Firebug (13 page)

 

 

THERE
are lots of reasons why I don't drink. Heavily, I mean. Cade lets me have the occasional glass of wine with him at dinner on special occasions, but nothing much beyond that. Besides the obvious fire-related control reasons I had to deal with, when you drink a lot, things tend to come out. I've seen drunk girls throw themselves at guys they would never give the time of day to, cry over ancient troubles, and generally place themselves in dangerous situations with questionable people. I've seen drunk guys act just as bad. This is not to say every drunk person I've ever seen is a train wreck, but when you mix a depressant with hormone-crazed kids who are already depressed most of the time, the mess gets worse.

I've spent my whole life watching parties from the outside. Until my mom died, I never stayed anywhere long enough to make friends. When we were on the run, I had to watch people to survive. To blend in. To act normal. You know what I learned? Human nature sucks. And drunken human nature sucks more.

Needless to say, for various and fairly obvious reasons, it's a really bad idea for me to go out and get blitzed. I tried it. Once. The result was a melted kiddie pool, some kids who needed therapy after a night of what they thought was some really bad acid, and a rather hasty exit out of Lickskillet, Ohio, for yours truly.

Not to downplay the life struggles of my peers, but I don't have skeletons in my closet so much as a whole underground cavern of terra-cotta warriors like the ones that were found in China. They are ready to come to life and start some shit, given the slightest provocation.

And I have enough problems, thank you
very
much.

 

 

I DIDN'T
sleep well after my visit to Heaven. It wasn't the deep and blessed sleep I needed, but restless and even more nightmare filled than normal. And I have plenty of memories to create nightmares from. No embellishment necessary. Unfortunately my brain picked the worst one.

I'm twelve, or almost twelve, and I'm eating dinner. We're in Florida, at a safe house that Mom's friend Benny had found for us, and the air is thick and hot, even though it's nighttime. The bugs are making a racket, and having just come from a desert climate, I'm not used to it yet. I'll acclimate quickly, though. We never stay anywhere longer than a few months. When you're hunted by the Coterie, you don't get the luxury of putting down roots. I'm used to it.

I'm eating dinner with Benny and my mom. Her dark brown hair is pinned up so a breeze can find her neck and I'm thinking that my mom, is the most beautiful woman in the world and wishing I looked more like her. Oh, I have some of her features and her hair, but I'm stockier and not as graceful. I assume these other traits come from my father, and if I'd ever gotten to meet him, I'd know. He didn't leave us—we left him, or so my mom tells me. For his safety.

I'd had this explained to me at a very young age. I needed to know, my mom had said. My dad would have loved me, given the chance. But he wasn't given the chance, and I was in Florida with loud insects, eating dinner with my beautiful mother and Benny.

Benny was nice enough, but more important, Benny was like us—a firebug. He had gone underground after some friction with an organization out in Texas. Benny was hazy on the details, and since we were often around other people in hiding, I'd learned not to ask. We were in Florida with him for now, but that was temporary. Benny was part of a network that moved creatures like us away from groups like the Coterie. He had scars down his back and a slight limp because of this, though he wouldn't tell me exactly where he'd gotten them. He only showed me these things to firmly underline that what he did was very dangerous work. Like he needed to underline it. As if I didn't live it every damn day. I had to bite my tongue to stop myself from telling him that being a kid doesn't mean you're a moron.

My mom met up with Benny every so often to hear news and find out what was going on with the Coterie. We'd split up in a few days, but for now I had someone else to learn from and to play cards with.

I hadn't come into my own yet. As my mom told me, I was just beginning to spark. The ability doesn't fully manifest until puberty. Until then, I was like a box of wet matches. The potential was there, but I needed more time for it to be useful. So I was sputtering along and Benny was helping out. We'd spent the morning reviewing distance, his weathered hand using a charred stick to draw lines in the sand, each scratch marking off ten feet from a burnt-out tree trunk. I can still hear his patient explanations about our limitations—we can only be so far from our targets or the fire goes out. Or worse, we lose control of it. Benny had great control and excellent distance. He could almost give my mom a run for her money. Almost. I'd had a few lessons with my mom, and she outstripped Benny, but we didn't tell him that.

I didn't always like the appraising looks he gave my mother, but Benny was a nice-enough guy. Too nice to get the end he got.

We'd set our empty plates in the sink after dinner so we could play hearts. I was always attempting to shoot the moon, though I lacked the skill to pull it off.

“You need to play a more conservative game, hoss,” Benny said, the words stretched out by his slight drawl.

“What's a hoss?”

“You're a hoss. Now stop being flashy or you're going to lose again.”

“I can't,” I said, shifting my cards. “I want the glory of the slaughter.”

My mom laughed and shook her head, and Benny couldn't help joining in.

Benny had just started to go over his strategy again when there was a knock at the door—
thunk, thunk, thunk
—and we all went silent. It was too late for a casual caller; the neighbors weren't very close by and kept to themselves.

The snap of a twig by the back door—where we'd piled them for this exact reason, so we'd have some warning—told us that there would be no sneaking out that way either. And the only windows that opened were in the back bedrooms, which would put us out by the back door. The side windows were nailed shut, and breaking one would loudly declare what we were up to. There was nothing to do but open the front door and see who'd come a-callin'.

My mom gestured for me to hide, but I was used to this game, and I was already halfway into the broom closet, my cards held loosely in my fist. If I'd left out my hand, it would have been too easy for someone to spot that a third person had been at the table. I thought absently as I left the door open a sliver that I was getting too big to hide, and that pretty soon I wouldn't fit easily into closets like this anymore.

There were three of them at the front door. Two guys and a girl. I can't remember exactly what was said or what they looked like. All I heard was the blood pumping in my ears. But I could tell the conversation wasn't going well. Soon Benny was tossed into a wall like a crash-test dummy. He lay still. I watched for the rise and fall of his back, something to show he was alive. Nothing. Whoever had sent these goons would be pissed. You don't damage valuable assets. I'd already begun to see us that way. As merchandise. Which meant either this group was stupid or they hadn't known that Benny was a firebug.

The girl had my mom up by her throat now, and she was squeezing. Not too hard, but hard enough. I shook in my closet, wanting to help but knowing my mom wanted me to stay hidden.

One of the guys broke my mom's fingers. I heard each bone crack, but she wasn't giving them whatever they wanted. I closed my eyes for a second, trying to wish the situation away. My eyes opened just as the girl smacked my mom into the wall.

My mom had told me all about recovery teams. They were my childhood bogeymen, the long arm of the Coterie. I knew that when the Coterie sends a recovery team out, the leaders are vamps chosen by Venus and two strong backups—my guess was some kind of were-creature. Whatever these thugs were, the blood was distracting them and they weren't handling the situation well.

The female vampire hadn't fed—that much was obvious—and the smell was going to make her frenzy, like I'd seen happen with sharks on TV. If that happened, I doubted her helpers would stay out of it. A blood frenzy was dangerous, but it was also helpful. It meant that they weren't paying attention to me as I slipped out of the closet and clobbered one guy with a chair. While they were focused on him, I grabbed the necklace off the other man, praying that his ward was attached to it. It was.

Baby firebugs are kind of like baby snakes. When a juvenile snake bites you, the bite isn't as bad and they have less venom, but nature makes up for that by concentrating what they've got for emergency situations. I'd rather be bitten by a full-grown viper than by a baby. It's hard to fight survival instinct. Since I hadn't grown fully into my power yet, my spark didn't always listen and my control was incredibly shaky, but the adrenaline built into the fight-or-flight response overrides everything else. So while I wasn't trained and had limited control, in times of extreme stress my ability worked just fine. In fact, it worked better than fine. And I was in a situation of extreme stress.

I flicked my hands out, and the were I'd stolen the ward from burst into flame. No slow burn, no trickle of smoke, nothing but quick combustion. He screamed and tried to roll, but that doesn't work when I'm around. Every flame he beat down, I encouraged.

The guy I'd hit with the chair was down, and I could see his ward plainly pinned to his jacket, which really only protects the jacket. Moron. So I set his pants on fire. Either someone had told him that wearing it on his jacket would be just as good and he'd been duped like the meat that he was, or he hadn't really believed we were a threat. Weres get so used to being stronger and faster than everyone else that they start to think they're invincible. Skin contact was ideal when it came to wards, but the one on the pin had probably been cheaper. It was my experience that you shouldn't skimp on something that kept you alive. It didn't really matter, though, why he wasn't well protected—whether it was ignorance, stupidity, or thriftiness. All were fatal flaws for members of a recovery team, especially when they were hunting firebugs.

Fire-pants, clearly mad about the chair and his trousers, threw me back. I bounced off a cabinet and slid down, but it was too late, and he burned as quickly as his friend.

The girl still held my mother pinned to the wall. The chipped white paint that Mom's head rested on was smeared with her blood, and it looked like a lot. Head wounds can do that, bleed so much that you think it's worse than it is, but from the panicky flutter in my gut, I had a feeling that it was just as bad as it looked. Her eyes flickered, and I was pretty sure she'd lost consciousness.

The female vamp and I stood locked in a stare. She was stuck and she knew it—she couldn't let go of my mom, and she couldn't come after me without letting go. Her companions couldn't help her anymore. She was a lower-ranking minion, I was positive. She'd been sent to do a job, and she'd totally botched it.

In fact, I couldn't think of any way she could have screwed this job up more than she had. I was out of control, and her compatriots were dead. If she got out alive and made it back to the Coterie, she would be punished, probably fatally so. If she stayed and tried to handle us, she was just as dead. Stuck in every way. It was almost enough to make me pity her, except she was trying to either kill us or capture us, which kind of obliterated any sympathy.

“Walk away,” I told her. “Go back to your master and tell her to leave us alone. That's all we want.”

She sneered at me. “You know I can't do that.”

I shrugged and the movement hurt. I'd whacked my head pretty good against that cabinet. “Then stay and burn.” I said it like it didn't matter to me what she decided, and it didn't. I knew she was already a walking, talking corpse. She just hadn't gotten the memo yet.

The sneer turned into a grin. “Big words, little bug. We both know I'm warded.”

I cocked my head then, just a slight nonchalant tilt to the side. “Are you sure? I mean, your buddies thought they were safe too.”

Her eyes strayed to her friends, who were now turning into charcoal briquettes on the cabin floor. They'd stopped moving except for the crackle of the flame, and the smell was turning my stomach. Burning flesh and hair weren't among my top-ten favorite smells, and I doubted she was enjoying them either. I could see the doubt as it passed over her pinched features. I did my best to look calm, to continue to chip away at her confidence, but it was hard. I was scared, and I was worried, and my body wanted to respond. It wanted to burn, and it was all I could do to keep it in check.

The vampire kept one arm crushing my mother's windpipe while the other dipped into the neckline of her shirt and pulled out a long silvery chain. She waved it in front of me, and sure enough a delicate silver ward hung at the end of the chain. Her face was triumphant as she turned away, deciding I was no longer a threat.

Poor decision, that.

As she went back to snarling at my mother, I slid over to the cabinets. The fire was starting to spread to the cabin now, and I let it, encouraged it, using the crackle and snap of the flames to cover the sounds I made as I reached for the hatchet we'd hidden in the thin space between the pantry and the cupboards. It was rusty and dull, but that didn't matter. I just had to use a little more force when I slammed the blade into the back of the vampire's neck.

She turned on me, the blade still stuck into her spine like the fin of the shark she'd reminded me of earlier. One hand continued to hold my mom against the wall while her other hand whipped out and grabbed the front of my shirt, pulling me close to her. The sneer was back as my face came within kissing distance.

“Aw, the little baby has some claws.” Her pupils dilated as she caught my scent. “I bet you'll be a tasty little thing. Maybe I'll tell the master you didn't make it out of the fire? Too bad, so sad, boo hoo.” She grinned, and I could see her fangs, sharp and extended. She breathed me in, bloodlust clouding her eyes. “Did you really think the ax was going to kill me, little bug?” Her words were a soft exhalation against my cheek.