Embers (13 page)

“I think that’s when my mother gave me Sparky. Perhaps she had summoned him, somehow, to protect me even before I was born. I feel that she struck some sort of a bargain, somewhere in the past. I don’t remember her being a witch or a magician. . . we went to church twice a week. When I asked her about Sparky, she would tell me that he was my guardian angel. Which was true enough, I guess. But the little statue in the church of St. George slaying the dragon really bothered me. I wondered: what saint would hurt someone like Sparky? My mother told me that the dragon St. George was slaying wasn’t like Sparky, that he was an evil dragon. But I still felt really bad for him.

“We lived in a row house in Hamtramck. It was there that I swallowed my first spirit. . . it was the ghost of a woman who died in the 1950s. . . she was dressed in a polka-dot dress and sat beside the upstairs window. Her hair was perfectly coiffed and her lips were rouged red. She never spoke, just watched the street, as if she was expecting someone. I remember feeling so sorry for her that I threw my arms around her. I felt. . . I felt a hole open up in my chest. . . then she was filling it. And then she was gone. I never saw her again.

“I asked my mother what happened. She went very pale. I remember her kneeling down before me and telling me never to do that again.” Anya rubbed her arms. “She shook me so hard that I thought my teeth would rattle out of my head, but she seemed very afraid that something bad would happen.

“So. . . I did my best to ignore the spirits after that. I ignored the spirit of the librarian at the library when she asked me what I wanted to read. I didn’t speak to the ghost of the guy singing on the street corner for money. I trained myself to look down whenever we drove past the graveyard, so I wouldn’t see who was walking in between the stones.

“I know my mother saw them, too. I remember being at church and the ghost of a young priest sat beside us. He watched her and she stared straight ahead, anywhere but at him. I didn’t understand how she could do that, but I think I do, now. She was afraid. Afraid of acknowledging these spirits all around us, afraid that they would come to dominate our lives.

“She kept things pretty normal, though. My mom used to put up a Christmas tree every year. . . that was my favorite part of the year. My mom always insisted that the lights be unplugged every night when we went to sleep, though. I thought she was being her usual neurotic self.

“At the ripe old age of twelve, and knowing better than my mother, I sneaked down the stairs and plugged the Christmas tree in. Sparky and I stretched out before the tree, watching it snow through the living room window. It was truly a magical experience. . . I remember the pulse of the lights behind my eyelids, Sparky snoring next to me.

“I woke up, feeling Sparky jerking on my nightgown collar with his teeth. The smoke alarms were going off. The Christmas tree was on fire and he was trying to drag me out of the house. I screamed for my mom, but there was too much fire and smoke; I couldn’t see up the stairs.

“I remember firefighters breaking the door, being carried out into the snow. The snow was so very peaceful, falling gently on the massive blaze that I used to live in.”

Tears dripped down her nose. Ciro handed her a tissue.

“They found that the fire had been caused by faulty wiring in the Christmas lights. Mom had been right. They found her, dead of smoke inhalation, at the top of the stairs.” Anya’s fingers fluttered up to the collar around her neck. “CPS sent me to live with my aunt and uncle a few blocks away. Sparky came with me, but I never told them about him. They just. . . wouldn’t have understood.”

She lapsed into silence. Talking about it had reopened the wounds, made them too fresh and raw. Ciro’s fingers brushed her elbow.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

She made a face. “Of course it was my fault. I. . .” She looked down at Sparky. Sparky was damn well near indestructible. She could allow herself to love him. Sparky had always been there. . . but other people just seemed too fragile. And seeing Ciro, thin and weak like this, just made her even more wary to get too close, for fear she’d break someone. Everyone seemed to get broken sooner or later, and she didn’t want to be to blame for any more of it.

“It wasn’t,” Ciro told her with stern certainty. He grabbed her hand fiercely. “You were a child. It was an accident.”

Anya looked at the ceiling, blinking back tears. She didn’t know why all this had come rushing out now, to Ciro, but she wanted to slam on the brakes. “Can we—can we talk about the arsons? About that man—that thing—we saw?”

Ciro nodded. “If you want.” He leaned forward in bed. “But please know that you have no blame in any of this. Don’t do penance for a crime that isn’t yours—you’ll be doing it forever.”

Anya swallowed. She didn’t want to imagine
forever
—what it would be like when she finally died. Would she be a spirit, denied a resting place, wandering the streets of Detroit with Sparky at her side?

And how would that be different, at all, from now? she wondered.

The demonologist knotted his gnarled hands. “Your burning man. . . he must be human, since you’ve recorded his image clearly on camera. Brian can see him. He’s real.”

“But the fire!” she protested. “He can walk in fire and not be burned. He was able to melt concrete, to create a massive fire without accelerants. That’s not human.”

“True, there’s an element of the Other about him. Sparky can interact with him. He’s developed mastery over the element of fire. He sees spirits. Indeed, it seems as if he devoured the spirit of the repairman.”

“Do you think. . .,” she asked in a very small, frightened voice, dreading to articulate the thought. “Do you think that he could be like me?”

“A Lantern? Perhaps. He could be a Lantern who’s more in touch with his elemental nature than you. He sounds as if he’s an accomplished magick worker.” Ciro smoothed imaginary wrinkles from his bedspread. “He would have to be to try and summon Sirrush. As Katie has told you, that’s a very dangerous endeavor. Once summoned, Sirrush can’t be controlled by mortal means.”

Anya wrapped her hands around her elbows, suddenly cold. She thought she’d been the only one, the only Lantern. Unique. But now that there was the possibility of another, she wanted to know more. “He doesn’t have a familiar.”

“He may not have had a mother who loved him enough to conjure one for him.” Ciro’s smile was gentle, but his voice was hard. “I cannot imagine what it would have been like to grow up without a protector, to be at the mercy of every spirit he encountered.”

Anya’s brown knitted. She hadn’t thought of that. Would she have been as fearless of the casual spirits moving through the world without Sparky at her side? No matter what happened, she knew that Sparky would fight for her. She reached down to rub the loose skin under his neck. He made an amphibian face of pleasure and rolled over on his back.

“It’s no wonder that he became a destroyer,” Ciro speculated. “Regardless, he must be stopped.”

“How do I do that?” She spread open her empty hands, feeling helpless as the thoughts and theories slipped through them.

“You’ll need to bind him, my dear. That’s the only way to cage elemental energy.” Ciro shook his head. “I’ll need to research how this might be done.” He looked at her with rheumy eyes. “But you will need to capture him in the human world, first, before you can hope to bind his magickal power.”

Anya descended the stairs of Ciro’s apartment to the main floor. The old demonologist kept an apartment above the site of his primary occupation: the running of the Devil’s Bathtub. Outside, a neon sign sketched out a blue bathtub with red horns and a pointed tail emerging from the rim. Back in the Prohibition era, Ciro’s place had a speakeasy in the basement. Now, the bar ran on the first floor and DAGR gathered in the basement. When Ciro had taken possession of the run-down brownstone decades ago, he’d had all the original bar fixtures hauled up from the basement. A scarred, deeply waxed bar gleamed from one end of the room to the other. Wooden cabinets lined the walls, cleverly designed to look like bookshelves. They held bottles of gleaming liquors, outlined in the shimmer of mirrored glass behind them.

The centerpiece of the bar was a turn-of-the-century bathtub, once used for making gin. It now sat in the center of the floor, filled with pennies. Like children casting coins into fountains, the bar patrons made wishes on the devil’s bathtub. Anya didn’t know how many of those wishes came true, but it didn’t stop Ciro’s patrons from trying. She tossed a dime into the bathtub, sending a wish for good luck for the old man.

“How’s he doing?”

A sultry whisper emanated from the bathtub. A long, feminine leg reached out from the edge of the tub and two heavily kohled eyes emerged from the rim. The ghost of a flapper shimmered into view, her stylishly feathered hat cocked over one ear. She played nervously with her beads.

Anya pulled a chair up close to the bathtub of coins. “Hi, Renee.” Sparky coiled up under the chair, nonchalant. He was used to Renee; Anya thought he especially liked her because she always smelled like smoke and the fringe at the edge of her dress was fun to bat at.

Renee had been a singer in the speakeasy, before a bust by federal agents went terribly wrong. Her experiences hadn’t marred her zest for the afterlife. She’d kept Ciro company in the bar for decades. Ciro could have exorcised her years before, but kept her around after Renee had tearfully pled for him not to kick her out on the street of the hereafter. The old man didn’t mind her pranks, and she didn’t mind playing them. From the corner of her eye, Anya could see the glassware stacked upside down behind the bar and wondered if that was Renee’s way of trying to cheer the old man up.

Renee’s dark eyes flickered under a thick fringe of lashes.
“I don’t want Ciro to go. I’d
be very lonely without him.”
Her cupid’s bow mouth quivered.

Anya felt vaguely absurd, reassuring a ghost. “He’s resting, Renee.”

Renee bowed her head.
“I’ll sing something for him tonight. That might make him feel
better.”

“It always does.” Anya thought she detected something more than simple concern for the old man. “What is it?”

The ghost of the flapper fidgeted with her beads.
“I’m hearing things from the other
spirits.”

Anya suspected that many of the more sociable spirits found ways to communicate with others. Renee had been a social butterfly in life; she would be no less in death. “What did you hear?”

“That something very bad is coming.”
Renee sank up to her nose in coins.
“Someone is
eating ghosts, without cause or justification.”

“What do you mean?”

Renee gestured to Anya with a marcasite-ringed finger
. “You only take spirits that are
harmful. Evil. Ones that aren’t welcome among the living. There’s someone out there
who’s taking spirits who are minding their own business, ones who aren’t hurting
anyone.”

Anya’s brow wrinkled. The other Lantern. “Why?”

“No one knows.”

“Where are the other spirits disappearing?” Perhaps she could glean a clue about the other Lantern’s haunts.

“All over. He supposedly ate all the ghosts in the library downtown in an afternoon.”

Renee’s eyes were wide.
“That’s the rumor.”

Anya ruminated on it. Her arsonist was drawn not only to fire, but to eat spirits. . . just like he’d taken Virgil. Why?

“Don’t worry, Renee,” Anya said sincerely. “Ciro is a powerful demonologist. He will protect you.”

Renee sank below the false water level of the coins, her eyes holding immeasurable sadness.
“I hope he can.”

“I hope so, too,” Anya whispered after her. She couldn’t imagine what would happen when Ciro died—what would happen to DAGR, what would happen without all his knowledge to guide them. The thought was simply too much to bear, even for the dead.

At the top of the room, she heard a woman singing. The voice traveled up the stairs, and Anya hoped the lullaby would give Ciro sweet dreams.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“LET’S GET THIS PARTY STARTED.”

Max grinned at Anya as she slid through the narrow hidden door on the back stair of the Devil’s Bathtub. The basement had become DAGR’s base of operations: a large oblong room full of computer equipment, barristers’ bookcases bursting with Ciro’s dusty tomes, and wooden crates of arcane technological and magickal supplies. Jules, Max, Brian, and Katie sat in folding chairs arranged around a banquet table. Ciro’s place at the foot of the table was empty.

Anya looked away from Brian’s sunburned face as she slid into a chair. “Hey, guys,” she mumbled.

Jules slid a file folder across the table to her. “Thanks for coming, Anya.” Anya couldn’t tell if he really meant it. He sat at the head of the table, opening a folder of his own.

“We’ve got a pretty serious case tonight, folks: a case of suspected demonic possession involving a teenage girl. A parasitic leech.” His mouth was set in a tight line. Jules had little patience for ghosts, but had some sympathy for them. At least, to Jules’s thinking, ghosts had once been human. He
despised
nonhuman entities. Sparky usually made himself scarce around Jules.