Fury's Fire (25 page)

Someone whispered her name, and she imagined that she saw Will bending over her, weeping. Behind him stood Asia.
I would have died for you
, Gretchen heard Will say, but she could hardly make sense of the words.
I never would have let him die. Never
.

And still, she felt herself diminishing, like a spark into the night sky.

I am dying
, she thought, and there was enough of her left to feel reassurance and even a trace of happiness as her vision closed and everything went black.

“Come on, Will!” Angus shouted, waving to him from the ice. His barn jacket was open, revealing a plaid shirt, and he wore a cap pulled low on his head, his curls sticking out madly. His long wild limbs only made it more comical when he glided gracefully across the ice. “Come show us your
Disney on Ice
moves,” he urged, spinning into a lazy turn.

“Nobody can compete with Goofy,” Will replied.

Mafer let out a shriek as Angus glided into her, and they both spilled onto the ice, laughing.

Gretchen squinted at the blue sky. Cotton-ball clouds drifted across the expanse, seeming unhurried and untroubled. She was resting on a bench beside the lake. Will shifted beside her, as if the cold air was starting to chill him. He put an arm around Gretchen and pulled her closer.

She wore only a light corduroy jacket and no hat. Her long hair spilled down her back, white as the fresh snow that blanketed the ground, white as the clouds above. She was smiling, watching Will and Mafer goof around, but she had no urge to join them. She was happy here, on the bench.

Taking off his jacket, Will started to put it around her shoulders, but she shrugged it off. She turned to him, still smiling. “I don’t need it.”

Will slipped an arm back into his sleeve and shrugged on his jacket. “You still don’t get cold.”

Gretchen shook her head.

He touched her cheek with a gloved hand. She put her own bare palm over his and closed her eyes. She liked to imagine that she was warming him.

There had been no fires, not for weeks. Her room was finished, and she and her father had moved back into their own house, which was finally starting to feel familiar and comfortable. The boxes in the living room were unpacked, and with the addition of new things and objects and books from the Manhattan apartment, her room looked like a place where she belonged. It looked like home.

Even school had settled down. It had been hard, but Gretchen had almost completely caught up with all of the work she had let slide the first few weeks. Now she had to concentrate on pulling her college applications together—but there was still time. She was considering taking a gap year, anyway. She still had a lot to sort out.

The kids in the hall had stopped giving her sideways looks, and even the gossip about Kirk was disappearing, now that he’d managed to act normal for a few months. And yes, she was still warm, as if she carried her own fire inside. But she was no longer hot. No longer ready to flame out of control. She had no idea what it meant. Will liked to believe that she had burned
through her power, that she was a mere mortal now. Gretchen liked to believe that, too, when she could manage it.

But mostly she just didn’t know what to believe. Circe, Asia—all of that seemed like a dream, one she could barely recall, could only get a vague sense of. Mostly, it left her with a feeling of relief that it was over.

But sometimes she caught sight of herself in the mirror and felt a shock at her own stark hair. It had turned white the night Circe found her.

The events of that night had unfolded clearly for her only afterward, with Asia’s help. Circe had seen her moment—her power was great enough to inhabit a shadow form and attack. Gretchen had burned, burned to ash, burned to death. But she didn’t die—she couldn’t really die, not yet. It wasn’t her time. And in burning and dying and yet not dying, she had ripped wide open the slit in the fabric between the living and the dead. Tim had been there, and an army of the dead—all of the men and women who had fallen to Circe’s power. Their power had flared under Gretchen’s fire, and they had reached down and pulled Circe back into the Beyond.

Still, whenever Gretchen recalled that night, she felt a sense of vertigo as she tried to piece together what it all meant.

Am I Tisiphone?

Am I Gretchen?

She could get lost in the what-ifs.
What if I live five
hundred years? What if the power hasn’t left? What if Circe returns?

She wanted reassurance, a written guarantee that things were going to work out fine.
But no one gets that
.

Gretchen looked up at the sky again, imagining the Beyond. She liked to think of Tim there, watching over them. Still loving them.

She still missed him, and she knew that Will did, too.

In that way, she guessed, she did have a guarantee.
Love is eternal. It’s the only thing that lasts
.

“Is she out there?” Will asked, bringing Gretchen back to reality.

She looked over at him. The cold had made his cheeks glow, and deepened the blue of his eyes.

“Do you think? In the depths?” Will turned to face her, and Gretchen realized he was talking about Asia, not Circe.

“Somewhere,” Gretchen replied. Asia had disappeared two days after that night, and they had not seen her since.

“She was never comfortable around us. Humans, I mean,” Will explained.

“I can imagine that.”

“She was even ready to kill me. And she thought of me as a brother.”

Gretchen squeezed Will’s hand. “She would have killed me, too. And she was right.”

Will’s eyes met hers, and she felt their connection like a touch. “You couldn’t have killed anyone.”

“No.”

He leaned toward her, pressing his warm lips against hers. It was a soft kiss, lingering and full of love and restrained passion. Will twined his fingers through Gretchen’s long hair, and a thrill ran through her.

“Oh, God, get a hotel!” Angus shouted.

Something cold and wet showered over her, and Gretchen realized that Mafer had just tossed a snowball at Will.

She let out a shout as Will jumped from his seat to grab a handful of snow. In a few moments, a full-scale snowball fight was on. Even Gretchen joined in.

It was all so easy, so carefree, she couldn’t resist it.

Just like normal life
.