Child of Fire

about what was happening. I just worked at the flames. I slapped at them, smothered them, wrapped them in my jacket.

It was no good. The fire flared up and my jacket erupted in flames. I threw it aside and started to drag my shirt over my head.

The kid laughed as though we were tickling him. Then his skin turned silver-gray and his whole head came apart.

The flames roared. A wave of heat forced me back. The father rolled back onto his padded behind, almost bowling over his wife as she rushed around the car toward us.

I let my backward momentum roll me onto my feet. Annalise stood nearby. She had unbuttoned the fireman’s jacket she always wore, revealing colored ribbons alligator-clipped to her clothes. She pulled a green one free. The small sigil drawn on the bottom glowed with silvery light.

I turned back to the family. The boy’s head, arms, and chest had come apart and been transformed into a mass of fat, wriggling, silver-gray worms, each about the size of my pinkie. Then his stomach came apart, then his hips. It happened so fast I had no chance to think about it. I saw the worms twisting themselves against the packed gravel, trying to burrow into the earth. They swarmed over one another, heading west. Everything they touched turned black with scorched, greasy soot.

I felt a tightness in my throat that might have been the urge to vomit, but there was nothing to bring up. I was completely hollow inside.

The father struggled to his feet, and his wife tried to move around him to her son. The expression on her face told me she already knew the truth, already knew her son was gone, but she could no more stay away from his disintegrating body than she could leap up into the clouds.

I tackled them. My shoulder sank into the father’s broad, soft belly, and I grabbed the mother around the waist. With all my strength, I pushed them away from the car.

I didn’t look back at Annalise. I didn’t have to. I knew very well what those green ribbons did and how little she cared about collateral damage.

The father and mother stumbled backward and fell over each other, hitting the gravel hard. I landed on their legs.

I heard a whoosh of fire behind me. Annalise’s green ribbon had hit its target. I glanced back and saw flames, green ones this time, roar up around the wriggling mass that had once been a boy’s body. Where the flames touched them, the gray worms burst apart.

The sphere of green fire expanded. I pulled in my legs, trying to get away, but I was too late. The cold green fire washed over me.

I sucked in a lungful of air to scream my life away. It was too soon. Too soon. I looked down at my legs, expecting them to burn away to blackened, smoking bones.

It didn’t happen. There was no pain, no damage to my legs, nothing. My clothes didn’t even burn. I felt nothing more than a slight pressure below my collarbone-a place the flames did not even reach.

The flames receded. I was undamaged. So were the parents. I had pushed them out of range just in time.

The worms had not fared so well. There was nothing left of them but gray slime.

“Holy God,” the mother said, her voice thin and strained. Her face was slack and her eyes were glassy. If I hadn’t pushed her away, she would have been killed along with her son-another person struck down for no other reason than she was next to someone Annalise wanted to kill.

Annalise took another ribbon from beneath her jacket. This one was blue. I had no idea what the blue ones did, but I knew it wouldn’t be good.

Before she could use it, a force passed through me. It wasn’t a physical push. It struck my mind, my consciousness, what ever you want to call it, and it felt as though I was standing in heavy surf. It almost toppled me.

At the same moment, I felt a twinge high on the right side of my chest again.

Annalise staggered and winced; her blue ribbon fell from her hand. She felt it, too. The mother and father didn’t stagger. Their expressions went blank.

Then it was gone.

The couple stood and began to straighten their clothes. “You didn’t have to knock me over,” the man said. “I was only trying to help.”

“What?”

“We pulled over to help-oh, forget it.” He slapped at the dust on his pants.

His wife clutched at his shirt and looked at me worriedly. “Douglas, let’s just go.”

They started walking toward the car, glancing back at me as if I was a stray dog that might bite.

They did not look the least bit upset by what had just happened to their son.

After they got into their car and slammed the doors, Douglas started the engine. His wife leaned into the backseat and fussed with a baby sleeping in an infant seat. I hadn’t noticed the baby until then. Douglas turned on the music. Bobby McFerrin. Gravel crunched under the tires as they began to drive away, as though they were leaving behind nothing more important than some old fast-food wrappers.

Annalise charged past me, lowered her shoulder, and slammed into the car’s front panel, just above the wheel. Her legs pumped. The fender crumpled and the car slid sideways like a tackling dummy until it tipped into a ditch.

She stood and straightened her jacket, a scowl on her delicate little face. I had seen her strength before, of course. She could have flipped the car onto its roof or torn the door off and pinched off Douglas’s head. I assumed the only reason she hadn’t done either was that she hadn’t finished with them yet.