Wildcat Fireflies (5 page)

“Maybe I should go in without you?” Tens asked.

“Maybe.” I shook my head. I had that peculiar, particular tingling feeling. I felt myself being drawn to the special death window. When a soul needed me, my soul became a portal to the afterlife. I’d be towed as though caught in a riptide, to a different plane where I stood side by side with the dying until they crossed over. I didn’t know what that place was called and I didn’t yet know how to go about my physical life while my spirit was otherwise occupied. It was possible, but it took more skill than I’d developed. Which meant Tens was given the duty to protect and care for my body in situations just like this. I felt the soul heading straight for me. “Tens?” I heard ambulance sirens nearing.

I felt him catch and steady me. I’d gotten much better at this part, but if I wasn’t prepared for a soul to seek me, then it was a bit like riding waves and having a spectacularly large one pick me up and carry me.

Immediately, I was on a balcony overlooking a busy cityscape. I recognized it as Paris, from the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Elysées in the distance. I went from a crisp January night to a spring afternoon on another continent.

“H-hello,” I stuttered, remembering to breathe. What I did here I tended to do in the real world, and breathing was one thing I wasn’t yet ready to let go of.

“What’s happening? Why am I in Paris?” A gray-bearded man of indeterminate middle age rocked back and forth next to me. “I’m supposed to be cleaning the gutters.”

“Does anyone look familiar?” I asked, evading his questions.

“I haven’t been here in years. Who are you? Oh my God, that’s my mother, my grandfather; they’re waving at me. But they can’t be—”

“Meridian!”

I heard my name and flinched, turning toward the source.

I
leaned down through the window, almost falling onto the balcony next to the man. Auntie called up to me from the streets below, her arm slung around a woman barely older than me. She might once have been pretty—in a modern Scandinavian-princess way—but it was hard to tell under the pocked, ridged scars covering most of her face and disappearing down her neck. Wounds like that made the flesh look like melted wax. While Auntie appeared fully vital, the woman flickered from solid to milky transparent. Entreating, Auntie continued mouthing words
up at me, but if she was yelling I couldn’t hear her now over the traffic rushing in the streets below.

I pushed myself farther into the window, disobeying all of Auntie’s rules about staying grounded on my side. I had to get to her. I had to hear her and talk to her and hug her. I didn’t know if I’d ever see her again. I strained, feeling the casing gouge my sides, getting closer, ever closer, but heard the man instead: “My mother—there’s my mother—I’m going to see my mother.”

Immediately, I was back in Tens’s arms, holding on to his shoulders with a white-knuckled grip. My side throbbed and I grabbed for my skin because it felt as if I’d been stabbed. No blood. I’d see a nasty bruise later, though. I had to remember that wounds I received on that side came into my body on this one. That was part of the danger of turning sixteen without guidance; souls inadvertently killed Fenestras who didn’t know what to do.

The ambulance raced away, through a night already quieting around us.

“Auntie—she was there,” I gasped, wanting Tens to know, to help me make sense of the unknowable. I folded into him, letting him support my weight completely.
What was she doing there? How was that possible? Who was the woman?

Tens carried me to a bench and set me down, cradling me against him. I blinked my eyes until they focused. When would I get used to this process?

“Breathe, Merry, deep breaths,” he reminded me, forceful yet gentle.

I tucked my head farther under Tens’s chin, inhaling the spicy clean scent of his soap. If only I could stay in his arms forever like this. Seconds became minutes, until my equilibrium returned.

“Better?” he asked. Anyone else might think he sounded lazy, but I knew this was his way of trying to not pressure me. The tension in his thighs and jaw belied any laissez-faire.

I made eye contact and held it. “She was right there.”

“Auntie? Really? I thought you were mumbling nonsense.”

I rushed my words together. “Uh-huh. Right there. I haven’t seen her. Not since—” Tears choked off my words. I hadn’t seen her since before Perimo’s melting, before the fires, the caves. “Before” seemed so long ago.

“Easy. Steady.” He threaded his fingers through my lengthening locks to rub light circles on my scalp and pulled me closer. “This one seemed harder than the others.”

“Maybe.”

“Do you think it was because of Auntie being there?”

I shook my head negligibly.
If only I knew
.

“Did she say anything? A ‘Hi, how are you’ or something else?”

“I couldn’t hear her. I tried to read her lips, but it felt like a different language.” I broke out of his hold. Suddenly his arms were too tight, making me claustrophobic. From perfection to cage, in a matter of breaths.

He simply waited and watched, letting me move.

The pain in my side subsided to a dull ache. “There was a woman with her. Youngish. Deformed or hurt.”

“How?” He rubbed his mouth, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

I frowned and tapped my fingers against my cheeks. “No one’s ever been hurt. That’s so weird.”

“What is? Auntie being there, or the woman?”

“Both. People on the other side are usually themselves, only more so. Better, perfected versions of them. No matter what their bodies look like when they die, they’re always perfectly formed on that side of the window.”

“What do you mean by ‘more so’?”

We hadn’t talked about this before. I hadn’t realized it, paid attention to it. My trips to the window were blinks of time, mere seconds in this world. Fuzzy when I came back, like a dream on the edge of my consciousness.

“Meridian? What do you mean by they’re more so?” Repeating his question, Tens dragged me back.

“Like they’re timeless. Recognizable, but not the same. They’re the age my people recognize them as, but I get the sense that they’re not really that age.”

“Okay.” He clearly didn’t understand.

I pretended not to notice because I ran with a thought. “No one’s ever been hurt there.”

“And the woman was hurt?”

“She flickered in and out like candle shadow. And she leaned against Auntie. A lot. Like Auntie was holding her up completely.”

He nodded. “I see what you mean. Auntie couldn’t have held up a gnat at the end.”

“Right. She was herself in those streets, old, and
exactly how I remember her, but she was also not like I had ever seen her. She was brighter. Stronger. Bolder.”

“If everyone looks better and not hurt, then why show you someone who isn’t?”

“Maybe she was trying to tell me something? I need to go to the hospital.”

Tens leapt up. “Are you sick? I thought that was getting better? What do you need? Medicine? Ginger ale?” Tens was used to seeing me near death after an episode of delivering a soul to the window. I knew it would take time for him to understand that the critical danger had passed when I successfully transitioned Auntie with no ill effects to me.
I think
.

“No, no, no. I need to find someone ready. I need to get back to Auntie.”

Tens huffed. “Merry, that’s dangerous. You can’t go seeking out dead people.”

“Dying, not dead. Besides, that’s my cosmic duty. Get with the program.” I flashed him a smile. His worry was cute and baffling when it came to this.
Protect me from the Nocti, not my job
. Neither of us knew much about his destiny as a Protector. It was tricky to know where to place my boundaries or when to let him step in. I didn’t want to be the damsel forever. I wanted to return the Protection as an equal.

“Right. But—”

I cradled his face in my hands, trying to impart confidence and understanding. “Stop worrying. I won’t do anything stupid.”

“Where have I heard that before?” He finally chuckled and wagged his head. He gestured at the studio behind us. “Glass balls or hospital first?”

I felt like saying “eeny, meeny, miny, mo.” Both places felt necessary and fundamentally important. But we were already here and the balls glowed above me like streetlights. “Balls.”

Why did they light up around me? And how did we get them to stop before anyone noticed?

“Meridian, look up.” Tens pointed above our heads at the green street sign.

“Meridian Street?”

“As signs go, that’s a good one.”

“The right choice in the scheme of things?” Knowing that they—whatever name given to the Divine—existed and communicated unnerved me. I wished they’d simply learn English and text me instructions.

As we opened the glass door and entered the studio, the B-52s pulsed out at us, their voices inviting us enthusiastically to the “Love Shack.” The space was all industrial pipes and brick, but somehow calming and warm.

“Greetings and salutations! May I help you?” A rotund giant of a man perched on a ladder, his back to us. He tied ribbons through what appeared to be an orange glass octopus dangling from the ceiling.

I shrugged at Tens and said, “Good evening, we’re here to find out more about the—”

“The Spirit Stones, yes?” His voice was a rumble of an earthquake, powerful and commanding.

“Uh—no, um, the, um, Witch Balls.”
Spirit Stones? Same thing, or yet another freaky thing I knew nothing about?

He clambered down the ladder like a chimpanzee. His teeth flashed in a smile lost somewhere under more hair on his face than ever might have been on his head. If the ceilings of the studio were the regulation eight feet instead of industrial height, he wouldn’t have needed a ladder. He dwarfed Tens by a foot, and several hundred pounds. “Same, same. Oh, look at you.” He studied me and walked around us in a circle. “Wondrous. Simply prodigious. I’ve been a-calling for you. Never believed the lore. Not really. A story. Only a bloody
brilliant
story.”

Initially, I grabbed my hands to steady them against his intense scrutiny. I wasn’t scared, no—but uncomfortable, definitely. His enormous biceps framed a chest the size of a compact car, so his study intimidated, yet didn’t scare. He was almost like a huge, goofy Great Dane that had no sense of its size and impact on people.

“What are you doing?” Tens asked, trying to put himself between the giant and me.

“You’re a Window Light, the Good Death, aren’t you?” he asked, squinting at and staring past me at the same time. I think he would have touched me if he could have moved Tens, but instead he merely invaded my personal space.

“Um?” I backed up a step involuntarily.

Oblivious, he turned to Tens. “And you, you’re her Guardsman, correct? Am I right? You both are the reification, the tangible manifestation of the Spirit Stone idea.”

What are these terms? Window Light? Good Death? Guardsman? And do our answers matter or not?

He continued squinting at me like he needed glasses. “I am gifted to meet you. I have traveled the world and heard pieces, but it seemed incompossible. I should have known better. Then,
wham
, this morning I woke feeling a dog lick my face and I knew you’d appear today. I knew it deep in here.” He thumped his stomach.

Curiouser and curiouser
. “A dog?” I squeaked, as Tens pushed me behind him.

The man reached out a hand as if to pet me, but answered my question instead. “I don’t have a canine. I’ve never owned a pet; they never travel well. This wasn’t only a furry intruder, it was a wolf—a huge wolf with these golden eyes. Huge tongue. Capacious. May I serve you coffee? Juice? Grape, perhaps?”

How does he know that?
I wasn’t sure he needed any more caffeine and I wasn’t about to swallow anything until I knew more.
Color me a pessimist
. “Um, no thanks.” I didn’t feel like running, or hiding, or standing and fighting. There was no threat—not if I stopped and only listened to my heart. Fenestras love the flavor of grapes; I’d drunk grape soda or juice my whole life. When I met Auntie, she, too, chose grape, and she told me of our preference. She couldn’t explain why, but it ran in the family. That and broccoli. Yes, broccoli.

“Oh, my Lord in heaven, my apologies! Where are my manners? My name is Rumi. Like the poet? I’m a glass artist, see? I blow glass and lampwork.” He waved his
hands at the warehouse around us. “I’m a historian, mystics scholar, rugby man, chef du jour to my friends, a reformed world traveler. A Renaissance man of elder times.” He acted as though we’d been invited to a party, old friends merely getting reacquainted.

Rumi shook his head as if he were his own Magic 8 Ball. “You do have that glin about you. Peripherally. Fascinating. Sit, please. Sit down. Soda? Beer? Are you of age for alcohol? Does that affect your abilities? I can’t imagine it matters, but is your gift temperamental? I wonder if it says anything in my Nain’s papers about that. I’ll check, shall I? How long have you known this? What brings you to town? Unless, do the Spirit Stones work that well? Can they beckon out of town? Are there more of you coming? Should I go to the market? How about accommodations? Do you take care of that, or shall I?” He went on with his questions, clearly not needing, or waiting for, a response from either of us, his childlike enthusiasm irresistible.

With each question, Tens melted a degree. I picked a chair of wrought iron made to resemble ivy leaves and vines. This place felt magical, but not in a weird, fictional sense, more in the inexplicable.

“Who is Nain?” Tens stood behind me, his legs spread and his weight balanced for anything, arms uncrossed but ready. His face had shuttered to blank.