after his mother's death; despite the generosity and charity of many, he never bothered to look for help outside of a bottle again.
Cameron could, if he chose, conjure up a Magickal vision of his father as the man had been, but all that remained in his memory was the drunk.
I can't even think of him with any positive feelings; he was never more than someone I had to obey-and sometimes take care of. The only time that Ronald Cameron was not drunk was when he was suffering from a hangover and trying to scrape together the cash for his next bottle of rotgut whiskey. He dragged himself from one odd job to the next, hauling his young son behind him like so much unwanted, half-forgotten baggage.
It was life on the edge, but children are flexible, and he had endured it because it was all he knew. Such a life could not last for long, but it had been long enough to ensure his father's complete descent into a state where nothing mattered to him but the next drink.
The two years Jason spent trailing about after his father should have been a century for all the misery they contained. Always cold, hungry, filthy-fighting with tramps who tried to steal the little he and his father had left, always sleeping with one eye open for trouble-small wonder he had gotten sick.
Small wonder father abandoned me as soon as became a real burden.
As so much of his memory was fragmented, he had only bits and pieces of memory from his illness, but the pieces he had were extraordinarily vivid. The first was of the hour before dawn, and his father literally tying him to the front gate of a brick house so that he would not try to follow, or wander away in his delirium. He recalled that he was cold, but as light-headed as he was now, and as he shivered, he could not make himself move so much as a finger. The second sequential piece was of an amazingly ugly man peering down at him, then glancing up at someone out of Jason's line of sight ...
'Sick as a dog, sir.' Then, in a tone of acidic irony, 'Someone must've mistaken this place for a charity hospital. I'll call a policeman. '
A second voice. 'Wait a moment.' A second face, thin and ascetic, peering at him through the lenses of a pince-nez. 'No, bring him inside, clean him up, and send for the doctor. I can use this one. '
And that was his savior. Jason grimaced sardonically. Not surprising that 'clean him up' was the order before 'send for the doctor.' Alan Ridgeway was not a cruel man, but he was not a compassionate man either. He could have stood as a model for anyone wishing to study the morals and manners of the pure intellectual. There was very little warmth in him, which was rather ironic considering that he was the most powerful Firemaster in Chicago.
He had not been in Chicago at the time of the Great Fire, or it might not have gotten as far as it had.
Might. He might have been able to separate the combatants before they burned down half of Chicago and thousands of acres around Peshtigo ...
One Firemaster had lived in Peshtigo, a lumber town in the heart of the Wisconsin woodlands, and one on the South Side of Chicago. They had always been rivals, but one day in October, something happened to make them deadly enemies. And a few days later, the battle began that claimed twelve hundred lives in Wisconsin and an additional three hundred in Chicago.
The only other Masters in the city at the time of the Fire had been of Air and Earth, and precious little use in the face of an inferno. There were no Masters of any kind in the lumberland of Wisconsin. And when it was over, both Firemasters were dead.
The Masters of Boston had been horrified by the carnage, and in an unprecedented burst of public- spiritedness, those of Fire decreed that one of their number must relocate to Chicago to see to it that there were no outbreaks of fires caused by Elementals set free by the deaths of their Masters. He had been told the Masters of Water of New York had sent a similar representative to counter any actions of Salamanders. The Firemasters had drawn lots to determine who should go, and Alan Ridgeway had lost.
A true Boston Brahmin, Ridgeway had changed his name when he achieved his Mastery and had vanished from the ken of his family, who would have expected certain duties from him that he was no longer able or willing to fulfill. Magick was his mistress and his wife, and no mere female could ever interest him enough to make him want to make even a token effort to satisfy her. That would not have Done in the circles he was born to, so he removed himself from those circles.
It hardly mattered that he was no longer even part-heir to the family fortune, since no Master was ever without money for long. He soon made a modest fortune of his own-a modest fortune was all he wanted-and when he was chosen by fate to go to Chicago, he went without too much complaint.
But the Fire that had claimed so many lives seemed to have claimed a disproportionate number of those with the Magickal Nature of Fire itself, for the one thing Alan Ridgeway had not been able to find in the year he had been in the City was an Apprentice. For some, this would have caused no great trouble, but for Alan, brought up to always strictly follow the rules, it was very disturbing. He was a Master and a Master needed an Apprentice. He had left his previous Apprentice with another Master, since the boy was not able to make the move with him. And Alan Ridgeway, unlike many Masters, loved to teach. Without a pupil, he felt truly incomplete.
So when a filthy, sick, penniless child, with the purest Magickal Nature of Fire Ridgeway had ever seen, had been abandoned at his front gate, it must have seemed like the hand of a beneficent Providence at work.
Not that Ridgeway believed in Providence. A true Cynic of the ancient Grecian school of philosophy of that
