Marjorie Liu - Within the Flames

When he could see again, he was back in his own body, crouched on the floor beside Lyssa. Hands clutched, white-knuckled, fingernails drawing blood from one another. His head throbbed, lights dancing in his vision, but when he looked up, he saw Nikola staring with hunger and fear.

I’m on fire, he realized dimly, noting the flames crawling up his arms as though far away, distant as a star. Lyssa was burning, too, the claws of her right hand flickering with a golden light that licked the air with threads of hungry fire.

Eddie tried to stand, dragging her with him. From the corner of his eye, he sensed Nikola take a step toward them — and without thinking, he set her jacket on fire.

She screamed, twisting wildly to tear off the burning red leather. Eddie hauled Lyssa across the room, following bloodstained tracks on the floor — guessing, hoping, that it would lead them where they needed to go.

Namely, to where Jimmy’s mother was being held. Though he hoped fervently that the blood wasn’t hers.

Lyssa choked down sobs as they ran. Part of Eddie was still inside that vision, and each time her voice broke inside her throat, some of his heart broke with her. Fire skipped down her body, crossing their joined hands and riding up his arm. Fire shimmered in the air. Fire, in his blood. Rising, rising into an explosion. Not yet, but soon. His control was fraying. No calm. Nothing but thunder in his head and the feeling of a knife stabbing his back.

His life, licked away by a hungry tongue.

No, not his life, he reminded himself. Lyssa’s mother.

“Down,” whispered Lyssa, surprising him. Her tears still flowed, but there was a look in her eyes that was a pure stubbornness, and that eased some of the tightness in his chest that was making it so difficult to breathe.

“Basement?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, and gave him a searing look. “You were there in my mind. I could feel you.”

He knew what she was referring to. “Yes.”

She looked away, wiping her running nose. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“My mother was a good person,” she replied, which under different circumstances might have seemed like a random response — but in this case made sense. Especially given what he knew: truths he had figured out for himself, on top of what Lannes had told him.

“She loved you,” he said.

“She gave herself up for me. And my father.” Lyssa shot him a pained look. “I couldn’t save her.”

Eddie knew there was more to it than that, but there was nothing he could say to comfort her. He hadn’t saved his sister. No words or sympathy would ever lessen the pain.

Ahead of them, the blood-sticky tracks led to a massive oak door that stood partially open. Stairs on the other side. Lyssa inhaled deeply, closing her eyes. Light leaked from beneath her lids.

“This is it,” she said, trembling. “I need to tell you something. About what I am.”

“No,” he replied, nudging her aside as he peered down the stairs. “You really don’t.”

Empty stairwell. No sounds. Eddie didn’t trust it. This had been a trap from the start, and nothing would change that. On the other hand, he had the feeling that both of them were wanted alive. No one went to this much trouble to play mind games — literal and otherwise — just to put a bullet in someone’s head.

Down the stairs, silently. Breathing controlled, and soft. Lyssa stayed behind him, her back pressed to the wall. No more tears. Nothing but cold, sharp stone in her eyes.

They still held hands: wrapped together, anchored. Heat between their palms. Fire, building in their tangled fingers. Eddie wasn’t certain he could have let go, even had he wanted.

Bloody footprints covered the stairs. A trail that led to a dark hall with a stone floor and rough rock in the walls, lit in intervals by track lights that hung from the ceiling. The air was cool and held a scent that reminded Eddie of caves he had explored with his friends: a vein inside a hill always had its own scent, like air was blood and the earth the flesh.

Lyssa pulled back on his hand. “I hear pain.”

Pain. Eddie studied the hall ahead of them, which curved. “What kind of pain?”

“The cutting kind,” she murmured, and edged ahead of him with her right hand held up, palm out, clawed fingers flexing as though she was feeling the air.

It wasn’t until they were around the curve in the hall that he heard the whimpers.

There was a door in front of him, standing ajar. It was as if seeing it opened his other senses: He could hear pain, he could smell blood. He didn’t want Lyssa anywhere near those things.

Not up to you, he told himself, beginning to sweat. She needs to do this.

And he needed to watch her back. No blade was going to touch her. Not while he was breathing. Her mother’s stabbing still made his shoulders tingle, and the idea of anyone doing that to her—

Eddie tugged on Lyssa’s hand and made her look at him. Before she could say anything, he leaned in and kissed her — with all his strength, every ounce of passion he could muster, throwing open his heart.

She leaned into him, her lips soft and hot as she grabbed the front of his sweatshirt. Desperate longing filled his chest — swelling, rising, until it was hard to breathe. He had never felt so lost in another person. He hadn’t thought it could happen to him — not so fast, with such intensity.

Alone, for so long. Alone, with friends. Alone, in a crowd. Alone, in his heart, because some pain couldn’t be shared, much less spoken out loud.

“Remember,” he murmured. “Whatever happens in there, you’re not alone.”

Lyssa loosened her fingers from his sweatshirt. “When you say things like that. .”

But she stopped, and a hard look flickered in her eyes as she looked at that door at the end of the hall. For a moment, Eddie lost himself in memories not his own, and saw knives pressed to her twelve-year-old throat. A chill raced over him.

He heard a low groan, thick and heavy with pain. Dread prickled, a sickening anticipation. The bloodstains on the floor caught his eye. Nikola’s feet had been red and sticky. Walking through that much blood. .

Lyssa took a deep breath and strode toward the door. Eddie followed.

A cold rush of power rolled over him just before they reached the end of the hall. Like water, a river, flowing against his skin. Lyssa glanced at him and pushed open the door.

Blood, everywhere. For a moment, it was all he could see. A small circular room, made of stone, and a floor that was crimson and wet, and reeking of death. He saw lumps in the blood-pool. It took several seconds for his mind to register them as bodies.

Horror wasn’t big enough for what he felt in that moment. Some primal, primitive force clawed through him, tearing at his heart, ripping his soul. He wanted to scream, but his voice wouldn’t work. He wanted to run, but he couldn’t move. Part of him died, looking at that room.

Something moved, on his right.

It was a leopard.

Again, shock filled him. The cat was huge, sitting on its haunches and grooming its massive, blood-soaked paw. Blood covered its entire coat, crimson streaks obscuring its spots. Its tongue made a low rasping sound — though it stopped, once, to stare at him with black eyes.

Lyssa stepped past him, her shoes making squelching sounds.

“How dare you,” she said to the leopard, in a deadly soft voice. “How dare you wear his skin.”

The leopard blinked, and its mouth opened in a panting grin.

Eddie heard another groan, turned — and his heart collapsed.

Jimmy’s mother was slumped against the wall. Head hanging, chest rising and falling. Unconscious, but alive. Seated in blood, though it didn’t seem as if any of it were hers. Hard to tell if that was the truth.