Flame Caller (19 page)

“
It’s really nice to hang
out with you again, Sean,” Xander said, changing the subject. “It’s
really nice to be hanging out with someone who just likes hanging
out with me because of who I am, not what I am.”

“
Funny is what I do,” Sean
explained. “I don’t have much of a choice.”

“
No?”

Sean shrugged. “Fat people have to be
funny. It’s a law. You have to choose to either be fat and happy or
skinny and rude. No one likes being around the person who’s angry
about being fat.”

“
I’m glad you are,” Xander
replied with a broad smile. “I’ve missed you, brother.”

“
Aw, shucks.”

Xander squeezed Sean’s shoulder before
giving him a playful shove and walking over to where the girls sat
miles apart on the seven-foot couch.

Sammy looked up at him as he
approached. Her eyes pleaded, as they had last time she and Jessica
were left alone, for him to save her from the uncomfortable
situation.

Begrudgingly, Jessica looked up at him
as well. Her gaze lacked the affection he saw in Sammy’s eyes. She
didn’t seem happy at all to see him.

“
I got to say, Jessica,”
Xander said as he sat down in one of the armchairs facing the
couch. “I’m really surprised to see you and Sean hanging out
together.”

“
You’re not the only one,”
Jessica said with a sigh. “But misery acquaints a man with strange
bed…”

“—
fellows,” Sean finished
with a smarmy grin. “You almost called us ‘bedfellows’.”

“
Shut up, Sean,” Jessica
replied. She turned back to Xander. “So, you’re a superhero
now?”

Xander flushed at her scrutiny. He
realized they hadn’t left on the best of terms but he hadn’t
expected her to be so aggressive.

“
I don’t know about
superhero,” he replied sheepishly. “I just have powers.”

“
Don’t be modest,” Sammy
interjected. “You’re one of the most powerful Wind Warriors
alive.”

Xander smiled at his girlfriend. He
knew what she was doing; she was making him look good in front of
his ex-girlfriend, giving him some confidence in a conversation he
was clearly losing.

“
Wind Warrior?” Sean
asked. “Is that the official title?”

Xander shrugged. “It’s what we’re
called, apparently.”

“
We? So there’s more like
you?”

“
Seven,” he started before
he frowns. “Six. There are six others.”

Everyone fell silent, recognizing the
pain barely concealed behind his words. Xander looked down at his
hands, his mind drifting back to everyone he’d already lost. With a
quick shake of his head, he shook away the morose
thoughts.

“
So, Jessica,” he began,
“you seem to be taking this way better than I would have
expected.”

She crossed her arms across her chest
and chewed on her bottom lip in frustration. “Well, it’s been a
whole week of strange events. My ex-boyfriend can fly. Some guys
can make fire out of the air and burned down an entire apartment
building. And, stranger than all the others, I’ve been hanging out
with Sean.”

“
And you love it,” Sean
replied with a smirk.

“
You’re an idiot,” she
said, not for the first time.

“
I’m a little more
impressed that Sammy is still hanging out with you,” Sean said. “I
would have figured she would have left you as soon as things got…
weird.”

“
Weird like, ‘I want to
have a relationship with you but I can be awkward,’ or weird like,
‘I can make tornados’?”

Sean smiled. “A little from column a,
a little from column b.”

Xander looked over at Sammy and smiled
at the nervous blush on her cheeks. He knew why she was nervous.
Despite all the time he’d spent defending her to the other Wind
Warriors, the two other people in the room had no idea that she was
a Fire Warrior. If Sean’s stories of their experiences while he was
away were any indication, they weren’t going to handle the news
well.

Jessica looked back and forth between
the two. “Someone want to fill us in?”

Xander cleared his throat. “Sammy’s
pretty okay with my powers. She’s…”

“
She’s what?” Jessica
asked darkly.

“
I’m a Fire Warrior,”
Sammy explained.

Sean arched his eyebrows but stayed in
his armchair. Jessica’s response was a bit more severe. She leapt
from the couch, putting as much space as possible between her and
Sammy. Jessica reached out quickly for the fire extinguisher beside
the couch but Xander was quicker. He kicked it aside and it skidded
across the hardwood floor.

“
Stop that,” he said
harshly to his ex.

Jessica fumed, her nostrils flaring
with anger. “You brought one of those monsters into my house? What
were you thinking?”

Sean raised his hand and waited for
her to recognize him. “No offense, but it was just a couple days
ago that you brought a Fire Warrior into my apartment.”

“
Shut up, Sean. Anyway,
how did that work out for us?”

Sean shrugged. “Semantics.”

“
She’s not a normal Fire
Warrior,” Xander interceded before the atmosphere got any tenser.
“She’s on our side. She left her kind to save my life. No can
everyone please sit down so we can talk about this like adults?”
Xander shook his head. “God, who would have ever thought I’d be the
one trying to get everyone to act like an adult? Next thing you
know, Sean’s going to be telling me that comic books are
stupid.”

“
You shut your dirty lying
mouth right now,” Sean replied quickly.

Xander looked up at the rigid Jessica.
He motioned toward her spot on the couch. “Please.”

With a frown, she slid past the
armrest and sat down, keeping her body angled as far away from
Sammy as possible. If looks could kill, Jessica would be trying to
commit genocide.

Xander looked at Sammy, who shrugged
weakly. He glanced over at Sean, who simply gave him a look that
said he understood how awkward the whole situation was.

“
Well, isn’t this
awkward,” Sean said, voicing what everyone was thinking.

Jessica stroked her chin thoughtfully
as the expression on her face rolled from betrayed to
infuriated.

“
Wait a second,” Jessica
blurted. “So when we were at the Spring Formal and the sleeve of my
dress caught on fire…”

Xander looked over quickly to Sammy.
“You didn’t.”

“
I didn’t,” she quickly
replied. “It was the candle, I swear.”

“
You tried to set me on
fire,” Jessica screamed.

Sammy stood quickly and held up her
hands defensively. “I swear I didn’t. If it happened, it was purely
a coincidence.”

“
You tried to kill
me.”

“
She does that a lot,”
Xander said, before immediately regretting opening his mouth. Sammy
and Jessica both glared at him.

“
Can we calm down?” Sean
asked. “There are apparently Fire Warriors around town that aren’t
on our side and I’d rather not draw attention to us.”

“
She tried to…” Jessica
started to repeat.

“
All right,” Sean said as
he stepped past Xander. He put his arm around Jessica and led her
out of the room. “Let’s let everyone cool down for a while and
we’ll try this again later.”

He and Sammy watched the unusual pair
leave the room before they turned back toward one
another.

Sammy smiled sheepishly. “That went
well.”

“
As well as I expected it
to,” Xander admitted. He bit his lip as he furrowed his brow. “You
didn’t, did you?”

Sammy laughed at the absurdity of the
situation. “For the last time, I didn’t. The bimbo really did lean
over a lit candle.”

Xander laughed too.

They heard the heavy footsteps on the
hardwood floor moments before Sean returned alone.

“
Jessica decided to take
some time to herself and think through everything,” he explained.
“I kind of agreed with her.”

Xander smiled. “I think you made the
right choice.”

Everyone took his or her seats once
again. Xander glanced over his shoulder at the archway, checking to
make sure Jessica wasn’t going to suddenly make a reappearance. As
he started to look back toward the others, his eyes slid across the
flat-screen television on the far wall.

He pointed to the television. “What
have I missed since I’ve been gone?”

Sean followed his gaze. “You
serious?”

“
I’ve been stuck on an
island in the middle of nowhere. No TV, no internet, not even a
newspaper. I literally have no idea what’s happened in the last
couple weeks.”

Sean looked over to Sammy as though
she were going to refute everything Xander just said. She merely
shook her head and shrugged.

“
Man, we’ve got a lot of
work to do. Turn your chair around and let’s start flipping through
the channels.”

The island should have been nearly
pitch black. It was far from the normal lights of civilization.
Even on nights of full moon illumination, little of the light
filtered through the walls of the waterspout surrounding the marble
homes.

Giovanni slammed his fist angrily onto
the windowsill as he looked out over the island. The waterspout
reflected the red glow of the flames. The air was starting to smell
of burning drywall and wooden support beams. While he stood at the
window, he heard the splintering of a roof’s support beams and the
clay tiles collapsing into the interior of the home.

He couldn’t see the fire; the flames
were being started further down the wheel’s spoke from where his
home was located. He didn’t need to see the blazes or the people
starting the fires to know what was happening. The twisting in his
gut told him that elemental wielders were nearby.

Looking out the window, he shifted his
gaze to the island’s central dome. A small bell tower stood at the
crest of the dome, its bronze bell concealed in the darkness.
Giovanni crouched, ready to leap from his window, when he heard
voices beneath his window.

“
What are you doing?” a
cloaked man growled at a younger Fire Warrior. The younger man
quivered in the presence of his obvious superior and stammered a
response.

Giovanni slid into the shadows of his
room but kept his gaze locked on the mysterious leader. The man’s
dense robes concealed every inch of skin, leaving his hands draped
with the elongated sleeves and his face hidden beneath the folds of
its protruding hood.

“
If I find you standing
around again,” the leader continued berating the younger man, “I’ll
burn you to ash.”

“
Yes, General,” the Fire
Warrior stuttered.

“
Go,” the General
demanded. “Burn this island to the ground.”

The younger Fire Warrior hurried away,
angling down the road and far away from his threatening leader.
When he was passing Giovanni’s house, an older Fire Warrior grabbed
him by the arm and dragged him toward the Italian’s
doorway.

Giovanni scowled at his bad luck. He
would have preferred to fly toward the central dome but with the
two Fire Warriors at his doorstep and the General hovering nearby,
he wasn’t sure he’d make it far before being set ablaze. He took
another longing glance at the bell tower, hoping that the others
would be alerted to the threat without him having to ring the bell,
before turning back into the interior of his room.

Unfortunately, the house didn’t have
another exit, aside from the available windows and the front door.
With both options blocked, he had little choice but to search for a
place to hide.

As he stepped into the hallway beyond
his bedroom door, he heard the front door crash open. It hadn’t
been locked and the Fire Warriors clearly had little care for the
damage done. As soon as they entered the downstairs, however,
Giovanni could hear their heated conversation. The Italian swore
under his breath. They had been burning houses, one after another.
Nearly all the houses on the island were abandoned, their living
rooms and dining rooms completely barren of furniture or other
amenities. As soon as the Fire Warriors entered the house’s foyer,
they would have seen his dining room table and paintings hanging
above the console table against the wall.