Pyromancist (5 page)

She got onto her knees and inched toward him.
“Josselin–”

“Go!” He looked back at her with harsh eyes.
“Go,” he whispered.

Clelia bit her lip. She couldn’t leave him in
the state he was in. She should stay with him, or take him home,
make sure he was all right. She was still contemplating her options
when he shifted, as fast as lighting, his hands pressing on her
shoulders, pushing her back against the rough surface of the
menhir, his lips going to her neck, sucking at her flesh before
trailing his tongue over her skin and sinking his teeth into the
tender muscle of her shoulder. Clelia cried out in ecstasy as much
as in shock.

“Go,” he said gruffly, pushing away from her
once more, “before the effect of the alcohol wears off.”

Clelia scurried away from him. His arms fell
loosely to his sides. He didn’t try to stop her when she got to her
feet. Instead, he lay back onto the soil and closed his eyes.
Clelia looked from him to the discarded gun. She picked it up,
opened the cylinder and dislodged the single bullet, silently
thanking Erwan for teaching her to handle his rifles and guns. She
dropped the bullet in her pocket and the gun in her backpack, just
in case he had more bullets on his person. Without looking back,
she ran to the gate, only faintly aware of the thorns and sharp
twigs digging into her toes and the sides of her feet. She ran all
the way to Carnac and caught the last bus to Larmor. When she
passed Josselin’s abandoned childhood house, she noticed a cleaning
service van from Vannes parked in front of it.

Chapter
Three

When Clelia got home, it was dark. Erwan sat
by the kitchen table smoking his pipe. This made her stop in her
tracks. Erwan never smoked in the house. The last time he smoked
between the four walls was when Tella, her grandmother, had passed
away.

“Erwan?” she said in an unsteady voice.

Tripod looked up from his cushion by the
stove and wagged his tail. From far away she heard Snow howl. A
distant part of her distressed brain registered that it was strange
that Snow wasn’t by the door to greet her.

Without looking at her, Erwan said, “We need
to talk.”

She came around the table with her heart
fluttering in her chest. “What’s going on?”

Erwan’s gaze moved to her knees. He lowered
his pipe slowly. “What happened, grandchild?”

“I tripped over a rock,” she said, brushing
his concern aside. “Erwan, what’s the matter?”

“Do you remember the story I told you about
your mother?”

Clelia sat down in the chair opposite Erwan.
She frowned. “Yes.”

There was only one story Erwan told about her
mother, and that was how a Japanese fishing boat had docked in the
harbor and left a little girl behind, the girl Erwan and Tella had
adopted and called Katik, her mother.

Erwan looked at his hands. “Well, I didn’t
tell you everything.”

Clelia closed her eyes briefly. Instinctively
she knew she didn’t want to hear what was coming, yet, a part of
her had always known there was something Erwan had kept from her
and that part longed for the truth.

“Thirty-seven years ago a Japanese trawler
docked in the Gulf. They were carrying a cargo of fish, and
something very unusual.”

Even if Clelia had heard this part of the
story many times before, she sat quietly, realizing that Erwan
needed this well-worn introduction to an old story so that he could
tell her the part he had omitted. For whatever sinister reasons he
had done that, it made her feel as if a thousand red fishing worms
were crawling over her scalp.

“The freight they carried and wished to
offload was a girl. She was six years old. No one knew her name.
She didn’t speak. They found her abandoned on a yacht in the middle
of the ocean and had to assume that her parents, and whoever else
she had been with, had drowned in some accident. There were signs
of a fire on board, and it was a wonder that she was still alive.
There was no clue as to her identity, no papers, no evidence of
another soul on that vessel. What happened was a mystery they never
solved. They took her aboard and sailed with her as far as
Brittany.”

He looked at the table and when he didn’t
speak for a while, Clelia said, “And you saw her at the harbor and
brought her home. You and Tella adopted her because you couldn’t
have children of your own.”

And we all didn’t live so happily ever after,
Clelia thought, but didn’t say. She never knew her mother who died
giving birth to her. She only suffered the insults about her
mother, the merciless teasing and the exclusion from the close-knit
community.

Erwan glanced at her, but lowered his gaze
again. “It didn’t exactly happen like that.”

Clelia grew cold. “How
did
it
happen?”

He cleared his throat. “The men wanted to get
rid of your mother because they said...” He paused. “They said she
had brought a curse onto the ship.”

“What curse?” Clelia’s mouth felt dry. She
desperately wanted a glass of water, but she was too wary to
interrupt Erwan’s story.

“They said that since they rescued her, they
didn’t catch one single fish. Overnight, their nets ran dry.”

“And they wanted to leave her behind for
that?”

“An empty net is a very powerful omen to a
fisherman, Clelia.”

It couldn’t have been only that. “But there
was something else, wasn’t there?”

He lifted his pipe and took a puff. “They
said they suddenly had a lot of inexplicable fires onboard, and
they believed her to be the devil’s child.”

Clelia gasped.

“Of course the mayor at the time didn’t want
to hear anything of a child being left behind with no passport and
identity. And folks didn’t like the fishermen’s tales, but by
sunrise, the boat was gone, and the girl was found in the harbor,
alone, standing on the jetty. I took pity on her and brought her
home, where Tella, who always loved children and could never have
any of her own, fretted over the scrawny scrap. She bathed her and
washed her hair, cooked a meal, fed her and bundled her into
bed.

“I immediately realized my mistake. By
bringing the child here, I had given Tella a taste of what she
wanted most but didn’t have, and I knew then that letting the child
go, even after just one evening she had spent here, would be the
death of Tella.”

He took a deep breath. “While the town
council was trying to sort out the legal and administrative red
tape of her fate, someone had to take care of her. Tella did it
gladly, seeing that all the other women were too superstitious, and
the only other appropriate candidate would have been the priest,
but he was almost seventy years old and living alone, barely able
to take care of himself.

“At first we thought she was deaf, or mute,
because she didn’t react to anything we said. Tella was a clever
woman, though,” he smiled, “and she persevered by talking to the
child and reading books to her in both French and Breton. It took
nine months, but one day she just opened her mouth and spoke a
whole phrase in perfect French. For nearly a year she had only
listened, observed, and when she finally spoke to us in our
language, she didn’t even have as much as an accent.

“By then she had gotten used to us and us to
her, and God knows how, but we managed to get the legal paperwork
done to adopt her. Tella’s family pulled some strings. Your
grandmother’s father was, at the time, still very influential in
government and business. Wasn’t easy, but we got it done. Tella was
beside herself with joy, calling your mother a gift from God.” He
kept quiet for a while.

Clelia tilted her head. “You say that as if
it weren’t the case.”

“Things happened when Katik was around.”

“Such as?” Clelia said softly when he fell
silent again.

“Accidents. Bad harvests. Dry fishing
seasons. Dead animals. Stillbirths with the sheep and the dogs and
the cows. The community wanted us to send her away, but Tella would
hear nothing of it.”

Clelia blinked back at her grandfather in
shock. “Surely you weren’t superstitious enough to blame these
things on a little girl?”

“We didn’t. Not at first.”

“What do you mean ‘not at first’?”

“There was something else.” He battled to
meet her eyes.

“Erwan, what was it?”

He looked up slowly. “There were fires.”

The air was knocked from her lungs. “The
stories the fishermen told were true? She could spontaneously start
fires?”

Even as Clelia said it and saw the pieces
coming together, she didn’t want to believe it. The fires Clelia
had started when she was a child made sense now.

“Things combusted around her when she was
angry or sad. Tella and I managed to keep it quiet, hide it from
the people, and Tella taught her how to control her emotions until
it stopped. It was never an easy road. The villagers don’t forget
easily, and they didn’t forget what the Japanese men had said.
Integrating her into the community was already tough. We didn’t
need everyone to learn that their worst fears were true.

“Besides, Katik didn’t do it maliciously. The
firestarting was an involuntary response triggered by a strong
emotional reaction. For four years, we practically lived in
isolation. Luckily, when she turned ten, the fires disappeared, and
we never spoke of it again. The bad omens ceased. Everything went
back to normal. We never told a soul.”

“Why? Why didn’t you try to find out what was
wrong with her? Why didn’t you try to get help?”

“We were ... Tella was worried that they’d
take Katik away from us. She loved her more than any biological
mother could ever love her daughter.”

Clelia covered her face with her hands. She
was an anomaly. For years, she had managed to ignore it, to hide
from it, even as people reminded her every time they called her
‘witch’, a title she had inherited from her mother, but she
couldn’t hide any longer. Only little more than an hour ago,
Josselin had asked her what she was. He didn’t phrase the question
to ask who she was. He had said,
‘What
are you’? Now she was
asking herself that very, same question.

She lifted her head and took a shaky breath.
“Why are you telling me this now, Erwan?”

“Because Josselin’s woman is going around the
village asking questions about your mother. I wanted to tell you
the truth before you hear it from someone else.”

Clelia frowned. “Why would she want to know
about my mother?” Suddenly, it became clear. “She thinks there is a
connection between me and the fires.”

She stopped breathing. The dream, Josselin’s
return, the fires, and now Josselin’s woman asking about her
mother...

“What does Josselin’s girlfriend have to do
with it?” she asked.

“I don’t know, but if we stay here, we’ll
soon find out. She came to the house tonight.”

Her heart jolted. “She spoke to you?”

He shook his head. “I was on the water. I saw
her from the boat coming in and anchored in the cove, behind the
trees.”

“Did she see you?”

“Nay. The dogs made quite a show of
protecting the property. She was preoccupied with not getting her
throat ripped out.”

Clelia looked around. “Where’s Snow? She
didn’t hurt them, did she?”

“Nay.”

“Why did she come?”

“I don’t know, child. Maybe to ask more
questions.”

“You think she’ll come back?”

“I know she will. She left a message on the
phone, saying she’ll be back in the morning. And from the look of
her I can tell you she’s not someone who’s going to give up
easily.”

Clelia didn’t particularly feel like facing
Josselin’s girlfriend, or talking about her mother. Neither did she
want to go to the police, but there was no other way.

“Erwan, I have to turn myself in. It’s the
only way to get to the bottom of this. They can do tests or
something, monitor my brain or whatever it is they do to determine
if I did it, if I’m capable of doing it.”

“Nay!” He got to his feet so fast that his
chair tipped back and hit the floor with a bang. “If you say
anything about what I told you about your mother or about what
happened only twice when you were just a toddler, you’re signing
your own death warrant. You didn’t start these fires. Turning
yourself in is not going to help anything. People fear what they
don’t understand. The police don’t know you. They don’t know you’re
incapable of hurting a fly. You’ll be blamed, no matter how
innocent you are. Don’t you see what’ll happen? They’ll take you
away from me. You’ll spend your life in jail or worse, an asylum.
They’ll probe your brain and study you like a lab rat. And you
don’t deserve that.”

“How can you even say that? My mother did it.
She started fires. I got it from her. Erwan, it could have been me.
Without even knowing, I could have done it in my sleep. All of
those fires were started at night, and we both know we cannot
account for me having been in my bed, because I woke up all over
the island.”

“I want you to go to Larmor-Baden tomorrow
first thing. Take my boat and go to Île aux Moines. Under the big
tree by the ruins, there’s a box for you. I buried it by the
protruding roots. There are money and things you’ll need inside.
You have to disappear for a while. You’ll know what to do when you
get the box. You can’t speak to anyone about this. Don’t pack.
Don’t take a suitcase that will attract attention and look
suspicious. If someone sees you take the boat and asks where you’re
going, say I’ve sent you to Port-Blanc for oysters.”

“You’re scaring me.” She jumped up and
started pacing the room. “If I go, you go too. I won’t leave
without you.”

“I can’t go with you. No matter what happens
to me, I want you to get to that island.”

“Erwan,” she exclaimed softly, “what will
happen to you? What are you not telling me?”