streak. “Clean up,” she said. “We’re getting an early start tomorrow.”

She went into her room and I went into mine next door. I stripped off my clothes in the bathroom and examined them in the bright lights by the sink. My jacket, shirt, and pants were nasty. I needed a laundromat and some industrial detergent. I wasn’t going to get them. I took the clothes into the shower, washed off the waterless cleaner and blood, then scrubbed at every spot of
blood on my clothes I could find. The blood was still wet, and the clothes came clean fairly well. I tried not to think about what sort of diseases Harlan might have had. I just wanted to be clean.

Eventually, I ran out of steam. I hung the clothes on chairs by the heater and turned it on low. Then I fell onto the polyester bedcovers and disappeared into dreamless slumber.

It seemed like an instant later that Annalise thumped on my door, hitting it hard enough to rattle it in the jamb. I climbed out of bed, wrapped a blanket around me, and opened the door.

She had changed her clothes, switching her fireman’s jacket for simple brown leather. Her pants were black and her shirt a white button-down that looked a size too big for her. Her boots had been exchanged for simple black leather walking shoes.

She barely glanced at me. “Get dressed. We have a lot to do today.” She tossed the keys to me.

My clothes were still wet, but they were all I had. There were traces of Harlan’s blood that I had missed the night before. Damn. I put the nasty clothes on my clean body and went out to the van. I left the jacket in the garbage.

It was just after 7
A.M.
The sky was gray, and there was a steady drizzle. I was hungry but I couldn’t picture myself sitting at a restaurant with wet, bloody clothes. I just drove, hoping to find a drive-through somewhere.

Instead, Annalise had me turn into a side street beside an outdoorsman’s store. Aside from the diner, which had cardboard taped over the broken windows, it was the only place open at this hour.

Annalise led me inside and bought me new clothes. They weren’t fancy—four pairs of jeans, four black long-sleeved pullover shirts, four pairs of white socks, one pair of black hiking boots, one windbreaker with a zip-out lining.

The clerk held open a trash bag and I threw in all my old things, including my sneakers, which were rimmed with Harlan’s blood. I hadn’t even noticed. He threw all that old stuff away, and I walked out in new clean clothes.

It felt good. I wondered if the four pairs of clothes meant she expected me to live another four days.

Next, we stopped off for breakfast. We chose a different diner this time. Annalise ordered very rare steak with eggs and a side of ham. The waitress looked dubious, but Annalise packed all of it away.

Her tattoos were visible above the open collar of her shirt and at the edges of her sleeves. They looked like mine, which meant they were made with a paintbrush and a spell, not a needle and ink. They were just as permanent, though.

I didn’t know who had given them to Annalise, but I wondered if she’d been conscious for it. I’d been awake for part of my own tattooing, and the pain had been worse than anything I’d ever experienced in my life, with the exception of casting my ghost knife spell.

I absentmindedly touched the spot below my right collarbone where I’d been feeling twinges for the last few hours. My fingertips registered the touch of normal flesh, but my chest registered nothing at all. The parts of my body marked with spells couldn’t feel a thing.

And those spells had come from Annalise. I wondered if she could sense them—and me—the way I could sense the ghost knife. I also wondered if my tattoos had been as painful for her to cast as my ghost knife had been for me. When I’d created the ghost knife, channeling all the energy needed to power it had been like dousing myself with gasoline and setting myself on fire.

It was possible that I’d cast the spell incorrectly, but what if I hadn’t? Annalise might have had to go through that same pain when she’d put these marks on me, and
when she created each of the ribbons she carried. I didn’t want to think about that.

Her abilities went beyond the marks though. Her strength was incredible, and she could heal herself by eating meat, the more raw the better. She also wore that vest full of spells, which was probably back in her room with the fireman’s jacket.

I wondered what effect all those spells had on her. Was she still human? Would she still be human even if her body changed into something monstrous, as long as she thought like a human? I wondered how much her quest to hunt down and destroy dangerous magic had changed her. I wondered how it would change me, before she put an end to me.

Of course, the only reason my mind was wandering this way was because I had no one to talk to. Annalise sawed at her food and shoveled it into her mouth, one bite after the other.

The silence became annoying. I asked Annalise why Harlan was the only one who remembered his kids. She didn’t answer. She didn’t even look up from her plate. I asked her if she thought we’d find someone else like Harlan in town. No answer. I asked her where she grew up.

She stopped eating and looked up at me. It was not a friendly look. Fine. I dropped the subject. I got a Seattle newspaper off the rack and began to read it.

Hammer Bay was too far away from the city for Harlan’s shooting to make the paper, but surprise surprise, I found a small mention of me in the local news section.

It was strange to read about myself in the newspaper. It was like being in a crowded room where everyone else suddenly sat down but I didn’t have a chair. I felt exposed. Maybe that was absurd, but that’s how it felt.

The article was on the fourth page, and it was barely one and a half column inches. It said, simply and quickly, that Raymond Lilly, convicted felon, had been released
from police custody in the matter of the several slayings, followed by a list of the dead. It was quite a laundry list of names. The official reason given for my release was insufficient evidence to charge me with murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, drug trafficking, assault and battery, and breaking and entering. They left out grand theft auto and discharging a weapon within city limits. Maybe they’d been short on space.

What the article didn’t mention was that certain prominent local citizens claimed that I had saved their lives while those crimes were being committed. It also glossed over the forensics reports that stated the people I had supposedly killed seemed to have been dead for days or weeks before they met me.

I looked over the list of names again. Some were strangers to me, but there were several I had known all too well. It still made me heartsick to think about them, even after all these months.

Irena’s name wasn’t on the list. I wondered if her body had been tidied away by the society, and I wondered if they would do that for me when my time came. Would people think I’d left the country or changed my identity? I didn’t have much in the way of family or friends anymore, but I had an aunt who’d opened her home to me when no one else would. I’d hate for her to think I wasn’t grateful or wanted nothing to do with her.

Annalise finished her meal. I showed her the article, but she didn’t care. I finished my breakfast while she paid the bill. I didn’t feel like eating anymore, but I’d need the fuel later.

We got back into the van, and Annalise handed me a slip of paper with an address on it. I consulted the ridiculous tourist map and saw that it was near the toy factory.

We drove there through the mist and drizzle, and I realized that it
was
the toy factory.

The factory was actually two buildings. The first was
a glass office building, four stories high, with curves instead of corners. If it had been in a corporate campus or an urban downtown, and if it had been ten stories taller, it might have seemed sleek and prosperous. Here it looked rinky-dink.

The second building was an old warehouse. It stretched from the edge of the office building toward a thick stand of pines and a steep slope that could have been the outer reaches of the Olympic Mountains. The warehouse was three stories tall, although I doubted there were actually floors inside. It was ringed with cars, mostly new, inexpensive models—Kias, Hyundais, that sort of thing.

There was no guard at the entrance to the campus. I pulled in and found a space at the west end of the lot.

I climbed out. The ocean lay before me, just within the limits of visibility in the misty weather. It had been a while. To the south I saw the shape of the light house marked on the tourist map. It was also obscured by fog, so I couldn’t see much detail, but it was certainly picturesque.

Annalise and I walked to the front of the office building. The two spaces closest to the building were reserved. There was a Prius parked in Charles Hammer’s parking spot. He was a man who drove with a conscience. A black S-class Mercedes was parked beside it.

I opened the door and held it for her. She carried a worn leather satchel like she knew what we were doing; I followed along.

The lobby was simple and elegant, if a little low-budget. Annalise stalked up to the receptionist, told the woman her name, and said she had a meeting with Charles Hammer.