Embers (8 page)

“No worries.” Katie perched on a bar stool beside her, her bare toes splayed on the wooden rails of the stool. “Elementals will be elementals.”

“I wish mine were a bit less elemental. Can you cook up some magickal sedatives for him or something? Something to chill him out?”

Katie shook her head. “Nope. Sparky is what he is. You’re stuck with him, until and unless he decides to serve someone else. And since he seems pretty attached to you, I don’t see that happening.”

“I just wish that he came with an off switch.”

“Didn’t you get a user manual when you summoned him?”

Anya snorted. “I never summoned him. My mom gave him to me before she died.”

An aggrieved yowl sounded from the bedroom. Fay trotted into the kitchen and parked herself under Katie’s chair. The cat mewed plaintively. Katie stared down at her. “Well, if he plays too rough, bite him back.”

The cat slunk back across the kitchen linoleum to the hallway, tail kinked.

Katie smiled over her soup spoon. “It’s a good thing I don’t have kids. I’d let them eat each other and the victor would be one badass homicidal freak. There would be no point in summoning a salamander to protect the winner.”

“Sparky’s a very good protector, I’ll hand him that. Better than any Rottweiler.”

Katie gave her an arch look. “He protects you from all the things that go bump in the night, does he? Even the things you
want
to bump you in the night?”

Anya made a face. “Something like that.” She stuffed her mouth with a hot matzo ball to keep from having to elaborate.

Katie plunged in anyway. “Look, Brian knows about Sparky, right? What’s the big deal?”

“Issss complimifacated,” Anya muttered around the matzo ball scalding her tongue.

Katie rolled her eyes. “It’s only as complicated as you make it, you know. Brian’s a good guy. And he cares about you.”

Anya continued to chew.

“And he’s hot, in a geeky sort of way,” Katie continued.

Anya kept chewing. “Gnnnew subject, pllllshhh.”

“Okay.” Katie lifted her hands and backed away from the topic, silver bracelets jingling.

“Let’s talk about your symbol.”

Anya swallowed her matzo ball. “Did you find something?”

“Check this out.” Katie pulled a book across the counter, bookmarked with Anya’s arson scene photograph. The title was
Eqyptian Divination
, and featured a fearsome picture of a man with the head of a jackal on the cover. She flipped it open, and pointed to a page of symbols. The page depicted a sketched symbol of a wavy, serpentine line, with a curving upturned arc for the head. “It’s called the Horned Viper, in Egyptian hieratic script. The serpentine ideographic meaning is clear, but it’s phonetically equivalent to the letter
F
in our language.”

Anya placed the picture beside it. The figures were the same. Now she could see the sinuous curve of the serpent’s spine, that the curve of the horns indicated a head. “That backs up my suspicion that it was a ritualistic crime. Do you know of any uses this might have in ceremonial magick?”

Katie shook her head. “Egyptian magickal systems aren’t my specialty, but I’ve never heard of this particular symbol being in common use. Its purpose would depend upon the other objects in the environment and the specifics of the ritual.”

“If there were any other items used, most of them would have been obliterated.” Anya frowned. “I asked the lab to take a casting of the symbol, to see if they can find any tool marks. I want to know how this mark got impressed in the concrete.”

Katie turned the photograph around in her hands. “The viper’s head,” she said suddenly.

“Do you remember what direction it faced? The direction the viper was crawling?”

Anya ran through the building’s orientation in her mind, remembered the sun rising over the building. She thought a moment more. “South. It pointed south.”

“That’s the cardinal direction associated with fire.”

Anya cupped her chin in her hand. “I’m going to have a hell of a time trying to explain this to my superiors. Magick and forensic science don’t play well together.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” said Katie. “Those things don’t sit neatly behind their lines, never touching.”

But I need them to be
, Anya thought.
I need the balance between the known and unknown
worlds. And the unknown is leaking too far over.

“Deep breath.”

Anya lay on the floor in Katie’s spare bedroom, surrounded by books and the saffron glow of candles. An exhausted Sparky was curled around Anya’s feet, tail spilling over to one side. She could feel his warmth on her bare feet, and she wiggled her toes. Vern lazily licked his tail, while Fay had fallen asleep with her paws around one of Sparky’s gill-fronds. The familiars enjoyed Katie’s Reiki treatments as much as Anya did. Though the goal of the treatments was to balance and smooth the wrinkles out of Anya’s energy, the critters enjoyed lapping at the edges.

Anya closed her eyes. She felt Katie press her fingers lightly over her face, the heels of her hands resting on Anya’s brow. Katie’s slow, regular breathing, the crackle-pop of the candle flames, and the occasional contented sigh from a familiar were the only sounds in the room. She was conscious of a warm buzz in Katie’s hands.

Anya let her mind drift, drinking it in. She was tempted to let herself fall asleep while Katie worked. Usually, she was able to stay awake, but she felt herself pulled slowly down, down into the warm darkness of the dream she’d abandoned this morning.

Heat shimmered from the floor of the ice cave, moving in lazy transparent curtains from one side of the ice cave to the other. Anya could feel the heat washing over her skin, drawing sweat from her pores. Beside her, Sparky paced. His tongue probed the darkness, tasting. It seemed that, in this warmth, he moved even more fluidly. Amber light played over the speckles of his skin in a hypnotic swirl.

Anya looked down to see the Horned Viper sigil she’d seen at the arson scenes engraved on the slick floor. Her eyes picked out another. . . and another. Dozens peppered her path. Like an army of snakes, they were sketched in the ice, horns pointing toward the blackness. In the seething light, they seemed to squirm, to undulate in the haze.

The little girl from the pickle lady’s pop machine faced Anya. She tipped her head to one side, and a barrette grazed the shoulder of her dress. She pointed to the darkness.

“Sirrush is coming.”

Anya knelt down on the slippery floor before the girl. “Sweetie, I don’t know what that means. Who is Sirrush?”

The girl stared at her with glassy eyes. “Sirrush is fire.”

CHAPTER FOUR

ANYA AWOKE WITH A GASP and hissing from the cats and salamander at her feet. The cats, disturbed by her movement, scrambled away. Sparky lifted his head, skin on his back rippling.

Katie froze, her hands resting on Anya’s collarbones in a V-shaped position. “What did you say?”

Anya swallowed. Her mouth tasted scorched. “I didn’t say anything. I was dreaming. . . I think.”

Katie narrowed her eyes. “You said, ‘Sirrush is coming.’”

Anya sighed. “I’ve been hearing that a lot lately.”

Katie finished the Reiki session in silence, pressing her hands over her heart, solar plexus, waist, and knees. Anya turned over, dislodging Sparky, so that Katie could work the Reiki hand positions on her back. Sparky uncurled himself, his tail spiraling, and yawned. He padded away in search of the cats. Katie finished sitting at Anya’s feet, holding her bare feet in her hands with her head bowed over them. Anya’s skin prickled and buzzed. The sensation ebbed away when Katie let go.

“I’ll bring you some water,” Katie told her. “Relax now.”

Anya turned over and stretched. She stared at the ceiling. The dream felt close, still roiling in her chest. Katie’s energy work usually left her feeling calm and energized, but she couldn’t help but feel that the dream had interrupted the process, leaving a metallic taste in her mouth and a sense of unease in its wake.

Katie returned with a glass of water and sat cross-legged beside her. “Tell me about this dream.” Her freckled face was carefully blank, but Anya could see the agitation in her hands as she fingered her bracelets.

Anya sat up and drank the cool water. In between sips, she told Katie about the dreams. The telling and the water seemed to rinse the taste of iron from her mouth. Katie listened carefully, stroking the edge of a bracelet.

When Anya had finished, the witch frowned. “When I was aligning your energy, I felt something shift. It flared for a second.”

Anya blinked quizzically at her.

“Well. . . everyone’s energy patterns are unique. When I do energy work for myself, I visualize my aura as being a curtain of blue light, like a stage curtain at a theater production. I imagine pulling the wrinkles out of it and brushing the dust off.” Katie passed her hands in front of her body. “I think of your particular aura as like the surface of the sun. Dark spots, like sunspots, occasionally bubble up and I try to use Reiki to even them out. But what I felt in this last session was like. . . a solar flare. Your aura twitched and receded.”

“Um. . . so what does that mean?”

“I don’t know for sure. But, if I had to guess, I’d say it was a reflexive reaction to stress or something you felt was invading your space. It felt angry, hostile.”

“So that was the spiritual equivalent of kicking the doctor when he hits your knee with the little hammer?” Anya winced. “Sorry.”

Katie’s blue eyes were serious and Anya’s joking tone faded. “You mentioned Sirrush.”

“He’s the king of the salamanders, right? Like Sparky.” Anya envisioned a salamander wearing a crown, chewing on a light-up scepter more impressive than Sparky’s Gloworm.

Katie shook her head. “Not like Sparky. Sparky’s a fire elemental, sure. But there are different levels of elementals, a hierarchy. I’ll show you.” Katie stood up, rummaged through her bookshelves. The shelves lining the walls were in no discernible classification order, stained country cookbooks intermingled with paperback gardening books and handwritten spell notes. Muttering to herself, Katie plucked a tome from the shelf and flipped through the index.

“There are five levels of salamander. It’s analogous to the hierarchy of angels: seraphim, cherubim, archangels. . . you get the drift.” Katie handed the book to Anya, open to a page depicting a drawing of a creature that resembled a tadpole. With a long tail, no arms, and big black eyes, it looked like it could star in its own cartoon and have its own line of trading cards. “At the bottom of the list are the efts. Efts are the elemental forces behind candle flames, pilot lights. . . they’re the littlest fish and the most numerous. Paracelsus described them as being like fireflies.”

“He’s cute.”

“Yeah, well they get progressively less cute the further you go up.”

Katie flipped the page. Embedded in the text, a small lizard stood on two legs. Its arms were short, holding a tiny ember like a squirrel holding a nut. “These are newts. Newts are common in home hearths and bonfires. They’re usually the spirits or guardians of houses and they’re almost always tied to places.”

“Still cute.”

“Keep going.” Next was a larger creature with familiar proportions: long body, short legs, and loose, speckled skin. “These are the firedrakes, like Sparky. They’re also called hellbenders in some places. They’re evolved enough to have free will, but they don’t speak. They’re drawn to large fires. . . burning buildings, that kind of thing.”

“Okay, I’ll admit it. Sparky is slightly less adorable than the newts.”

“More powerful than firedrakes are the basilisks.” Katie turned the page. The creature depicted on the page was much less cute than Sparky. It stood on two legs, dusted in soot. It reminded Anya of Godzilla, covered in bumpy scales and a ridge running down its back. “They’re said to be rare, as large as men, with the power of speech. There are only few dozen of these known to exist and they’re said to spend their free time snorkeling in volcanoes.”

“Good thing for us.”

“Most definitely. And this is their daddy.” Katie flipped over the last page. “Sirrush. A dragon.” The image of a dragon churned over two pages, wings outstretched. Its fearsome horned snout leaked fire and its claws raked the air. For scale, a man was drawn the size of a house cat at his feet. Anya didn’t think the man at his feet had much of a chance against the fearsome creature.

“Shit,” Anya said.

“No kidding. There used to be dozens of other dragons throughout history in this category. Fables tell of them going underground, but the most prevalent theory is that Sirrush ate most of them around the time of ancient Babylon. The good thing for us is that he’s supposed to hibernate underground and pay humanity little mind.”

“I’m confused. I thought witches invoked Sirrush in ceremonial magick?”

“We do, but it’s really just a courtesy. Kind of like when you send your nasty great-uncle Mort who you haven’t seen in ten years an invitation to your wedding. You don’t really want him to show up, but he’ll be pretty pissed if you don’t show him the respect of asking. The vast majority of the time, he just drops a check in the mail and doesn’t show up to family events.”