Sparks (25 page)

"Joseph Campbell. Yeah, he's a trip. Great guy. And he's having a rocking good time in the Afterworld."
Charon shook his head, and the air clawed through his Flock of Seagulls hair.
"Anyway... archetypes are these idealized mythological images. Remember what I said about thought giving life to form in this world?
"

"Yeah."

"Pieces of those archetypes sometimes express themselves on the physical plane. They want to be timeless and eternal... so they don't want the physical world to forget about them. Otherwise, they stop existing here, too.
"

"Gah." The whole theory made her head hurt.

"The short version is, you've been touched by Ishtar. Or the timeless archetype of Ishtar, however you want to look at it. In ancient times, this would have made you a priestess or a god's favored champion.
"

"I'm her avatar in the physical world?" Anya struggled to keep up.

"You're
one
of her avatars, probably one of hundreds over time. Maybe thousands.
"

Anya's mouth thinned. "I got possessed a few months back by a demon who had been a priestess of Ishtar."

"You'll attract synchronicities that connect you to that archetype. It's totally unpredictable, but that's the way it works.
"

"And the salamanders?" she asked.

"The salamanders need a protector. You're a formidable threat, from their perspective. You're a Lantern, and you can see into their world. You've got the touch of Ishtar upon you. So, yeah, a perfectly rational fire elemental would want to latch on to you to mother its offspring.
"

"But Sparky just didn't pick me out of a crowd. My mother gave him to me."

"Remember what I said about pieces of archetypes wandering into the physical plane? Somewhere, someone in your family picked up that salamander collar, and it found its way to you. You've been blessed by fire.
"

Anya's jaw hardened. She didn't like the idea that these bits of myth expressed themselves with conscious volition, regardless of the willingness of the recipient of their graces.

"This stuff is a lot like seeing ghosts,"
Charon explained.
"They're not part of everyone's daily consciousness. But when you can see beyond the mundane physical world, you realize the fingers of myth are all around you, touching and underneath everything. And here, on the astral plane, myths and ghosts are a lot more solid and powerful than they would ever be on your corporeal plane.
"

"Look, Charon. I was raised to be a good Catholic girl. This is just a bit too New Agey for me to digest."

"Good Catholic girls don't devour ghosts, raise fire elementals, or go gallivanting off with motorcyclers on the astral plane."
Charon snorted.
"I don't think Ishtar really cares about your upbringing. She liked you, and you became one of hers.
"

Charon peeled off down one of the side streets, and Anya held on for dear life. He pulled the motorcycle off the street in front of Michigan Central Station and shut the engine off. The silence made Anya's ears ring.

On the astral plane, the train station looked much as it did in real life: a shattered black husk. But here, throngs of people moved past the windows and along the warped steel tracks. Anya could make out hats shading faces, the swish of skirts, hear the chatter of voices and the creak of luggage.

"They're ghosts." Anya's brow wrinkled, and she scrambled off the back of the bike.

"This place is what it's always been: a way station for spirits among planes. Spirits come here before they move to the Afterworld, whatever that destination may be for them.
"

Anya followed Charon up the steps. "So... this is the gate to heaven?"

"Or hell. And anywhere in between. From here, you can travel to any plane of reality. And the spirits don't have much choice where they go.
"

They passed through the doors into the crowded lobby. Hundreds of ghosts milled. They were images of people from many eras: women in bonnets, men in zoot suits, a child dressed in footie pajamas clutching a stuffed toy. No one seemed to notice the disparities in eras, and Anya wondered how long it had taken some of them to travel here. Some stared at a clock high on the wall, waiting with train cases and briefcases. Others flashed through the darkness like minnows in a pond, racing for the train platform. Long lines snaked to the ticket counter, which was made whole and full of glass. Anya watched as a shadow pushed a scrap of paper through the window to a ghost. The ghost at the head of the line, a teenage girl, took the ticket. She looked at the stub and burst into tears.

Charon wove through the crowd like a native New Yorker in a subway station. Anya struggled to keep up with him, trotting in his wake. From his high perch, Sparky craned his head above the crowd. The bodies of ghosts pressed against her, cold as winter wind, chill fogging her copper armor. Sparky remained wound tight around Anya's neck like a spring. She shivered, and her armor rattled around her.

Charon paused at the edge of the train platform, peered into the darkness with his hands stuffed into his pockets.
"It's coming soon.
"

"What's coming?" Anya's mouth was dry. She could see light beginning to prickle the edge of the tunnel, hear a terrible sound moving toward them.

"The train. It'll take you where you need to go.
"

The roar trembled the platform, whipping up wind and a scorching heat that shimmered in the air. A blackness thick as the dark at the bottom of any basement stairs rushed down the tunnel, blotting out the weak lights strung there like a cloud moving over stars.

"It's going to hell!" Anya shouted, feeling a visceral fear rise in her stomach. That sound could come from nowhere else.

"Not hell."
Charon's voice was shredded by the black.
"But a road to it.
"

Before she could turn and make a break for it, the shadow washed over the platform, sucking all the spirits like tissues in a vacuum cleaner. Anya crouched down and clutched Sparky, remembering tornado drills from elementary school. But the ghost train pulled her in as if she weighed nothing.

She felt an exquisite moment of weightlessness, of falling. Her body lifted in its armor, and she could feel it loosen, spinning around her skin. Sparky's heaviness around her shoulders lifted, though her fingers still wound in his feet. Blackness surrounded her, punctuated only with sparks of light that she suspected came from her own retinas, perhaps a concussion. She could feel the eggs strung around her waist orbiting her like glowing planets. The vertebrae along her spine and the bones in her joints loosened, and she wondered for a split second if this was what the ghosts felt, ephemeral and fluid...

... and then she hit the ground. The blackness spat her out with a roar and a rush of wind on concrete. Her armor slammed around her as she took the impact on her left shoulder and hip, trying to shield Sparky and the eggs.

She groaned and rolled onto her back, Sparky squirming out of her grip with a huff. He stalked away, licking at his back as he shook his tail in irritation at the rough landing. Her fingers fluttered to the eggs strung around her waist, feeling nothing shattered. She blinked stupidly up at a streetlight, realizing that a soft skiff of snow had blown over the concrete. Snowflakes drifted in the streetlight like mosquitoes in summer. They melted when they touched her face and armor, tasting like iron and pollution.

"It helps if you hit the ground running."
Charon stood over her, hands in his pockets.

Anya sat up, got her feet under her, and slowly stood. Where she'd fallen, she'd scraped an angel in the snow. "Shove it up your psychopompous ass, Charon."

Charon snorted. He fished in his pocket for a cigarette. Snow didn't melt on the shoulders of his coat or in his hair, just collected there like dandruff. But Anya could smell something burning before he lit the lighter.

Her brows drew together. She was on a residential street, a familiar one. Though the aura around the streetlights was surreally soft and the numbers painted on the curb were fuzzy and indistinct, she recognized this place. She recognized the cracked macadam, the skeletons of crabapple trees planted too close to the street, the fire hydrant painted yellow. It was a place she hadn't been since childhood, a place she'd tried to forget.

Her voice was low, threatening. But a cold sweat had broken out under her armor, a sweat that had nothing to do with the snow. "Charon. Where the fuck are we?"

The flame of the lighter illuminated Charon's angular face, rendering it inhuman for an instant.
"The train takes you where you need to go.
"

"You also said the train went to hell."

"Same difference. We've all got to go through hell to get where we're going.
"

Anya swallowed and turned to see her childhood home, burning to the ground.

A
NYA FROZE
.

She froze as she had when she was a child, looking up and seeing the Christmas tree in flames. Then Sparky had dragged her out of the house. Her mother, upstairs, had been unable to escape. She'd died in the fire... the fire that had been twelve-year-old Anya's fault; her fault for sneaking out of her bedroom, for plugging the damn Christmas tree lights in, for falling asleep under its comforting glow with the salamander draped across her legs. The fire that had been ignited in the brittle Christmas tree--this was the first year they'd had a real one--by the multicolored lights that pulsed like stars.

She stood on the curb, fists clenched, unable to move. A hiccup congealed in her throat as she watched the flames lick through the broken front window of the little saltbox house. The husk of the Christmas tree shriveled through the smoke that began to peel and melt the vinyl siding. There were no sirens in the distance, no one coming. Only the crackle of flame and the trickle of the snow melting on the front lawn, draining away into the street gutters.

"This can't be real," she whispered to herself. Her vision blurred, turning orange in the glare.

Charon's voice seemed distant behind her.
"It is real. Real on this plane. Playing over and over, because you remember it.
"

Sparky growled. He stood up on his hind legs and grabbed Anya's hand in his teeth, dragged her a step toward the house.

Her suspension broke, and her firefighter's instinct ignited. Anya raced to the front door, ripping open the screen door. The wooden door was locked fast. She front-kicked the door as hard as she could, aiming high for the lockset, the weakest point in the door. The sound was deafeningly loud in the silence, like a gunshot echoing in her helmet.

Crack.

Crack.

Crack.

Her armored foot finally rattled the lockset loose. One more hit broke it open, and she stumbled against the door sagging against the frame. Sparky lunged ahead of her, racing across the rust-colored shag carpet to the fire.

"Sparky!" she screamed.

The salamander dove into the flames, and Anya's heart lurched into her throat. She'd not run more than two steps after him when he emerged from the blaze surrounding the corpse of the Christmas tree, dragging a small body by the collar.

It was Anya. Anya as a child, curled into a ball with her fists over her face. She recognized the Wonder Woman pajamas. Sparky hauled speckled ass past the adult armored Anya, dragging the child out to the cold snow of the lawn.

It was exactly as she remembered, Sparky rescuing her. This parallel world was unfolding exactly as it had in the real world she knew.

Smoke billowed over her, and Anya's eyes watered and stung. Her gaze raced up the stairs. But it didn't have to unfold exactly like the past this time.

"Mom!" she yelled.

She stumbled up the stairs, feeling the heat of fire spreading under the stairs. On the living-room wall, she could see wallpaper blackening and curling. Lack of oxygen made her vision shimmer and buzz; smoke rolled up the steps, rendering the blackness deep and total.

Over the roar of the fire below her, she could hear voices:

"You can't have her!"
It was her mother's voice, growling in the darkness.

Anya fumbled down the hallway on her hands and knees, trying to keep below the level of smoke. Her mother's bedroom was at the far end of the hall. Her armored fingertips clutched shag carpet that was beginning to melt, and she could taste the char in the back of her throat.

"She's mine."
The voice that answered was one that she'd never heard, more a low hiss than human.

Anya pressed her hands against the closed bedroom door. As soon as she opened it, she knew that smoke would flood the room. She reached up for the brass doorknob, felt it sizzle against her hand through the armor. She turned it and tumbled into the room in a cloud of smoke, slammed the door behind her.

"Mom!" Anya cried.

Her mother stood barefoot in her nightgown, fists clenched. Her long dark hair floated around her in the updraft of the heat. She turned, and her face was a mask of fear and fury.