Take up more space.
My own words. From a table at Bayberry House, with margarita salt on my lips and three women who saw me.
I closed my eyes.
Felt the fire. Not as an attack—as recognition. The same heat that lit napkins and boiled tea and radiated from my skin during hot flashes. The same energy Lori had been teaching me to control.
Mine, I thought.This is mine.
The flames shuddered.
I reached out—not with my hands but with that thing behind my sternum, the muscle I’d been learning to flex—and I pushed. The fire resisted, wild and hungry, and for a second I thought I’d lose it the way I always lost it, the heat surging past me toward everything combustible?—
But I held on. I pictured the dimmer switch. Not down this time.Sideways.
The flames bent.
They pulled back from me like a tide retreating from shore. The air around me cooled—not cold, but breathable. The fire didn’t go out. Itmoved. Away from me, pressing toward the walls, the ceiling, clearing a pocket of space around me like a bubble in boiling water.
Not perfect. Not controlled. But mine.
Sirens. Red and blue lights through the smoke-blackened windows. The crash of a door—the side entrance—and voices, shouting, boots on hardwood.
Tony came through first, arm over his face, and behind him Jill with both hands outstretched. Her telekinesis ripped a fire extinguisher off the wall bracket and sent it arcing through the smoke. Lori and Tammy pushed in behind them. Chemical foam hissed against the walls.
“I’ve got this,” I said. My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. Someone who controlled fire.
I focused. Pictured the dimmer switch. Turned it down.
The flames died. Not all at once—they shrank, retreated, guttered out section by section until the room was dark and smoking and ruined but no longer burning. The walls were scorched black. The ceiling had collapsed in one corner. The solvent still stank.
But the fire was out. And I’d done it.
Tony scanned the room. Me, untouched, standing in the center. The scorch patterns curving around my feet like water around a stone. His jaw worked once. Twice. He filed it—whatever it was he’d just seen—and the cop took over.
“Where is she?”
“Claudia. She ran. Through the front?—“
He was already moving, radio in hand, barking instructions. Then he stopped. Turned back. His eyes found mine through the haze, and the look on his face wasn’t shock or confusion or any of the things I expected.
It was belief.
Three seconds. Then he was gone, boots hammering down the hallway, and Jill caught my arm as the adrenaline drained and my knees decided they were done for the evening.
“The lighter,” I managed. “She planted George’s lighter. We have to find it.”
Jill didn’t ask questions. She turned slowly with her hand up—the lighter rose from the floor, and floated gently to the windowsill.
“Chain of custody,” she said. “Maintained.”
Despite everything—the smoke in my lungs, the shaking in my hands, the fact that I’d almost died for the second time in a month—I almost laughed.
They caught Claudia at the end of Marsh Road. She’d made it two hundred yards on foot before Tony’s car cut her off, blue lights painting the scrub pines. I didn’t see the arrest. I was sitting on the bumper of an ambulance with a blanket around my shoulders and a cup of tea Tammy had produced from the void—the woman defied the laws of physics when beverages were concerned.
Lori was beside me, one hand on my wrist, that healing warmth seeping into my pulse. She hadn’t said a word since they’d pulled me out. She didn’t need to. Her hand said everything.
Jill paced in a tight circle near the ambulance, phone pressed to her ear, already talking to someone about evidence preservation protocols and crime scene integrity. She was shaking. Her pacing left a trail of small objects floating in her wake—a pebble, a pen cap, someone’s dropped gum wrapper—all drifting six inches off the ground behind her like anxious satellites.
