Embers (7 page)

Anya inwardly resolved not to react to the woman. She strode deliberately to the information desk and spoke quietly to the clerk. “I’m here to see Steve Neuman, please.”

“I’m sorry,” the clerk answered, paging through her clipboard. “He’s in the burn unit, and no visitors are allowed. Are you family?”

Anya flipped out her badge. “I’m with DFD. I promise that I’ll be brief.”

“Hold on. . .” The clerk punched the buttons on her phone.

“She stole my cigarettes! Bitch!”

Anya steadfastly tried to ignore the brittle old woman, who was leaning across the desk at her, craning her neck to stare up at her with beady bird eyes.

“Give ’em back!”

Sparky bellied up to the old woman and bit her foot. The old woman jerked back, falling in a sprawl of twisted limbs. The hem of her hospital gown flipped up over her head and she screeched incoherently. Out of the corner of her eye, Anya saw Sparky scamper away with a pink sock in his mouth. Her mouth hardened and she willed herself not to turn around. She leaned forward on the counter, shielding her eyes from the old woman’s ectoplasmic nudity with one hand. The old lady’s screaming was drawing the attention of other apparitions; the phantom of a teenage kid with a chest full of gunshot wounds walked through a wall and gave Anya the once-over.

“Hey, princess.”

Anya ignored him, focused intently on the clerk talking into the phone. The clerk was wearing incredibly long, intricately airbrushed false fingernails. Anya wondered how she could type with those pink daggers glued to her hands.

“You stuck-up or somethin’?”

Anya continued to contemplate the clerk’s nails, wishing she’d hurry the hell up.

“Hey, I’m talking to you.”
The spirit tried, unsuccessfully, to grasp her arm, and she felt a draft of cold air.

She turned to him, glowering.

“You need to smile, baby. Pretty girl like you should smile.”
The kid grinned, showing her his custom-made golden grill. He leaned on the countertop beside her, his sagging jeans showing entirely too much skin. Anya rolled her eyes. If he’d been alive, she’d have told him to get his ass back to school. Now there was no point. His destiny was to hang out in the ER, hitting on chicks. She wondered if there were any ghost girls here his age or whether his only company was the crazy Jell-O lady.

“You can go back now,” the clerk told Anya, mercifully. “He’s in room 7-A. . . it’s the tank in the back. You can’t miss it.”

“Thank you so much.”

In her periphery, she could see the teenager sauntering over to hit on the girl throwing up in the trash can. The girl would have no idea he was there, but the kid needed all the practice he could get talking to women in the afterlife.

Anya slunk down the hall. She didn’t know where Sparky had run off to, but she hoped he wasn’t pulling the plug on somebody’s grandfather.

“Sparky,” she snarled.

A woman in a wheelchair turned around to stare at her and Anya tried to cover the snarl with a cough. Whose idea was it to have an uncontrollable familiar? This didn’t happen in books. Every witch and warlock in popular culture had familiars who did their bidding. She resolved—again—to try to introduce this concept to Sparky.

The giant salamander poked his head out from beneath a biohazard bin.

“Ew. Sparky, get out of there.” She didn’t know if salamanders could pick up communicable diseases, but that was certainly a good way to find out.

Sulking, the salamander waddled back to her side and looked up at her with eyes as unrepentant as marbles. The crazy ghost lady’s sock was gone. She could only assume that he’d eaten it.

Resolutely, Anya followed the signs to the burn unit. This wing’s atmosphere felt palpably heavier than the rest of the hospital, as if an enforced curtain of silence had been drawn around it. Even the spirits here were quieter: she glimpsed one staring out a window; another lay in an unoccupied bed, staring up at the ceiling, lips melted shut. The ghost of a woman holding an infant walked down the hallway, humming a soft lullaby.

Anya turned away. Long ago, she’d promised herself that she wouldn’t interfere with spirits who weren’t disturbing humans. But she felt sorry for the ones that seemed trapped in loops of time, reliving painful hours for years without end.

She rounded the corner to what might have been a renovated neonatal unit, windows looking into a glass fishbowl full of technologically arcane equipment studded with lights and dials. Medical personnel swam around the obstacles in masks and green scrubs. Inside, in a bed covered by an oxygen tent, she saw a body swathed in gauze. The figure’s eyes were taped shut, a tube extending from its mouth. It looked like a scene from an alien autopsy show, all shiny and sterile and raw.

Anya pressed her fingers to the glass. Neuman was clearly in no condition to talk. . . if he ever would be. She saw no trace of a spirit lurking around the plastic tent. That meant Neuman’s spirit had either moved on or was still locked away in his body.

“They’re keeping him sedated. . . on paralytics, anticonvulsants, opiates, benzos. . . you name it. They don’t want him to feel anything, and they don’t want him to remember any pain if he does manage to wake.” Captain Marsh stood in the hallway, arms crossed over his chest. On the chair behind him, Anya could see two empty coffee cups and a rumpled newspaper. Marsh had been keeping watch. It was Marsh’s day off, as well as Anya’s, but his jeans were pressed with military-sharp creases. From the time she started as an investigator, she’d learned there were really no days off when working a major case—any good investigator’s sleep would be too troubled by a case to truly be able to relax until it was resolved. But no matter how much overtime Anya worked, she never managed to compete with Marsh’s record of the most unpaid overtime worked in the Department. She suspected his conscience bothered him even more than hers did.

She gestured to Neuman through the glass. “That doesn’t look too good.”

“The initial burns were complicated by that damn mannequin melting all over him.”

Marsh shook his head. “You know. Plastic burns and keeps burning. The fumes got into his lungs.”

“He’s not breathing on his own?”

“No.” Marsh’s dark eyes peered through his reflection to the man in the bed. “They aren’t acting like he’s going to, either.”

Anya frowned. “Where’s his family?”

“The kid’s parents are out of state. Snowbirds—spent their whole lives in Detroit. They retired and moved to Florida last year to get away from the crime.” Marsh’s mouth twisted downward. “They’re flying in now.”

Anya was glad she’d missed that. She knew she had to come, though there would be nothing useful gained in the investigation through her presence. As the lead investigator, it was her duty to see all the results of the arson, to see the truth from all its devastating angles.

She looked down to see Sparky snaking around her feet. He seemed a bit sobered by the burn unit. Perhaps, being impervious to fire himself, he was fascinated by what he could never experience. His obsidian eyes peeped up over the window glass, working back and forth as he seemed to take in all the glittering machinery.

“Did the lab analyze those prints you found?” Marsh asked.

“Yeah. There were several sets of prints, but no hits in AFIS. Our guy hasn’t been in prison, the military, or the police.”

Marsh rubbed his head. “Damn. We have to get this solved. Yesterday.”

“I know.” Anya knew that Marsh was running a good deal of interference for her from the chief, trying to give her space to work. But she could feel the administrative net tightening.

“If Neuman dies. . .” She could see that Marsh was having a hard time articulating the words, as if voicing them might give the thought shape and make it true. “Then it’s a homicide. The case will be turned over to Detroit PD.”

The fire chief would give the best sound bite he could and the press would be all over the idea of a fireman killed in the line of duty by a serial arsonist, like ants after an egg sandwich. Anya wouldn’t turn down the idea of extra help, but she didn’t relish tripping over investigators unfamiliar with the case, who would need extensive debriefing and who could easily shut her out. She’d had some negative experiences before and would rather not repeat them.

“So. . . what do you have for me? Anything?”

“Lab’s analyzing the gaseous evidence from the carbon scrapings. The smoke patterns are too regular to identify a single point of ignition. The best lead I have is this.” Anya pulled her pictures out of her purse, showed him the symbol on the floor of the warehouse basement. “This has been found on the floor of every scene. I took a cast of it. The techs are looking for any corresponding tool marks.”

“What the hell is it?”

“I’ve got an expert working on it.” Anya’s mouth thinned. “But I think we need to seriously consider the idea that our firebug isn’t a usual one. He’s not after money. He’s not trying to cover up another crime. My sense is that this is ritualistic, an occult crime.”

“Damn.” Marsh rubbed the scar on his head. “Halloween’s coming up, and all the crazies are out early.”

“Devil’s Night is just over two weeks away.”

Detroit was notorious for the night before Halloween, Devil’s Night. The criminal element appeared in full force to commit all manner of mischief and property damage; entire city blocks had burned in the seventies. The fires had waned in the late nineties, but the economic crises of recent years had created sufficient psychological fuel to reignite the blazes: unemployment, despair, and anger. Last year alone had seen more than thirty houses, several dozen cars, a post office, and a shopping mall burned to the ground.

Marsh frowned. “I hope this isn’t the firebug’s idea of practice.”

Anya stared through the glass. There was no sign that the firebug was interested in stopping himself. She would have to stop him before the burn unit got more crowded.

Anya wondered what Katie’s neighbors would have thought if they’d known that a witch lived in their little piece of suburbia. Small brick ranch houses lined Katie’s quiet street. Streetlamps and yard and porch lights revealed concrete yard ornaments standing guard over mulched flowerbeds and postage-stamp-sized yards. But this chunk of the middleclass American dream seemed to be slipping away, as Anya could see more and more FOR SALE signs cropping up like dandelions. On Katie’s street alone, there were five signs with paper flyers stacked in clear plastic sleeves, touting improvements to a market that didn’t exist. The grass was beginning to grow tall around those signs.

The witch in their midst was standing her ground, however. Katie’s porch light cheerily illuminated marigolds around the front step going to seed. Her door was decorated for Halloween with a wreath wrapped in orange and black ribbons. From the maple tree in the front yard, she’d hung bats and tiny ghosts. Anya was surprised that the neighborhood kids hadn’t run off with them, but perhaps the kids had moved away with their parents.

Katie appeared at the front door, and Anya could smell something delicious through the screen. She’d given up her baker’s uniform for an ankle-length tiered skirt and tank top, her long hair tied back in a ponytail. Her bare toes curled over the doorframe.

“C’mon in. Soup’s on.”

The instant Anya crossed the threshold of the witch’s domain, Sparky shivered with excitement. He peeled himself off Anya’s neck and leaped lightly to the floor. His spadeshaped head twisted right and left, peering intently under the fringed velvet couch, around the floor cushions, into the fireplace overhung with drying herbs smelling of lavender and rosemary.

Shining eyes peered from the hallway. Named after Vernors ginger ale and Faygo pop, both Katie’s cats were fully carbonated—shake ’em up, and they went off like rockets. And they were primed and ready for Sparky’s arrival.

Vern took the offensive. The gray-striped tabby circled behind the couch, stalking Sparky’s irresistibly lashing tail. Fay, a round calico cat, stealthily crept across the wooden floor in slow motion as Sparky nosed in the fireplace.

And all hell broke loose. Sparky’s head whipped around in delight as he caught sight of Fay. Fay scrambled backward on the slippery hardwood floor and skidded down the hallway. Sparky gave chase, short legs churning in the air. Vern leaped from behind the couch, startling Sparky. Sparky rolled, Vern pounced on his tail, and the two tumbled down the hall in a series of trills and snorts.

“I wish I could see Sparky like the cats do,” Katie remarked, padding into the kitchen. Her silver bracelets and earrings jingled musically when she walked.

Anya followed, stomach rumbling. “Trust me, he’s more of a pain in the ass than you know.” She perched at Katie’s scarred butcher-block kitchen bar. Katie bustled around the kitchen bristling with low-tech culinary items: wooden spoons, glass decanters, copper pots, wire whisks. Katie was an old-school chef and proud of it. Above the sink, a kitchen witch figurine spun slowly, keeping watch over the herbs growing on the windowsill. As Katie ladled the soup into the bowls, Anya told her about Sparky’s adventures in the hospital.

Katie grinned. “You know, witches have been known to keep nearly any kind of creature—seen and unseen—as familiars. I’ve met witches who have parakeets and witches who have naiads.”

“What are naiads?”

“Water spirits. But there’s a reason a witch won’t take a salamander as a familiar.”

“That reason being?” Anya was pretty sure she already knew the answer.

“They’re entirely unpredictable and uncontrollable. . . destructive, like fire.” Katie shrugged, placing a steaming bowl of soup and slices of fresh-baked bread before her.

“They’re also said to have very little in common with humans, so their goals and our goals don’t intersect much.”

A crash echoed from down the hall. Anya covered her eyes with her hand. “Sorry.” There were few electronic items in the witch’s house that Sparky could destroy. Katie kept the number of electronic gadgets in her house to a minimum, as electrical fields interfered with her magick work. But Sparky and the cats could still find many breakable nonelectronic objects.