Embers (17 page)

Some remembered portion of that silence welled up in her, now, glued her to her seat like a little girl in adult’s clothes. It welled up like a broken pipe in a flooded basement, and she bit her lip to keep it from overtaking her. She wondered if Neuman’s parents felt that silence, far away in the front row, feeling the meaningless words washing over them.

The density of the people in the pews shifted. DFD was lining up by rank to do the final walk through, filing past the casket to pay their respects. Remembering the bars on her arms, Anya slipped down the pew and fell into line.

She approached the casket, brushed her fingers across the flag draping the top. She felt no cool shadow underneath it, no bewildered ghost hovering near. The casket was empty of everything but bones and a dress uniform. She felt a stab of relief at that. Her attention slipped back to his elderly parents. Wherever Neuman had gone, he wasn’t here with them.

The priest’s voice echoed above her. “Merciful God, hear our prayer: open the gates of heaven to your servant. Help those who remain to comfort one another with faith, until we are with you and our brother forever in the kingdom of heaven. We ask this through Christ, our Lord.”

“Amen,” she whispered.

Anya walked the two blocks back to her car. The church bells rang around her, signifying Neuman’s last alarm. The pallbearers and the honor guard had loaded the casket back into the pump truck, to be taken to the Holy Sepulchre Cemetery for interment and the rite of committal. The procession had slowly pulled away down the street, headlights shining in the clear blue day. The hundreds of mourners and DFD members dispersed, as if a black dandelion had been blown, seeds drifting down the streets.

Anya paused at her car, anger bubbling in her. A piece of paper had been stuck to her windshield. She’d placed her official business parking placard in her front windshield. . . what kind of an asshole meter officer would give her a ticket for a funeral, to boot?

She stalked to the driver’s side and snatched the piece of paper from the wiper blade. Her meeting with Vross and the detectives was enough law enforcement cheer to last her a good long time. Someone was going to get this ticket crammed up their ass. . .

It wasn’t a ticket. The note, scrawled in jagged handwriting, fell open in her hand. It read:

LANTERN, LANTERN, BURNING BRIGHT

IN THE CORNER OF MY SIGHT. . .

Below the words, a charcoal sketch depicted Anya in exacting detail. She sat in the cathedral pew in her dress uniform, hands open in her lap. Her eyes were unfocused, staring into the distance, and the turn at the corner of her mouth was sad.

It was signed with the hieratic character from the crime scene, the Horned Viper. The linen paper smelled faintly of sulfur.

Anya spun on her heel, bristling. Her heart hammered in her chest, hard enough to drive more itchy wool fibers from her dress uniform into her burn. She scanned the stream of dark-clad mourners exiting the church, nearly indistinguishable from one another in their somber clothes, scattering in all directions on the sidewalk. Cars drove slowly past on busy Woodward Avenue, while others waited with their turn signals on for a break in traffic.

She’d been right. . . she
was
being watched in the church. But not by a ghost. By her arsonist.

An arsonist who knew who and what she was.

CHAPTER NINE

HE WAS SOMEWHERE CLOSE.

Anya’s gaze drifted away from Neuman’s interment. She stood on the edges of the gathering, Sparky sitting on her polished shoes, as the flag was folded by the pallbearers and handed to Neuman’s parents. She was too far away to hear what the bishop said, to hear anything but the ratcheting of rifles as the salute was prepared.

The rolling grass of Holy Sepulchre Cemetery was still green, though the many trees had turned color and begun to drop their leaves. Anya scanned the crowd assembled here in the newest part of the cemetery, the fire engines parked beyond at the access road, back at the oldest part of the cemetery with its sinking, ornate tombstones and crypts. The new section was planned in symmetrical rows with sharp, geometric tombstones, rolling away in meadow and grass to the jagged, ornately wrought stones of the turn of the last century. Those stones had been blackened by pollution and time, much of their information erased by years and acid rain. The cemetery had been begun during the park cemetery movement at the turn of the twentieth century, when graveyards had been planned to be pleasant, tree-lined places for picnics and children to play. Then, the Victorian idea of death breathing close to the living still held sway. As society chose to have less and less to do with death, the tombstones became plainer, less elaborate, and less visited.

Today, there were too many figures for Anya to single out just one, to pick her arsonist out of the crowd. The hundreds of mourners at Neuman’s interment spread over several rows. The press stood at a respectful distance, clicking a few pictures and shambling away back to the news trucks. Beyond them, mourners for dozens of other sites wandered among the stones, clutching flowers. A woman was busily clearing out the overgrown weeds on a plot fifty feet distant. A group of high-school-age students were making grave rubbings of the older stones with crayons and butcher paper. A man who might have been a historian or genealogist stepped among rows with a notebook and pen. And those were the living. The park cemetery movement would have been pleased.

The dead walked in the sun as well. In the afterlife, this place remained a park, by design. The ghost of a child sat on a stone, swinging his legs back and forth, while a girl the same age climbed a nearby walnut tree. The spirit of a young woman stretched in the shade of a pine tree, playing with her infant child. A middle-aged pudgy man sat on one half of a double tombstone, ball cap in his hand. There was no death date for his wife on the other half, and Anya wondered how long he would have to wait for company.

An elderly man’s ghost walked his dog between the rows several yards away. Sparky scampered away to play with the dog. The old man chuckled as the salamander and dog sniffed under each other’s tails and romped around a headstone.

“I’m sorry about that,” Anya said, moving to retrieve Sparky. In the hundreds of mourners at the gravesite service, no one noticed that she was gone.

The ghost of the old man laughed
. “Let ’em play. Bones gets bored. It’ll make his decade
to play chase.”

The guns fired the salute, jolting Anya back to the commitment rite. The guns sounded twenty-one times. Anya thought that even the spirits turned their attention to the scene, to the parents with no living children clutching the flag, to the riflemen with the white braid over their shoulders turning the rifles with white gloves.

But one man did not turn to look. In the distance, in the old part of the cemetery, Anya saw a figure walking in the spaces between the trees. He wore a black jacket, pants, and sunglasses. His profile was indistinguishable from this distance, but there was something familiar about the way he moved, the way he favored his right leg as he walked. In his path, the ghost of a man in a suit and a bowler hat strolled, hands in his pockets. The man seemed to quicken his pace, walking toward the spirit.

Anya slipped away from the ghost with his dog, breaking into a sprint. Sparky tore himself away from the ghost-dog and surged beside her, loping like a giant squirrel. The cool October air burned in the back of her scraped and ruined throat, her lungs threatening to reject it.

The walking man ignored her, advancing toward the ghost drifting along the edges of the tombstones. The ghost’s feet didn’t touch the ground; he wandered as slowly as a cloud, drifting down the worn path between the stones.

She shouted for the man to stop, shouted a warning to the ghost, but she could only emit a hoarse rasp. She doubted that anyone from the graveside service could hear her, much less the distracted ghost.

Too late. The man walked briskly across the grass, into the ghost. As if he walked into a wall of smoke, the ghost dissolved. The ghost shredded into tendrils that faded into the crisp blue air. A thin sigh, like an exhalation into the vault of a shell, rolled over the grass.

He’d devoured the ghost, as easily as if he’d walked through a sheer curtain. The nonchalant ease with which he did so shocked her. . . and he kept on walking, never breaking stride, heading over the hill to the crypts.

She chased him and he disappeared around a stand of trees. Winded, she ran out into a clearing dominated by an Art Nouveau limestone mausoleum. A trio of walnut trees stood before it, their branches skimming toward the ground in graceful arches. Two black iron lions guarded the arched entrance, paws lifted. Past them, the pierced iron door was cracked open.

An invitation?

Sparky’s gills bristled, and his nostrils flared. Anya unbuttoned her dress jacket, reaching for her gun. She pushed open the door, snatching her hand away at the heat still lingering in the metal. The lock had been melted away, leaving the elaborate iron piecework intact.

The daylight cast her shadow long before her. Geometric shapes from the door and high grates played on the marble floors and the tarnished brass plates on the walls. In the center of the mausoleum, a marble bench rose from the floor. A dark figure stood at the far wall, fingering a smear of graffiti paint on one of the brass plates. Sparky lowered his body to the ground in a fighting stance, growling.

“They don’t build places like this anymore,” he said. In calm profile, without the aura of fire, his face was handsome: square jaw, chiseled chin, deep-set eyes under a thick brow. His sunglasses hung on the collar of his shirt. He could have walked from the pages of a glossy magazine. “Such a shame to deface them.”

Anya laughed, a short, rasping bark. “An arsonist who’s a historical preservationist.”

He turned to look at her then, lifting an eyebrow. His left eye was a warm brown, the iris dilated in the half darkness. Over the other, a milky cataract spread over a frozen iris that didn’t react to the light. The eyebrow over that eye was slightly twisted, as if scar tissue lay beneath the perfectly groomed eyebrow. He was blind in that eye, she realized.

“One has to remove the old to make room for the new,” he said.

Anya kept her gun trained on him. “Is that why you’re setting these fires? To make room for—”

“To make room for Sirrush.” He broke into a brilliant smile, his teeth flashing white in the darkness.

“Who the hell are you?”

“I’m the Right Hand of Sirrush. Obviously.”

“I don’t care if you’re the right hand of God. Put your hands up,” Anya ordered.

“No,” he said. “I’d much rather talk with you here, privately, than in the back of a police car.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I’m not letting you out. You’re coming with me, and I’m going to frog-march you down that hill.”

He smiled. “I don’t think that you can force me to do anything.” His hand flamed brightly as a torch, and he delicately wiped away the graffiti from the brass with his fingers. He shook his hand out, as easily as if he doused a match. “You certainly aren’t going to be able to get those cuffs around me.”

Anya backed toward the door. She reached into her belt for her handcuffs. She fumbled them behind her back, wound them into the ironwork. She snapped them shut, securing the door, and tossed the key out into the grass.

“That’s interesting,” he said, crossing his arms.

She plucked her cell phone from her handbag, and dialed 911. “This is Lieutenant Kalinczyk from DFD. . . I need backup at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery. . .” She told them the location of the mausoleum, heart hammering in her chest. “Bring fire extinguishers. Lots of them.” When she hung up, her arsonist hadn’t moved.

“You’ve got about five minutes to talk before this place is swarming with cops.”

He lifted a finger, limned in red fire. “I can burn through that door.”

“Sure. Eventually. If it doesn’t offend your artistic sensibilities. But I could probably shoot you a few times first.” Sparky growled at her feet. “And you have to get through him, too.”

His face split into a smile. On any other man, in any other place, she would have found it attractive. “How did you acquire a fire elemental? I confess to being. . . jealous.” He reached his hand toward Sparky, and Sparky bared his teeth.

“Hands off the little guy.”

“Indeed.”

“What did you do with Virgil? And the ghost of the man here in the cemetery?” she demanded. Now was her moment to ask questions, before he was surrounded by the reality of Vross and his detectives at police HQ.

He shrugged. “I consumed them.”

“Why? They weren’t bothering you, or anyone else.”

He looked back at her, as if puzzled by the question. “It’s what we do.”

She thinned her lips and decided to be obtuse. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You. Me. We’re Lanterns.”

“I’m not anybody special, though at one point in time I was a Girl Scout.”

He snorted. “You see them, every bit as I do.” He approached her, and Anya leveled her gun at his dark, burning eye. “You’re a Lantern. I can sense that hole in your chest, the heat from your skin. . .” He planed his hand in the air, inches from her. “You’re like me. Burning from the inside out, like you’ve swallowed a star.” His stare was black as obsidian and pale as quartz, taking her in from head to toe. “You’ve got no idea what you’re capable of, what I could teach you to do. . .” He took another step toward her.