Flame Caller (21 page)

Xander scoffed. “They don’t care. They
take trips to the mainland to resupply all the time. They had to
have heard by now.”

He stood up quickly from the couch.
The other two turned their attention to him.

“
Are you going somewhere?”
Sammy asked. “You know you can’t go outside, right? Not right now,
at least.”

Xander nodded. “I’m not. I’m just
having trouble sitting right here and watching TV. I just need a
break. I’m… I’m going to go check on Jessica. Make sure she’s
okay.”

He didn’t turn around, which saved him
from seeing Sammy’s disapproving look. Even without seeing it, he
was more than capable of imagining her stern glare. As he passed
Sean, he swore his best friend wore a similarly disapproving
frown.

Beyond the large common room, most of
the sorority was dark. The lights were off so as not to draw too
much attention from any passing Fire Warriors. Plus, the lights
were unnecessary. The girls were all gone, long since fled back to
their respective homes. They thought getting out of White Halls was
the best decision; that somehow the violence and destruction was
isolated to a single Tennessee town.

At the end of the hall, he could see a
glow coming from underneath one of the closed doors. He knew the
room and could have found it even without the lights on. With a
smile, he realized that most of the times he had been to Jessica’s
room, the lights had been off. It was against the rules for a guy
to spend the night in a sorority, even for the order’s president.
He knew how to navigate this hallway in the dark for the same
reason he knew that the hinges on the screen door leading out of
the kitchen only squeaked if you opened the door more than
halfway.

Xander paused before the door and
knocked gently. He turned the handle and walked in before Jessica
had a chance to respond.

“
Just come on in,” Jessica
said with a frown.

She sat on her bed with her legs
dangling over the side. She wasn’t facing Xander when he came in
but he had no doubt she knew whom it was. To his surprise, she
didn’t look angry. She just looked defeated.

“
Can I talk to you?” he
asked.

“
I’d prefer you didn’t but
I don’t think what I say is really going to make a
difference.”

Xander took a seat in the wooden chair
in front of her computer desk. There was a thick cushion on the
bottom of the chair and he sank into memory foam as he got
comfortable.

He knew what he wanted to say to her
but it seemed abnormally hard to start the conversation. Jessica
looked up from where she had been staring at her hands and arched
her eyebrows with impatience.

“
Why did you come back
here, Xander?” she asked softly.

Xander shrugged, not entirely sure he
knew the answer anymore. “I just… I wanted to tell you… God, I
don’t know.”

“
You wanted to tell me
what?”

He sighed and looked into her blue
eyes. It didn’t take a mind reader to see the pain behind them. “I
wanted to tell you I’m sorry. You aren’t a bad person but I sure
treated you that way. You didn’t deserve what I said and you sure
didn’t deserve the way it ended.”

Jessica quietly reached up and wiped
away a threatening tear from the corner of her eye. She laughed
softly to herself.

“
I’m not mad at you for
breaking up with me.” She threw her head back and laughed a little
louder at the audacity of her last statement. “No, that’s not true.
I was mad at you for breaking up with me. I was pissed at you. I’m
not saying I’m perfect, because I know I’m not. But I’m a lot
better than the way you made me feel.”

Xander looked down at his hands and
fidgeted in the seat.

When Jessica spoke again, her voice
was much softer and her words thick with emotion. “But you know why
I was really mad at you? Because you dumped me for someone that
looks just like me. You basically dated me for a few years, and
then dumped me for a prettier version of me. That really sucks,
Xander.”

He reached behind him and retrieved a
tissue from the desk. As he handed it to Jessica, she used it to
completely cover her face.

“
She’s not a prettier
version of you,” Xander said as he placed his hand on her
leg.

Jessica looked over the top of her
tissue. “So you don’t think she’s prettier than me?”

“
That’s not what…” Xander
stammered. A thousand wrong answers all flooded through his mind at
the same time. “There’s no possible way to answer this that doesn’t
get me into trouble, is there?”

Jessica smiled through her tears. “No,
Xander, there really isn’t.”

Xander felt a bright flush spread
through his cheeks. He had never been so relieved to have a woman
let him off the hook.

He took a deep breath and tried to
explain. “I didn’t break up with you because some cute new thing
walked past me. It’s complicated. We’re, well, we’re kind of
destined for one another.”

Jessica furrowed her brow. “Like an
arranged marriage?”

Xander laughed. “God, I wish it were
that simple. No, I mean actually destined for one another. Like,
hand of God stuff.”

Jessica wadded up her tissue and
tossed it into the wastebasket beside her bed. She ran fingers
beneath her eyes, removing the smudges of mascara that had smeared
when she was crying. With a quick cough, she cleared her throat.
Aside from the redness in her eyes and the slight puffiness around
them, she looked like her old self again.

“
Life was so much simpler
when you were just a slacker without a future. This whole superhero
thing doesn’t suit you.”

Xander smiled, glad to see his old
ex-girlfriend back again. “You’re preaching to the
choir.”

He stood up and extended his hand to
her. “You want to go back and join the others?”

Jessica bit her bottom lip as she
stood. “Do I get to spray your new girlfriend with the fire
extinguisher?”

Xander laughed and put his arm around
her shoulder. “I’d really prefer you didn’t. She knows where I
live.”

They stepped toward the door, feeling
like old friends finally reunited. As they reached the doorway, the
ground beneath their feet lurched. Xander’s arm slipped from
Jessica’s shoulder as she dropped to the floor for support. He
stumbled forward into the doorframe as the ground beneath him
rattled like it was a rodeo bull trying to toss him off.

“
What’s happening?”
Jessica yelled.

Xander tried to stay upright but found
it harder and harder to do. He dropped to his knees and pulled
Jessica into the relative safety of the doorway.

“
It’s an earthquake…” he
said, but his voice trailed off at the implications. He’d
experienced a violent earthquake once before but that had only come
after Bart died.

The shaking stopped as abruptly as it
began. Xander climbed quickly to his feet and ran down the hall,
leaving Jessica behind. As he rounded the entry into the common
room, he saw Sean and Sammy lying on the floor with their hands
protectively over their heads.

“
Is everyone okay?” he
asked breathlessly.

They both looked up from their spots
and slowly stood.

“
I think we’re good,” Sean
said as he dusted himself off.

“
Xander,” Sammy said
nervously.

“
I know,” he replied. “I
know what it means.”

“
What does it mean?” Sean
interjected.

“
We don’t know that for
sure,” Sammy said, trying to put his mind at ease. She grabbed both
their backpacks and crammed the few items they had taken out back
into the bags. “It could just be an after-effect of everything
that’s happening across the world. We don’t know if it
happened.

“
If what happened?”
Jessica asked as she walked up behind Xander.

Before he could reply, the first
aftershock struck White Halls. The aftershock seemed far more
violent than the original earthquake. The television tumbled from
its stand and shattered on the floor. Glassware in the kitchen fell
from the cupboards and smashed on the counters and on the
ground.

A thunderous crack erupted in the
room. The drywall along the front of the house split. The seam
raced up the wall and across the ceiling, tracing its way to the
wall beside where Xander and Jessica stood. Dust poured from the
new crack, filling the room with white powder and choking the
oxygen out of the room.

The group coughed as they tried to
crawl out. In the hallway, the air was clearer, but they still
clung to the sides of the hallway for safety.

The aftershock rattled the house for
minutes before petering away to a gentle rocking. A few seconds
later, the world settled back into relative silence.

“
What was that?” Sean
blurted. “You guys clearly know something we don’t.”

Xander leapt to his feet only slightly
quicker than Sammy. “We need to get back to the island.”

“
Where are you going?”
Jessica called after them as the two raced toward the front
door.

Xander threw open the door and looked
out on a seemingly sea of rubble nearby. At least three of the
sorority and fraternity houses on the Greek Row had collapsed
entirely. Xander counted them lucky that the Tri Delta house had
withstood the shaking.

“
I need to fly now,”
Xander explained as he slipped his arm around Sammy’s waist. “I
don’t care if they can sense me.”

“
Do what you need to do,”
she replied, her lips shaking as she said the words.

Xander kicked off the ground and
launched quickly into the air, leaving Sean and Jessica standing
confusedly in the doorway. As he leveled off high above the
sorority house, a boom rocked the sky as he reached supersonic
speeds.

Night had retreated and the sun was
cresting the horizon by the time Xander and Sammy flew out over the
ocean. The waterspout was gone. In fact, the ocean was smooth and
calm, stretching to the horizon. The only thing breaking the flat
Gulf of Mexico was the Wind Warrior island, canted and resting
half-submerged in the water.

The island was in disarray. As Xander
and Sammy flew toward it, they could see a few red roofs cresting
the lapping waters. Other buildings were barely visible as dark
shadows just beneath the surface of the ocean.

The buildings that were still above
water were shattered from the impact. Narrow walls were still
standing in silhouettes of the buildings they had once been. The
roofs and interior walls were crushed into bricks of rubble,
resting within the broken frameworks.

Xander landed in a run, dropping his
bag as he went, and not bothering to look behind him to see if
Sammy was still following. He ran past a couple of houses that
still smoldered. Their exteriors were charred, the marble blackened
from heat and smoke. There wasn’t any doubt in Xander’s mind what
had happened to the Wind Warriors.

“
Grandpa,” Xander yelled
as he cupped his hands around his mouth. “Giovanni. Alicia.
Anyone.”

His screams were met with silence. He
had felt the earthquake shaking White Halls, which meant a Wind
Warrior had died. Clutching a half wall for support, Xander raised
his hand to his mouth and bit back a wave of panic. Sammy caught up
to him as he caught his breath. Slipping her arm around him, she
laid her head on his shoulder. She saw the scorched marks on the
houses around them as well and knew it had been her people that
attacked.

“
He can’t be dead,” Xander
muttered.

“
I don’t think your
grandfather is,” she answered.

He stood and wiped his eyes with the
back of his hand. “He was already so weak. If they attacked, how
could he possibly have walked away from this?”

Sammy didn’t have an answer for him,
so she leaned closer and squeezed his arm. Xander pushed away from
the wall and looked uphill. The way the island came to rest in the
water left the far end a couple dozen feet higher than where they
landed. The climb would be difficult, especially since they had to
maneuver around the rubble that lined the street. Even the
cobblestones were now slick with sea spray, leaving them slippery
to climb. Cobblestones were meant for walking on even ground. They
became awkward for climbing.