Source Fire: A Young Adult Fantasy (Arcturus Academy Book 5) Page 4

  Ryan rolled his eyes. “Just do it, Cagney. You are such a freaking Mary. Do you want to get to the next location before Nero, or not?”

  I blew out a breath and looked down at the artifact, rolling it in my palm and admiring its glistening surface. My fire burst into life, more eager than I was, it seemed, to see what would happen. Pushing aside the thought that every time Ryan told me to do something lately, I either ended up vomiting or face down on the floor, or both, I pitched up the temperature.

  Ryan nodded, a slow smile crossing his face. “Atta girl.”

  “Does it matter how fast I do this?” My eyes hardened and lit up like kerosene lamps.

  “The faster the better, we don’t have all night.”

  “Okay, then.” Like yanking the ripcord of a parachute—half because I was afraid that if I hesitated, I’d come up with a reason to calve out—my fire spiked into the thousands of degrees.

  The orb did not change, in fact, it didn’t even get hot. The metal remained cool against my blazing palm. I sent Ryan an amazed glance. The air baked with waves as the ventilation system sucked the heat up and spewed it into the night air over the coast.

  Passing four-thousand degrees, then five thousand, I stopped counting and jacked it further. Still the orb remained cool and intact. Somewhere around the eight-thousand-degree mark, I heard a sound like wind, then waves crashing against something solid.

  “Can you hear that?” My voice echoed eerily within my skull, halting in my mouth. I coughed at the strange feeling, and the cough flared my heat further as I realized some black shadow was crawling over Ryan’s face. Fingers of darkness crept over his skin like special effects for a ghost movie. He didn’t appear to notice. He was saying something, calmly, like there was nothing unusual going on, only I couldn’t hear him. I felt an urgent need to warn him about the shadow, which had darkened further, but then it swallowed him completely.

  Then it swallowed everything else, too.

  Even the forge was gone. I looked into my hand, but I had no hand. There was no longer an orb, and I was bodiless, without form or skin sensation. I was weightless, yet somehow dropping. Falling. Thoughts dissolved like butter in a warm skillet.

  A canopy of stars dipped and swayed on all sides, then I was falling through them, passing lasers of white light, tracers left behind by celestial bodies whizzing by at terrifying speed. Then I was swallowed by sudden darkness and became aware of a dramatic, bone-chilling cold; aware of it, but not suffering from it.

  A new visual emerged.

  Frost cracked the edges of my vision. Beyond and far below swirled a black sea full of ice. Water churned over the icebergs, frothing and crashing with unending, impotent rage. The sea came up to swallow me, but water became blasting snow as a hurricane of maniacal flakes battered around and through me, ripping my non-existent breath from my non-existent mouth.

  A huge white bear with snarling jaws and flashing yellow teeth loomed against the snowy backdrop. It was there and then gone, replaced by the sight of a woman’s face peeking from a ring of fur. Her dark eyes glittered with intelligence. Then she blew apart, her cheeks and lips turning into snowflakes. The snowflakes diminished, spiraling away, sparkling in the darkness like glitter.

  Fat, silver fish burst from the black velvet backdrop, flying horizontally across my field of vision, writhing and curling and vital with health and life. A silver spearhead so big it blocked out everything slashed from horizon to horizon, trailing streamers of bright red blood behind it like Maypole ribbons.

  Voices sang and chanted, emerging and receding against the background audio of an angry sea and the soft sound of snow swirling. A barrage of firelit faces, old and young, craggy and smooth, like paintings on canvas, brought to life by magic, took shape then swept by like the scenery outside a fast-moving train. Their eyes were bright with life and hope. One set of eyes flared with the orange light of a mage; I tried to call to them, but I was voiceless and they vanished along with the rest.

  A river emerged below the faces, it broke into many rivers. Many rivers became soggy tundra, what seemed like hundreds of thousands of miles of it, flying by. A fat rabbit with snow-white fur burst past on my right, running in a wild zigzag pattern, evading some unseen predator. The rabbit’s footfalls left ripples of ice-blue light hanging in the air. A growl loomed on my left, a snap of shining canines and the rabbit vanished in a plume of smoke. The smoke thickened and pulsed like a living heart, sending fat bursts of iron-gray plumes into a starry night sky, like signals.

  A raspy voice spoke slowly and eloquently behind the sound of a crackling fire; a storyteller, both old and wise. Life lessons, given in a language I didn’t recognize, poured into young imaginations. Juvenile intellect matured there, under those stories, grew wise and passed on that wisdom in a never-ending, generational chain that remained unbroken for thousands of years. I understood all of this in moments with inherent comprehension.

  And there was fire.

  At times, only flashes of it, in astounding hues of purple, pink and green. It raged past me in a line so straight it looked laid against a ruler, spewing orange and red sparks. It hissed and cast embers which burned wounds through my vision the way a cigarette leaves holes in cotton. Through those wounds lay a whole other vision layered beneath this one. I was drowned by a sense of awe as I understood that these layers of history were without end.

  Other times, fire appeared in my periphery, only to disappear when the spectacle swayed in response to my desire to see the fire better. Each time it evaded me, like a star you see only when you focus on the blackness beside it. To look meant to lose it entirely.

  There were many faces, so many, from all angles. There were animals, and wilderness, and northern lights in spectacular displays of emerald and violet.

  There came a man’s face, as clear as spring water.

  High cheekbones, a long and angular skull with fierce beauty. Deep, black eyes with coals at their centers. Thick, beautiful lips that curved with an alluring smile and snarled with a dangerous cruelty. This face came with the sound of a deep and powerful heartbeat, and crackles of fire. He was somehow more than the others, more of everything. More substantive, brutally strong, breathtakingly arrogant, and yet tender-hearted.

  If I could have sensed breath in me, he would have taken it away.

  Instead, he opened his mouth stretched in a smile that seemed like it would never stop. Then that grinning mouth opened wide. Looking straight through me, he swallowed me whole.

  “How is she?”

  Whispered words punched through the darkness like a wrecking ball through wooden paneling. Who was speaking, and why couldn’t I open my eyes? The sensation of fabric against my cheek emerged next. I was lying down, but not on neoprene mats, on a proper mattress.

  “I think she’s coming to.”

  My heart quickened at the sound of Tomio’s voice, the hope in it, the worry. It felt like drugged blood was sludging through my veins. I sucked in a deep breath and some of the lethargy lifted. I became aware of a warm patch across my torso. Lifting my eyelids with monumental effort, Tomio’s face swam into view.

  “Hey.” He smiled and shifted closer, his features zooming toward me in 3D. I clenched my eyes shut against a woozy feeling.

  “Hey,” I croaked, lifting a hand to touch my face. Was I corporeal again? Well, yes. I knew I had a body again because my arm weighed at least four thousand pounds.

  “Thank God. I’ll get Basil.”

  I recognized the other speaker now, it was Mehmet.

  The sound of a door creaking open made me want to open my eyes. A shudder took my body as Tomio reappeared. Ryan stood behind him, studying my face with the detached interest of a scientist.

  “Can you sit up? I’ve got water.” Tomio moved off screen for a moment, then returned. Cold glass pressed against my fingers.

  “Why do I feel like I was run over by an elephant?” I fumbled for the glass, my fingers slow to respond to mental commands. “Ma
ke that, a herd of elephants. Pissed-off ones.”

  “It’ll pass,” Ryan said, helpfully.

  “I’m never doing anything you tell me to do again, Ryan,” I said, lifting the water to my lips with Tomio’s help. After getting the water down, I pulled myself up into sitting and saw the reason for the warm patch on my torso. A beam of sunlight lay across my bed, but I didn’t recognize the bedroom. “Where am I?”

  “We brought you to the closest room to the CTH,” Tomio explained, then added with apparent annoyance, “Well, Ryan did. The rest of us were sleeping.”

  “How long have I been out?” The room seemed to tilt behind the men’s faces, but it settled as I drank more water. I looked down at myself and saw that my fireproof clothing looked like something unearthed from the tomb of an ancient king: ragged and fragile. Still, I was impressed it had survived at all. I tugged at the hem of my shorts and the material stretched like spider web, then broke apart. Best not to touch it, then.

  “Eleven hours or so—a good night’s sleep.” Ryan’s words were infused with forced cheer.

  Tomio shot him a warning look that made me wonder what words they might have exchanged while I was unconscious. He turned to me. “What do you remember?”

  I put the heel of my hand to my temple where a dull throb had surfaced. It felt like some tiny creature had taken up residence in my head and was mining for something… with a pick-ax. “A lot of crazy visions. Faces, voices, animals, fire.” I looked up at Ryan. “What was I seeing?”

  Ryan paused, then cocked an eyebrow. “What makes you think I would know?”

  I made an incredulous duh face at him. “The whole thing was your idea! Ow.” I covered my eyes; raising my voice was a bad idea.

  “Yeah, but this is Basil’s orb. I’ve never used it before,” Ryan said.

  “So, they all give a different experience, is that what you’re saying?” I went to drink more water and found my glass empty.

  “I’ve only… traveled through one, but I think so, yes.”

  “Traveled.” I thought about this. “Yeah, that’s a good word for it.”

  Tomio poured more water into my cup.

  “Thanks.” I downed it, and the sharpness of my headache subsided a little. I held my glass out for more. I was going to spend a lot of time in the bathroom today.

  The hinges of the bedroom door squeaked again and I looked up to see Basil enter holding a black box, his face flushed and eyes bright. He handed it to Ryan before addressing me. “Mehmet said you were up. How are you feeling?”

  “Like I partied all night, with alcohol… and drugs that don’t mix well with alcohol.” Handing Tomio the glass, I turned and put my feet on the floor.

  “Do we have anything yet?” Ryan asked Basil.

  Basil shook his head. “Not yet, but soon.”

  Feeling my soles flat on the floor did a lot to steady me. I looked up at the headmaster. “What are you talking about?”

  “The words you gave us.”

  “Words?”

  Basil looked from Tomio to Ryan and back again. “You haven’t told her?”

  “She just woke up, give her a second,” Tomio replied, exasperated.

  “I don’t need any more seconds. Tell me what’s happened?”

  Ryan took his phone out of his pocket and woke up the screen. Flicking through his device, he turned the screen toward me.

  Taking the phone, I studied the image. Amazement slowly dawned. I looked up at Ryan, “I did this?”

  “All you, baby.”

  On Ryan’s phone was a photograph of a piece of paper with the kind of scribbles on it that we’d seen in Nero’s underground hideaway. These were clearly a completely different language, but the outcome was basically the same—a mess of nonsense scattered across the page.

  “The original is being analyzed by someone Ms. Shepherd knows in London,” Basil explained, speaking quickly. “He’s not as talented as Janet, but he thinks he can give us an origin within a few days, maybe as soon as 24 hours. That, combined with the information her physicist comes up with should give us enough to mobilize.” His expression wilted. “Exactly how we mobilize is a little less clear.”

  I handed Ryan his phone, stunned speechless at what I’d produced and wracking my brains to try and remember it. “How did the pencil and paper not burn up?”

  “All the heat gets sucked into the orb, that’s when the visions start. That’s when I moved you to a counter and put a pencil and paper in front of you,” Ryan said.

  Basil headed for the door. “I’d better go. Your color is looking good, I daresay you’ll be on your feet in no time.” He gave the men a final directive. “Take care of her. We still have one orb to go.”

  I watched Basil disappear and then stared at the empty doorway. “We have one orb to go—” I parroted, marveling at how much Basil had changed his tune. He’d been so terrified Ryan would damage the orb that he hadn’t wanted to trust him with both. I couldn’t remember much about the visions I had, and nothing about the scribbling, but based on Basil’s reaction, the orb had survived the encounter just fine.

  Ryan lifted the black box with a smile. “Let me know when you feel up for round two?”

  A snake of dread curled around my stomach and settled there like it planned to move in permanently. Ryan put the box in my hands. Even opening the lid and seeing the beautiful orb within didn’t lift the unpleasant feeling.

  This one was a shining green metal, with a depressed pattern rather than a raised one. It was pretty, but knowing how badly it could knock a mage on their ass tempered the charm of it somewhat.

  I closed the box and held it back out to Ryan. “Can’t you do it this time?”

  It’s not like heating up the orb had endowed me with superpowers. I could now admit that I had half hoped it would. All I’d gotten out of the experience was an excessively trippy high, followed up by a hangover.

  Ryan’s face fell as he took the box but he didn’t seem surprised by my request. “I suppose. It isn’t very fun, is it?”

  I rolled my head to work out some of the kinks. “It’s the opposite of fun. How did you even know what to do with it?”

  Tomio moved to sit beside me on the bed. To my utter delight, he began to give me a massage, his fingers working into the tight muscles at the base of my neck.

  Ryan took Tomio’s chair, balancing the box on his thigh. “When I found the one in Iran, I was supposed to bring it straight back to Nero without touching it. I’ve never been one for following orders—”

  Tomio and I shared a simultaneous snort.

  Ryan smiled. “I figured that an orb made by a fire mage should logically reveal its secrets when exposed to high temperatures. It would be the perfect obstacle; setting the orb to awaken at eight-some-thousand degrees would ensure that only the most powerful of Burned mages could access its hidden information.”

  Tomio’s hand paused. “You can conjure eight-thousand degrees?”

  Ryan nodded. “Fahrenheit, of course.”

  Tomio tugged on my neck and looked into my face. “Can you do that, too?”

  I nodded without bothering to tease him that if I hadn’t been able to, the orb wouldn’t have given me anything. I gestured for him to continue his massage.

  He resumed rubbing and muttered, “No wonder I’m just the masseur.”

  “So, you heated it up, and voila?” I closed my eyes as Tomio’s fingers found a sore spot.

  “Yes.”

  “Weren’t you worried about damaging it? Basil thought they were super fragile.”

  “Basil is clearly not an authority, as much as he thinks he is. If he’d been more willing to take risks he might have found an actual orb instead of faffing about in his basement making plaster replicas.”

  Ryan’s contempt for the headmaster brought out feelings of protectiveness, I glared at him. “Give him a break. He approaches things like a scholar, unlike you.”

  Ryan approached things like a court jester—in my opin
ion—leaping before he looked. But in this case, it had worked out.

  “Plaster replicas?” Tomio dug into my shoulders, making me groan.

  Ryan slouched, ignoring Tomio’s prompt for more information. “But no, I didn’t worry about damaging it. If by some chance I had, then I would have told Nero that I’d simply failed to find it.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me.” I winced and let out a moan of pleasure-pain. “But there’s something else I don’t get. If the orb doesn’t give you any enhanced ability, as I had thought it might after seeing the way you fought with him inside Vesuvius, then how did your skills accelerate so quickly?”

  Ryan paused long enough for me to open my eyes and look at him. He looked… caged.

  “Nero taught me,” he finally replied.

  “After you got back from Ramsar?” I gave Tomio’s hand a grateful squeeze and rolled my shoulders. He stopped massaging my neck to listen.

  “That’s right,” Ryan said.

  “So, you didn’t acquire those abilities in Ramsar, so as far as you know, he never suspected you’d used the orb?”

  “No.”

  “And where are the scribbles you produced?”

  Ryan’s cross-armed pose tightened as he straightened from his slouch. “If I did any scribbling, I don’t remember it.”

  “Huh. So, you returned from Ramsar, no different than when you’d left, handed the orb over to Nero, and then he taught you how to accelerate the learning of alchemy?”

  He nodded. “Exactly. And shortly after that, I got Tomio’s message and realized you hadn’t been lying about Gage, and called you. Fast forward a few hours and we were slinking through a volcano.”

  “So, you learned all that fancy alchemy in… what? A matter of days?”

  Ryan’s eyes cast to the floor, then to the window.

  Ms. Shepherd poked her head in. “Ryan?”

  He perked up. “Yes?”

  “We need you on a call in fifteen minutes, can you come to lecture hall C?”

  Ryan stood. “Yes, I’ll go with you now.”