Embers (16 page)

Anya laid the back of her hand against his face, almost afraid to touch him. His skin felt cool and stubbly, not warm and smooth like the night in the computer lab. Sparky reached up through the bars of the bed to rest his head on the crook of Brian’s elbow.

“Hey, Brian,” she whispered.

Only the whir and beep of the machines answered her. She leaned down, brushing his cold ear with her mouth. “I know you’re in there. You come out when you’re ready. I’ll be waiting, okay?”

She stepped back, letting Katie and Max crowd into the tiny space. Katie said a prayer over him and Max’s lip quivered.

She stepped beyond the curtain to find Jules waiting. She wrapped her arms around her elbows. “I can’t believe this is happening to him,” she croaked.

Jules looked past the curtain. He tried to be reassuring, but she could hear the fear in his voice. “He’s gonna be okay. Really. It’ll just take time.”

Anya bit her lip. “I hope you’re right.”

“How are you doing?” Jules shifted his gaze to her.

“I’m fine.” She brushed off his concern. “It was just more. . .” She paused. The exorcism of the demon had been much more than she’d bargained for: more powerful, more unsettling, and a helluva lot more painful. She finally watered the thought down for Jules.

“It was more involved than I thought it would be.”

Jules nodded sympathetically and his expression infuriated her. He had no idea what he asked, time and time again.

“Look, about that case, Anya, when you have time, can you—”

“No,” she snapped, and her voice crackled. “No, I will
not
, Jules. No more of this.”

Jules’s face creased in shock and she stabbed a finger in his chest. “Brian’s lying in a hospital bed, and all you can think about are the damn cases. You’re going to keep screwing around with things you don’t understand until someone gets killed.”

Jules backed up a step.

“Don’t ever ask anything of me again, you hear me? I’m not going to be part of this any longer. You’re on your own.”

She stomped down the tiled hallway, away from him, away from DAGR. Her shoes echoed very loudly in that shocked, silent space.

The funeral was on a perfectly clear blue day the Sunday after Neuman’s death, a vivid autumn sky with nary a breeze to ruffle leaves from the few straggly trees on the street.

Anya stood on the sidewalk, dressed in her black wool dress uniform. It was the most formal appropriate outfit she owned. Gold stripes curled in bracelets around the wrists of the jacket, brass buttons gleaming in the sunshine. The wool seemed to creep fibers under her white dress shirt and black ascot, scraping her burnt skin with every breath she drew. Tendrils of her chestnut hair leaked from her starched white hat, tickling her collar. Her badge was shrouded by a thin strip of black electrical tape. Sparky lay wrapped tightly around her throat today, clutching his tail. The tip of his tail was lodged in his mouth; he’d developed a habit of sucking his tail. Anya was concerned about him as it seemed to be a stress reaction, analogous to a child sucking his thumb. She reached up and pressed her hand to the warm copper collar, trying to reassure him over the roar of the ache in her chest.

The intervening days had done little to numb the ache. Ordinarily, the scorch mark left by a spirit would have faded, but this one wouldn’t heal. Between running down fruitless leads on paroled arsonists in the area and sleeping, Anya tried to block it out. But it felt too hollow. Twinges of pain and restlessness invaded her unusually heavy sleep and woke her with the sensation that something was sitting on her chest. She’d find Sparky curled around her hip, and nothing but air would be pressing against the stubborn wound.

As the funeral procession drove into view, Anya stood on her toes to see over the heads of the hundreds of people congregating. A fire engine draped in black bunting and lilies served as the flower car. The caisson crawled along behind it, a pump truck that had had the pump removed to hold the casket. The pump truck was from Neuman’s home duty station, surrounded by the firefighters from his station walking beside it in formation. Glossy black limos with their headlights illuminated followed behind, carrying family, pallbearers, and honor guard. The fire chief’s car followed behind, leading two ladder trucks. The line of private cars behind those trailed back down the block.

Behind her, the Cathedral of the Most Blessed Sacrament loomed over the pavement. The neo-Gothic limestone spires gleamed stark white against the sky and ground, saints in their niches gazing down sublimely at the throng of people gathered on the grounds.

The caisson stopped just beyond the steps and the first of the escort cars pulled beside it. The pallbearers stood in formation before the steps, with DFD members and the general public staged behind them in rows. The DFD chaplain stood at the curb, waiting. Neuman’s parents emerged from the first car. Anya remembered them from the vigil at the funeral home earlier in the day; they had seemed suspended in shock, their hands pumping up and down and glassy eyes frozen. The chaplain met them at the curb, then walked them up the steps and into the cathedral. One by one, the limos disgorged their occupants, blinking, into the sunshine.

The pallbearers, all firefighters from Neuman’s duty assignment, climbed out of their cars. As one unit, they marched to the caisson and lifted the coffin from the back of the pump truck.

“Present arms.” The officer in charge ordered a hand salute, and all the DFD members lifted their right hands to their hat visors as the flag-draped coffin passed over the sidewalk and up the steps.

As it disappeared beyond the massive wood doors into the shade of the cathedral, the OIC

ordered the rest of the DFD to follow: “Right face.” The black-uniformed figures congealed into three columns. “March.”

Surrounded in a wall of black, Anya slowly marched into the cathedral. She tried to remember to keep her steps at exactly thirty inches, and to keep the correct distance from the firefighters at her right and left.

The Cathedral of the Most Blessed Sacrament had its own gravity, one that could be felt as soon as she stepped through the threshold. The glare of sunshine dimmed and cooled. Far up on the walls, stained glass cast fragmented patterns of color on the floor. The turnof-the-century Gothic arches reached upward like the ribcage of some great beast that swallowed a flock of blackbirds. Twenty-first-century renovations contrasted with the structure’s nineteenth-century bones: the font, cathedral, tracery, and altar included geometric, modern slabs of limestone. It reminded Anya of the sharp contrast between the old and new downtown. A requiem played softly in the background, trickling upward to cantilevered ceilings. Wisps of incense smoke drifted lazily in striations in the light.

As the columns parted around the font, Anya surreptitiously reached to dip her fingers in the water. She hadn’t been a practicing Catholic since her mother’s death, but being in this place. . . she felt the resonance of her mother’s influence. Her fingers brushed the water.

A spark of static electricity stung her. Startled, she brushed the water on the side of her uniform pants and fell into line behind the other uniforms standing at the back. The pews were filling rapidly. Anya genuflected, crossed herself, and slid into one of the last pews. On her right side was a man scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad; a journalist, she supposed. On her left was a freshly minted, buzz-cut firefighter who smelled like garlic. She wrinkled her nose and turned away. Three rows ahead of her, she thought she saw the back of Captain Marsh’s head, seated beside his wife.

The coffin had been placed just below the flat limestone altar. Flowers were arranged in profusion in the nave, as if a garden had sprouted from the black-and-white tile floor. The flowers spilled over into the sanctuary, filling even the back rows where Anya sat with the cloying smell of roses, lilies, and chrysanthemums. From this distance, she could barely make out the line of relatives seated at the front right or the features of the large photo of Neuman held on an easel. From this distance, he looked very young. His ears stuck out a bit, but it was too far away for her to see expression in his eyes. The photo had been from his graduating class; Anya had posed before the same flag and the same blue wall, once upon a time.

The archbishop, a small man in a blindingly white robe and stole, seemed to blend in with the limestone interior, cut as sharply as the stone. His hands fluttered like moths over the gilt Easter candle, water, pall, cross, and Bible arranged on the altar and coffin as he spoke: “May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

“Amen.” Anya answered with the rest of the assembly.

“In the waters of baptism, Steven Neuman died with Christ, and rose with Him to everlasting life. May he now rise with Christ in eternal glory.” The priest sprinkled holy water on the casket, water droplets glittering in the filtered sunlight.

Anya’s attention drifted. It drifted from the stain of light the rosette window cast on the floor to the assembled congregation. In this crush of people, she felt uneasy. Sweat prickled under her copper collar. She felt watched. She wondered if beyond these hundreds of people, there was some spirit, somewhere haunting these old and new walls, a fly buried in amber glass that watched over time. She looked down at her folded hands. If whatever was watching would leave her alone, she would leave it alone.

Perhaps it was her own uneasiness. She hadn’t been inside a Catholic church since her mother’s death. Her mother’s funeral mass had been much smaller, simpler; a seemingly ordinary woman’s death would not have made the front page of the paper, much less summoned the bishop to perform funerary rites before a thousand people. There had been no honor guard, no salute with rifles, no flag on the simple black casket. There had been an unembellished white pall and a plain rosary with plastic beads placed on the casket, and egg sandwiches at her aunt and uncle’s house. No, her mother’s death hadn’t warranted pageantry. It had simply been a dozen people in a small chapel in Hamtramck: Anya, her aunt and uncle, the priest, and the parishioners who had come to see what had happened to the quiet woman whose house burned down. Her aunt kept telling her to cross her legs, but she couldn’t: Sparky was sitting between her feet, his feathery gills drooping. Anya remembered sitting in the first pew, not listening to a word the priest said, staring at the closed box. She wondered if there had been some mistake, that perhaps her mother wasn’t truly in there. Perhaps she had gotten up and walked out on her own.

Then she had listened, straining to hear her mother’s spirit, the way she had heard the voices of spirits all her young life. She had refused to believe her mother would leave her, no matter how shiny and pretty the afterlife. But no voice whispered from the black box, no cold hand reached out to brush her cheek. Her mother was gone, without a word or a backward glance. Though Anya had later come to understand that this is how it should be, a spirit slipping quietly into the darkness without the drama of a haunting, it saddened her to think her mother didn’t care enough to stick around, for at least a little while.

Instead of her mother’s spirit or the cold plastic of her rosary beads in her hand, Anya had wound her fingers in the copper collar. Her aunt thought that it was a terribly inappropriate thing for a young girl to wear, but her uncle had told her to “shut up and let the kid grieve.”

Around her, the practicing Catholics knelt, gave the required responses to the mass. Anya sat still, with her hands knotted in her lap, lips sealed shut as the mass and eulogies continued. She was no longer one of them. When the time came to take communion, she stayed in the pew, watched as the priests laid the communion wafers on the tongues of the faithful.

Not her. She hadn’t confessed since she was a child. And what was there to confess to?

Creating the fire that killed her mother? Interfering with God’s inscrutable plan for the spirits that wandered the earth, devouring them and sending them to. . . to who knew where? Destroying them? No, those were sins the church wouldn’t forgive. And she couldn’t bring herself to ask.

She remembered the kindly parish priest trying to counsel her after her mother had died. Her aunt and uncle had no use for religion, but brought her out of a sense of worry. For weeks after her mother’s death, Anya had not spoken to anyone but her imaginary friend. She was entirely too old for such fantasies, and Anya’s aunt and uncle hoped that the priest would be able to wake her from her stupor of grief.

The priest had sat with her in his office, where she stared at the wooden cross hanging on the wall beside the window. As he spoke, she watched the dust motes drift in the sunlight, listened to the ghost of a long-dead priest tread the hallway outside. She wondered what the dead priest had done that had been so terrible as to cause him to be denied eternal light. There was not a single thing the living priest could say that would bring her mother back, that would alter her perception of reality. And her crime was too great to utter. Her lips remained stubbornly sealed for months, until her frustrated aunt slapped her out of sheer frustration.

Anya gasped. That sound seemed to bring the world rushing in, lit the fire of anger in her lungs.

She slapped her aunt back.

The next day, her aunt and uncle made an appointment with Children’s Services. They couldn’t handle her, they said. They wanted to put her in foster care, they said. The caseworker looked across her desk at them and told them to take a number. She had serious families with serious problems to take care of.

And so she stayed with her aunt and uncle. Her aunt rarely spoke to her, and her uncle was rarely home. The silence in her room, at mealtimes, in front of the television set, gave her too much time to think, but her thoughts rarely made their way past her lips. She was like a ghost living in their house, slipping through the hall in her stocking feet and burying her nose in library books and Sparky’s neck. When she was old enough to leave their home—never
her
home—she spoke with them even less.