Page 3 of Darkest Magic

The sound of footsteps behind me let me know that Dad had come to the kitchen as well. He stood in the doorway, still in his work clothes, which was no surprise. He was covered in oil and bleach and probably still smelled of both. He looked older than he had that morning but I guess your only child running into a burning building will do that to you.

After a moment’s silence my mother pushed to her feet and came around to my other side, taking my arm in her strong grip, turning it this way and that as she looked for damage. Her thumb passed over a piece of ash, smearing it against my unblemished skin, before she set my arm down again as though I was made of glass and hadn’t just survived being almost burned alive.

“Scared ten years off me, you did,” she grumbled quietly.

“Sorry, Ma,” I replied.

Dad was there then, his big hand landing on top of my head and tousling my hair. It was what he used to do when I was little and his hand was big enough to encompass my whole head. I leaned into it. I may have been too old to relish such a touch, but that night I didn’t care. His hand stayed on my head for a moment and my mother reached out and squeezed my free hand, and for just a moment I let the two of them hold me up.

Then I remembered I was usually the one doing the holding.

“I should shower,” I croaked. “I probably stink of smoke.”

My mother made a sound that was a choked back sob and said, “You do smell awfully close to an arson investigation.”

“Go,” said my Dad, finally withdrawing his hand.

I went because we needed me out of the kitchen and away from where they were both staring at the burned away shirt sleeve. There needed to be space between us before they gave in and asked what happened and I either had to lie to them or sound like a mad woman.

As I pushed up from the table I looked out the front window and saw that the Walkers’ house was starting to sag in on itself, the red flashing lights of the fire truck still going and reflecting over the wet pavement. The neighbors were finally drifting away, no more drama to see tonight.

One figure caught my eye. She was standing under the dead streetlight at the end of Calder Street. She was small, standing ramrod straight with her hair pinned up. It was a figure I knew well, but for a moment I almost couldn’t name her.

Edie Mercer.

She was the Calder Street librarian. She had put books in my hands before I was old enough to understand what a library was let alone reach the counter, and she was half the reason my childhood had existed at all.

I realized that she was watching me, not the house that was still burning, but me, through the window of our own place. The back of my neck prickled and she lifted one hand. It wasn’t quite a wave, more like she was marking a place on a map.

Someone walked between us, blocking her from my sight and when they moved she was gone. Not walking away down the street, just gone, like she’d never been there in the first place. It was just the dead streetlight she’d been standing under and the red lights flashing in the dark.

I stood in the hallway, where I’d apparently moved to while watching her, smokey hair and singed clothes, and for the first time that night fear found me. The fire I could explain, the adrenaline had seen me through and I had a sentence to describe how I’d survived. But I didn’t have a sentence to explain the way she’d been watching me. Nor did I have a sentence for the way my neck had prickled with fear at seeing her.

TWO

Billie

Four days had passed since the fire and I found myself going to the library. I might not have been able to get that image of Edie Mercer standing under the broken streetlight out of my head, but no one in the library was going to ask me about the fire, especially not if I hid in the dead languages section.

Which was where I sat.

The library was on the corner of Calder Street and at the end of a building that also held a dentist who only took payments in cash and a laundromat that had gone out of business. Not exactly an inspirational place to be. The building itself had a brick front and a ceiling that leaked in at least three places that required buckets when it rained heavily enough. It smelled of dust, paper, and that specific orange cleaner that Ms. Mercer used on the checkout desk every afternoon.

The dead languages were in the back corner with some of the other subjects that no one ever used but the library kept on hand just in case. It was the perfect place to hide out precisely because no one ever came down that row unless they were lost, or, like me, hiding.

The radiator on the wall would knock twice whenever it turned on and for some reason I found that comforting. It also had an old mineral smell that came off it sometimes, which had the same effect on me as smelling the lotion my mother used.

I was nestled between a Latin dictionary and Old English: A Primer with my sleeves pulled down over my hands, playing with the mismatched cuff. That was part of the problem, the sleeve was new, replacing the one that had been burned away. The new sleeve still had its original shape and hadn’t been broken in to my tastes yet.

My mother had purchased it from the thrift store the day after the fire and repaired it for me. Both of us had pretended not to think about the fact that my arm was completely fine while the shirt had been destroyed. It didn’t help that under the sleeve it still felt like my skin remembered the heat of the flames and the way it had moved away from me.

Which was another reason I found myself in the library. Research. I doubted they had a book on why certain girls didn’t burn but I figured I could research around it and see what I found.

I had three books open all around me, one open to combustion, one looking at burn patterns, and one going into detail about smoke inhalation. To be honest, I was surprised that the small Calder Street Library had as much as they did on fires and smoke. Still, researching and looking for answers I knew I probably wouldn’t find was better than sitting at home under my mother’s unasked questions while I applied for jobs.

The book in my hands had a diagram of how heat moved through a room and showed that hot air rises, which made the sentence I’d told the fireman true. I’d stayed low for a reason. I just hadn’t known it at the time. It was a sentence I could tell everyone that they would believe, except myself.

“There you are, Billie,” Edie Mercer’s voice called out from the end of the row.