Rachel Caine - Thin Air

I tried to pull away from the memories, but Kevin’s mind was full of mines, booby traps, sinkholes of horrible things. He’d been a good kid once, or at least no worse than most boys his age, but throw in a stepmother who wasn’t above teasing him, then using him, then outright molesting him…

Kevin’s mind was a house of horrors. I was afraid to move; everything I did seemed to resonate through him, and there was no clear path, no direction. I tried viewing him in the map of lights that had become my guide, but his lights were gray, bloodred, almost nothing clean. Oh, Kevin. It broke my heart how much he’d suffered, and that the memories never left him. And no matter how careful I was, things shifted, bled, broke open as I moved.

And things oozed out, whether I wanted to know them or not.

The night she finally did it, the night she turned off the lights and crawled into bed and Did It, it all got confused; it all got mixed-up; he felt horrible and wrong and excited and sick and scared and worried, and there was something wrong with him, wrong, and what would Dad think? But Dad was asleep, drunk off his ass, and that was that, this was this, and even though he didn’t really want it he did; there was something sick about it he couldn’t control, and-

God, stop! I yanked myself away, but the memory was like tar-it wouldn’t come off. Wouldn’t go away.

– after it was over she went away and he tried to sleep but there was something wrong in his head, something he couldn’t start, couldn’t stop, couldn’t control, and it was this heat, this shimmer, and he could almost…

When he woke up, the house was on fire. His bed was on fire. And he could hear his father screaming.

And the fire didn’t burn him, it dripped out of him like sweat, and his stepmonster Yvette had shrieked at him to STOP, KEVIN, STOP, but he didn’t know how, and whatever she did didn’t help, and when he found his dad and tried to drag him out, the skin just-

I pulled free of Kevin’s horrors with a yank that I felt through my entire soul, and tried to touch as little as possible while I sped through those filthy, polluted halls of memory, avoiding the traps where things whispered and beckoned, looking…

Looking for a clean path.

And I was shocked to find that it was…me.

“She’s a bitch,” Kevin said to Cherise. They were sitting in the back of an airplane, rattling through turbulence, and he was staring at the back of my head a few rows farther up. “No offense.”

“None taken,” Cherise said cheerfully. Turbulence seemed to agree with her in some strange way, or maybe it was just the extra glow she seemed to have with Kevin. Resentment was just part of who he was, but in Cherise’s company it evaporated like ice in summer. “She can be, sure. But she’s a good person, Kev. Like you.”

He snorted. “You don’t know me.”

God, that was true. Kevin had done terrible things, but he’d also had even worse done to him. I couldn’t blame him. I couldn’t imagine the strength it had taken to get him through it in the first place.

“Besides,” he said, “she’s just looking for a reason to turn me in. She thinks I’m dangerous.”

I realized something important. Kevin honestly feared me, and he honestly respected me, too. He didn’t like me. He’d never like me, not in the way that Cherise did, but it mattered what I said to him. What I did.

I had become an authority figure in his eyes. Kevin hated authority figures, but he needed them, too. Same for Lewis…respect, contempt, and need, all rolled up in a toxic mixture together.

“You are dangerous,” Cherise said, and winked at him. She reached out and took his hand in hers. He loved the way her small fingers wrapped over his, loved the way she smelled, the way she sounded and looked and felt. Cherise was the one thing in his life that he loved without judgment.

Without resentment.

He’d do anything for her.

God, she was pretty. Not just pretty-beautiful. And she was so…bright. Yvette had been pretty, but in a cheap kind of way, a slutty way, but Cherise…when she smiled it was like the sunshine. What the hell she was doing hanging with that stone-cold bitch Joanne…

(whom he nevertheless respected…)

… Cherise was somebody he could help. Somebody warm and soft and someone who needed him , needed him. And when he got between her and trouble, she made him feel…He was too young for her, she’d teased him, but she hadn’t treated him that way, not really.

And she hadn’t used him. She’d just been…amazing. Sweet and kind and funny and normal, in ways that he’d never known before. She didn’t want anything except his company and his time. She wasn’t looking for an advantage-hell, she had guys crawling over broken glass to ask for dates. She didn’t need him.

And yet somehow she did, and that made this so much better.

And that made it so much worse, when he failed in the forest.

I’d found it. The trail turned dark again, as if Cherise’s sunshine presence had gone behind a cloud, and all his internal demons had crawled out of their holes, never more than a heartbeat away.

I took a breath and sank deep into his memory.

At first it was good. Better than good. The Wardens had given him assignments, and he’d surprised himself with how good he’d been at it. Lewis had been an ass at times, but he’d shown him stuff, and Kevin had learned, although he hadn’t wanted to let on that he was paying attention. Wasn’t cool to be too eager.

So when the Wardens dropped him on the front lines of the California fire near Palm Springs, he’d taken Cherise with him. Wasn’t supposed to; he’d been told to leave her at the base camp, but she’d wanted to come, and he’d wanted an audience, right? Somebody to impress.

So it was all his fault.

At first it had worked just the way he’d wanted. He’d been taught how to set controlled fires to create firebreaks, and he could do it faster and better than the regular firefighters, without any risk of losing control no matter how long the fire line got. He’d done a good job, a really good job, and Cherise had kept him supplied with water and sometimes kisses of congratulations, which had been pretty great. Because she’d asked him to, he’d worked with some crotchety old bastard of an Earth Warden to save some horses who were trapped on the hills, and the light in her eyes as the small herd galloped past them, safe, had been better than any sex he’d ever had.

And then it had all gone bad right around dark. First he’d felt it as an ache in his chest, and he’d thought he’d caught some smoke, but he couldn’t cough it out. There was something wrong with him, and there was something wrong with Cherise, too, and he couldn’t stop it. Couldn’t help her. It was like the whole world was dying around him; he could feel it slipping away, and…then it came back, and things had returned to normal for a few minutes, and he’d held Cherise and told her it was all going to be okay, and that had been a lie.

The fire jumped one of the breaks he’d set, so he went closer to try to stop it before it could leap treetops. He told Cherise to stay back, so he didn’t see it happen, but when he extinguished the flames racing through the dry underbrush, he turned back and…

She was on the ground, and there was a thing, a thing with its hands buried in her chest.

Kevin screamed and threw himself at it, and it batted him away into a tree. He saw blood and stars and felt something wrong with his head, like he’d hit it too hard, and when he got up again Cherise was standing there like nothing had happened.