Child of Fire (6 page)

“Harlan, do you know who Justin Benton is?”

“Nope,” he answered. He shifted his grip on his rifle and looked up the street. He was getting antsy. Where were the police sirens? It had been more than two minutes since that first shot.

“He was a little boy who lived in this town. Earlier today, I saw him burn up.”

Harlan burst into tears. The barrel of his gun wavered, then angled toward the asphalt. “My girls,” he said, his voice small and broken with pain. “My girls.”

“Is that what happened to them?” I asked.

“I don’t know. The Monday after Thanksgiving, Lorelei didn’t come home from school. I went nuts looking for her. But … but …”

“But the people in this town acted as though they’d never heard of her. They acted as though she didn’t exist.”

“They’re liars!” he shouted, his grief flaring into anger. He didn’t point his gun at me. “And the next week, my little Marie disappeared from her bed. Right in the middle of the night. And …”

He couldn’t go on. I helped. “And there was a black mark on the floor. A long, scary mark. It led to the door—”

“The window.” He approached me slowly. There was no threat in the way he moved.

“And it disappeared into the dirt. Now no one in town remembers either of your girls.”

“They don’t remember any of the kids! Not even their own!” His face was slack with astonishment. He’d apparently forgotten that he’d just accused the whole town of lying to him. Maybe he’d never really believed it. “Even after they saw it happen with their own two eyes! They still have tricycles sitting in their front yards and Happy Meal wrappers on their dashboards, but it’s like they can’t see them!”

“
You
saw it, though, didn’t you? You saw it happen right here in town.”

“Five times.”

“Is it always kids? Does it happen to adults, too?”

“Only kids. Never adults. My God, every single person in this town must have seen it, but I’m the only one who remembers.” His eyes welled up with tears. The rifle hung loose in his hand. “Why am I the only one who remembers? And why do I feel this pressure in my head! It’s been there for months, since before my Lorelei vanished. It’s driving me wild!”

“Harlan, I’m new in town but I came here to find out what’s happening in Hammer Bay. I can’t promise that I can get your girls back, but I’m going to find out what’s going on.”

I saw hope in his expression. He was a tired man, with a heavy load of grief. He’d been carrying it for nearly half a year, but he wasn’t so far gone that he couldn’t recognize a helping hand when it was offered.

“Can you do that?”

“Man, I don’t know,” I told him. “But I intend to try. I have some questions for you, and I’m going to want to check out the black mark in your house, but I’m not going to be able to do any of that if you shoot me.”

Harlan looked down at the gun in his hand and blinked.

I kept my voice low. “Can I have that gun, please?” That was when we heard the sirens.

Harlan backed away and lifted the rifle. “I’m not crazy,” he yelled. “I was married. I had two little kids!”

Goose bumps prickled on my neck. “I know, Harlan. I believe you.”

“Someone in this town is going to tell me where they are. Someone knows what’s happened to them.”

“Harlan,” I said. His expression had become hard and
distant. “You’re that someone. None of these people can remember. Only you.”

A police car turned the corner and stopped in the road, lights flashing.

Harlan looked at it like a man nearing the end of a big job. Suddenly, I understood. He was done. His kids were gone, and he was going to commit suicide by cop.

“Harlan, don’t do it. There are other kids in town,” I said, thinking of the two kids at the gas station. “You could help me put a stop to this. You might be the only one who—”

He leveled the gun at my chest. His face was calm. “Why don’t you go back into the diner now,” he said in a resigned voice. “Before something bad happens to you.”

He was aiming at my chest. Would the tattoos there protect me if he squeezed the trigger?

I had no idea how to talk him down. I imagine cops and paramedics are trained in that sort of thing, but I was just an ex–car thief.

I laid my hand against the pocket containing my ghost knife. I could feel it there, thrumming with life. If talking wouldn’t work …

Harlan turned away from the flashing lights on the patrol car and looked up the street. His eyes narrowed. I followed his gaze.

A wolf stood in the road. I’d never seen one outside a zoo before, but I recognized it immediately. The fur along its back was tinged with red, and it stared at us, standing sideways as though it wanted to present the largest possible target.

It was big. I don’t know much about wolves, but it looked much bigger than I’d have expected. Then again, when Harlan had pointed his rifle at me, it looked like a .90 caliber. Fear can do that.

Harlan swung the rifle to his shoulder and fired. I saw
the bullet chip the asphalt between the animal’s legs. The wolf bolted, running down the street and out of sight.

Harlan worked the bolt of his rifle. I slid my hand into my pocket and took out my ghost knife.

Harlan saw me out of the corner of his eye. He spun and slammed the butt of his rifle against my hand, smashing it against my hip. The ghost knife fell onto the street, and I staggered a few feet away from it.

He aimed the rifle at my face. I didn’t have any tattoos to protect me there.

“It was just a piece of paper,” I said.

Harlan glanced at the ghost knife and confirmed that what I was saying was true. Without a word, he swung his weapon around and sighted down the street, looking for the wolf.

I had cast the spell that created the ghost knife, and I could sense it there on the asphalt. I opened my hand and
reached
for it. The laminated paper flew into my hand, and in one motion, I threw it at Harlan like an oversized playing card.

According to the spell book I’d copied it from, a ghost knife cuts “ghosts, magic, and dead things.” The wood and metal locks of the Bentons’ front door were dead things, and the ghost knife cut through them easily. It could also destroy magic spells like my tattoos or the sigil on Annalise’s scrap of wood; the results weren’t always pretty.

But every living person has a ghost in them. At least, the spell thinks so, because when I use it on people, it passes through their bodies as though they aren’t there and cuts at their “spirit.”

And that’s all I know about it. Even though I cast the spell myself from an old book I’d acquired under less-than-honest circumstances, and even though I’d used it a few times against people who were trying to kill me, I had no idea how it worked or what it truly did. As with
so much else having to do with magic, Annalise, and her society, I was in the dark.

The ghost knife zipped across the few feet separating us and entered Harlan’s body just below his armpit. His shirt fell open where the ghost knife sliced through it, but the laminated paper plunged into his body without leaving a visible mark. A moment later, the spell exited through the other side as if he wasn’t even there.

Harlan sagged. His eyes dulled, and what ever was driving him to shoot up the town dwindled away. That’s what the ghost knife did; it stole away aggression and vitality for a while. The effects of the spell were temporary—at least, they seemed to be.

Harlan lowered his rifle. I stepped toward him, ready to take the weapon away. The left side of Harlan’s rib cage burst open. I never heard the gunshot. I only saw the exit wound. Blood splattered my left hand, and I felt the bullet whiz past me.

Harlan collapsed, falling onto his face on the street.

I looked up and saw a cop moving toward us, his revolver pointed at Harlan. “Move away!” the cop yelled. “Move away from the body!”

I was frozen in place. The cop pointed the gun at my face. He asked me who I was, and I told him.

He told me to move back again. I took a step back. The cop kicked the rifle just like they do on TV. It slid away up the street.

I heard a faint sucking noise and looked down.

“He’s alive,” I said.

“An ambulance is coming,” the cop said. “Don’t move.”

The cop was in his mid-fifties, with a good bit of muscle and a little paunch. He had long, slightly graying hair, which he combed back like a European movie star. His face, though, was scarred and rounded as though it
had been punched too many times. His jaw was long and heavy, and the look in his eyes was slightly feral.

He looked down at Harlan and smiled slightly, as though the dying man was a nifty bit of entertainment.

“Where’s that ambulance?” I asked. I couldn’t hear sirens.

He looked at me as though he thought I might be his next fun project. “
On its way
, I said. Who are you again?”

“Raymond Lilly,” I said again. “Harlan has a punctured lung. He needs help right now.”

Someone said: “Did you get him?” I looked up and saw two more officers approaching. One bore a close resemblance to the first cop—a younger brother, I assumed. Except this new arrival hadn’t shaved in about a week and was chewing the ragged end of a burning cigar. The other cop had too much flab pressing down on his belt, and his face was red and shiny with exertion.

“I surely did,” the older cop said.

They stood around Harlan’s body, looking down at him as if he was about to turn into candy. I still couldn’t hear ambulance sirens. The fat one licked his lips in a way that gave me chills. None of them moved to help him.

So I did. The three cops jumped back and trained their weapons on me, but I didn’t look at them. I laid my hand over the wound on Harlan’s back, then slid my other hand under him, searching for the exit. When I found it, I covered it with my palm. I tried to seal the wounds with my hands. Harlan seemed to be breathing a little better. Maybe it was my imagination.

“What are you doing there, son?”

I wasn’t sure which of them was talking to me. “Trying to save his life.”

“Why?”

“I thought you might want to shoot him again later.”

I heard chuckling behind me. Someone thought that was funny. Ambulance sirens came next, finally.

Harlan tried to say something but couldn’t manage it. Kneeling in the street, I tried not to think about what I was doing. A crazy man who hadn’t bathed in weeks was bleeding all over my hands, and three cops were pointing their guns at me.

I heard more voices. The folks in the diner had come out into the street to gawk, and the sports bar up the street was emptying, too.

Annalise came near. “Boss,” I said, catching her attention. “I think I dropped a piece of paper around here somewhere. Would you find it? It might be our map.”

She understood immediately. We couldn’t leave a spell lying out on the street for anyone to pick up. I could have called it to me again, but an awful lot of people were watching.

She moved off toward the far side of the street. The older cop followed her. They talked, but I couldn’t hear them. The waitress and the mechanic were loudly telling the fat cop what I had done, and how I had almost talked Harlan into giving up his rifle. They were split over whether that meant I was brave, stupid, or both; their voices drowned out what ever the older officer was saying to Annalise.

The ambulance finally arrived and the EMTs gently shouldered me out of the way. I scuttled toward the curb, happy to sit and watch professionals at work. A chubby little guy with too much beard taped plastic over the gunshot wound. Beside him, his lean and hairless partner snipped the finger from a latex glove and then slid a long needle through the fingertip. They rolled Harlan onto his back. The bearded guy covered the exit wound with more plastic while his partner searched Harlan’s ribs for a place to insert the needle.

I didn’t watch. Weariness washed over me as my
adrenaline ebbed. I was tempted to lie back in the street and go to sleep.

I wondered if I was going to be sleeping in jail to night. I hoped not. It was too soon.

The older cop with the movie-star hair and the road-house face crouched beside me. “Your, uh, companion there tells me you came out to talk old Harlan out of shooting up the town.”

“That’s right,” I said. I wanted to stand, but I didn’t want to smear my bloody hands against the street. It was a weird impulse, but it was a day for weird.

I glanced at the man’s badge. He was the chief of police. The name tag beneath read
E. DUBOIS
. This was Emmett, I guessed, who hadn’t confiscated all of Harlan’s guns.

“Hold on there a moment,” the cop said. He stepped over and conferred with the fat cop standing just a few feet away. The fat cop walked away, and the older one came back. “That wasn’t the smartest thing in the world to do,” he said. “Why did you do it?”

“I didn’t think about it, really,” I lied.

“Good Samaritan?”

I didn’t respond to that. The fat cop returned with a plastic squeeze bottle and a wad of paper towels. The bottle was labeled “waterless cleaner.” I thanked him, squeezed the bottle over my hands, and started washing the blood away. The cleaner felt like jelly and smelled like rubbing alcohol.

“Witnesses said you’d just about talked him down when we showed up.”

I understood where this was going. He didn’t want people saying that I’d almost handled the situation diplomatically when he’d come in with guns blazing.

“I hadn’t talked him down from anything,” I said. “I had the impression that he was planning a suicide by cop.”

“That’s better. Much better than a smart mouth. I didn’t much care for your remark about shooting Harlan again. I didn’t like having to shoot him.”

I remembered the way he’d smiled at Harlan’s bleeding body and knew he was lying. “Sorry about that,” I told him. “I was all worked up with adrenaline.”

He smiled that same smile. “Fine,” he said. “That’s just fine.”

He asked where I was from and why I was in town, but he seemed distracted and his questions were careless. I managed to avoid saying that I’d been in jail that morning. He didn’t seem to care about me, now that I’d apologized.