I pick up the pace, my phone light crawling over stretches of arsenic-green grass and unsightly stones stamped with barely identifiable letters and numbers, each one another dead end. But the numbers are growing now—211, 309, 454. To my left, a pack of the most sinister firs I’ve ever seen loom like evergreenwolves, sniffing at the edges of the property, their teeth bared. I veer instinctively away, but when I find myself among the seven markers—701, 714, 729—I know I’ve overstepped. With a sigh, I start toward the trees, the stone I’m searching for probably nearby. As I draw close, I make out an indentation where a marker might be, but as I approach, it widens, blackening into a gaping hole. The dirt around it is fresh, still damp against my fingers. Someone dug here recently. I peer into it, unable to see much, though it looks deep, if not particularly large. The remains, whatever state they were in, are gone.
The trees crowding close make me nervous, and my light passes over the marker, practically round from overgrowth, just beyond the hole.
666, AV.
The same from the note card.
I should crumple with relief, but grave robbers aren’t exactly my idea of a good time. And as I kneel near the marker, to one side of the cavity, my phone picks up something just beyond the lip of the stone, white and waxy in the black, thin and vertical. I let the beam glide up and realize with a flash of horror that I am staring at a candle, stuck into the earth.Unlit.
“No!” I say, rising, taking a step back. Glancing around, I know they must be watching like before.Not this,I think. Anything but this. I can’t. Iwon’t. Not again. Noteveragain. Electricity is one thing. That part of my magic never hurt anyone. Butfire…Both my abilities may have saved me in their way, but fire did far more damage. In the end, it wasn’t worth the cost.
When there’s no response from the night or the trees, I try again. “I will not!”
The wind stills preternaturally around me, and the air vibrates with expectation. An illicit hush falls over the cemetery.
And my phone goes out.
Dumbfounded, my eyes claw at the night, desperately searching for a shape to cling to, a way to orient myself. But I am in the belly of the beast, swallowed, and there is nothing I can pick outin this fibrous black. I imagine the earth trembling beneath my feet, sucking me under, holding me hostage, my screams filling the void the Fathom left.
Frantic, I shake my phone helplessly, again and again. The battery was fully charged when I arrived, that I know. I had it plugged in during the drive so this wouldn’t happen. Looking up, the sky shimmers above me, strung with pearls, and I exhale, a little relief sinking in, certain that without this touch point, I would have given over to delirium.
But it’s short-lived. A beat of footsteps races past, close but unseen, and a thwack follows across my cheek, shunting my head to the side. A flash of my grandfather shoots across the back of my eyes, his meaty palm, wide as a board and twice as hard, striking my adolescent face. The shock that followed, the violence, the flame. The shadows gliding over the walls of my grandmother’s bedroom. It takes a moment to realize I’m not there.
I cry out, placing a hand to my cheek, the slap as astonishing as a blast of ice water. “Who did that?” I bark, but the night is quiet again, the graves mute.
I turn one way and another, afraid to step away from where I know I am, or at least where I last saw myself. Afraid that one wrong move will send me tumbling into an open grave. If I stumble in this ferocious dark, I don’t know where I’ll end up. And there is too much danger out there, too many negative outcomes, all pressing too close. I think of Levi, of how poignant his warning had been. How stupid I was to ignore it.
At my feet, I know there lies an answer, one I do not want to face. The candle waits. The fire inside me crackles. “No,” I tell it.No,I remind myself.Never.
This time, I hear the steps coming, getting faster as they near. My eyes strain at the nothingness, and I feel a yank against my collar, bringing me down with a thud on my back, knocking the wind from my lungs. I gasp for breath as I am raked backward across the grass by an unforgiving force. And I feel the paralysis I felt that night, the way my grandfather jerked me like a jointeddoll until he had me where he wanted me, how weak and pointless my protests were as he tore at my clothes, stripping them in layers to my beating heart.
But once the oxygen returns, I remember where I am and pull my arms from my coat and scramble to my hands and knees, scrabbling forward, feeling with my fingers until they reach the marker and the candle, the lip of open ground.
The temperature is dropping against my exposed skin because like a moron, I only wore a black T-shirt under the trench, having dirtied the black sweater I wore the other night. I grip the pillar of wax as tears gather at the corners of my eyes. I’m clutching this candle like it’s my only lifeline, and for all I know, right now it is. But it’s the last one I want to use.
The pounding of feet begins on my right, and I turn, but then, impossibly, I hear it on my left. I flip the other way, blind but searching, and the sting lances my right arm like a demon cutting the gloom. I shriek and put a hand there, feel the welt lifting beneath my fingers, but the skin is dry, unbroken. I don’t know what struck me, but I know it hurt. And in that moment, I feel the sting of my grandfather’s belt against my skin as he hastily undressed, so eager to violate me further, to claim what he believed was always his, in this room that was always hers. As if he wanted my grandmother to see, to know—even in death, he could still have her. She would always belong to him.
In the distance, I hear laughter, and it brings me back to the present. It rides the wind, dark and merry. Someone is enjoying this.
Do it,the voice inside me demands. Where were you, I want to ask, when I was on the Ave, when Calvin was in my face, when I was dumb enough to get out of the car tonight? “No,” I growl.
I don’t even hear the steps this time. Maybe because the scream sounding inside my own head drowns them out. Maybe because they were letting me hear them before. But I feel the blade against my other arm when they pass, frigid and fiendishly sharp, parting the skin in a clean slash. And I feel the sticky wet well of bloodwhen my fingers go to that place, when the scream passes my lips, when the tears fall from my eyes. It is the same feeling as that night, the gash in my head weeping as he attacked me, his last blow before I gave up and the magic took over, the last thing I remember feeling before my mother burst in, before flames licked their way up the walls, before heat consumed us all.
The laughter is lower this time, longer.Nearer.
I will my mind back into the cemetery and suck in a deep breath.I will die here, I think,in this cemetery for the damned.All because I wouldn’t light a fucking candle. They will slice at me until I bleed out.
Do it!The voice hammers on repeat inside me, filling up my skull, shrieking in the cavity of my chest.Burn!
When the air begins to stir and I can just make out vibration beneath my knees, I know they are coming again. I curl into myself, dig my fingers into the grass, the upturned earth, roaring at the taper before me, hearing the voice rip through me. “Buuuuuuuurrrrnnn!”
There is a crack like atoms splitting and the night my family died explodes behind my eyes in a series of cosmic flashes—my grandfather’s weight pinning me against the vanity, perfume bottles crashing to the floor as he pawed at me. The war cry my mother sounded when she found us, the way it blew him against the wall, hatred sparking in her eyes as I snatched up my clothes, barely escaping intact. The sound of my own sobbing as the curtains lit in gossamer tongues of white flame, quickly spreading to the chaise, the bedspread, anything soft or vulnerable in that place. The slam of the bedroom door as I stumbled down the stairs and out the front door, diving into the flowers like an ocean I could cross to safety. A great blast of air hitting my face and heat blistering my back. Turning to see the house engulfed, wings rippling out with flames like an angel of vengeance.
And there, through the fire-bright glare, the woman standing, made of living heat, watching me with immortal eyes.
Go!The voice had sounded in my head then.Run, Jude!AndI had, with everything in me. But not fast enough. Not before the gas line caught and the explosion slashed a hole in the fabric of reality, and I felt my feet lift off the ground.
But this time, it’s not my feet that lift off the ground. When the energy shoots through me and lights up the taper, spewing a ten-foot flame from the wick like a Roman candle, and the night around me erupts in a ball of fire, it is the bodies of my tormentors, the two illuminated in the flash, that are blown aside just before they can make contact with me. And then everything condenses into a single, docile flame, dancing at the end of a wick before my face.
