Misfit (15 page)

“It is,” says Dagon. “The trick is keeping it on track.”

“But it’s air. It’s everywhere, so what does it matter?”

“I’l show you,” says Dagon. “Getting the ice into steam was about getting the water molecules to go faster and farther apart, right?”

“Oh, God, this is turning into a science class.”

“Science, magic. Just labels for the same thing.”

“Huh,” says Jael, thinking of Rob.

“So,” Dagon continues, “hot-air bal oons work the same way. The air is heated, which makes the air molecules fly around faster and farther apart.”

“So, wait,” says Jael. “Are you tel ing me I can do that to make myself fly?”

He spreads his webbed hands wide. “I don’t know.

Can you?”

She closes her eyes. It’s kind of hard to actual y feel air unless there’s a breeze. So she waits until a strong wind comes up, then, when she can feel it al around her, she tries to recal that fleeting feeling of joy that she got from the steam.

“You want that, don’t you?” she says to the air around her.

Then she’s jerked off her feet and up into the sky.

“Ohhhhhh shiiiit!” she yel s.

She pitches forward, then spins around so fast that the ground beneath her becomes a blur. She pauses about fifty feet up and just hangs there.

Then she drops.

The earth rushes toward her and she screams,

“Please, God, no! Help!”

There’s a flash of orange.

Then she strikes. But instead of hard earth, it feels like warm pudding. She opens her eyes and finds that she’s submerged in a glowing orange sludge. She kicks hard through the thick liquid until she breaks the surface. Al around her, the forest is the same as it was, except for this smal pond of steaming orange.

“That was incredible!” says her uncle, his fanged mouth open in a wide grin. “You’re picking this up even quicker than I expected!”

She swims to the edge of the orange pool. “What happened?”

“You got the earth beneath you to liquefy so it would break your fal .”

“Liquefy . . .” She looks at the pool around her. “So this is . .

. lava?” She scrambles out of the lava and back onto solid earth.

“Why didn’t it kil me?”

“Are you kidding? Uphir recommends that demons bathe in lava at least once a month.”

“Who’s Uphir?”

“Hel ’s physician.”

“Huh,” says Jael. Then she realizes something.

“I’m naked!”

She drops to a crouch and covers herself as best she can.

“Of course you’re naked,” says Dagon. “Lava might be fine for you, but your clothes didn’t stand a chance.”

“What do I do?”

“What do you mean?” he asks, looking a little confused.

“I can’t walk around like this!”

“Oh,” he says, and scratches his scaly face thoughtful y.

“Hmm. Wel , you can change your skin to look like clothes.”

“I can?”

“Sure. Just get a picture in your head of what it looks like, and then . . . wel , it’s hard to describe. Just imagine the feeling of your skin changing into it.”

Jael pictures her jeans, T-shirt, and raincoat. But nothing happens.

“Try adding more details,” says Dagon. “The important thing is to get as specific as possible.”

It’s hard for Jael to concentrate when she’s squatting naked in a forest, but she tries to recal little things about her clothes.

She remembers the fraying on one pant leg cuff, the slight stretch in the shirt neck, and the buttons on the jacket. She holds the entire image in her head, then pictures her skin matching it.

When she looks down, there it is.

“Wow,” she says. She slowly stands up and checks herself over. “And I could make any clothes I want?”

“You could even grow fur and a tail,” he says. “You just can’t change your size.”

She moves around a little, testing the feel of her new clothes.

“It’s weird. I stil feel kind of . . . naked.”

“That’s because you are,” says Dagon. “You just look like you have clothes on.”

“Wel , that’s no good.”

“Why not?”

“It feels weird. I need to have something on.”

A flicker of irritation moves across Dagon’s face. “You know, these mortal hang-ups of yours don’t real y mean anything. You need to let them go.”

“They aren’t hang-ups,” says Jael. “It might be hard for you to understand, but being naked in public is a big deal for a mortal.”

“But that doesn’t concern you anymore,” says Dagon.

“Look, I guess you don’t like to think about it, but I am half mortal. I’m getting enough crap from my dad about being half demon. I don’t need you coming in from the other side hating on mortals.”

He looks at her, his black shark eyes unreadable.

Then he nods once, slowly, like he’s bowing to her.

“Fair enough.”

He scans the trees around them. “So, real clothes . . .”

He stands there for a few more moments, idly scratching at the smal gil slits on his neck, then his face brightens. “Here’s something we can do. Hold your hands out together.”

She cups her hands in front of her, almost like she’s receiving communion at church. Then he stretches out his arm, digs his claws into his shoulder, and slowly rakes them down, peeling scales off as he goes. The scales flutter into Jael’s outstretched hands. He begins to work faster, switching back and forth between arms, until he’s shucking a pile of scales into her hands.

Clots of blood bloom on his arms but are quickly covered as new scales grow in.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” she asks.

“Sure,” he says, stil scraping away. When he’s done, she has a heaping pile of scales cupped in her hands.

“There,” he says, and smiles in satisfaction. “That should be enough.”

“For what?”

He reaches out and picks up a single scale. When he lifts it up, the rest are drawn with it, like a big piece of fabric. He holds it up for her.

“It’s not much,” he says.

The scales gleam with glittery rainbow swirls.

“It’s beautiful,” she says.

He drapes it around her. “Just needs something to hold it in place,” he mutters. Then, stil holding the cloak in one hand, he reaches into his mouth and grasps one of his big shark teeth.

“Wait!” she says, then winces as she hears the crack.

He holds up a large, triangle-shaped tooth. He smiles in satisfaction, a trickle of blood coming from his lips.

“I could have found something else,” she says. “You didn’t have to rip your own tooth out.”

“It’l grow back,” he says. “Besides, since it’s stil a part of me, it’l stick to the scales.” He places it at the point under her chin where he’s holding two corners of the scale cloth, then lets go. It hangs around her like a cloak.

Jael gathers it around her body. The inside feels surprisingly soft. The outside feels smooth when she slides her hand down and rough, like sandpaper, when she slides it back up.

“It’s awesome,” she says. “Thank you.”

“Wel , you can only wear it in the rain. If it gets dried out, it’l look ratty and it’l probably smel . Like me.”

“I don’t think that’l be a big problem in Seattle,” she says.

“I don’t get why you did this, though. I mean, that had to real y hurt.”

“Jael.” It stil gives her a strange shiver when he says her name. Like she can almost get a sense of the person he believes she’s capable of becoming. A person who deserves an exotic name spoken with reverence. But now he looks a little sad. “If al you ever do is try to avoid pain, you’l never create something truly worthwhile.”

“I don’t try to avoid pain,” she says quickly. Then she thinks about it for a second. “Do I?”

“You’re a brave one, that’s for sure,” says Dagon. He gently lays his webbed hand on her head, covering most of her scalp.

“But you’ve stil got a ways to go. It’s one of those things that comes in time.” Then he looks around.

“And while we’re waiting

. . .” He turns her head in the direction of the seething orange lava pool that hisses at the occasional drops of rain that slip through the canopy of trees. “I think you better put out that pit before it eats up the forest.”

Eventual y Jael is able to coax the earth back into a solid state. She can feel its resistance and confusion.

After al , she was the one who asked it to liquefy, and that had been a much more urgent request. But final y, almost resentful y, it thickens and cools until it looks like a big patch of slick, black lumps.

“Okay,” says Jael. “So why didn’t the flying thing work?

That’s what started al of this.”

“It’s pretty easy to get air to do something,” says Dagon.

“The trick is to keep it doing that thing for more than a few seconds. You got it to lift you up al right, but as soon as it did that, it got bored and wandered off.”

“So is real flying even possible?” she asks.

“I’ve seen a few successes,” says her uncle. “And a lot of failures. But who knows, maybe you’l get it someday.”

“So there’s only one more element, right?” says Jael.

“We’ve done water, air, and earth. The only thing left is fire.”

“There’s actual y two left,” says Dagon. “And they’re somewhat interrelated. Fire and spirit.”

“Spirit? Like a soul?”

“Sure,” says Dagon. “If that’s what you want to cal it.

The part that makes us who we are. The spark of life.”

“So that’s why it relates to fire? The spark thing?”

asks Jael.

“Not real y,” says her uncle. “Here, let’s start with this.”

He reaches down and picks up a large branch that’s fal en to the ground. He brings it up to his lips and opens his mouth wide so that the rows of teeth protrude. He strikes a claw across one tooth, and a few sparks fly. He does it again, and more sparks leap out. A few of them hit a couple of the leaves on the branch.

He blows on the leaves gently until the sparks nestle into the green and start smoking. He blows harder and the leaves begin to burn. Soon, flames lick around the edges. Then, at last, the branch catches on fire.

It’s the first time Jael has seen fire with her demon eyes, and she’s not prepared for its beauty. The swirling, lashing orange and red intertwine in a dance.

Bits of blue flicker at the base, and the yel ow edges reach endlessly toward the sky. Of al the things she’s seen in the past few days, this simple burning stick is the most marvelous.

“What is fire?” asks Dagon. “It isn’t an object with mass or weight. It is the visible transformation from matter into energy.

So fire isn’t a ‘what,’ real y. It’s a ‘how.’ And yet you can see it.

You can hear it. And if you’re strong enough, you can feel it.”

He holds the stick out to her.

“Go ahead,” he says. “Invite it over.”

A part of her—the mortal part—is screaming at her to step away. But the demon part is too entranced with the fire’s beauty.

Hesitantly, she reaches out her hand. She’s not exactly sure what she says to the fire. Something awestruck and barely coherent, like a giggling fangirl.

But whatever it was, it does the trick, and the fire leaps graceful y off the branch and onto her hand.

When it touches her palm, the heat shoots up her arm, straight to her heart. She suddenly feels so light, so free. So this is what the steam was talking about, she thinks. She never realized how weighted down she was, how tied up with dumb, pointless details like clothes, money, and status. This means something real. Something perfect.

But then the fire shrinks down until it’s just a flicker, and the feeling of euphoria dwindles with it.

“Oh,” she sighs. “What happened?”

“You want to keep it going?” Dagon asks quietly.

She nods.

“It’s going out because it doesn’t have any fuel.”

“Should I put it back on the branch?”

“You could do that,” says Dagon. “Or you could feed it something else.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Give it back what it gave you,” he says. “Give it some encouragement. Give it some joy.”

She closes her eyes. Then she takes the little bit of lightness that remains within her and gives it up to the tiny fire in her hand. That offering acts like breath on the flame, bringing it slowly, gently back to life. Her eyes are stil closed, but she can feel it grow in her hand and the thril within her heart grows with it. But this time, rather than hog it al , she gives that to the flame as wel . And the more she gives the fire, the more she has to give.

She and the fire grow lighter and stronger and everything else drops away from her mind until there is nothing but this moment of freedom. She doesn’t know why, but she starts to laugh, and then she starts to cry. She must look completely insane, giggling with tears streaming down her cheeks, but she’s beyond caring.

“Jael,” she hears her uncle say.

She slowly opens her eyes. Her entire body is wreathed in flames that reach up to the darkening sky.

She is the fire. She is pure action, roaring and laughing and crying. She stretches out her hands and sings the song of fire, and it is glorious.

After some time, her uncle says, “Okay, time to come back.”

Regretful y, she withdraws from the fire, pul s herself back into her body and lets the flames slowly fade away. When at last she stands stil and quiet, she is just a girl again.

“That,” says Dagon, “is just a dim shadow of what it’s like to feel the last element—spirit. But we’l save that for another time.”

Jael looks up at him, pleased with herself but stil missing the fire. She tries to smile, but it only comes out halfway.

He grins at her, his jagged shark teeth gleaming in the twilight, with one gap. Then he scoops her up in a massive hug.

“You did good, kid. Now you should probably head out. I think your little explosion was visible for a ten-mile radius.”

It takes a while for her to get home. The buses don’t run very often on Saturday nights, and none of them are express.

But Jael hardly notices. Everything around her looks different.

It feels as if the change that began Thursday night is complete.

Life is crowded with potential, with magic. There are so many forces just waiting to be tapped, to be put to some constructive use, and she never realized it before. The world is like a giant toolshed fil ed with babies who don’t know how to use the tools, and don’t even realize that the tools are anything other than something to stick in their mouths.