Embers (21 page)

She staggered, leaning against the elevator. Her hands and forehead made steam marks against the polished surface. Sparky sat on her feet and stared up at her, crooning.

“Are you all right?”

A large woman in pink scrubs touched her elbow. Anya flinched. “I’m fine. I. . .”
I just
devoured a ghost for no reason
, she thought, but her teeth clamped down on the thought.

“You don’t look fine. Come sit down.”

The woman in scrubs led her back to the nursing station and made her sit down. Anya sat with her head in her hands. The woman in pink scrubs gave her a bottled water. Anya’s hand shook around it and she struggled with the cap.

“That’s a bad burn you’ve got there,” the woman remarked. Her scrubs were only pink from a distance; up close, they had a repeating pattern of fairies over them.

Anya glanced down. At this angle, her shirt gapped open, exposing her burns. The rest of her shirt had stuck to the antibiotic ointment she’d slathered on herself. She looked like a hot dog escaped from a rotisserie. “I’m fine, really,” Anya said, waving her away.

“Honey, I’ve seen fine, and that’s not it. You come with me.” The woman in scrubs loomed over Anya, hands on her sizeable hips.

Anya hung her head in resignation. She might be able to take on homeless ghosts, but the woman in scrubs outweighed her by at least seventy-five pounds. Anya was pretty sure that she would lose in a fight with the pink pixie lady.

She shuffled along behind the woman, who took her to an exam room. Sparky swished along beside her, staring at the pattern of pixies on her ass. Sparky was in love. Anya made a mental note to get him a Tinkerbell doll the next time she got to the store.

Anya sat down on an exam table, and the pixie lady pulled up a stool. Her name tag read

“Dr. Murdock.” She pulled on a pair of latex gloves. “Now, let’s see.”

Anya unbuttoned her shirt. The fresh burn from the bum ghost had raised new welts on the mess of red and black she was already growing. She’d given up on wearing a bra with those burns, reluctant to imagine the hellish feeling of a bra strap digging into blisters.

Dr. Murdock clucked under her breath. “Girl, what happened to you?”

“I’m with the fire department,” Anya said. That much was true. The doctor’s eyes trailed down to her jacket, glimpsing the brass badge pinned to the inside. Anya pulled it out. “I swear I’m not an electrocution fetishist.”

The doctor roared with laughter, slapping the exam table. The sudden sound startled Anya. “Honey, you wouldn’t
believe
the weird shit I’ve seen here. That would be tame.”

Anya smiled weakly. She wondered if the doc had any sense of the unseen patients still wandering the halls. . . they were just as weird.

The doctor stuck a thermometer in her mouth. “I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.”

Anya sat obediently on the edge of the exam table, feeling foolish. Sparky climbed up on one of the stirrups used for gynecological exams and stared at the digital thermometer in her mouth. He batted at it. The temperature jumped and it beeped. Sparky squealed in delight.

The pixie doc returned with an armload of dressings and ointments. She snatched the thermometer from Anya’s mouth and frowned. “You’re running a low-grade fever. That’s a sign of infection.”

“Great.” Anya sighed. “That’s the last thing I need.”

“
This
is what you need.” Dr. Murdock held up a fistful of green blister packs.“These are antibiotics, two weeks’ worth. You need to get in to see a doctor before they run out, to make sure that the infection’s under control.” She held up a tube. “Silvadene antibiotic ointment. Apply it twice a day, keep the burns covered.”

Anya looked down. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Now, raise your arms.”

Anya did as she was told. The pixie doc began looping gauze around her chest.

“You have to keep those burns covered in the meantime. And, honey, if you aren’t gonna be wearing a bra, you need a lot more gauze to keep those girls contained.”

“I, uh, usually do. Wear a bra. Why?” Anya stared down. “Is there something wrong with them?”

The pixie doc laughed. “They’re great, don’t get me wrong. But if you’re working with a bunch of men in the fire department, I’m sure that they don’t need to see all your womanly charms spilling over, you know?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Anya mumbled, feeling like a chastened teenager. “Thank you.”

“You just keep doing the good work you’re doing.”

Funny. She didn’t feel like she was doing good work.

Ten minutes later, Anya was walking out of the hospital with a bagful of samples and gauze, corseted up to her armpits in bandages. She sported a sticker of a fairy with glitter wings on her jacket collar. Sparky trotted along beside her, looking wistfully back at the place they’d left the pixie doc.

She didn’t want to admit it to herself, but she felt better. It wasn’t the new bandages, or the antibiotic cream. It was the cold chill in her chest soothing the heat of the burns. Taking the ghost had softened the pain. A stab of guilt rattled through her head, but it didn’t disturb the cold humming in her heart.

She’d taken a ghost without real provocation.

Her grip on the bag of medicine tightened. She had never done that before, always adhering studiously to her principle: never take a spirit unless there’s no other choice.

What kind of a monster did this make her?

A small voice bubbled up in her:
It makes you like him. Like Drake Ferrer.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

WHATEVER DRAKE FERRER WAS, it couldn’t be said that he wasn’t well diversified.

Anya drummed her fingers on her desk at DFD the next day, scrolling through Drake Ferrer’s property records in the city database. The city’s real estate division showed numerous properties belonging to Ferrer. So far she’d found a former strip mall, a car lot, a gas station, six houses, and a lot on which a video store stood. They’d been purchased in the late 1990s, titled under Ferrer’s name. She noticed they’d all been sold within the last six months, at well below market value, to his Motor City Phoenix Foundation. She’d love to see how the capital losses worked out on his tax returns.

“Are you finally planning to get out of Dodge? Or are you trying to raise money for other purposes?” she muttered.

She paused, her eyes sliding from the blue screen to her right hand. It gripped a pen, poised over a yellow legal pad. The skin between her shoulder blades prickled as she watched her hand scrawl across the page, without her conscious direction. Her meticulous notes on Ferrer’s property acquisitions dribbled away to loopy scribbles that resolved into a childlike scrawl that read:

ME. ME. ME. ME.

Mimimimimimimimi. . .

She forced her hand to stop, clamping down on it with her left hand. With white knuckles, she slowly released her right hand. The pen began to move again, writing:

ME.

Mimi.

She’d heard of this before: automatic writing. Some mediums could communicate with spirits by allowing them use of their hands. Anya had never done it; she had seen it once, but it had given her the willies. She found her hoarse voice: “Mimi, is that you, you bitch?”

The scrawl paused:
Hello, Anya. No need to be confrontational.

“What do you want?”

Actually, you could use some hand cream. Your cuticles are a mess.

“Thanks for the advice. Shouldn’t you be boiling in some netherworld hell?”

Well, government offices are an institutional hell, of a sort. Does that count?

“Actually, I’m surprised you’re literate, Mimi. Most demons of your ilk can’t do much more than drag planchettes around Ouija boards.”

That’s fun. Especially at slumber parties. All those teenage girls with burning questions
about their would-be beaux. . . delish. But that’s not nearly as fun as looking over your
shoulder.

“Was that you with me in the interrogation room?” She thought of the voice encouraging her to torture Ferrer.

He’s cute. You should interrogate him more.

“No thanks. I don’t touch suspects.”

At least that one’s conscious. Not like that atrophying bald guy in the hospital.

Rage bubbled up in Anya. “Go fuck yourself, Mimi.”

Gladly. But you should try it. You might like it.

The pen stilled.

Anya reached deeply within herself for the burning core that devoured ghosts. The reactor inside her ignited, and she reached outward, searching for this irritating little demon that seemed to still have one foot in the physical world. She had never failed to entirely consume a demon before. She supposed it was possible, if the demon was stronger than she believed. She planed her hand through the air, searching for the demon to finish the job. She felt nothing, no acidic presence, no shadow of Mimi looming over her desk.

She returned her hand to the pen. “Where are you, Mimi?”

The pen didn’t move.

“Mimi. Answer me. Where are you?”

The pen remained still. Either Mimi was gone or she didn’t feel like talking.

Anya shuddered. Having the urge to scrub her hands, she stepped across the hall to the ladies’ room. Green subway tile created a soothing, if somewhat institutional, ambiance. She emptied an entire soap pump of pink liquid in her hands, scrubbed until the hot water ran out and her right hand was pink and raw. To hell with her cuticles. She wanted to scrub the stink of demon off her, no matter how much soap and water it took.

She glanced up at the mirror. Her reflection startled her. She looked too drawn, wan. The antibiotics for the infection hadn’t kicked in yet. She wanted nothing more than to go home and go to bed.

But she knew that she needed to get some help. Not from the pixie doc, but someone more well-versed in spiritual ills.

She had burnt her bridges with DAGR. There was no one left to ask. . . so she would have to figure this out on her own.

“Thank you for agreeing to meet me, Father.”

The elderly priest sat beside Anya in a back pew at St. Florian Catholic Church in Hamtramck. This church possessed a much different grandeur than the Gothic-modern cathedral she’d attended days before. St. Florian remained in traditional Gothic form, warmed by red and gold carpets underfoot. The dark wooden pews had been polished to a deep sheen, and the stained-glass windows cast violet shadows on golden sandstone tiles on the walls. Colorful depictions of saints occupied the niches, wreathed with a riot of yellow and red flowers. Unlike the cathedral, this place felt warm and familiar. The irony that St. Florian was the patron saint of firefighters was not lost on Anya.

This had been the church her mother had taken Anya to when she was a child; this was the church that had overseen her burial, and this was the priest who had tried to counsel Anya after her mother’s death. Anya was amazed to learn he was still in the parish, and even more shocked he still remembered her, and that he cleared his schedule to meet with her on such short notice. Anya had spent all night staring at the ceiling, too reluctant to sleep for fear that Mimi would invade her dreams. She’d been amazed that Father Mark himself answered the parish secretary’s listed phone number at seven in the morning.

“Of course.” Father Mark folded his gnarled hands on his knee. He was entirely bald, stooped with age, but his eye still held the level gleam of confidence. “I remember you. You were the girl who wouldn’t speak after your mother’s death.”

Anya looked forward at the gilded altar, overlaid with red and orange flowers. She hoped the shadow of this holy place upon her would be able to lift the seed of darkness she felt growing in her chest. Perhaps the seed had been there a long time, but she felt it stirring, flowering, and needed someone to show her how to pull it out. “I have carried the guilt of her death with me for a long time, Father. I’m afraid it has tainted many aspects of my life, and I’m beginning to think that my life isn’t really my own to control.”

It was Father Mark’s turn to be silent as she confessed what had happened with her mother, how her mother’s death had been caused by Anya’s disobedience. The guilt had left her heart fertile ground for so many tragedies: the careless stealing of spirits, rejecting love. Perhaps it even cracked open a door for Mimi to enter. She didn’t tell Father Mark these things, but simply told him of the great and terrible darkness she felt weighing upon her. She told him of the arsonist, how he seemed untouchable, and that she feared he would continue unless stopped.

She even told him about DAGR, using a broad brush, and that she’d quit. Anya told him she had felt a most unpleasant presence since she had left, her fear that some bits of her former work clung to her.

Anya told him what she had told no one else: that she was afraid. Afraid that she couldn’t stop the arsonist in time. Afraid that Brian wouldn’t emerge from his coma. Afraid of being alone, of being unloved and unlovable.

High above in the vaulted arches, a bird had somehow found its way in. It flitted right and left, trying to find a way out, beating its wings against the impassible light of the glass. Anya watched it as she spoke.