She blocked that. He was powerful, and he was wounded. He might be very dangerous indeed.
But he needed her, and she knew what she must do. 'I'm yours, Dan. Forever, if you want me. I'll come with you to Hellbane U.'
A ghost of a smile touched his lips. 'Thank you for that, love, but it isn't so easy. I need the town.'
The word 'love' collided with the rest of it. 'The town doesn't need you.'
'Same argument as before. They have no choice.'
'Then why are you sitting out here instead of going in?' She pointed at the closed gates. 'Blow them open!'
The brand rose again without touch and began to whirl, shooting flame into the dark. She glanced at the wall. Was that damned camera still running? 'Put that thing back before someone sees it!'
It stopped, then settled with perfect gentleness into the fire bed. 'Better?' he asked.
Her heart raced, and tea and ale churned. 'Was that demonstration of control designed to reassure me?
Because it failed.
He inhaled, and she thought she saw impatience, frustration, anger — an army of dangerous emotions. Every bit of her flinched, but she made herself meet his eyes.
'All right. I hoped if I just turned up, they'd let me in before they thought about it. Once in, I knew it would be a different game. I didn't expect the guard on the gate now it's over.'
'It's become a habit.'
'A bad one. Once I was stopped, I could only try persuasion. Nothing would work if I stormed my way in. It's like that night in Surrey Green,' he said, 'and you. I need… welcome, Jen.'
'The town's not going to fall in love with you.' It was an indirect response to his declaration of love, and she saw him note it and put it aside as she had. Their feelings were not the crux of this matter. 'What do you mean 'nothing would work'? What are you trying to do?'
He flexed his hands in a gesture of frustration. 'I don't know. I know I need the town, and I need you. I can pay my way,' he added, almost pathetically. 'I'm still a fixer.'
'More than a fixer.'
'True. But I could do only what a fixer did.'
His desperation tormented her. Whatever he'd become, he'd done it for them all — for the town, for Gaia. They should be welcoming him, but a wounded animal is a wounded animal, no matter what the cause.
'If you could pretend to be the old Dan Fixer…' She answered herself. 'But you can't. We all know, or at least guess. You're a hero of the Hellbane Wars, mighty and to be feared. Do you know they renamed Bond Street Dan Fixer Way?'
'That's ridiculous.'
'But you're stuck with it.' She eyed him. 'Why do I feel comfortable all of a sudden? Is it magic?'
'I don't think so.'
The relief only lasted a moment. 'Are you saying you don't know? Don't know what you're doing?'
'No, not that. But I can't say there isn't any… radiance from it. If there is, I can't do anything about it. Does it matter?'
It was an anxious question, and she didn't know the answer. She raised her knees and rested her weary head on them. 'Explain, Dan. Please. Explain what you're trying to do.'
He picked up a dead stick, an ordinary one, and poked at the fire. 'The remaining fixers are all more or less as I am now. In power. Hellbanes are a powerful potion.'
'Is that why you let everyone think you were dead?'
He nodded. 'We had to decide what we'd become before we could decide what to do. We could have disappeared, let everyone think us dead. The thing is some of us are… out of control. Mad, I suppose. But mad with great power. We're guarding them, but it takes nearly all our resources. Perhaps they'll heal. If not…'
'You'll kill them?' She was proud of her calm voice.
'We'll have no choice. We can't spend all our energy on them.'
'Why not? We miss fixers, but we can cope.'
He shook his head. 'Gaia needs fixers. We have to rebuild the system.'
'What, with a handful of you? Perhaps Alice Cottrel had the right idea and you should stay at Hellbane U and come when called. For important things only.'
'I'm not talking about that kind of fixing.'
'What, then?'
'If the blighters come back. We have to be ready, and we have to find a better way.'
Blighters back? But her mind fixed on the pain at the end of the sentence.
'What happened, Dan? What did you have to do?'
'You don't want to know.'
She gripped her hands together. 'Tell me anyway.'
He tossed the stick into the fire, and it burst into wild flames, making her flinch away.
'All right. It was my idea, clever lad that I am. Fixers were dying one by one, and the blighters only grew stronger. We all wanted to rush out and fight, but I persuaded everyone to play with their magic like I'd been doing, to find the stuff training had locked up in us.'
His eyes brightened for a moment. 'It was amazing what some of us could do, Jen, the power we could draw on. It became clear that the presence of so many blighters was making us stronger, day by day. But what to do with it?'
Any light in him died. 'Do you remember what I said about power gained and lost? We figured out that we could act in a group and have even greater destructive force, but we still couldn't modulate it. What we needed was blighters bunched in huge numbers, and that doesn't seem to be their way.'
Jenny was trying to follow his logic, but mostly she was following something that ran beneath his words. Something terrible.
'So we baited a trap.'
Her mouth dried. 'With what?'
He leaned back on stiff arms. It might have been a relaxed posture, but it wasn't. 'They like people more than animals, but they really love fixers — like I love Walker's spiced meat pies, and you love those big strawberries your father grows. A solitary fixer draws blighters from all around. Perhaps they fight over the prey. I don't know…'
She stared at him, but apart from that betraying pause, his tone was flat.
'So we formed troops of the ideal size — about forty, as it happens. We'd form a circle and put the bait in the center. When the blighters rushed in to feed, we cleared the area. We'd get thousands sometimes, and the juice would flood into us, making us stronger still. Then the troop moved along and did it again. And again. And again. Troops had to merge, of course, in time…' After a moment he said, 'It was mostly my idea, and it worked.'
She was still trying to form words when he added, 'We drew lots. My name was never drawn.'
After three swallows, she managed, 'How — how many of you were there in the beginning?'
'More than a thousand—' Like a violently untethered spring, he curled forward, hands over his face. 'One thousand two hundred and twenty three.'
And eighteen came home. Day after relentless day, numbers dwindling, lots drawn, good-byes said…
'We all wanted to be noble sacrifices, but the fear's too strong. So we used magic to hold the bait. Right in the middle. It's most efficient that way.'
She scooted around the fire and gathered his pain tight into her arms.
'You dread being chosen,' he whispered. 'You dread not being. You dread living—'
'Dan. Dan… don't. Don't think about it.' Oh, how crushingly stupid.
He turned to her and clung, and she did the only thing she could and held tighter still. She wished he'd cry, but he'd surely drained himself of tears long ago.
'You don't want to be here, where you're not wanted,' she murmured, rubbing her face against his hair, stroking him, tears escaping. 'If it's me you want, I'll come with you. Anywhere.'
He turned his head against hers to brush lips. 'It's you I want, Jen. It's you I need. You. I thought of you,
