Fire (7 page)

Adriana pulls out and the car accelerates away. Minoo watches it go. And feels that she can see her principal adjust the rear mirror, as if to look back at Minoo.

A rat-ta-tat of Kevin Månsson’s moped is closing in and Minoo has to jump clear when he almost drives it alongside her. He laughs out loud.

Nope, he still hasn’t grown up, Minoo thinks.

She joins the stream of pupils flowing towards the dull brick building that houses the Engelsfors senior school. The
filled-in crack in the tarmac runs across the school yard like a dark scar. The dead trees look somehow even more dead, as if utterly desiccated by the merciless sun.

Walking towards the main entrance, she feels the hot surface burning under the soles of her sandals. Here and there she registers new faces or, rather, new-old ones. Out of sight for just one year when Minoo had started senior school and they stayed behind in the last class of junior school. Now they’re back together again.

How young they look, Minoo thinks.

It feels like ages ago that she started here, but of course it’s only one year. Back then, she felt she was so mature, so grown-up and ready for a new life. Full of hope and expectation, too. The future would surely bring something huge. If only she had known how her wishes were to be met she would definitely have taken it all back.

Minoo pushes her way into the dense crowd in the entrance lobby. She catches sight of one of the boys in the final year who is pinning up a large poster on the noticeboard.

He turns, spots her and smiles radiantly. He has dark hair, wears steel-rimmed glasses. Minoo searches her memory feverishly for his name. Rickard, maybe. One of the football guys in EFC.

‘You don’t want to miss this!’ he says.

This is the first thing he has ever said to her. He doesn’t wait for a reply, just disappears into the crowd. Minoo looks at the poster. Under the large, red letters forming the word ‘COMMUNITY’, a group of young people are lined up in a summer meadow. Their arms are around each other’s shoulders and they are all laughing, bursting with self-assurance in their out-of-date clothes and fluffy hairdos. Mouths full of gleaming white teeth. Cutely wrinkled noses. Some of them even do thumbs-up.

‘BECOME PART OF POSITIVE ENGELSFORS!’ the caption under the jaunty team shouts in block capitals.

Whatever, Minoo is definitely giving this lot a miss.

There is a small photo at the bottom of the poster showing a smiling, middle-aged woman with curly, carrot-coloured hair.

It takes a second before Minoo makes the connection. The woman is Helena Malmgren. Elias’s mother.

Elias.

She feels herself breaking out in a cold sweat, despite the heat. Memories of what happened in this school last year rush back at her.

The blood on the floor of the toilet. Elias, his dead eyes staring at the ceiling.

His soul when she freed him from Max.

Already, it is too much for her. But then, Max’s memories begin to infiltrate hers until she can hardly keep anything apart. She’ll never be able to rid herself of what she has seen in Max’s consciousness.

Minoo forces herself back to the present.

She follows the corridor leading to the caretaker’s office and knocks on the door. It takes a little while and then Nicolaus cautiously opens the door and puts his head round it. He is wearing a mustard-yellow shirt and brown corduroy trousers. Minoo has a vivid idea of what Ida would say about his outfit.

‘Come in,’ he says.

She follows him into his small office and closes the door behind her. The stale air smells of dust. The
Book of Patterns
is open on the desk and the silvery Pattern Finder is placed neatly next to it.

‘I very much regret my behaviour last night,’ Nicolaus says. ‘I was excessively brusque. Still, I stand by my view. You must not dig up that grave, under any circumstances.’

There are dark rings under his eyes, but his gaze is steady as he looks at Minoo. As if he already knew that the others have sent her on a mission to persuade him to agree to Project Grave Opening. She grasps at once that it is pointless to try.

‘Did you find anything?’ she asks instead and nods towards the
Book of Patterns
.

Nicolaus shakes his head.

‘It remains silent.’

‘Do you think the book might be damaged in some way?’ Minoo asks. ‘What I mean is, Linnéa and Ida haven’t seen anything new since the winter. And it wasn’t as if it worked all that well before then.’

‘I don’t know whether it is the book that is flawed or our capacity for interpreting its messages,’ Nicolaus says, twirling the Pattern Finder. ‘Sometimes, I feel that it is trying to reach me. It could be that I was once able to read it, but if so, I have lost that skill now.’

He looks up.

‘Which reminds me … have you arrived at any new insights into your own gifts?’

We belong together.

‘No. But I dreamed about Max again,’ Minoo says.

‘What happened in your dream?’

Minoo thinks about the vision of her mum and dad in bed. It had seemed so real. She does not want to talk about it.

‘Just the usual. I lost the fight. He said that we belonged together and that my powers are not for good.’

‘Your powers are not
good
,’ Nicolaus explains patiently. ‘Nor are Anna-Karin’s. Nor Linnéa’s. Nor are Vanessa’s and Ida’s. What matters is how you use them.’

‘But my powers are not like any of theirs. I have no element. My magic takes the shape of black smoke, just like
Max’s demonic magic. It seems I am the only one who can see it. Besides, I can’t understand how the power to suck the souls from people’s bodies and root around in their memories can
ever
be good. Especially since Max said the demons had a plan for me.’

‘That’s what the demons told him, of course,’ Nicolaus says. ‘They may well be peddling untruths. They’re demons, after all. Did you see any details of this alleged plan when you had access to Max’s memories?’

‘No, but then, I didn’t see everything in his memory. Maybe, if I had been looking for …’

‘Exactly so!’ Nicolaus responds. ‘You must explore your powers so that you become able to use them constructively.’

‘No,’ Minoo says in a firm tone, because she knows already what Nicolaus is going to say next.

‘Minoo, you must,’ he pleads. ‘I know that my memories exist somewhere, but out of my reach. You could help me disperse the thick mists of forgetfulness.’

‘So you end up in a coma, too?’

‘You broke the demons’ blessing of Max and I believe this was the actual cause of—’

‘I will not experiment with your life,’ Minoo interrupts.

Nicolaus sighs deeply. This summer, they have been through this discussion several times and Minoo senses that they are both equally frustrated. She decides to change the subject.

‘There is one thing I’ve been wondering about. Why can’t Cat tell you why that grave is so important? It is your familiar after all. How can it know things about you that you don’t know yourself? I mean, first the bank deposit box and now this.’

‘I so wish I knew,’ Nicolaus says and pulls his fingers through his hair. ‘Don’t misunderstand me. I do believe that the gravestone is significant. Otherwise, Cat would not have
led the way for Linnéa Wallin. But, no, to start digging in consecrated ground …’

He stops and lowers his voice.

‘I don’t know what is concealed in that grave. But please promise me not to interfere with it.
Promise
.’

Minoo can’t make herself say the words needed for a lie. Instead, she nods quickly and leaves, hurrying back down the corridor.

When Minoo returns to the hall, she sees Linnéa, who stands in front of the noticeboard and examines the ‘COMMUNITY’ poster. She is wearing a black dress with puff sleeves and a long necklace that looks like barbed wire.

Minoo goes to look at the poster over Linnéa’s shoulder.

‘Have you heard anything about this?’ Minoo asks.

‘No. But “Positive Engelsfors” sounds so typically Helena,’ Linnéa says and points with a bright green nail at the picture of Elias’s mother. ‘That’s how she was going on all the time. Like, you know, “Pull yourself together” and “When a door closes a window opens”. Or “Look on the bright side of life”. People with real problems unnerved her completely.’

‘People like … Elias?’ Minoo suggests cautiously.

Linnéa nods.

‘People like Elias.’

‘Strange that she decided to become a minister.’

‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but most people are so fucking strange,’ Linnéa says.

Adriana Lopez is on her way down the stairs. She is moving quickly and passes them. She looks like her usual composed self as she hurries towards the assembly hall where she’ll soon be welcoming the new pupils to the senior school.

‘We’re to meet in the fairground this Saturday and start the lessons again,’ Minoo says.

Linnéa rolls her eyes skywards.

‘Oh, yeah. Great. We’ll be allowed to start on “defensive magic” at last.’

‘Not sure,’ Minoo says. ‘She seemed like she was up to something. Talked about how there would be changes.’

‘Whatever. The magic lessons could hardly get
more
pointless. Have you talked with Nicolaus, by the way?’

‘Yes, I have. He’ll never agree to do it.’

‘He’s scared. He doesn’t know what’s in the grave but he’s afraid of what we might find,’ Linnéa says and then adds quickly: ‘It isn’t as if I read his mind on purpose … but sometimes I’m not quite in control.’

Minoo looks into the other girl’s dark eyes. She feels ill at ease, as always when Linnéa’s capacity for mind-reading is mentioned. She can still recall painful moments when Linnéa must have known what Minoo thought.

‘But we have no choice,’ Linnéa continues. ‘We’ll have to do it without telling Nicolaus.’

As Vanessa steps inside the classroom, she looks around for Evelina and Michelle. They haven’t turned up yet. It makes her quite unreasonably irritated. After all, they don’t know that she’s just about to boil over and simply has to talk to them about what she saw last night.

When she left for school this morning, Nicke still hadn’t come home. Vanessa couldn’t bear meeting Mum’s eyes across the breakfast table. Part of her wanted to shout out what she had witnessed. This was her chance to get rid of him. At last. But there was another part of her, a side of herself she hardly recognised, which made Vanessa hold her tongue. That part of herself could not endure the thought of her mother’s grief.

Vanessa collapses on a seat at the very back. Just then,
Evelina and Michelle, clinging theatrically on to each other, make an entrance into the classroom.

They sit down on either side of Vanessa. Evelina draws a deep sigh.

‘Christ, I’m knackered. Didn’t sleep last night.’

‘Her parents have been on the phone again, talking to each other,’ Michelle explains.

‘I thought the whole point about divorce was that people didn’t have to fight each other all night long any more,’ Evelina says.

Evelina’s parents divorced several years ago. Since then, she has been living with her mum. Her dad is a long-distance trucker and hardly ever back in Engelsfors. Which doesn’t stop him phoning up from all over Europe to voice his opinions about how Evelina’s mum is bringing up his daughter.

‘Are you all right now?’ Vanessa asks.

Once more, Evelina sighs from the bottom of an abyss.

‘Must it take, like, a hundred years before we’re supposed to be proper adults?’

‘We should live together, the three of us,’ Michelle says. ‘As soon as we’re eighteen. Do you realise what a good time we’d have!’

‘You wouldn’t have to put up with Nicke,’ Evelina adds.

‘But I might get rid of him anyway,’ Vanessa replies.

‘What’s that?’ Michelle asks. ‘What do you mean?’

Vanessa observes the curiosity in her friends’ faces.

They will say that she must tell Mum. And even though they would realise that her mum would be very upset, they wouldn’t see any other problems with the tell-Mum scenario. Like the fact that Vanessa could be the messenger everyone wants to shoot. Besides, Mum mightn’t even believe her.

There is an alternative, Vanessa thinks. Tell Nicke instead. Force him to admit all of it to Mum.

That seems to her to be the best option. But she hasn’t slept all night and doesn’t trust her judgement in the slightest.

She looks at Michelle and Evelina. She loves them but can’t talk to them about this.

‘What’s it about?’ Michelle asks again and twists a dark wavy strand of hair between her fingers.

‘Nothing, really,’ Vanessa replies. ‘Just wishful thinking.’

Linnéa manages to slip inside the classroom just before Petter Backman comes plodding along and closes the door behind him. She can sense him ogling her from behind her back and wishes she could shake off his sleazy eyes.

As soon as she had received her power, the art lessons became almost more than she could stand. Backman has always had a reputation for putting his arm around female pupils, rubbing up against them in a creepy way, but Linnéa has never actually caught him at it. He’s presumably too smart. But when he’s sitting at the teacher’s desk or patrolling the art room, he allows his mind free rein instead, with very detailed fantasies.

Olivia is sitting at the back, doodling on her sketchpad. Linnéa goes over to sit next to her. Might as well get this out of the way.

‘Where the fuck were you yesterday?’ Olivia whispers. ‘Why didn’t you reply to my texts?’

Her blue hair looks like radioactive spun sugar. Her heavily made-up face is paler than ever. Sweat has formed tiny runnels in the powder.

‘I forgot,’ Linnéa says.

‘Not answering is so totally mean.’

‘But you’ve hardly been in touch all summer.’

‘So, can I help that my parents force me to stay in the
country the entire deadly holidays?’ Olivia looks hurt as she stares at Linnéa with big brown eyes which would look perfect in a Manga figure’s face. Linnéa can’t be bothered to say that she knows Olivia is lying. She has been spotted several times in the centre of town. Blue-haired girls aren’t that common in Engelsfors.