M Sellars - Never Burn A Witch

Felicity had hastily bandaged my arm while we both shrugged into clothes in record time-record time at least for someone who was not a firefighter. All the while Ben had impatiently waited in the living room where earlier he had been keeping vigil. His anxious shuffling was marbled throughout with frustrated hurry up’s and come on you two’s. When all was said and done, we were ready to go in less than five minutes. It had only seemed longer. With my friend behind the wheel of his van and the corner of the roof adorned with his own madly flickering red emergency light, traffic signs and speed limits became instantly null and void. In just less than twenty minutes from the time we left the driveway, we sped down the park access road and jerked to a halt on the grounds of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.

Now that we were here, I would just as soon have been almost anyplace else. And the more I dwelled on that desire, the more my arm began to throb.

An ashen-faced rookie clad in the uniform of the city police department was just unfurling a roll of bright yellow barrier tape when we signed in to the crime scene. The vacant look in his glassy eyes was reminiscent of inner redolence brought on by abject horror. His cold emptiness combined with the unmistakable fetor wafting from a point several dozen yards behind him acted as a harbinger of the abomination we were about to witness.

“Who’s runnin’ the scene?” Ben asked the officer while Felicity and I penned our names on the log.

“Detective McLaughlin,” he answered distantly.

I had grounded myself before leaving the van, and thankfully, for the moment at least, I didn’t seem to be having any trouble maintaining the connection. However, compared to my normal level of ethereal protections, the shield I had cast about myself was a fragile eggshell in danger of cracking at any moment. Unwanted visions were angrily demanding ingress through the porous envelope, and the fearful disgust felt by the young man was already seeping through to bathe me with frigid anxiety. What he had witnessed had brought him close to his own personal threshold, and I could feel his need to retreat.

The emotion injected itself into me, gelling in my heart and oozing outward through arteries and veins to poison my body on the whole. I had to beat back an overwhelming desire to turn and flee. My forearm tensed as blackjacks of pain threatened to crush it.

“She with the body?” Ben prodded information from the traumatized officer.

The uniformed man simply nodded as if his voice had left him and continued mechanically about the task of cordoning off the area.

Our end-on angle of approach to the south leg of the metal half-parabola had obscured our view when we arrived. Now, as we ventured past the young officer and toward the active portion of the scene, the sickening charred odor grew thicker with each step. The lighter tang of kerosene slipped through the heaviness to layer itself with the fetid stench and lift it higher on the moist night air, making it inescapable.

“Look, I know you’ve been havin’ some kind of problem with the hocus-pocus stuff, Row,” Ben stated as we walked, “so if ya’ don’t think ya’ can handle this…”

“I have to handle it,” I answered matter-of-factly as his voice trailed off even though I desperately wanted to grab his offer of escape and run as far away as it would let me.

That very thought brought another blinding stab of pain to bear on my forearm. I could feel the warmth of the blood soaking through the bandages and trickling along my skin.

“No ya’ don’t.” He stopped in his tracks and turned to me. “You’ve been way too weirded out on this whole thing, Row. I don’t know what’s goin’ on, but ya’ ain’t right, white man. Especially here lately.”

“Aye, Ben is right, Rowan,” Felicity added with more than a hint of personal fear in her voice. “You aren’t balanced, and you know it. Maybe we should wait at the van.”

“You can wait there if you want,” I offered. “But I don’t have any choice in this.”

“The hell you don’t!” my friend admonished. “I just gave ya’ a choice, and I’m damn near ready to make it an order. I should cuff your ass and park ya’ in a squad!”

“Do it now then because that’s the only way you’re going to stop me.”

“What the fuck? Stop you?” he appealed angrily. “Just what the hell has gotten into you, Rowan?”

“I was summoned here, Ben,” I told him with absolute conviction. “Just as I was summoned to all of the other scenes.”

“You were what?”

I thrust my arm out for them both to see. Though the fabric of my shirt and jacket covered it, I knew all they would need to see was my bare hand. In the wildly choreographed splash of lights, the crimson rivulets of fresh blood streaking it were plain to see. I winced as yet another stab of pain twisted through the hot flesh.

Felicity closed her eyes and sighed.

Ben merely shook his head and muttered, “Jeezus, white man.”

“Do you think I WANT to be here?” I asked. “Do you think I actually WANT to see what this sick bastard is doing to innocent people? Trust me, I’ve let the thought of running from this investigation cross my mind more than a few times tonight. I didn’t invite these marks to appear on my arm. Someone on the other side who is trying to tell me something is putting them there, and if I can believe the last dream I had, that someone is Kendra Miller.”

“But what is she trying to tell you?” Felicity pleaded.

“I still don’t know. But I can tell you this-every single time I’ve thought about turning and running from this, the pain has intensified. Judging from the bleeding, my guess is that this wound has gotten worse, not better. The last time I didn’t pay attention to one of these marks, I ended up with pool water in my lungs.”

“And Christine Webster had been drowned…” my friend admitted quietly.

“This time he killed with fire again. I really don’t want getting my attention to progress to that step if you know what I mean.” I fell silent and allowed my arm to drop back to my side. Ben and Felicity simply stared at me. After a moment I let out a long sigh. “I’m here for a reason. I was summoned. I don’t have a choice until I figure out what that reason is.”

“You still aren’t grounding very well,” Felicity softly intoned with a razor sharp edge of seriousness in her voice.

“I know,” I answered simply.

“So what about all the Twilight Zone stuff?” Ben questioned. “You mentioned somethin’ about not bein’ grounded the other day when you had that backlash thing. Isn’t it dangerous?”

“It can be,” I assented.

“Aye, it can, so I suppose you leave me no choice either then.” Felicity shook her head. “Someone has to be there to keep you from going too far.”

As we rounded the base of the Arch, the picture of the horror was revealed to us at first in small, disorganized sections. It took several moments of pondering the scene before the pieces began to interlock into a meaningful panorama.

Disheveled detectives in various modes of dress, most looking as though they were just dragged kicking and screaming from the warmth of their beds, were milling about in a loose group. One of the throng was interviewing a pair of uniformed officers, and another was talking to a park ranger who looked to be just this side of hysterics.

CSU technicians focused their attentions on a lamppost at the landing of the stairs that led down from the park grounds above. Flash units added their intense brilliance to the dancing lightshow as techs took pictures of the metal pole as well as the marred concrete surrounding it. White residue caked itself to sections of the post and spread out across the walkway to partially obscure a spray painted rendering of the ever familiar Monogram of Christ. A few feet away, a tented marker inscribed with the number two rested on the ground next to a carelessly abandoned and recently used fire extinguisher.