The Burn (17 page)

"Seth?" a voice called to him, a human voice.

The glow of a lantern spread over the floor grate around him. "Seth? Fuck, cowboy, what the hell were you thinking? I told you to wait for me."

A cloaked figure appeared above him, crouching down to put a hand on Seth's arm. Pete's face swam in the glow, his features pinched with concern. "Yeah, okay. Don't worry. At least they didn't bust up that pretty face, right?"

"Pete."

"Yeah," he said, leaning down to unlock the handcuffs on Seth's wrists. "Your knight in shining armor, fuckwad. Why did you charge in here like that?"

"Cecilia—"

"Been fucking him for days, sport. I know you've been busy, but c'mon."

"How did you find me?"

"I had help," he said, moving out of the way to allow the light to show Julie standing in the background. "Hell hath no fury, right? Freak-o plans on having you killed tomorrow night, some timing thing, and Julie here decided she'd had enough. I came in here looking for you and she found me, told me what happened. She's with us now, understand?"

Seth nodded, holding her gaze. "Where is Miranda?"

"She can't be awakened now," Julie whispered.

"Just tell me where she is."

"Whoa ho," Pete said. "I know how you feel, sport, but now is not the time. We're outnumbered at the moment and you just got your ass kicked. We need to get you out of here, get some additional help and then come back, understand?"

Seth shook his head, staring up at the man. "I thought they got you."

"They sent some kids with knives, but you can't just be some punk who never saw real action and expect to take out a black belt in kick ass, can you? One of the kids bled, not me. I'm pretty sure it was a wound that could have been stitched up outside of an ER, but who knows. I wasn't really too concerned at the time. Anyway, he was fit enough to run away. I tried chasing him but they all disappeared into the crowd."

"Help me up," Seth muttered.

Pete grabbed onto his hand and pulled Seth to his feet.

Seth reeled off balance, accepting the other man's help to stay upright. He drew a shallow breath through his teeth, trying to ignore the pain.

"We got an extra cloak for ya," Pete said, unraveling the long garment in his hands. "Best costume ever."

Seth nodded, accepting the hood over his head, the slide of thick black fabric over his shoulders. The cloak covered him, draping all the way to the floor.

"Great," Pete said, satisfied. "No wasting time, c'mon. We've got to get you out of here."

Seth stood on his own, his vision clearing in the dim light, his balance returning. "I'm okay."

"Sure." Pete chuckled under his breath. "This way."

They ducked under compartment's metal doorway and crossed into the corridor. Julie led the way, her steps silent on the grate, her cloak floating in the darkness after her.

The spiral staircase appeared in front of them and Julie stepped onto it, ascending quickly. Seth followed her up, the metal whispering to him as he grabbed hold of the railing. The place was alive, its ghosts warming the material all around him.

They climbed past the Necromancer's vacant hallway. Cecilia's soft cries of pleasure rang in the air, lush words of encouragement offered to a lover whose intentions she couldn't possibly understand. Seth hesitated on the staircase, his fists clenching at his sides, revulsion churning in his stomach.

"Seth," Julie said softly, stopping to take one of his hands in her own. Her fingers were cool on his skin. "It may not seem like it, but this was a choice she made, okay? By tomorrow, she'll be a member of this camp. It's what she wanted from the moment she first spoke to him, the moment she realized the power he has over these people. You can't help her now."

"As if you ever could," Pete muttered behind him. "Jesus, cowboy, what were thinking with that one?"

"You're saying she deserved this?" Seth asked, his gaze on Julie. "What about you? Did you deserve it? Did Miranda?"

"He never used Miranda like this," Julie whispered back quickly. "Her name is in Gate. She is Rathvam and there are rules between them. An honorable act is permitted, no matter how gruesome. A dishonorable act is not. He could never do to her what he did here… to…"

She shook her head, tears forming in her eyes.

"To you," Seth finished for her.

"We have to go," she replied, tugging on his hand.

He followed her up the stairs and onto the upper corridor. She led him down the hallway, through the glow of lanterns and cast of shadows under the bulkheads. The markings on the wall whispered as he passed, echoing Miranda's name from the darkness. He felt her close now, her presence reaching for him.

"Miranda," he breathed, stopping in front of a closed door.

"You can't. It's locked," Julie whispered.

He held up one hand to quiet her, placing the other on the door. A welcoming murmur passed through the metal. The wheels and latches on the outside ground to life, moving of their own volition. The door unlocked and cracked open.

"What the—?" Pete swore from behind him.

"No one can do that," Julie said, shaking her head. "No one."

Seth ignored them both, stepping through the doorway and into the golden chamber beyond it. The walls glittered around him, the luster of the metal unlike any he had ever seen.

Miranda lay on an altar in the center of the room. She had curled onto her side, her face delicately tucked against her wrists. Her eyes were closed, her red hair wild over her shoulders. A draping ivory garment, so thin he could see through it, pooled around her like water.

He moved to stand by the altar and pulled back the hood of his cloak. She lay beneath him, the soft rise and fall her breathing visible through the fabric.

"Miranda," he whispered, reaching for her.

He meant to touch her lightly, on her forehead or her hair, but his fingers passed right through her. He paused, realizing in horror that she wasn't really there. Her presence was there. Her soul was there, surreal and beautiful on the altar, but the part of her that he could reach was not.

He dropped his gaze, feeling a pain deeper than anything the Necromancer and his followers could inflict with their fists. They had done this to her, put her in some place that she couldn't find her way back from.

"I'm here," he murmured, hoping that on some level, she knew.

On the wall above the altar, a golden symbol caught his attention, its scroll-like turns shimmering in the light.

Miranda.

There was no whisper, no song that came from the symbol itself, but power hid in its dimensions, strength and determination captured in its continuation of swirling circles. The altar had been placed directly beneath it.

He drew a sharp breath, understanding now.

It wasn't an altar.

Pete appeared at his side. "Christ, look at her," he whispered, grasping for Miranda's hand. His fingers passed through her and he snapped them back, alarmed. Seth said nothing.

"What is this?" Pete asked, anger sharpening his tone. "A trick? Mirrors? A hologram or something?"

Seth looked at him. "You really think this is a hologram?"

"Yeah, has to be something like that, right?"

"No."

Julie spoke from the doorway. "We have to go now or we'll lose the chance to get Seth out. They want him dead, remember? They've got this whole plan of how they're going to do it. You want to stick around for that?"

Pete frowned.

"Seth, you have to go," Julie pleaded. "You can't wake her. She's trapped in a different place."

"She's not trapped. She's lost."

"She can't hear you from where she is now."

Seth shook his head, unable to accept that.

"There's nothing you can do," Julie whispered. Walking into the room, she grasped onto his hand and pulled him toward the door. "If they find out you're gone, they'll kill us all. Seth. Please! They'll kill us all."

He looked down at her, reading the desperation in her eyes.

"You'll come back through the Gate," she murmured. "Because you're one of them. But my name is not on these walls. When he kills me, I'll be gone."

Seth grimaced, then nodded, forcing himself to turn away from Miranda. Julie led him to the door, keeping her hold on him as she peered into the corridor then headed for the exit.

No one appeared in the tight passages. No one tried to stop them as they crossed through the metal door to the decks and stairways outside.

They made it to the sand and the crowds, the giant speakers booming noise, the stages washed with colored light and glowing with fire. They left it behind, three cloaked figures leading each other into the open desert, nothing more than shadows under the moon.

M
iranda opened her eyes to the glare of sunlight. The playa stretched out before her, vast and empty. The people were gone. Their camps, their costumes, and their laughter…everything gone. Only the desert remained, its open plane of parched silt fading into the white blue horizon

Dust devils formed and dissipated in the wind, spinning excitedly along the desert floor like angry ghosts. She turned, gazing across the emptiness, following the flat line of the sand to the mountain ridge in the distance.

She was alone.

She looked skyward, fighting a dizzying wave of panic.
Where the hell am I? There's no one here. The Gate is gone, everyone gone…

The wind rose from the sand, catching the gossamer dress she wore, billowing the fabric as if she stood weightless in an ocean current. Her hair floated around her in the sunlight.

She shook her head, her lips parting as if there was something she could say, but there wasn't, wasn't anything. She was somehow lost here, banished to this empty place by an executioner in a golden mask.
You do not suffer in vain, goddess, though I am destined to kill both your lovers
.

"No," she whispered, remembering the brutal slash of his blade, the thick smell of blood in the air. "Seth. Jesus. He’ll come for you…"

Her voice vanished on the wind, the words meaningless.

She cried out, her body held tight. She couldn't be here, couldn't be helpless like this. There had to be a way back. There had to be a way to protect him. Clenching her teeth, she forced herself to breathe, to think. Seth was somewhere on the playa, the real playa.

She narrowed her gaze on the mountains, following the line of brown, rocky peaks, using her memory of them to estimate where the Rathvam camp had been.

It was difficult. The open space of the desert offered no perspective. It swallowed the distance with pale sand, presenting only a flat and empty desolation to draw from. Releasing a steadying breath, she began to walk, focused on the vacant desert ahead.

* * *

The Sheriff's deputy stood in the heat, his uniform crisp, the textured grip of his semi-automatic weapon strapped tightly into the holster at his hip. He studied Seth, his gaze flicking over the wrist brace and purpling bruise at his temple, forming a terse assessment.

"You gotta tell me what happened, Seth," the officer said finally. He held a clipboard at a slant in front of him, his pen poised on the lines of a photocopied form. "Otherwise, we can't really do anything, you know?"

Seth considered him for a moment, flexing his fingers, testing his wrist under the white fabric brace. He winced at the pain then shook his head.

The medics had cleaned him up pretty well, given him the brace and the rib belt he wore under his t-shirt, offered him a few pain relievers and some advice they knew he wouldn't take. Get seen by a doctor, go home, get some rest.

He had slept a few hours in the RV, ignoring Pete's questions and Julie's soft replies from nearby, knowing that they were having, more or less, the same conversation he'd had with Miranda. It was the conversation where she had told him the truth and he had tried to reason her out of it.

"C'mon Seth," Pete prompted. "We need help to go in there. You tell this guy what they did, how they attacked you, we get charges filed and they can go in there and shut the whole thing down right now."

Shut the whole thing down, Seth thought. And that would leave Miranda…where, exactly?

Seth looked directly at the officer. "I'm not filing a complaint on this."

"Bad decision," the officer replied.

Seth shrugged that off, glowering in the heat.

"You're kiddin' me," Pete argued. "Jesus, Seth. How hard did they hit you anyway?"

"If it's a matter of protection—" the deputy offered, shifting his weight. "We could make sure you're safe."

"It's not that," Seth answered simply.

"Then what?"

"I have my reasons."

The deputy sighed.

On the playa behind him, a man dressed in a bandana and a denim jacket climbed into the back of his pick-up truck and poured the contents of a gas can into a small metal stand with a circular tube at its top. The man lit the tube on fire, then bailed out of the truck bed and disappeared.

A moment later, the tube burst out fireball, puffing a giant smoke ring into the air. A group of onlookers whooped and shouted in salute.

The deputy looked back and frowned.

The smoke ring hovered in the blue sky above them, spiraling upward toward the sun. People stopped to point and watch, their bright costumes covered in dust.

"Well, look," the deputy said, slipping a card out of his pocket. "If you change your mind, this is my card. The Sheriff's compound sits outside the fence over that way. As you can see, my name is Deputy Warner. You can ask for me any time."

"Thanks," Seth said, accepting the card.

"And if you're not going to file complaint. I'd seriously recommend going home at this point, since your friends aren’t camped too far away and it's likely you'll see them again. I mean, unless you want to add a cast and some dental work to those white bandages of yours."

"I understand."

"Let's hope so," the deputy replied, smacking his pen against his clipboard. He turned and walked toward his truck, pausing as a line of motorized cupcakes rolled past him, the drivers wearing cherry hats and sitting under mounds of fabric icing and plastic sprinkles. They circled him and each other, sweeping lines of dust in the wake of each cupcake.