Pyromantic Page 9

  We kept an eye out as we walked, doing our best to stay alert. There was no guarantee that all the peryton were gone. Lock swung us by the does’ pen. They appeared a little agitated, which made sense. Even if they couldn’t see what had happened, the smell and noise of our peryton cook-off would have made any creature wary. Apart from that, though, they acted normal. Lock made sure they had water; then we left them for the moment. Since they posed no immediate danger, Alistair could decide what to do with them.

  We trudged back to the house. I made us take a moment to ruin the guest bathroom by cleaning ourselves up. Those lavender towels would never be the same, but Lock and I couldn’t walk around with gore-covered faces. Lock found a tube of toothpaste and did his best to clean the puke taste out of his mouth. Back in the kitchen, I draped a quilt over Mrs. Jefferson before I filched a banana and sat on the counter to eat it. Seems heartless, I know, eating next to a body like that. But the phone was in the kitchen and I needed to eat after all the energy I’d expended blowing up peryton. After being with the Coterie so long, you get used to a certain amount of callous-seeming practicality. Lock called the situation in to Alistair using the Jeffersons’ landline. Definitely not something we should have done, in case the human police became involved later and decided to take a look at any outgoing calls, but we needed to check in on this, and our cells still didn’t have any service.

  “Cleaning crew is on the way out,” Lock said as he hung up. “We’re supposed to see if we can find the daughter, then get out.” He rummaged through the cabinets until he found two glasses and poured us some water. “Drink.” He handed me a glass.

  “Shouldn’t we search for the girl?”

  “While I hope she’s alive, I doubt it, and either way we won’t be much help if we collapse. I don’t know about you, but I’m wiped.” Without thinking, I put my empty glass down and pulled Lock closer so I could examine his face. His eyes were tired, and the area underneath them looked smudged with bruises. He hadn’t had time to shave, and his dark stubble made his face appear pallid. He’d missed a spot of dried blood by his ear, so I grabbed the dishcloth dangling from the sink next to me and wiped it off.

  I ran my thumb along the edge of his chin, moving his face to the side to see if I’d missed anything, and he swallowed. In a breath I realized how close he was. I’d pulled him against the counter so that he stood between my legs. His hands were on my thighs for balance—I hadn’t even noticed him putting them there. This is how it always went with Lock—one minute, everything was fine and it was just me and my best friend, and the next there was this sudden awareness of each other. I could feel the heat of him under my fingers and smell the scent of his skin, and I wanted nothing more than to close the distance between us. Instead we stood, paralyzed, each of us either too afraid to move and break the moment, or too worried that if we moved, we would follow our own gravitational pull into each other.

  A few months ago, I would have made a joke, pulled away, sliced through the tension, and put up a comfortable wall. But after being away from him and feeling the sharp ache of his absence, I realized that the last thing I wanted to do was to put up anything that would make him go away again. At the same time, I’d tasted what it was like to lose him, and I was even more afraid to do anything that would jeopardize our friendship than I had been before. My apology was still fresh and the hurt I’d caused probably still raw. Now simply wasn’t the time to stray from comfortable paths. I also didn’t want any first-kiss kind of stories to involve the phrase “a few feet from a fresh corpse.” I’m particular that way.

  I pulled my hand from his chin.

  “We should go look for the girl,” I said.

  Lock nodded and stepped back, offering me a hand to help me down. My stomach sank, and I would have traded that feeling for another peryton bloodbath any day.

  8

  FINDERS KEEPERS

  WE WENT UP a set of stairs and found ourselves in the middle of a landing. Off to the left were two closed doors, while there were three to the right of us. More family photos dotted the walls, but there was nothing on or around the doors to indicate which room had belonged to the girl. Splitting up would have been faster, but we had no guarantee that the house was safe, so we explored as a team. In Coterie life, the buddy system often saves you from certain death.

  The doors on the left revealed a bathroom and a large office and craft room. Nothing tried to eat us in either, so we decided they were clear.

  The first door we opened on the right was a linen closet, and the scariest thing in that was the floral print on the sheets. After that we found the girl’s room. It was as immaculate as the rest of the house. I don’t trust people with clean houses. I don’t mean tidy houses, or that I like filth, but when nothing is out of place? No laundry on the floor or the occasional dust bunny? That’s when I start to worry. It’s not normal to live like that. Even the craft stuff was in neatly labeled bins. We kept our house pretty organized, but if you walked into my room, it looked more like something was trying to nest there than like a human dwelling.

  “Even her posters are framed,” Lock said.

  “I know, it’s kind of freaking me out.” I checked under the bed and found nothing. That’s right: nothing. Not even a rogue dirty sock or a stack of overdue library books. “I’m beginning to think these people were aliens.”

  Lock checked the closets and confirmed that they were not crammed full of junk, but also neatly organized. Moreover, the girl wasn’t in them. That left the last door. The master bedroom.

  I didn’t really want to see the Jeffersons’ bedroom. It’s terrible to glance into the private part of someone’s life, their inner sanctum, and know that they won’t be coming back to it. It feels like an invasion. Since we were physically going to walk in there, I guess it was an actual invasion. But we didn’t have a choice.

  Lock rapped softly on the door with his knuckles. “Hello? If you’re in there—you don’t know us, but we’re here to help.”

  Silence.

  Lock splayed his hands as if to say, Now what? I knocked this time, a little louder. “Hi. This is Ava. My friend Lock was the other person who just talked to you. We … we know what happened downstairs. Well, we know what happened to your parents.”

  “We’re really sorry for your loss,” Lock added.

  “Yes. Very sorry.” I nudged him with my elbow. Either he was going to let me talk or I was going to make him take over again. “We’re hoping you’re okay, and we’d like to take you to safety so someone can…” I couldn’t think of a nice way to say, Clean up this awful mess. Sweep her parents’ slaughter under a rug? Cover up the peryton snafu in the backyard? I settled on “fix things.”

  The corner of Lock’s mouth twitched, clearly mocking my word choice. I flipped him off. “Anyway, we’re going to open the door, okay? Please don’t throw stuff at us.” I reached down and turned the knob slowly, the metal chilly in my grip, then gently pushed the door open. Cold air wafted out at us, and I tightened my jacket. The Jeffersons liked their air-conditioning.

  The master bedroom was much like the rest of the house. Immaculate, cute—right out of a catalog or the set of a TV show. Large four-poster bed with a plaid cover and a hope chest at the foot of it, probably holding all the winter blankets. Reclaimed-wood picture frames on the walls—a parade of their life from wedding to baby to now. The plush carpet softened our footsteps. Again, I wished we had Ezra—he would have been able to listen for breathing or slight movements. Lock and I were somewhat limited by our human senses. It would have been useful if the girl had left some sort of trail. A bloody handprint or a closet left ajar.

  Lock stayed by the door in case she tried to bolt. Just because we knew we were friendly didn’t mean she’d come to the same conclusion. If I were her, I’d be hiding somewhere with a weapon. Despite all the fishing photos, I hadn’t seen any hunting paraphernalia, so it appeared that Mr. Jefferson had stuck to fishing. Since he was raising livestock, he might have s
ome sort of rifle about, though. Best to be careful.

  I opened the closets first. I stood to the side, reached over, and flung the door open while keeping myself out of the possible line of fire. But the closets were empty. That left the hope chest and the bed. I checked the hope chest first—just blankets and the sharp smell of cedar. Which left the bed. I couldn’t think of a good way to sneak down and peek without putting myself in danger. Except maybe crawl on top of the bed, but surely that would alert the person probably under the bed.…

  “I’m going to look under the bed now. I’d really like it if you didn’t shoot my face off or hit me with anything, okay? I like my face.” I crawled onto the hope chest and flipped the edge of the blanket up. When nothing happened, I moved slowly onto the floor. The girl was wedged down toward the head of the bed, curled into fetal position, her hands tightly clasping a pair of large scissors, probably pilfered from the craft room. Her eyes were wide, and I could see her trembling from where I was. Even in the semidarkness, I could tell she was in shock. Well, couldn’t exactly blame her. She was looking at me but wasn’t seeing me, not really. Too busy being locked into her own private little hell, I imagine.

  I don’t consider myself an unfriendly person, but I’m not exactly warm and fuzzy, either. At least, I’m not the kind of person that people automatically open up to, or little kids smile at. I’m not sure what I do that instantly marks me as suspect, but there it is. My guess was that, having been raised on the run and not really throwing down roots anywhere, I was missing some key social cue. I was fairly good at blending in, but I didn’t give off the welcome vibe. It just wasn’t one of my strengths. Still, I smiled and tried to not look off-putting. “Hey there,” I said, while waving Lock over with one hand. I wasn’t the right kind of person, but Lock was. He was one big ball of warmth and comfort—the human equivalent of chamomile tea.

  Sure enough, as soon as Lock eased down and started talking, she perked up. He introduced us again and offered our help. The girl was still out of it, but I could tell she was actually hearing Lock, whereas my voice had all been white noise.

  She let out a shaky breath, and I saw it mist out into the shadows. I looked closer and realized that the bed frame around her was covered in tiny icicles. There are quite a few things, believe it or not, that can create cold and icicles out of nothing, but—factoring in the current summer season—very few of them were mundane. And since the effect was centralized around the girl, then odds were good that she was either the cause or the target.

  Alistair could manufacture cold like this, since his element was weather. Ice elementals, yetis, and other creatures could as well, but very few of those actually look human. In fact, for a lot of them, human was a valid meal choice. The girl breathed again, and this time frost wound out from underneath her. I pushed my hand down on the carpet, and it crunched.

  “I think we’ve got ourselves a Jack Frost,” I said, lifting my hand off the icy carpet.

  “More like a Jill Frost,” Lock said. “Don’t be sexist.”

  “I always thought the term encompassed the whole race, like firebugs, or how we stopped using the word actress and just use actor now.”

  Lock gave the girl a gentle smile while continuing to argue with me. “Jack implies masculine. You know a lot of girls named Jack?”

  “No, but I’d like to.”

  The girl watched us now, her eyes focused, though she was still shaky. “You’re not police.” Her voice trembled, but she gripped the scissors tighter. She was a fighter. Good.

  “No, we’re not,” I said. “We’re Coterie.” She now had the scissors in a stranglehold, her knuckles white. Smart girl.

  “Mom made me call the phone number. For emergencies only.” She licked her lips. “But I got a restaurant. I hung up.”

  Likely she had called the Inferno, gotten the switchboard, and panicked when she didn’t know who to ask for. Alistair would have had someone investigate the dropped call. “I doubt you’ll take my word for it, but we’re not here to hurt you. Someone sent us. The place you called? The Inferno? It’s Coterie owned.”

  Lock opened his hand and the girl flinched, but all he had there was a tiny seed, which she probably couldn’t even see. The seed split, a thin green shoot appearing out of it. The shoot unfurled and grew leaves, curling like a vine around Lock’s hand and onto the floor. “Dryad. We’re not known to be killing machines.”

  The fact that Lock was part of my team, which under Venus’s reign had indeed been, essentially, a killing machine, was neither here nor there. If it made the girl feel better, so be it. Her hand eased on the scissors, but she didn’t let go. Then she shifted her attention to me. “What about you? Are you a dryad, too?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not cool like that. I’ll show you what I can do, but I want you to remember that’s all I’m doing—showing. Not here to hurt you, okay?” She didn’t nod or anything, but I decided that she’d heard me. I mimicked Lock’s open hand, but there was nothing in mine. I called a flame into my palm—just a little one—and attempted to do a flower. It would have been better to do it slowly, but I hadn’t been practicing that kind of control lately. In fact, my lifestyle tended to encourage the opposite. Instead of a delicate flower, I got a monstrous lily that rocketed up and met with the ice on the bed frame, causing it to hiss and steam. The girl flinched and leaned back.

  “What are you?” she whispered.

  “Firebug.” I killed the flower.

  “I’ve never heard of a firebug.” Her face became pinched and tense. I wasn’t surprised. When it came to frosts, they either vilified firebugs because we were their opposites and they feared that we would have some sort of extra power over them, or they chose to believe we were a figment—a made-up story their parents told to scare them. If the frosts hadn’t spent much time with others like them, the story didn’t get passed on. I thought about the house, with its neat, and somewhat off-putting, catalog charm. Mr. and Mrs. Jefferson had been playing human. They’d wanted to fit in but probably hadn’t spent enough time with actual humans to see how they lived. So they’d built their camouflage from data mined from magazines and TV. If the girl had gone to school, she’d be much better acclimated simply due to the day-to-day interaction with people. The parents could have avoided such contact.

  My guess, based on experience, was that the parents had probably immigrated in, most likely from an even colder climate, and then done their best to erase all vestiges of their origins. Accents would be ground out, old recipes forgotten, local habits and customs adopted. Whether or not the girl even knew about this transition was a toss-up. She might have been too little when it happened, or not even born yet. And with customs went religion and folktales. So no ingrained fear of firebugs.

  “Well, until tonight, I’ve never considered a peryton to be deadly, so I guess it’s a day for new discoveries.” My neck was starting to get a crick from holding my head up to talk to her. “Look, this is starting to get really uncomfortable. If I’d wanted to hurt you, I could have already. But I haven’t, because we really are here trying to figure out what happened and to get you out. So, please, do me a favor and rejoin the outside world? My neck hurts and I kind of want out of your house. You can keep the scissors if it makes you feel better.”

  Lock shot me a glare for being so blunt, but he should have known better. I’m not a negotiator. To our surprise, the girl crawled out from under the bed, though on the other side. I respected her for keeping the scissors.

  “Do you have any family?” Lock asked. “Anywhere we can take you where you’ll feel safe?”

  The girl shook her head. “Mom said all her family were dead and Dad didn’t talk to his. A falling-out.”

  “What’s your name?” My neck cracked as I rolled it to get the kinks out.

  “Kat.”

  “Is that short for something? Katherine?” Creatures can give up a lot of things, but names … names were difficult. I was willing to bet that they’d had to change t
heir last name to Jefferson, but when it came to naming a baby, old habits died hard, as they say.

  “Katya.” Her eyes tightened as she glared. “Call me Kitty and you die.”

  My money was on Eastern European descent. I nodded, then left Lock to deal with Kat while I popped back into the kitchen to call Alistair from the landline. Funny how I had always done everything I could to avoid contacting Venus but didn’t have that problem with Alistair. I didn’t entirely trust him yet, but I couldn’t deny that he was preferable to my old boss.

  “Alistair,” he said instead of hello.

  “Hey, boss.”

  “Ava. I hope you have some good news for me.”

  “That entirely depends on your definition of good,” I said. Even though I had no evidence, I was willing to bet that Alistair was pinching the bridge of his nose in that “give me patience” gesture I brought out in so many people. Taking pity on him, I gave him my report. As succinctly as I could and almost entirely without snark, sarcasm, or any of the other things I was known for. I must have been tired.

  “The cleanup crew is on its way. I’ll have to remind his tech people to clear out the phone log. At this rate, Mick is going to have to hire more people.”

  Mick, from Mick’s Sparkle-Time Cleaners, was the guy you called when a situation had to be taken care of in such a way that it wouldn’t show up on human radars. He was expensive but usually timely. “That bad, huh?”

  “I’ve been putting out metaphorical—and occasionally actual—fires all night. Boston has been doing what we expected. Some extra squabbles due to regime change, but out in your neck of the woods from Portland and up the coast, we’ve had a spike in activity. Katya seems okay?”

  “Yeah. No visible injuries. She was doing better when I left.”

  “You left her alone with Lock? Out of sight?”

  “No cell coverage.”

  “Then you should have either waited to check in or brought them with you.”