Child of Fire Read online

  “Would you hurry up?” Annalise snapped. “I don’t want to stand here all night.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’ve never done this before.”

  “Well, don’t step in that,” she said, pointing.

  There was a long black streak on the carpet that led to the door. I hopped over it into the living room. The streak led out the door and turned left toward the sea. I was glad I hadn’t stepped in it.

  Annalise shut the door and surveyed the room. She laid the scrap wood against the wall. The design continued to churn.

  I looked around the empty house. Could there be a predator somewhere here?

  “What do we look for?” I asked.

  “Start by following this snail trail to its source. I want to know what happened here and why. Look around. Be thorough. Don’t turn on the lights. And keep your ghost knife handy.”

  That seemed straightforward. Annalise went into the kitchen while I knelt beside the streak.

  An opening in the curtain allowed light from the street-lamps outside to shine on the carpet. I got down on my hands and knees beside it. The carpet fibers appeared to have been scorched, and although I couldn’t smell smoke, I could smell the nasty, sterile tang I’d smelled in the gravel lot.

  The streak went up the stairs. So did I. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom on the upper floor. The streak led to the back room, where it ended in the middle of the floor, surrounded by a heap of scorched blankets.

  There were Kim Possible posters on the wall and little pink ponies on the dresser. A third child for the Bentons. A daughter.

  There was a certificate on the wall that said she’d won her sixth-grade math bee. I didn’t read it. I didn’t want to know her name.

  The room was cluttered and disorganized-she wasn’t a tidy kid-but there were a couple of blank spaces. One was on the wall beside her certificates and awards. Another was a rectangular space in the center of her bureau, among the piled clothes and school papers. Everything had two or three months’ worth of dust on it.

  The nightstand beside her bed was a nest of photos in cheap frames, except for a blank space at the front edge. Four or five more photos lay on the carpet beside the bed. I picked them up, wishing that Annalise had given me gloves.

  Most of them featured a dark-haired girl on the verge of puberty. She was small-boned, like Meg, but she carried a lot of flab, like Douglas. She wasn’t a kid I would have noticed, but standing in her bedroom, knowing that the scorch marks on the floor probably marked the spot where she died, I felt a profound sense of loss.

  The pictures showed her smiling with a group of friends. She was, if you believed the photos, a happy kid. I saw the cowlicked boy in one of the pictures and looked away.

  There was a second dresser in a corner of the room. Beside it, a mattress and box spring stood against the wall. This dresser was older and held fewer mementos. A photo on the back corner showed the same younger daughter with an older girl with the same narrow glasses and pointy chin. A sister? I liked the challenging, mischievous expression on her face.

  I noticed that there was no dust on this dresser or any of the knickknacks. Someone had been cleaning it. Could Meg have been walking past the younger daughter’s things to clean the older one’s? It seemed so. Obviously, they still remembered the older sister.

  The middle room was larger and had two beds. There was a definite clash of styles in here-the Wiggles versus Giant Japanese Robots.

  On the younger side of the room, I noticed several more empty spaces amid the clutter. The older boy’s things, however, had been torn apart. Drawers had been yanked out of the dresser and dumped on the floor. The closet had been ransacked, toys and books scattered.

  Someone had packed in a panic.

  I went back into the hall. The scorched black mark was still there. I noticed something funny about it and crouched down on the floor.

  At the edge of the streaks were a couple of smaller burns. It was like a river that had one main channel and some small channels that separated for a short while and then rejoined the main flow.

  The silver worms had made this trail. I’d suspected it, of course, from the moment I saw the trail leading out the door, but now I was sure.

  I hopped over the scorched carpet and checked out the bathroom. It was also in disarray. Toothbrushes had been scattered across the sink and floor. There were a lot of personal effects in here, from expensive salon conditioners to a paperback beside the toilet.

  The hall closet was filled with towels and cleaning supplies. Everything was neatly folded and arranged. This had obviously been passed over during the frantic packing.

  Last was the master bedroom, which looked like it had been tossed by the cops. I walked on the clothes on the floor because there was nowhere else to step. An abandoned crib at the foot of the bed was loaded with winter clothes. The end table had a pair of cheap paperbacks on it, along with a pair of alarm clocks and a pair of eyeglass cases. Behind the clocks sat a little box coated with a thin film of dust. I disturbed the dust opening the box. Inside was a pile of unused condoms.

  The Bentons had skipped town like a drug mule who had been caught dipping into the product.

  At this point, I started to feel dirty. This was too private, and there was too much grief and tragedy here. I was ashamed of the tingle of excitement I’d felt at the door.

  And yes, it made me angry. Angry at Annalise for forcing me to come on this job. Angry at Meg and Douglas for having these problems. Angry at whoever had cast the spell that had burned these three kids.

  I kicked the clothes on the floor into a pile in the corner but found only ordinary carpet underneath. No circles, sigils, or other signs of summoning magic.

  I opened the bedroom closet and dug around. If I was going to do something I hated, I was going to do it quickly. I pulled stacks of clothes out of the back of the closet and uncovered a small safe. It was locked.

  Annalise could probably tear it open, but I didn’t need her help. I took out my ghost knife and sliced off the steel hinges and the lock. The safe door fell onto the floor.

  Inside I found a long, slender box and a folder full of papers. I opened the box, revealing a diamond necklace.

  I don’t know much about jewelry, but it looked old, like necklaces I’d seen in old movies. It was probably an heirloom, and it was probably worth a lot of money, yet the Bentons had abandoned it in their rush for the county line.

  I held on to the necklace longer than was strictly necessary. I had no job and no food in my belly. My bed and board were in the hands of a woman who hated my guts and wanted me dead. It would have been easy to slip this jewelry into my pocket. I needed money of my own if I was ever going to be free, and it wasn’t like the Bentons were coming back for it.

  I put the necklace back into the box and put the box back into the safe. I didn’t think about it or try to reason it out. I just closed the box and moved on.

  The folder was full of investment papers. Douglas had a 401(k), some stocks, and a house in Poulsbo that he rented out. There was a lot of money tied up in these papers, but they’d been abandoned, too. It looked like the Bentons were too busy saving their kid to worry about their investments. I was starting to like Douglas and Meg, tire iron or not.

  Considering the find I’d made in the closet, I decided to check the closets in the bathroom and the rest of the bedrooms, too. None of them held anything of importance, and nothing otherworldly bit my arm off. I supposed I shouldn’t have worried about the danger. If there was a predator in the house, Annalise’s piece of scrap wood would have detected it.

  Whether she would have told me about it is another matter, of course.

  Once, not too long ago, I’d cast a spell from a stolen spell book to give myself a vision of a vast expanse of mist and darkness. The Empty Spaces. The Deeps.

  There I’d seen predators moving through the void: colossal serpents, huge wheels of fire, groups of tumbling boulders that sang to one another and chang
ed direction like a flock of birds. All of them were searching for living worlds to devour.

  Then I came face-to-face with a predator that had come here, to our world. It was a parasitic bug the size of a house cat, and it had a hunger for human flesh. If I hadn’t stopped it, it would have brought the rest of the swarm here to feed like locusts.

  Before she’d discovered the truth about me, Annalise had told me a little about them. They were not demons or devils, with pitchforks and horns and contracts you sign in blood. They were simply creatures hunting for food-predators-and we were the food.

  They were drawn to certain kinds of magic the way sharks were drawn to blood. People summoned and tried to control them for all sorts of reasons-to destroy enemies, to grant power, to guard, or even just to learn the secrets of the world behind the world. That house-cat-sized predator I’d destroyed had been brought here for its supposed healing powers.

  The only thing the predators wanted was to be brought to a world where they could feed. They love to be summoned, Annalise had said, but they hate to be held in place.

  She had told me that the second predator she’d ever seen was a strange, spongy lattice that was difficult to see even under bright light. The creature was only clearly visible when it was filled with the blood it fed on.

  The man who had summoned it had killed derelicts and petty criminals for years to sustain it, prompting the press to call him “the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run” and “the Torso Killer.” Annalise said she had no idea what that weird predator had done for him in return for all that blood, but she had personally burned them both to ash.

  She wouldn’t talk about the first predator she had seen.

  Any of those predators, summoned to Earth and allowed to run loose, could scour the planet of life. That was why we had come to Hammer Bay-to make sure that, what ever was happening here, it was stopped.

  I thought about that old friend of mine again, the one I’d crippled and who’d loved the Mariners. I had loved him like a brother and I’d nearly helped him-and the predator inside him-destroy the world.

  My hand fell against my jacket pocket, feeling the laminated paper inside. Of the three spells I’d cast from that stolen book, the ghost knife was the only one I still had. I had a copy of that stolen spell book hidden away, but I hadn’t decided what to do with it. There was power in it, absolutely, but spell casting was painful and dangerous, and if Annalise or one of the other peers found out that I still had it, they’d execute me on the spot. For the Twenty Palace Society, stealing magic was a capital crime.

  I couldn’t think of anything else to do on the second floor and went downstairs, stepping carefully around the marks on the carpet.

  There was a message on the answering machine. Since Doug and Meg didn’t seem likely to be coming back, I pushed Play. It was only thirty minutes old and was from someone named Jennifer. She sounded about fifteen. The message was for “Mom and Dad” and made clear her outrage that her parents were planning to pull her out of school-and away from all her friends in the dorm now that she’d finally made some-with only three weeks until finals. This, apparently, would ruin her chance to get into a decent college. Can anyone express contemptuous disbelief as purely and cleanly as a teenage girl? I pressed the Save button on the machine; I liked Doug and Meg too much to erase a message from their daughter.

  Annalise stood in the dark kitchen, staring out the window. Her face was utterly blank. Something about her made me give her some space.

  I looked away and noticed a crumpled sheet of paper in the corner. I picked it up but there wasn’t enough light to read it.

  Annalise glanced at me, her expression still inscrutable. I approached her and looked out the window, too.

  In the next house over, a woman sat at her kitchen table, crying over a small, framed photo. I wondered how long she’d been sitting there, and how long Annalise had stood silently in the darkness, watching.

  “What did you find?” she finally asked.

  “Douglas and Meg, who think they hadn’t been blessed with a boy until last whenever, have actually had five kids. Three boys and two girls. It sounds as if the older girl is at a boarding school somewhere. The younger girl died upstairs in her room, and the worms marked up this carpet as they made a run for the soil outside. I suspect the middle boy died in his car seat a while ago. They packed in a frantic rush, but only for the middle child. We saw what happened to him.

  “They rushed off in such a hurry that they left jewelry and financial documents in the safe upstairs. It looks like they threw a bunch of clothes and crap into their car and took off.

  “I didn’t find any evidence of a spell, or a spell book, or predators. Nothing except that scorched streak in the carpet. That…” I wasn’t sure how to continue. “Those worms that came out of the boy… those were predators, weren’t they?”

  Annalise didn’t look at me. “Did you take the jewelry?”

  “No,” I said.

  She started to pat me down. Without thinking, I drew away from her. That was a mistake.

  Annalise grabbed my upper arm and squeezed-not hard enough to break the bone, but enough to remind me she could. I held myself very still.

  I still had the ghost knife, of course, but I wasn’t confident enough to try it against her. Maybe later, though. Maybe soon.

  She searched me and I didn’t do a damn thing about it. When she was done, she went back to the window without a word. I moved next to her and stared at the woman, too. What ever Annalise was seeing, it didn’t entrance me the way it did her.

  Eventually, Annalise went upstairs to the master bedroom. I followed. She took the jewelry from the safe and laid the wood scrap against it. The sigil twisted at the same steady pace. The necklace was no more magic than anything else in the house. Annalise didn’t seem surprised.

  “So, boss,” I finally said, “do you want to see what picture she’s crying over?”

  “Yes,” she answered. Her funny little voice sounded small.

  “Does it have anything to do with the job?”

  She looked up at me. Her tiny eyes were shadowed and impossible to read. “I’ll know soon enough, won’t I?”

  I walked out the front door, up the Bentons’ walk, and down the sidewalk to the next house. The mailbox had the name FINKLER on it in gold stickers.

  I rang the front doorbell. After about three minutes-a long wait, but I knew she had to wipe away tears and check herself in a mirror-I heard her turn the knob. I stepped down her front step, giving her space and putting myself below her. I wanted to be as nonthreatening as I could.

  She opened the door without undoing a lock. I’d have placed her in her mid-forties, although she could have been older. She had grim lines around her mouth and eyes, and her face was puffy.

  As I looked at her, her expression changed. The traces of sorrow vanished. Within a few seconds, she was as pleasant as if she had just been watching a dull sitcom. “Yes?” she said.

  I wanted to tell her to lock her doors. What if some ex-con came by with some song-and-dance story? Instead I said: “I’ve been trying to reach the Benton family next door? I’m a day early? No one seems to be answering, though?” I let my voice rise at the end of each sentence, turning everything I said into a question.

  “I saw them loading up their car. It looked like they were taking a trip.”

  “Really? They were expecting me. Aunt Meg was going to help me find a job.”

  “At the toy plant?”

  “She didn’t say. I guess so.”

  “And she’s your aunt?” She looked at me carefully, measuring me.

  “We haven’t met. Our family is pretty spread out. I’m still not sure what I should call her. ‘Mrs. Benton’ sounds so formal, but I’m not comfortable yet calling her ‘aunt’ when we haven’t even met.” I kept vamping, wondering how much time Annalise would need.

  “When you see her,” Ms. Finkler interrupted, “ask her what she wants to be called. People should let peop
le pick their own names.”

  “Welp, that makes a lot of sense.”

  “But they went on some kind of trip. You say you’re early?”

  “Only by a day.”

  “They looked like they were going to be gone longer than that. I don’t know what to tell you. But if you want a job, you should go to the toy plant tomorrow. They’re always hiring lately.” She looked me up and down. “Wear something decent.”

  I smiled at her. It took an effort. “Thanks. I appreciate the advice.”

  “You’re welcome.” She closed the door.

  I walked back to the van and climbed behind the wheel. Annalise hadn’t told me where to meet her, but I hoped she knew better than to think I was going back to the Bentons’ house. I drove around the corner, parked beside the alley, and waited.

  The streetlight was overhead. I took the piece of paper I’d found on the floor of the living room and held it up to the light. It read:

  I’m putting this where you will find it. This is the only way we can talk about the truth. Every time I try to talk to you…

  We need to get away from here before we lose Justin and Sammy, too. I sent a postcard to my sister asking her to invite us for a visit. I told her to make it seem like an emergency. When she calls, let’s run and never come back.

  I’m terrified and I don’t know what to do. When I’m alone, I remember them just for a couple of minutes at a time. Do you remember them, too, in the middle of the night when no one else is around?

  I miss them terribly. I don’t know what’s happening. I just want to get away. I don’t think I’m crazy. Am I crazy?

  I love you.

  That was it. The note was unsigned, but it looked like a woman’s handwriting.

  They’d lost three of their kids, and while I didn’t have kids of my own, a lifetime of Hollywood movies had convinced me it was the worst thing that could happen. Except they only knew it had happened in odd, lonely moments.

  Why the Bentons? Who had targeted their kids, and why?

  The passenger door swung open. Annalise climbed in.