Embers, page 23
She swallowed. The painting was unmistakably of her, but to mention it seemed invasive. “What did you use here?”
He answered her without turning around, focused on his current work. “That’s mica applied to the black paint. The white paint has a sheen of quartz in it. And parts were smoked with a candle.”
“It’s a beautiful effect,” she said.
“I had an inspiring subject. It’s called Ishtar.”
She blushed, looking down and away. The dogs were busy showing Sparky the collection of tennis balls they’d squirreled away in a corner. He seemed distracted for the moment.
“What are you calling the painting you’re working on now?” she asked.
Drake stood back from the orange and charcoal, taking its measure. “You won’t like it.”
“I think I already do like it.”
“The working title is Sirrush.”
Strange how he could do that: how he could make her feel at ease and then turn that off with a single word or glance.
He turned to look at her, one corner of his mouth upturned. “I will refrain from telling you that I told you so.”
Questions rose in her throat, and she gave them voice, awkwardly: “If you summon Sirrush… what then? How could you convince a god to leave?” She couldn’t even get rid of a minor demon—how could a mere human like Ferrer hope to control the king of salamanders?
“These creatures have existed since the beginning of time, Anya. In ancient times, in the time of Bel’s temple, sacrifices were made to them. When well fed, Sirrush can be a benevolent god.”
“What sacrifices?” she asked.
“Sacrifices of flesh and spirit.” He dipped his brush into the carbon and began to work it into a new section of paint.
It dawned upon her. “The people you’re killing in these fires… the fireman. The people in the apartment complex. You consider them to be sacrifices to Sirrush.”
“Flesh is a potent sacrifice. But there are less visible ones.”
“Virgil. The ghosts in the library.” Anya’s brow knitted. “You devoured them.”
Drake turned to face her. “You don’t wonder what happens to the ghosts you devour?”
She stared down at her hands. “I’ve never known.”
He balanced the paintbrush on the top of his cup. “A spirit that’s devoured by a Lantern, a human that’s killed in a fire… these are offerings to Sirrush, and those like him. They are, to put it bluntly, food. Honored food, but still food.”
She shook her head, refusing to believe, her hands balled into fists at her side. She refused to contemplate the idea that the ghosts she’d destroyed, that Neuman, that her mother… that all of them had gone to feed Sirrush. Sensing her distress, Sparky left his new dog pals and leaned against her side, casting a dirty look at Drake.
“That’s not true,” she said. “There’s no way you could know that.”
Drake’s good eye burned black and intense. “After I was nearly killed in that armpit of a city that you’re bent on protecting, I did some wandering. I didn’t spend all that time on the shores of a bucolic lake in Oakland County.
“I spent some time trying to make heads or tails of it all. Creation. Destruction. They seemed terribly out of balance and I wanted to learn why. I went to Egypt, to Iran, to Jordan. I met many magickal masters who taught me a great many things: how to manipulate fire, where Sirrush and his kind sleep. I learned how to make glass out of sand with just my hands and my breath.
“But the most valuable lesson I learned was from an old man in Petra. He made me realize that nothing is ever destroyed. Just because you swallow a ghost, doesn’t mean it stops existing. It has to go somewhere.”
“That doesn’t mean they go to feed Sirrush,” she argued. “There could be any number of afterlives—”
“Anya.” He set his cup down on the floor. “Everything must be fed, even things that sleep. In ancient Babylon, Lanterns like us were the priests and priestesses of Sirrush and his siblings. It was up to us to keep them warm, safe, and fed.” He gestured to the salamander winding around Anya’s knees. “Like you do with Sparky.”
“Sirrush isn’t a larger version of Sparky.”
“No, he’s not. But he’s been around since there was fire and he’s required food since then. Every time, since the beginning of time, that man has died in a brush fire, that man built a house or temple that burned… Sirrush and his kind have not allowed the sacrifice to go to waste. They’re part of the natural world, and there’s nothing evil about that cycle.”
Anya leaned against the table, her heart churning with the possibilities. She quailed away from them. “No. I choose not to participate in this… and I choose not to believe what you’re telling me.” She couldn’t imagine her mother in the belly of a dragon and she would not accept the explanation. She turned away, wrapping her hands around her elbows.
“If you didn’t believe that I know some bits of arcane lore that you don’t, why did you come?”
Her breath froze in her throat. “I came to talk to you.”
She heard his steps behind her. He put his hands on her shoulders, and Sparky growled below her. “You came because you want me to devour that demon that’s chewing a hole in your gut.”
She turned in his arms, startled. “How did you know?”
His mouth curved up, but the smile was rimmed with bitterness. “I can feel it in you. Here.” He touched the hollow of her throat. “And here.” His hand brushed below her sternum, lingered. Anya’s heart hammered and she was certain he could feel it. Under his touch, she could feel Mimi turn over and stretch. Acidity burned between her ribs, and she gasped.
“But I can’t take it from you. Not now.”
“Why not?” Her brows drew together.
His gaze on her was heavy. “I want to help you. I do. But that demon you’ve got inside you is older than most diamonds. I’ve got to conserve my power for Sirrush.”
Anya turned her face away, cheeks burning. She didn’t know why she’d come, why she thought he’d help her. He was a stranger, a liar, and a monster. What could he possibly do to help her? And why would he want to?
She jerked away from his grasp and started toward the door.
He reached out and caught her wrist. “Wait.”
She looked back at him, feeling Mimi surge like bile in her throat.
“I will take the demon from you, but after. After I’ve summoned Sirrush. Please understand that… no matter what I feel, that must come first.” The look on his face was resigned, lonely. She understood that look, that feeling of apartness.
And she was tired of it, tired of always being on the outside looking in. Tired of being different, tired of feeling used, tired of no one understanding what she felt or why she just couldn’t allow anyone to be close to her. She was tired of everything she cared for breaking, and having it be her fault.
Drake was the only unbreakable person she’d ever met, the only other Lantern. He didn’t want anything from her, but her. And she didn’t want to let go of him. She would hold fast to this one thing.
His fingers laced in hers, and she heard Mimi laughing in the back of her head.
She tipped her face up to his. His fingers wound in her hair as he kissed her, scalding her mouth with his. His fingers scraped up through her hair, sending a shiver from her scalp to the base of her spine. She splayed her fingers on his chest, feeling the heart that beat so quickly there, and the void beyond it. His lips slid from the corner of her mouth down to her neck, leaving a molten trail of heat from her jaw to her collar. She pressed her body to his, feeling the tense warmth beneath his clothes.
Anya felt Sparky tugging at her skirt, heard his warning growl. For an instant, her breath and her hands faltered. She felt Sparky pulling her in one direction, Mimi in the other. The demon roiled underneath her skin, eager to vicariously feel the pleasures of Drake’s touch.
Drake snatched her hands, stared at her full in the face. His expression was guarded. “Is this you or is this the demon? What do you want?”
“I…” She swallowed. She wanted him to fill this dark void in her chest, wanted to feel something other than this damnable standing at a distance from the world.
“I want you,” she answered. “Maybe not for the right reasons, but I do want you.”
The tension in his face fractured into a dark smile. He laid his fingers on her lips. “Stay right there.”
He backed two steps away from her, reached for a can of spray paint on the table, and shook it. He sprayed a circle on the floor, nine feet in diameter, surrounding her, Sparky, and the table. He left a three-foot break in the circle open beside Anya. He threw a handful of salt that scattered across the floor like insects.
Drake picked up one of the dogs’ tennis balls. “Sparky.” He bounced the ball through the circle and to the opposite side of the studio.
Instinct got the better of Sparky. He lunged through the break after the ball, with the two dogs. After he realized he couldn’t grasp it with his elemental jaws, he turned back to Anya and Drake—only to find that he couldn’t cross the circle Drake had finished painting on the floor. The salamander paced at the perimeter, whining.
Drake advanced on Anya, backed her into the edge of the table, and laced his fingers in hers. His thumbs rubbed circles against the backs of her hands. His paint-stained hands left smears of gold on her skin.
“How did you do that?” she breathed.
“It won’t hurt him. Just a plain old magic circle that will hold just about any magickal creature—symbol and intent.” He nibbled at her earlobe. “And very delicious intent, it is. Is that mint?”
“Mmm.” She felt the muscles of his chest moving and slid her fingers under the collar of his shirt. She reached up on her tiptoes to kiss the scar above his blind eye, the bridge of his nose. He sighed and grasped her tighter, circling her ribs with his hands.
She flinched. He softened his grip immediately.
She cast her eyes down, dropping her hands. “The demon, ah… left me with some grill marks.” She couldn’t imagine how his artist’s eye would be revulsed by seeing the ugly burn on her chest. The overhead light suddenly seemed very bright.
Drake unbuttoned his shirt. “I’ve got a few scars of my own.”
His chest was crisscrossed with a spiderweb of raised white scars running across his ribs and curling around his back. Anya tentatively brushed them with her fingers, how they bumped over his ribcage and crossed over his spine in jagged tracks. It reminded her of the frost patterns made by the salt on his watercolors, strangely beautiful in their asymmetry, speaking of untold reactions beneath the surface, beyond what the eye could see. Her hands slid up to the cauterized, angry burn on his shoulder, where she’d shot him.
She lowered her mouth to a scar scraping just below his nipple, heard the hiss of his indrawn breath.
He picked her up, setting her on the edge of the table. She wrapped her legs around his waist, feeling his tongue thrusting in her mouth and his desire pressing against her belly.
His hands moved up from her hips to her breasts, teasing her nipples through the fabric. Plucking open her buttons, he pushed the blouse from her shoulders and kissed the first Hebrew character in blue permanent marker he found there.
“Your exorcist can’t spell,” he murmured against her skin.
“I thought intention was all that counted.”
“Not always.” He peeled the shirt from her chest, to her waist, stroked the burn crossing her chest with the back of his hand. He leaned forward to whisper in her ear: “Now, that’s the effect I’ve been looking for with carbon in my painting.”
He smiled against her hair, kissed her from her jaw to the hip bone jutting out over the waist of her skirt. His hand slid up under her skirt, stroking the inside of her thigh before sliding between her legs. She moaned and arched her back, pressing her breasts against his bare chest. She reached for his belt buckle, drawing it out of the belt loops and casting it aside on the floor. When she reached for him, he moaned, thrusting against her hand.
Drake pushed her back on the table. Bottles of paint and ink rolled away, clattering on the floor. Something shattered, but Drake ignored it as he drew open the drawstring of her skirt and slid it over her hips. He shucked his jeans on the floor and climbed up on the table.
She ached for him, craved the sizzle of his hot skin on hers. Taking his weight on his elbows, he pressed his body to hers. She moaned as he thrust inside her, wrapped her legs around him as he drove them both to an oblivion that rattled the last of his drawing pencils to the floor.
Somewhere in that sweetness of not being alone, something in her broke. It wasn’t the demon. It was something deep within her heart, behind the black void of the Lantern. It cracked and welled up, leaking from the corner of her eye in the form of a tear that she brushed away before Drake noticed.
It was a crack in the façade of fear.
Afterward, she lay drowsing on the floor in the enemy’s arms, wrapped in a clean muslin drop cloth. She lay with her head on Drake’s chest, watching the sky lighten to the east. Sparky lay piled with the dogs in the corner, his head tightly tucked under his tail. After this, she figured that the tail-sucking would be the least of her worries.
She rose and dressed in the thin gray light of morning. As soon as she stepped out of the circle, Sparky attached himself to her knee. She turned back and looked at Drake, stretched in the makeshift circle on the floor and the glitter of salt.
“Stay,” he said.
“I can’t.”
“Why fight what you are?” There was no accusation or anger in his voice, only a genuine wanting to know.
“Because I am what I am.” She bent down to kiss the scar on his eyebrow. “And I am not what you are.”
“I think,” he said, smiling sadly, “that you are not quite certain of that yet. But you will be.”
She left the studio when pink dawn began to stain the sky, his words ringing in her ears.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“LOOK, I TOLD YOU I couldn’t sleep with Ciro snoring like a chainsaw, so I left.”
Anya gripped the steering wheel and stared at the road ahead, not meeting Katie’s eyes. She still felt the witch’s disapproval heavy upon her. Between them, Sparky lay on the bench seat of the Dart. He was making a show of ignoring Anya by sitting this close to her with his back turned, thumping his tail on the seat.
“Yeah, well, it’s where you were afterward that bothers me.” Katie frowned. “You smell like enough fire magick to cook a steak.”
Anya rolled her eyes. “You’re not my mom, Katie.”
“Actually, since we got those forms notarized this morning, I am your mom. If you become mentally incapacitated, I get to decide which nursing home to stick you in.” Katie crossed her arms.
“I am not mentally incapacitated. Not yet, anyway,” Anya grumbled. “Are you navigating, or are you here solely to bust my ass?”
Katie smoothed the map over her knees. “The next turn is just ahead. Left. And I will bust your ass whenever you’re deserving of it.”
Anya made a face and switched on the turn signal. She’d been stuck in the car with Katie for the last five hours, including two bathroom runs at gas stations with very interesting assortments of entertainment available from the machines on the wall. Katie had bought her a fistful of glow-in-the-dark French ticklers, and stuffed them in the Dart’s glove box.
This far south in Ohio, the flat glacial plane had given way to rolling hills and woods. Autumn’s breath was more evident here than in the cities, the brilliant fiery foliage speckling the landscape in a riot of reds and gold. The straight, wide freeways of the north yielded to winding two-lane roads bent back with blind hairpin turns. The gray sky overhead spat occasional raindrops on the windshield. The Dart growled up the hills and valleys in third gear, making progress irritatingly slow. Or perhaps it was just the company.
“Remind me what we’re doing here again?” Katie grumbled, looking greener than the Wicked Witch of the West. She popped another peppermint into her mouth. Anya hoped that if Katie barfed, she would give enough warning for Anya to pull over. The smell of vomit would be nearly impossible to clean from the Dart’s interior. Anya had been under the impression that getting back to nature was supposed to be good for witches. Apparently, the ride there wasn’t so agreeable.
“I’m not really sure,” she admitted. “My mother brought me to Serpent Mound when I was a kid. The shape of it reminds me of the Horned Viper symbol. The research that Felicity did for me indicates that there are some abnormalities in the bedrock here, melt marks consistent with the marks left around the arson scenes… it’s just a hunch, really.”
“At least it’ll keep you out of Drake Ferrer’s backyard.”
Anya gave her a dirty look as she pulled into the parking lot of the Serpent Mound Museum. The park perched on a plateau overlooking two branches of creek and surrounding forest. This far south, the grass was still green as summertime, curving around the small blacktop parking lot.
Katie had wrenched the door open before Anya had even shut off the ignition. She took two mincing steps to the grass at the edge of the parking lot and heaved out the remains of a gas station hot dog. Sparky looked balefully up at Anya, the first time he’d looked her full in the face all day.
Sighing, Anya crossed to the front of the car to rub Katie’s shoulders and hold her hair back. She hit the dry heaves pretty quickly, then sat down hard on the curb.
“I’m driving on the way back,” she announced.
“Okay,” Anya agreed, stroking the top of her head.
When Katie wobbled to her feet, the women made their way to the Serpent Mound Museum, a log cabin flanked by two pop machines. They were in luck—the Ohio Historical Society was promoting Ohio’s Haunted Places for October, and the museum was open. Anya bought Katie a bottled water, which she sipped at gingerly. Now that her feet were on solid ground, color had begun to return to her face.
