Fire And Ash (9 page)

After a beat Derek’s body goes as tense as mine then it relaxes casually. His warm fingers tug upwards at the waist of my swimsuit. “You might want to keep that covered. And if you care about Cassie you won’t tell her. She wants to be normal. Knowing about you or knowing that you know about her won’t help her with that.”
 

Derek smoothly steps away from me as Cassie comes walking through the sliding glass door.
 

“Sorry Ash. I just…um…had to go to the bathroom really bad.”
 

Derek shoots a meaningful look at me then looks to Cassie. I see the desperation in her eyes to be normal behind the lie that she tells me for needing to leave.
 

I don’t have any right to take that from her. So I don’t tell her about me or that I know about her.
 

 
I hear heavy footsteps, I hear a voice, I hear shouting. I bury my head beneath the blanket. The shouting is coming from the same source that it usually does. My parents. They are fighting again. The footsteps thud down the stairs. A door slams and tires screech out of the driveway. Lighter footsteps pad down the stairs sometime later. They wake me up and I want to go to my mother now that we are alone again. Kiss the sadness off her face that I know will be there, just like I’ll do with Dad when he comes home again before the sun rises. I love both of my parents and I don’t blame either of them for their constant fighting. Even at six I understand that they are different people, moving in different directions, with different desires. Mom is not a hunter. She knew the life she was signing up for when she married Dad, but she can no longer bear the weight of it. She hasn’t been able to for two years now. Not since my cousins’ mother, her closest friend, was killed on a hunt in the park. She doesn’t want the same thing to happen to Dad or to me someday. But Dad has sworn a duty and Mom doesn’t understand why he feels so compelled to uphold it. She often yells at him that if he loves us he will leave. Dad yells back that he can’t. I wait for the footsteps to come back up the stairs. When they never do, I assume that she is sitting in the leather recliner, staring bleakly into nothingness with swollen, puffy eyes. I go in search of her and the recliner is empty. Our back door sits ajar. Our back door is never ajar. It and the front door and the basement door are always triple bolted. Especially at night when only her and I are inside. Something crawls over me warning me against going into the backyard. It whispers to go back upstairs and get back into bed. I ignore it because I know my mother is beyond that door and go outside anyway. I see something. Something that I know I shouldn’t be seeing. But my brain can’t make sense of the image. It’s fuzzy and shrouded in darkness. Then the darkness envelopes the entire scene and everything starts over from the beginning. I hear footsteps, I hear a voice, I hear shouting.
 

The nightmare that is really a memory plays on a continuous loop
until I finally wake up in a cold sweat, shaking with terror and gasping for air exactly how I would do in the months following Mom’s death. I haven’t woken up like this after the dream since I was six. But just like then I open my eyes to the feeling that I am being suffocated. I shoot up in the bed clawing at invisible hands. My lungs are on fire and my throat feels as if someone is crushing my windpipe from the outside in. I fight past the agony, dragging in one deep breath and then another.
 

Calm down,
I tell myself.
You were only dreaming. You weren’t really experiencing it again. Don’t let it get to you like this.

 
“To be afraid is to be weak, to be weak is to be dead. Jacobs are not weak. Jacobs are strong. It is in our DNA to be.”
I use my grandfather’s words to fight back the gut wrenching emotion that is beginning to take root.

My mind dredges up the rest of the memory. The part that comes after the darkness. The part I never dream about. I am thankful that I do not dream this part. That I do not see my mother’s lifeless body periodically when I close my eyes.
 

I open my eyes a moment after the darkness claimed me. I realize I must have fainted
 
upon seeing Mom sprawled across the grass. I automatically know she is dead. I don’t know how I know but I do. I don’t cry, I don’t scream, I don’t fall apart. Even at six I know that death is a part of our life. If hearing Granddad say it wasn’t enough, I saw it with Cousin Linda, Sean and Gerard’s mom, and Becca’s uncle who was their father. I also know I should go inside and bolt the doors. It’s not safe to be out at night. But I don’t. I crawl to Mom and sit down beside her. Lay my head on her chest, and avoid looking at the awkward angle that her neck is bent at. I close my eyes and wait for someone to come home. I won’t leave her out here alone. While I am waiting I pretend that everything is normal. We’re not lying outside on a cold ground. We are inside, where it is warm. She is in the recliner and I am sleeping on her lap. I open my eyes to Granddad. He is the first to find us. “Stand up,” he commands. When I do he instructs me to look down at my mom. He speaks to me as I do.
“
A phoenix is the reason you look upon what you see
.
For every human life they take, they add an additional one to theirs. They aspire to have what they were never meant to. And they do it at the expense of us. They prey upon humans and we evolved to prey upon them. We are the balance. We are humanity’s shield against it’s only predator. We are born as hunters and we die as hunters. It is a vow you will one day take. You will live by it, you will die by it, and this is why.”

I numbly get out of bed needing to move. I dress in black cargo pants and a long sleeve henley that is the same color. I lace up combat grade boots and grab the silver knives Aunt Farrah gave me off my dresser as I leave the room. I need to do
something
. Grandma will have a fit if she finds out, but everyone has been back in Highland Village for the past week since the amber alert about the young boy went out so they will never know. Derek may claim that he and his mom don’t, but there are phoenix out there that kill humans. They take our lives to add to theirs.
 

I leave my house and drive towards Red Creek. If I am lucky tonight, I will come across one of those phoenix that do and I will make sure one less human doesn’t end up like Mom.
 

I know the western side of Red Creek State Park as thoroughly as I know my own name. I’ve undergone countless training exercises in its wooded areas surrounding Laurel. Some with Becca, some with Dad and even more alone with Granddad. I’ve been in Red Creek too many times at night to be scared of the natural and non-natural things that roam it.

I pick up a trail of two sets of prints about half a mile from where I parked. I follow it east for three miles, keeping my senses open for any peculiar sights or sounds. One set of prints diverges from the other. I choose to continue to follow the larger of the two. Better to scout out and eliminate the potentially larger threat first.
 

When I hear leaves crunching beneath booted feet in the distance I release the safety from the crossbow I took from the armory. It’s a more practical weapon than my knives for hitting moving targets at a distance. I step into the clearing the noise is coming from and level my bow at the person I see standing over the missing boy’s body as it is encased in flames.

“I warned you,” I tell Derek. Without waiting for a response I pull the trigger and shoot.

His left hand shoots out, catching the cross bolt mere centimeters before it would have embedded in his chest.
 

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” He growls as he snaps it in two. “You almost pierced my heart.”

“That was the idea. You’re a killer like the rest of them.”
 

He watches me not my bow as he stands. His eyes lock with mine and refuse to release them.

 
“I didn’t kill him,” he says strained. “I’m tracking the phoenix who did.”

“Ha! And I’m supposed to believe that why? You’re one of them.”

 
A muscle ticks in Derek’s jaw at my accusation.“I am
nothing
like the phoenix that killed him. I told you I don’t kill people for selfish gain.”

I don’t miss the unspoken admission in what he says. “But you
do
kill people,” I accuse.

“When the lives of the people I care about are threatened and I have to.”
 

Derek rushes towards me and I fire another cross bolt without thinking. It buries itself in his side but he keeps coming. He rushes past me and collides with someone just as they’re emerging from the clearing. His snaps their neck and they drop to the ground.

“A phoenix,” he says as he pulls a long lethally sharp sword free from his back. The sword slices through the phoenix’ neck as if it is butter.

He doesn’t have time to say anything else and I don’t have time to ask questions. One second it is just me and him and in the very next we are surrounded by four more.

Where did they come from? It’s like they appeared out of thin air.

Two of them go for Derek and two start towards me. I shoot a cross bolt at the first. My aim is dead on and it buries itself in her chest. She drops while the second one keeps coming. He is too close for the crossbow to be an effective weapon against her. I drop it and pull the silver knives Aunt Farrah gave me free from their place at my waist.
 

I thrust, he dances to the left and I nick his side. He swings his arm out and hits me square in the chest.
 

In my peripheral I see Derek and the two he is engaging at the same time moving in a blur of deadly moves that are too quick for my divided attention to track.

I sweep my right leg out and take the phoenix’s legs out from under him before he has time to react. He shoots a hand out and yanks me to the ground with him. He uses his larger mass to roll us so he lands on top of me. His hands close over my throat trying to crush it. I don’t allow instinct to make me drop the one knife I held on to when I fell and claw at his hands with both of mine. Instead I let him continue to cut off my air supply as I bring the knife up behind him and slam it into his back. When I pull it free and slam it again his hands release my neck. I throw him off of me and jam the knife past flesh and breastbone and tissue and straight into his heart.
 

“I assume you want that back so grab it and let’s go,” Derek says from beside me.
 

No sooner than I dislodge it from his heart Derek cuts of his head like he did to the other three of the other four lying dead around us.

Voices and footsteps sound in the distance.
 

Derek grabs my arm and pulls me in the opposite direction of the clearing and across the park. As we run, footsteps thud behind us.
 

When we get to his car he yells at me to get in as he scrambles into the driver’s side. He throws the Mustang into gear, its tires screech against the pavement and then there is a loud boom and my entire body shakes from the force of an impact. The car goes sliding across the pavement and we hit a tree. The force of the collision reverberates through the car and everything inside it. My head slams hard against glass.

Darkness hovers at the edge of my mind but I fight to remain conscious.
 

Derek jumps out of the car and I hear movement that sounds like fighting.
 

 
I try to turn my head to see what is going on but the movement makes my vision go blurry. I blink once and then twice trying to clear it but I can’t. Everything looks fuzzy and the grunts that I hear sound extremely far away now. I hear Derek faintly shouting my name. Asking me if I am okay. I try to answer but I can’t. Pain explodes inside my skull and then I can no longer hold back the darkness. It completely pulls me under.

******

I open my eyes to Derek and Cassie looking down at me.

“Go tell Mom to tell the doctor she’s awake,” Derek instructs her.

She says okay but hesitates, like she doesn’t want to leave. Finally she does.
 

“We were coming back from Lookout Point and a car ran us off the road,” Derek whispers to me hurriedly right before a man in a white lab coat walks in.

His appearance makes me finally look at my surroundings. There is an IV bag to my left with a tube traveling from it to the needle in my left hand. To my right is a machine that beeps intermittently and all around me are glass walls. An old box television is mounted in the corner and in the one opposite to it sits an uncomfortable looking vinyl chair.

 
I’m in a hospital,
I think. Then the state park, Derek, the burning body, the phoenix, the fight and the crash
come flooding back to me. The thought of everything makes adrenaline flood my system all over again.

“Are you alright Miss Jacobs?” The doctor asks. He is alarmed that the beeps coming out of the machine at my bedside are becoming more insistent.

I take a deep breath, forcing myself to calm down. “I’m okay,” I croak out. My mouth feels as dry as cotton. “Just shaken up from the…
accident.”
My eyes travel to Derek when I say it.
 

“Do you remember what happened?”

“Yes,” I answer him. “We were driving back from Lookout Point and a car ran us off the road. I hit my head against the window I think.”

Mrs. Jensen walks into the room as he asks about my parents.

“Ash is staying with us,” she smoothly answers for me. “I am responsible for her while her parents are out of town.”

I wonder at the lie then figure Derek was forced to tell her about me and she prefers to keep my actual family out of things.

The doctor uses a flash light to check my pupils and asks me to tell him my full name, address, and date of birth. Once he is convinced I have nothing more major than a minor concussion he tells Mrs. Jensen that they can keep me for observation overnight or he can release me into her care.