Inside the Flame (Elemental Mages Book 2) Read online

  Inside the Flame

  By Rose O’Brien

  ©Copyright 2019

  Esther Robards-Forbes

  ISBN: 978-1-7328730-1-8

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  For Deidra

  Thank you for reaching down into the pit and giving me a hand up. You are the truest of friends.

  Chapter 1

  Jen Jiang felt the vibration of the blast more than she heard it.

  Car bomb. Not close – half a mile, maybe a mile to the east.

  The sound of a car bomb in Baghdad was a pretty common one these days. While the thrum of the concussion was like standing too close to a speaker at a rap concert, the bass shaking her ribs, there was a primal awareness of the danger. All the living things along the street, including Amal, the elderly woman Jen had been photographing, turned their heads toward the sound of the blast.

  Jen looked up from the viewfinder of her old Nikon camera and began scanning the skyline for the inevitable plume of smoke. A small spike of adrenaline tingled in her blood, an old familiar friend.

  “Do you mind if I come back to finish the interview and the photoshoot tomorrow?” Jen asked her subject in Arabic.

  Amal was the subject of a profile she was writing on shifting attitudes on women’s education. The retired architect and professor nodded, a little distracted as she looked down the street in the direction of the blast.

  Jen looped her camera strap around her neck, settled her messenger bag across her chest and threw her leg over her scooter, starting the engine with a push of a button.

  “Be careful,” Amal called. “Sometimes there are secondary blasts.”

  Jen waved to her as she pulled out onto the dusty street. She’d lived in Baghdad on and off for five years now. She knew about secondary blasts and the damage they could do to rescue personnel and those who rushed to a blast site to help.

  As she maneuvered her little scooter through traffic, she kept jerking her gaze to where smoke was rising over the squat buildings. She cursed as she realized the likely location of the blast. Not the market again.

  This neighborhood had already been through so much. The walls she flew by were marked by discolored lines of new plaster patching the damage of past explosions, if the locals had managed to repair them at all. Many hadn’t—the low, scarred houses often held multiple families trying to claw their way into middle class status. Every new bomb threw new debris into their path.

  Leaning into a turn, she shot around a slow-moving taxi and gunned it down the street. The little scooter hit its top speed of thirty-five miles an hour, the wind whipping her long, black braid over her shoulder.

  She hit another turn a bit fast, and her back tire skidded on the rough, crumbling street. With another curse, she righted the bike and almost rear-ended the pickup truck that slammed on its brakes in front of her.

  “Come on!” she shouted in Arabic, gesturing with her right hand for the driver to hit the gas already.

  The lonely cry of a siren went up to the east. First responders were on their way, at least. The pickup was moving again, and Jen twisted the throttle, giving the scooter as much gas as it could handle. The smell of smoke in the air said she was getting close.

  As she rounded the corner, she came up on the edge of the marketplace.

  The Al-Bayaa Market was a popular one on this side of the city. Built in an open square with an entrance off the main road, it was packed with stalls selling food, clothing, electronics and books.

  Now, it was something out of Jen’s nightmares. Voices filled the air, screams from the injured, shouts, and nervous chattering from bystanders who had rushed to the scene. Those were the easiest parts to tune out.

  Not so easy was the smell. Explosives, burned wood and plastic, charred flesh, hot metal and brick.

  Billowing clouds of black smoke rolled over the street and obscured anything farther than twenty feet away. She raised her camera’s viewfinder to her eye and twisted the lens to bring things into focus. The shutter clicked in rapid succession as she snapped several wide shots of the devastation.

  Jen abandoned the scooter on the sidewalk, but had the presence of mind to stick the keys in her pocket before she waded into what was left of the market.

  She stayed low, crouched slightly to keep her lens in the middle space. As objects or people caught her attention, she’d bring them into focus, snap several pictures, and move on, trying to keep her footing on broken bricks and rubble.

  A woman held a hand to her forehead, red blood leaking through her soot-stained fingers. A man carried a little girl on his hip as he ran toward the main road, black smoke offering contrast with his white tunic. She heard the ambulance arrive and turned to snap several shots of the rescuers jumping from the vehicle.

  To many, her seemingly callous documentation of the scene might seem macabre. She’d been called a vulture and worse, but this was her job.

  There was nothing she could do for victims since she had zero medical training. The one thing she could do was document this so the rest of the world knew what was happening here. She always gave herself a handful of minutes to shoot and then waded in to see how she could help.

  She let the camera hang by its strap and pulled out her smartphone. Bringing up its camera, she took some wide shots of the scene, trying to ignore the ash and the scents that threatened to choke her, so much stronger here than on the street. The phone’s camera couldn’t touch the quality of her DSLR, but it was faster to upload pics this way.

  In seconds, she had a tweet sent out with the photo attached.

  “The scene at Al-Bayaa Market in Baghdad following an explosion. Multiple injuries. Updates to follow.”

  She sent the message out to her hundreds of thousands of followers and got down to work.

  She approached a young man in his twenties who was standing off to the side watching the mess with a slightly dazed expression. His shirt was smudged with ash, and he was holding a gash on his arm.

  Jen pulled off the long sleeved button down shirt she wore over her T-shirt and pressed it to the wound.

  “What happened?” she asked him in Arabic. “Did you see?”

  He shook his head and tapped his ear, a confused look on his face. Hearing loss, Jen assumed. Sure enough, there was fresh blood marking the dark skin of his neck below his ears on both sides.

  She asked again, loudly and slowly, exaggerating the movements of her mouth so he could read her lips.

  He looked away as he started speaking, just staring straight ahead. Shellshocked. She’d seen it before. Had to make sure the paramedics knew to get him a head CT when they got him to a hospital to check for traumatic brain injury.

  “A truck pulled up at the edge of the market. I saw someone get out and walk down the street, like he was in a hurry to make an appointment. I had to leave my stall here at the front to get something from my uncle. He has a stand near the back of the market. I had just started back this way when I heard a noise and it felt like a big, angry fist knocked me to the ground.�
��

  His words were halting, as if his thoughts were jumbled. Jen peeked under her wadded shirt. Still bleeding. The bone was visible. She pressed it back against his skin.

  “ISIS dogs,” the man said. “Why can’t they leave us alone?”

  Jen pulled out the reporter’s notebook she always kept in her back pocket and wrote down what he’d said. It was word for word.

  She asked the man’s name and got him to spell it for her. It took a couple of tries for him to get it out. Catching the eye of one of the paramedics, she waved him over. As the rescuer climbed over what had been a fruit stall to reach them, Jen curled the young man’s fingers over her shirt, making sure he applied enough pressure to staunch the flow of blood.

  As the paramedic knelt down, she stepped back, bringing her camera up. No one heard the clicking of the shutter as more screaming ambulances rolled up.

  Speaking next to the paramedic’s ear, she told him the man probably had a TBI. The medic looked at her and nodded before pulling a pressure bandage from a green duffle bag.

  With that, Jen melted away from them, a part of the chaos, but apart from it.

  How many of these had she covered over the last few years? God, she couldn’t remember. There was almost a formula to it now.

  Snap photos of the scene. Talk to survivors to see if anyone saw anything. Snap photos of the rescue operation. Talk to the cops when they arrived. Check with the hospital in a couple of hours to get the number of dead and wounded. Check with police headquarters in the morning to get the name of the group that claimed responsibility. Revise dead/wounded toll as necessary. Repeat.

  Off to her left, she saw rescuers cover a prone form with a green plastic sheet. Shit.

  “Blast has claimed at least one life. Rescuers working to clear wounded.” She sent the tweet out.

  “Help me!” A woman’s voice screamed nearby.

  Jen’s head snapped up as she tried to locate where the voice was coming from.

  “Why can’t you hear me? I’m right here. Help me! Please!”

  Uh oh. A prickling awareness danced across Jen’s skin. Not this. Not now.

  She turned and saw a young woman in a black abaya. She was standing beside a paramedic who was leaning over a man with a severely broken leg, the compound fracture leaving the bone showing stark white against soot-stained skin. The woman was practically shouting in the medic’s ear, waving her hand in front of his face. No reaction.

  Shit.

  The shouting woman caught Jen looking and marched over to her.

  “You can hear me, can’t you? What is going on here? Why won’t anyone help me?”

  Ignoring them never worked. Once eye contact was made, there was some kind of connection, an awareness.

  The dead just knew.

  Jen turned slightly away and pretended to dig in her camera bag and tried to move her lips as little as possible as she spoke. No sense in spooking the locals. “Yeah, I can see you. And, no, you don’t need to shout,” she told the spirit.

  “What’s going on here?”

  “There was a blast. Do you remember that?” Jen asked.

  “A blast? What blast?” Confusion passed over the woman’s face, and aggravation made her spectral form vibrate.

  Jen sighed. It was like this with violent deaths sometimes. The spirit didn’t know that it was separated from the body. Jen had been seeing the dead since she’d hit puberty. It had terrified her at first. Now it was just a part of her life. An annoying part.

  She looked up and met the spirit’s gaze. Deep within her, there was a tiny ping of something like empathy. It was more like a remembered sensation, a phantom pain from a part of her that wasn’t there anymore.

  “I’m really sorry to be the one to tell you this, but you didn’t live through the blast. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s your body over there under that sheet,” she said, trying to keep her voice soft and quiet.

  She’d had to tell a few people over the years that they were dead, and it went about as well an L.A. traffic jam. This time was no different.

  “What do you mean I’m dead?”

  Jen put her hand out, palm up.

  “Touch my hand.”

  The spirit reached out, the look on her face clearly saying that the she thought Jen was messing with her. Her expression turned to shock and then to fear in an instant when her spectral hand passed through the flesh of Jen’s palm.

  “Told you.”

  The woman’s stricken face looked like she was crying, but the dead had no tears.

  “What is my family going to do without me?”

  Jen summoned up the words that she had developed over time for situations like these.

  “Your family will miss you, but they will survive. They’ll be sad at first, but someday, they will be happy again.”

  The specter shook her head. “No. There has to be something I can do, something I can do to fix this.”

  Jen put on her best I’m-trying-to-be-sympathetic-here face and just shook her head slightly, letting the specter see the truth in her eyes. There would be no going back this time.

  The specter crossed her arms over her non-existent stomach and let out a frustrated half scream.

  “Why me?”

  Jen sighed, “Because death is a random bastard.”

  “This is a lot to take in.”

  “I know it’s sudden. Just try to think calming thoughts.”

  The spirit seemed to gather herself as she looked around at the devastation.

  “What’s next? Where do I go?”

  Resignation was written on the specter’s features now, clouding her dark eyes.

  “I don’t know. I think it’s different for everyone. Some people see a light. Others see family members. My advice? Calm your mind and think of the time you were happiest in this world. But whatever you do, don’t stick around here. Anything is better than this place.”

  The specter nodded and looked back at the body under the green plastic sheet, her expression grim.

  “Would you do something for me?”

  Jen hesitated. She’d heard requests from the dead before. Most of them were of the “Tell my family I love them” variety. She hated those because if she fulfilled them, she wasn’t telling them anything they didn’t already know, and the family usually thought she was some whackjob psycho.

  “I’ll do what I can,” was all Jen said.

  “If it wasn’t destroyed in the blast, there should be a bottle of pills in my—the pocket, over there,” the specter said, gesturing toward the body. “It’s medicine for my son. He’ll die without it. It’s a three-month supply, and we don’t have enough money to replace it. I had just picked it up from the doctor and was buying bread for dinner when…” she trailed off, putting a hand that was fading to translucence to her mouth.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Rukia.”

  “Where do you live?”

  The spirit gave the address, or as close to one as any house in the slums had. Jen could find it. She had more experience navigating those neighborhoods than the well-off ones on the other side of the river.

  “I can’t believe I’m never going to see them again.”

  Jen stayed silent. A kinder person would have told the spirit that she would see her family again one day. But in reality, she had no idea what was on the other side. The spirits she saw might just be echoes of consciousness, the last electrical discharge of a dying brain. She wasn’t sure if she believed in a soul or an afterlife.

  She’d seen spirits fade out before and this one was headed in that direction. Jen had no idea where they went or if they went anywhere at all. Maybe they just became...nothing.

  This spirit had little tying her to this plane of reality. She was ready to go and leave this hellish place behind. Her hands and feet had already disappeared.

  Jen wasn’t sure what possessed her to speak. Maybe it was the hopeful expression on the specter’s face. Maybe it was the shitty, unfair way she�
�d been taken out.

  “I’ll take the medicine to your boy. Don’t worry,” she said, her voice soft. “Now, go with God, sister.”

  The specter closed her eyes and dissolved like a plume of smoke in a gentle breeze.

  Why had she said that? Jen didn’t even believe in God. She believed in exactly two things: the ability of humans to fuck over other humans and the inherent brutality of the universe.

  Jen put her hands on her hips and looked up at the sky, blowing out a long breath. She was such an idiot sometimes. And a fucking bleeding heart to boot.

  She looked around and found that the paramedics were moving the wounded toward the ambulances at an efficient rate. The police were just starting to arrive to cordon off the area. Anyone that could walk had left what remained of the market, probably fearing a secondary blast. Now was her chance.

  No one was paying attention to the corpse. Typical. It wasn’t like it was going anywhere. Not until the cops came, photographed the scene and hauled it off to the morgue.

  Picking her way over the rubble, she knelt by the sheet and looked around again. Still in the clear. She put her camera bag down to block the view and darted her hand under the sheet. She found the pocket of the woman’s abaya and fished out the glass pill bottle.

  Glancing at the label, she saw it was medication for hemophilia. Yeah, the kid probably would die without this. Shit.

  She stowed the pill bottle in her camera bag, rummaged around in it like she was looking for something and stood. Looping the bag over her head, she headed for the blockades the police were putting up.

  “Who’s the scene commander?” she asked one of the cops. She recognized him from the neighborhood. Young guy, tall, with a trim beard. He nodded to her, clearly recognizing her as the local vulture reporter.

  “Talk to the sergeant,” he said, nodding in the direction of an older man with four bars on his uniform. “But they won’t have much yet.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know the drill,” she said, waving him down.

  ***

  Theron Blackwell’s boots pounded against the pavement of the alley as he ran. He put a hand out and caught the rusty ladder bolted to the side of the building, using his momentum to leap onto the rungs, scrambling for the roof.