Angel Fire (17 page)

“Yes it is,” he insisted. “You and I are the same. We both have an ability to control an element.”

“But I can’t control it; it controls
me!
It’s not an ability—it’s a curse!” I argued.

“It doesn’t have to be.”

I stared deep into his eyes, as if I could scry the information there. I caught my breath.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He motioned me to sit down again. I did so, and he concluded his story.

“As you can imagine, I was horrified at what I had done that night. My date didn’t say anything to anyone about the incident. What could she say? People would think she was crazy. But she refused to see me again. I was wracked with guilt—I ruined that man’s face—but I didn’t have the courage to turn myself in. No one ever found out what happened.”

Neil wrung his hands.

He said, “It bent me out of shape for a while, but I decided that I would figure out—and control—this thing inside me. I could manipulate water, somehow. I needed to learn exactly how. I also wanted to make up for leaving my brother to die when I could have saved him. I thought joining the fire department would accomplish both things. I figured that in the heat of fighting a fire, maybe my ability would be triggered and I could, I don’t know, direct the water to douse the flames.”

“And did it … work?” I asked.

Neil nodded. “Yeah. It did. The first few fires I fought, I was frightened enough that my self-preservation instinct kicked in. I could trigger my ability by putting myself in danger, which I did over and over again, until I started to learn how to control it and temper it; focus it. I could also channel it.”

I narrowed my eyes. “What do you mean by that?”

“It’s like a raging emotion,” he explained. “A wild animal that needs to be let out once in a while. I thought, if a building is already burning and will be destroyed, what harm can there be in letting my beast loose? There’s so much water involved in fighting a fire, I could easily test my control by moving it anywhere I wanted. Who could tell the difference?”

He looked up at me to see how I was reacting, and laughed. “As far as you know, I’m some kind of nutcase making all this up.”

“No more than me,” I said.

“Difference is, I saw you in action—twice. All right.” He stood up and held out his hand. “Time for proof.”

Uncertainly, I slipped my fingers in his. “What do you mean?”

“Come, I’ll show you.” He led me to the river’s edge.

Canyon Creek was by no means swift running, but it had a strong current that had caught more than one unguarded summertime swimmer or fisherman by surprise and carried them a dozen miles downstream.

Neil glanced up and down its length to be sure no one was watching.

The bank of the creek had a gentle slope, but we both had to tread carefully not to slip into the cold water. Pulling his sleeve back from his wrist, Neil thrust his open hand into the river.

“Don’t try this at home,” he joked, and then his eyes unfocused.

His lips parted and, if I hadn’t known better, it looked as if the essence of Neil had vacated his body, and some alien entity had taken residence.

I noticed then that the flow of the creek was slowing around the area where his hand was, almost imperceptibly at first. Soon, it came to a complete standstill within a ten-foot radius. The rest of the creek flowed around this dead spot, as if avoiding it. And then the water level in that circle began to rise and form a shape. At first, I thought it was a funnel, but as I stared in disbelief, it formed into a giant hand with splayed fingers. It moved closer and closer to Neil. Before it reached him, it came to a stop, and the fingers closed in a loose grip around Neil’s.

As if meeting for the first time, Neil and Canyon Creek shook hands, and when I heard the words, “Pleased to meet you,” I had to look twice to make sure it was Neil who had spoken.

“That’s … unbelievable,” I said when the hand slowly disappeared beneath the surface of the creek, and the current resumed its natural pace.

I swayed and felt dizzy. This was confirmation; I wasn’t the only person in the world who had a supernormal ability. I could read about other people all day long, and still that wouldn’t bring it home. Seeing it with my own eyes made it real.

The power did exist. There was no coincidence; there were no mind tricks telling me I started those fires by ordinary means and just lied to myself about it.

The power of fire was in me.

Neil could control water.

How many other people in the world had such an ability, and were lost and confused, or scared by the lack of knowledge, or led to believe they were mentally unstable?

As if sensing I was at a crossroads and was struggling to get a grip on this new reality, Neil grabbed my arm.

“Are you all right?”

I spoke breathlessly. “Yeah. I just have to sit down, I think.”

He led me back to the bench and we sat, hip to hip.

After a moment, he asked, “So … what are you thinking?”

I shook my head. “I can barely form a thought. I have so many questions, but I can’t for the life of me decide which one to ask first.”

“The first thing, I think, is to tell yourself that you believe in it. It’s the first stage in acceptance, in control.”

“But I can’t do that—control it, I mean. It just happens whenever I become extremely angry or afraid.”

He nodded affirmatively. “Control can be learned. I heard that mantra you used the first night with Barry, and again last night. It helped, didn’t it? Maybe not completely, but it helped.”

I had a new thought. I moved away from him so I could turn and face him.

“How did you find me?” I demanded. “I can believe a lot of things. I can believe in this power. I can believe I am not alone in the world; but I can’t believe that it’s just a coincidence that you showed up here in Middleton the same week I came home.” I stared at him for a heartbeat. “I don’t know; maybe it is coincidence. Is it?”

“I’ve struggled with this all my life,” he said to me after a few moments. “For years I avoided becoming too close to anyone; I’ve never tried to patch things up with my folks. I carried this burden on my own, and I thought I would never meet someone who I could share this secret with.”

He cocked his head. “It’s not coincidence,” he admitted with a disarming smile. “A couple of years after I joined the department, and I developed a measure of control, I had plenty of time to think about things. My thoughts, naturally, led to the assumption, or belief, that I couldn’t be the only person in the world with this power. There have been stories of the strange and fantastic for centuries. There has to be a kernel of truth in them.”

He looked off to the creek.

“I started researching other incidents, stories of drowning, floods, anything to do with water and death. I read a story about a two year-old boy in Illinois who was caught under a frozen river for three hours, and somehow survived. I took some vacation time and went there to investigate for myself. As it turned out, there was a medical explanation: hypothermia set in and he was preserved in the ice water. This has happened in other cases. There was nothing supernatural about it.”

Turning back to me, he said, “But that didn’t stop me: for years, whenever I read a story on the internet or heard the slightest rumor, I would go and find out the truth, hoping one day to meet someone who was like me.

“After a time, I had a revelation that this power might not be limited to the element of water; there could be others out there with the power of fire, earth or air. I expanded my search.”

I asked, “And that led you to me?”

Neil nodded. “Yeah.”

“How?”

He seemed to search for the words. “Now, there’s one thing that I haven’t told you about. As time passed and I was better able to control water itself, another aspect of the power slowly developed in me.”

I blinked. “Aspect?”

He chewed on his lip. “Well, I developed a kind of intuition about things. Like, for instance, if there was a kid trapped in a burning house, I seemed to know exactly what room he was in. I’d be driving down a road and get a sudden urge to take a different route; later I would find out there was construction and I would have been delayed for hours. On long overnight shifts, the guys would play cards; I could always call everyone’s bluff, and I seemed to win more than my fair share of hands to the point where one of the veterans offered to punch my lights out for cheating. That kind of thing.”

I asked, “You mean, like fortune telling?”

“No.” He gave a slight shake of his head and smiled. “I could never see the future in those kind of terms. I’ve purchased many a lottery ticket and I’m still living paycheck to paycheck. No, this is more like an intuition. People sometimes get hunches; I get them all the time.”

“All right,” I said, though I wasn’t clear on what he was leading up to.

Neil sighed. “Well, I told you earlier that it was Chief Hrzinski who contacted my chief…”

“Yeah,” I said, my tone cautious.

“That part was true, but originally, the job was offered to Darryl Lumiere, my lieutenant. When I heard about it, I just had this feeling that I needed to take the job instead. Before I knew it, I convinced Darryl to reject the offer, and campaigned for it for myself.”

Neil shrugged. “I didn’t know why, at the time, but the first opportunity I got, I hit the internet and dug up every scrap of information about Middleton I could find.”

He looked me straight in the eye. “That’s when I read about you, and about your past and imprisonment. It only took a phone call to a friend on the police department in Phoenix to find out you were being released on parole a few days before I planned to come out here.”

I swallowed hard. Coincidence? Destiny? Fate? There were forces at work here I couldn’t understand.

“It was like a breath of fresh air,” he said finally, after I didn’t respond, “having confirmed that you were, indeed like me. Knowing there is someone you can talk to about this, and who would understand.”

An odd thought occurred to me; something that didn’t make complete sense. “Since you’ve done all this research, did you figure out if there was a catalyst for this ability in yourself?”

“You mean, why me? Why you?”

“Sort of,” I said. “I told you my great-grandmother Beatrice had this ability. But it seems to have skipped a few generations. Her journal implied her power was triggered when her husband killed her mother. And for me—” Suddenly, it was very difficult for me to finish that sentence.

“You had a similar trigger event,” Neil guessed, his voice low.

“Yes,” I admitted. “A miscarriage.”

“I’m so sorry.” He fell respectfully silent.

“It’s all right.”

Neil cocked his head. “I never really thought about that. The power being hereditary, I mean. I never heard any stories about any of my ancestors having anything like this. My dad was a fisherman; owned his own boat. My grandfather on my dad’s side was a captain in the Navy, and I think his father was in the Merchant Marines. I guess there’s a seafaring tradition in my family—I’m the first to break that trend. As far as I know, there haven’t been any extraordinary events like mine.”

“So what caused this in us?” I asked aloud.

Neil lowered his eyes. “My brother and I were both drowning; he died and I developed my ability at the same time. For you, your power manifested when you lost your baby. For Beatrice, when her mother died, the fire in her appeared. If I had to guess, this power in us only manifests when someone close to us dies.”

Could that be it?

“When the bond of blood is broken,” I whispered.

Neil looked into my eyes. “Pardon?”

My mind was spinning. There had been so many revelations today, I couldn’t keep up. I wasn’t sure I could process everything; but at the same time, I was like a starving animal—only I was starving for more information.

But Neil interrupted my train of thought. “We should be getting back; your aunt will think we’ve fallen in the river.”

Neil stood, but I grabbed his arm and pulled him back to the bench. “I want to know one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

I gestured to him and then to me. “How did you control it? How do I control it?”

He shrugged. “For me, I stopped resisting it. I let it flow. It’s like balance. The first time you ride a bicycle, you have no balance and fall down. After awhile, I just knew how to ride. You can’t really explain how to keep your balance; you just learn to do it by giving yourself over to your body’s own natural instincts.”

I embraced the flame.

…And I did not end.

Was that the secret, after all? Give myself over to the fire? Surrender to its power?

I didn’t know if I could do that. I had caused so much pain and destruction in the past ten years; how could I consciously open myself up to more?

On the way back, I struggled with that thought.

Chapter Twenty-One

Aunt Martha had
the apple pie cooling on the kitchen window sill when we got back. She spotted us, clucked with delight and corralled us back to the table.

“What took you so long?” she demanded. “Ten more minutes and I would have had to put it back in the oven.” She put the pie on the center of the table and searched for a knife. “Edward, you bump,” she hollered into the living room. “Come and help me serve. Scoop the ice cream for me.”

Uncle Edward was sitting on an armchair trying to read a magazine; he would alternately look at the page through his reading glasses, and then try reading it without. Neither method proved successful. That’s what happens when you pick a random pair of glasses from a pharmacy without consulting an eye doctor. At his wife’s summons, he tossed the magazine on the settee, folded the glasses, slid them into his shirt pocket, and then pushed himself to his feet.

I didn’t think there was room for another bite of food after the enormous meal earlier, but the moment Aunt Martha put the pie in front of me, I dug in without hesitation. Neil also had no problem finishing his dessert.

“My, oh my,” Aunt Martha said. “You must have found your appetite on that long walk.”