Flame Caller (12 page)

The room was growing far too dark to
sit in with any practicality. Despite his eyes adjusting to the
dark fairly quickly, the room seemed morose and—despite his
hesitation to admit it—haunted.

He walked toward the windows. He had
closed the shutters on the windows that morning when he went to
train to keep out the virtually constant sea spray. He had made the
mistake of leaving his windows open after first arriving on the
island and quickly realized that leaving them open here was like
leaving his car window cracked during an unexpected summer shower.
His clothes had been drenched that afternoon and he hadn’t made
that mistake again.

He hadn’t bothered to open the windows
again after training that day because he was too distracted with
dinner preparations.

As he approached the shuttered window,
he caught a whiff of something unexpected. The smell wafted through
the closed shutters—an odd combination of campfire and sulfur. His
blood ran cold as the smell of rotten eggs permeated his room. He
had smelled that before when encountering Fire Warriors.

As his hand was closing over the
shutter’s handle, a sharp pain stabbed into his gut. The pain
buckled his knees and he moaned as he slid down to the floor. His
head lowered toward the hard ground as it felt like the knife in
his stomach was twisted sharply upward, aiming for his
heart.

He had felt the twisting in his guts
before whenever a Fire Warrior was using their abilities nearby but
this pain far exceeded anything he’d experienced before. Moaning,
he reached upward and searched for the windowsill. He fought the
urge to curl into the fetal position on the floor and wait for the
pain to pass. If he was feeling this exquisite of pain, it could
only mean that the island was in trouble.

Finding the windowsill with his hand,
Xander pulled himself up to his knees. A dim light was visible,
flickering through the closed slats. The smell of smoke was
stronger now and he could see wisps of gray ash seeping through the
closed window. Reaching out, he knocked the shutters
open.

Dancing flames were visible through
the cloud of putrid smoke that billowed down the street in front of
his house. The vibrant oranges, reds, and yellows illuminated the
island in ghostly shadows.

He couldn’t see the source of the
flames through the black cloud but he didn’t need to. There were
only a few houses on the island that were occupied and only one
that was that close to his own house.

Sammy’s house was on fire.

Despite the pain, Xander leapt from
the window without a second thought, buoyed by a sudden updraft of
wind. The smoke stung his eyes and burned his throat. He shifted
the direction of the wind around him, blasting the smoke away from
him. It obeyed his command and parted as he flew forward, but the
smoke curled angrily around behind him, enveloping him in its
consuming darkness.

The smoke parted before him as he
approached Sammy’s house. The heat was intense, rolling from the
upper floor of the building in scorching waves. Flames licked the
roof as it poured through the slats of her closed shutters on her
bedroom window.

Xander started to approach, pushing
the smoke aside with the wind he generated. The angry flames
reacted to the extra flow of air by flaring brighter. The clay
tiles of the room cracked in the sudden increase of heat. He saw
the red shingles fall from the building in shattered clusters and
smash into the ground below.

Panicked, he pulled up short and
pulled his buffeting wind in closer to his body. He didn’t know
what had happened to Sammy but he couldn’t risk harming her in his
poorly conceived rescue plan.

“
Sammy,” he screamed into
the night’s air but the roar of the fire stole his
words.

The smoke around him whipped
chaotically, signaling the arrival of the other Wind Warriors.
Giovanni emerged first, being the fastest flier of the group.
Xander turned to the others as they approached, signaling for them
to keep their distance.

He turned back to the house and saw
the shutters on her window catch fire. They glowed a vibrant amber
as the paint peeled away, quickly turning from wood to smoldering
embers.

“
Sammy,” he yelled
again.

He could hear the warning calls of his
aunts and uncles as they gathered behind him. They saw something in
his body language that was only just now occurring to Xander. He
knew Sammy had to be inside. Whether she was inside with another
Fire Warrior or by herself, he didn’t know. Frankly, he didn’t
care. Sammy was in trouble and he was going to save her.

Xander tilted forward and launched
toward the closed bedroom window. The others called cautions behind
him but he ignored them as he flew to her rescue.

He crossed his arms defensively over
his face moments before he struck the burning shutters. The
shutters exploded in a spray of sparks and wooden splinters as he
crashed into the room. The wind faltered with his concentration and
he tumbled onto the bedroom floor. He tumbled across the floor,
slamming into a chair and writing table before sliding to a
halt.

The smoke was choking inside the
bedroom. He could barely see his hand in front of his face as his
eyes watered where they burned from the ash. Xander tried to keep
himself low to the ground, remembering that the oxygen in the room
would remain on the floor.

“
Sammy,” he choked. He
tried to yell for her—to find her in the gloom—but the smoke burned
his lungs every time he tried to inhale.

He crawled along the floor, his
fingers digging into the cracks between the marble tiles. The
closer he grew, the more he could see that the bed was completely
swallowed by swirling flames. The light from the fire was intense,
to the point of being blinding. Whatever had started the fire on
the bed had been insanely intense.

Xander’s eyes watered, not just from
the smoke. Sammy had gone home to go to bed. With the bed so fully
consumed, he feared the worst. He wondered again if it had been
some plot by the Fire Warriors, as retribution for her
betrayal.

He stared as long as he could at the
swirling inferno on the four-poster bed before finally looking
away. Blue dots danced in his vision, after effects of staring into
the intense light. He blinked furiously to wash away the artifacts
floating in front of his eyes. As the blue lights began to clear,
he saw her smooth, exposed legs sprawled beside the bed.

A coughing fit overcame Xander as he
crawled toward her prone form. His body felt heavier than it had
when he first entered the room. Dragging himself while staying low
to the floor was growing increasingly more difficult.

As he rounded the clawed foot of the
formal bed, he saw Sammy collapsed on the floor. Her breathing came
in labored gasps and her eyes fluttered in her
unconsciousness.

Her alabaster skin practically glowed
from an inner light. She didn’t seem harmed aside from the scorched
nightgown that clung feebly to her body.

He reached out for her leg and wrapped
his fingers around her soft flesh. Smoke curled from between his
fingers and he heard the searing of his palm. He screamed in pain
and quickly withdrew his hand, cradling the injured hand to his
chest.

Her skin was burning from within, like
her skin had been transformed to a living ember. He glanced down at
his hand and saw blisters forming from his brief
contact.

The ceiling above them creaked loudly
as the flames weakened the wooden supports. Plaster poured from the
ceiling in shards as the roof began to crack from the heat. Xander
cringed at the sound but was just as quickly overcome by another
coughing fit.

Another massive crack split through
the room. One of the wooden beams collapsed, crashing into the bed.
The canopy crumbled on the four-poster bed. The beam striking the
smoldering mattress sent a wave of sparks into the air. They stung
Xander’s skin as they settled over him.

He knew that there wasn’t any time
left to dawdle. Despite knowing the anguish he was about to be in,
Xander pushed to his feet and rushed to Sammy’s side. When he was a
foot away from her unconscious form, his skin began itching from
the heat. His tunic steamed as it threatened to catch
fire.

His hands paused just before her body.
With a shallow breath, he slipped his hands beneath her and lifted
her off the ground.

Pain lanced up the length of his arms
as he cradled her close to him. Tears welled in his eyes as he
staggered under his burden. He knew immediately that he should have
just carried her within a bubble, rather than lift her himself. He
hadn’t wanted to risk his wind powers further weakening the support
beams.

Xander ran forward as quickly as his
burning lungs would allow. Without breaking stride, he leapt
through the open window and plummeted toward the ground.

Sammy slipped from his grasp as they
fell. His hands were numb and unresponsive as he tried to reach out
for her. Reaching through the pain, he concentrated enough to
create a pillow of pressurized air beneath them both.

They struck the bubble with incredible
force, shattering his concentration. The wind had slowed their
decent but hadn’t come close to stopping their fall. They both
slammed into the cobblestone street and rolled away from the
burning building.

The aunts and uncles converged on the
pair. Alicia threw a bucket of water over Sammy. A cloud of steam
erupted from her skin as the cool water connected with her body.
They all stepped away in surprise.

Xander tried to stand but moving his
head left him horribly disoriented. He felt a trickle of blood
seeping from his hairline, running down over his left eye. He
reached out toward Sammy and saw the angry red blisters spread
across his hands and forearms.

“
Sammy,” he moaned as
darkness crept into the corners of his vision.

Try as he might, he couldn’t keep his
head aloft as his world went black.

Xander looked at the gauze wrapped
tightly around his hands. His fingers were protruding, their skin
only pink as opposed to his fiery red and blistered palms and
wrists. He knew he was lucky. The burns turned out to be
second-degree burns, which meant the blisters would eventually
subside and the skin would return to its pink. There probably
wouldn’t even be any major scarring, except for the fact that he
would probably never tan quite right again.

There was acute pain that radiated up
his arms and seemed to pool around his elbows. He occasionally
shook his arms as though the action would drain the pain back down
to his hands where it belonged.

He flexed his fingers as he walked
down the narrow hall that led to the back bedroom. The whole
building had been converted to a makeshift hospital long ago;
Xander assumed it was when the island was full. They had offered to
move his grandfather to the hospital but he knew it would hardly
make a difference. He was comfortable where he was and Xander saw
no reason to move him.

Sammy had been set up in the back room
once she could be moved. It had taken buckets of water to cool down
her body. She had originally glowed like a smoldering ember but had
returned virtually to normal by the time they carried her away from
the burning house.

As he slid down the hall, the friendly
Italian greeted him. Giovanni nodded to Xander as they met in the
narrow hall, each turning sideways to allow the other to
pass.

“
How is she?” Xander
asked, pausing before the long-haired man.

“
She’s awake but hasn’t
said more than two words to anyone. Maybe she will talk to you
instead?”

“
Is she hurt?”

She hadn’t seemed injured when Xander
carried her from the heart of the flames but giving her a thorough
examination wasn’t possible as he was dangerously close to
succumbing to the smoke.

“
Nothing that I could see
but I gave her a certain degree of modesty during my exam. She
doesn’t seem to be suffering, if it makes you feel better. Alicia
offered to come by after she tends to your grandfather. She can
check her a bit more… thoroughly.”