Embers (22 page)

Father Mark followed her gaze. “It will find its way out. They always do. And you will find your way out, too.”

“Would it be too much to ask for a blessing, Father?” The words nearly stung her parched throat. She had not asked for such a thing, ever. She was sure the priest would send her away, tell her to come back for reindoctrination classes or come to the next mass.

“Though it may be out of the ordinary for a lapsed Catholic, I strongly feel it would be good for your soul to take communion, Anya,” Father Mark told her. “You have a task ahead of you in bringing the arsonist to justice and many tasks before you in purifying your heart. I feel the Holy Spirit should be summoned to guide your hands and your heart.”

If I don’t manage to offend the Holy Spirit by nibbling on it, first,
Anya thought.
And I’d
much rather have the Holy Spirit guiding my hands than Mimi.

Father Mark bustled away to prepare the communion. Anya sat alone in the pew, staring up at the bird. She felt a surprising measure of peace. She had hoped that being here might conjure up the smallest shred of belief to help guide her. After quitting DAGR, she felt very, very alone.

Except for Sparky. He laid at her feet, dozing. She leaned down and scratched his eargills. He chuffed happily in his slumber. He would always be with her. As long as she had Sparky, she could never be truly alone.

“Father Mark can’t see it. But I can.”

Anya turned in her pew at the voice behind her. She saw the ghost of a young priest in a black suit, sitting a row behind her. A worry mark was pressed into his brow. He seemed barely old enough to drive, much less to have completed the training. She remembered him from her childhood, pacing the halls outside Father Mark’s office. When he lifted his hands to grip the back of the pew, Anya could see the thin white marks of scars circling his wrists like bracelets. A suicide. No wonder he was trapped here.

“See what?” Anya asked.

The young priest leaned forward. His eyes were wild and intense.
“The stain of the
demon upon you.”

Anya’s hands fluttered up to the bandages on her chest. “You can see that?”

“Yes. And I can see that the demon is taking root in you.”
His knuckles whitened to the point that they became translucent.
“I’ve been there. I know.”

“How do you know?” she asked, as dread twitched through her. She’d suspected, worried at it, but the priest had given the terrible thought shape and form. Anya had failed to entirely devour Mimi. The demon had moved from Chloe into her.

“It begins simply enough, as obsession. The demon feeds on it. For me, it was an
obsession with a woman.”
He looked away, and she could see the pain in his eyes.
“But
you can’t let it take hold. Fight it.”

“How? How can I fight it?”

The priest’s gaze was leaden.
“If you cannot defeat the demon through your own virtues,
you must transfer it to someone else. Give the burden away.”

Anya leaned back, shocked. She couldn’t imagine forcing Mimi on someone else, couldn’t imagine a priest advising her to do that. The young priest was clearly mad, unhinged from the way he’d departed life. “I can’t do that. This isn’t a cold that I can give to someone by sneezing on them, that they’ll eventually get over.”

“You must. If you can’t destroy it, you must pass it on.”
The young priest looked at her.

“You are needed for other tasks—to stop this arsonist, to keep Sirrush from waking. For
the greater good, it has to happen. Don’t let the demon sacrifice you.”

“But, I—” she sputtered. It seemed that the entire underground spiritual world knew about Sirrush. Could they feel that much? Was he that close?

The young priest’s ghost sank into the pew and disappeared into the floor. Anya heard the footsteps of the old priest approaching.

She turned. In one hand, he held a gold chalice. “Are you ready?”

“Yes, Father.”

She knelt before the altar and recited the Lord’s Prayer with Father Mark. She’d always said the Lord’s Prayer in the company of others, and her voice seemed a tinny shadow compared to Father Mark’s.

Father Mark said, “Deliver us from every evil, Lord, and grant us peace. In your mercy, keep us free from sin. Protect us from all anxiety as we await the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.”

Anya responded, “For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and forever.”

“May the peace of the Lord be with you, always.” Father Mark presented the transubstantiated body and blood of Christ to the empty church, then lowered the chalice to Anya. “Blood of Christ.”

Anya pressed her lips to the cup. The wine scalded her throat and she struggled to swallow. “Amen,” she croaked.

Father Mark placed the host on her tongue. “Body of Christ.”

The wafer dissolved against the roof of her mouth and she felt it sizzling against her teeth, as if she’d swallowed a fistful of Pop Rocks.

“Amen,” she gasped, lowering her head. She hoped that Father Mark thought her to be simply overcome with the power of prayer.

“Bless this child of yours, Lord. Relieve her of her suffering and assist her on her mission. Thanks be to God.”

“Thanks be to God,” she echoed, but she couldn’t hear her own voice. She heard nothing but the sound of the trapped bird beating its wings futilely against the stained glass.

Anya lit a novena candle for Brian and said a prayer, hoping that wherever his spirit was locked away, it would have some small effect. She waited for the spirit of the young priest to return, but he didn’t make an appearance. Ghosts were never particularly dependable creatures.

She left the church shortly after sunset. Autumn had reached into all the corners of Hamtramck, painting the leaves on the trees gold and red. The lawn around the ruddy stone of the church had stopped growing, splinters of yellow blades prickling into the carpet of grass. Cirrus clouds scarcely moved in the darkening sky, though a breeze rattled litter and leaves along the gutters. Sparky chased a paper cup rolling along the sidewalk.

She decided to walk home. The living priest and the dead one had given her much to ponder. Like it or not, she needed to face the fact she was being haunted by Mimi. Having seen a handful of these cases with DAGR, she knew the signs. Mimi had gained a toehold in her physical body. If she wasn’t careful, she’d come down with a full-blown case of demonic possession like poor Chloe, flailing in her bathtub. . . and that would help no one.

The old priest’s ritual had stung her. Anya hoped that meant it had worked, that the communion had driven Mimi away, at least for the time being. Passing Mimi on like a hand-me-down pair of jeans wasn’t an option. It went against every last grain of ethics in her; she wouldn’t visit the harm Mimi represented on an innocent. It simply wasn’t going to happen.

She could go to DAGR. She’d thought about that. But her pride wouldn’t allow her to go crawling back to them, to ask for the help that she’d been reluctant to give. No. There would be other solutions, solutions that wouldn’t endanger them or her pride. That bridge was burned and she would find another way.

She opened her mailbox and rifled through her mail in the last of the sunshine. Bills. Junk mail. More offers for aluminum siding. Anya stood back and looked at her house. It didn’t look that bad to her. Why did they keep bothering her? She fingered past three credit card solicitations before her fingers stilled on an ivory envelope. It was hand addressed to her. She recognized the scrawl from the flower card and the sketch Drake Ferrer had drawn of her in the cathedral.

She slit the envelope with a fingernail and pulled out the message. It was an invitation to Drake’s art opening Friday night at the Detroit Institute of Art. Her brows shot up. What the hell? Was he trying to date her or taunt her?

Her first impulse was to tear it up, but she paused. Why
shouldn’t
she? Why shouldn’t she take the opportunity to glare at him, to make him uncomfortable. . . to show him she wasn’t afraid of him.

She looked down at her feet. “Sparky, do you want to go to a party Friday night?”

Sparky paused in his intense scrutiny of the electric meter. His tail kinked up.

“Yeah. A party. With wine and cheese, snotty art, and an opportunity to bite that nasty man from the graveyard again.”

Sparky’s tail wagged. He was on board.

Now, she just needed something to wear. Piss. She supposed it would be in poor taste to turn up in her firefighter’s boots. She looked down at her hands. Maybe Mimi had been right. She could use a coat of nail polish.

She’d worry about that later. She chucked her mail and her keys on the kitchen table, beside the microwave she had yet to return. The light on her answering machine blinked furiously and she sighed.

She stabbed the button.

“Kalinczyk, this is Marsh. Turn on the news. Call me.” That was Marsh: to the point. The time stamp on it was fifteen minutes ago. She hoped she hadn’t missed whatever he was talking about.

Anya clicked on the television, an old set plugged into a scorched surge protector. The local evening news was still on, and the news anchors blathered in full-crisis mode. A newscaster in a hardhat was yelling above sirens that obliterated the sound feed. Behind him, she saw an apartment building going up in flames.

Anya put her head in her hands. “Oh, shit.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

ANYA’S VISIT TO ST. FLORIAN had apparently done little to improve the karma of firefighters in the greater Detroit area.

By the time Anya arrived at the scene of the apartment fire on the northwest side of town, trucks from five different ladder companies were trying to keep the blaze under control. The fire had apparently begun in one building of twelve units and had spread to another. These were newer apartment buildings, built within the last ten years. Anya would never have considered living in such recent, cheap construction: the siding had melted and the firewalls only reached up to the roofline, allowing the fire to roar through the attic space from one unit to the next. There was a reason why firefighters called so many of the new builds
tinderboxes
. They were built to look good, with enough pretty details to impress the shallow eye, but not all the crown molding and walk-in closets in the world could protect you from a disaster the way solid metal doors and cinder-block firewalls could. There was definitely something to be said for old and ugly.

This fire was a bad one. Anya had passed two ambulances racing to the hospital on her way in. While this wasn’t the worst time of day for a fire—most of the people who lived there would be awake—many of the occupants would be home from work and school.

Anya geared up and made her way to the perimeter of the scene. Five apartment buildings were tightly packed around a central parking lot, which was crammed with emergency vehicles. It looked as if a child had dumped out a box of toy cars on his sister’s broken dollhouse. Residents wandered, dazed, in the lot. A woman somewhere was crying for her child. A man sat on the bumper of his car with his keys in his hand, watching his home burn. A teenage girl sat on the curb beside a police car, clutching her pet cat. A little boy holding a gerbil cage tagged along beside his mother, who was carrying a baby. The police were trying to keep the civilians out of the lot and behind the line, but more people kept pouring out of the buildings.

A patrolman was trying to hold back a wailing woman trying to cross the line. She was dressed in a waitress uniform, clearly just off work.

“You have to let me in!” she yelled. “My dogs are in there!”

Anya slipped on her helmet. “How many dogs?”

“Two dachshunds. Please get them!”

“Which apartment?”

“It’s 1811. . . A8. . .” She pointed toward the next block of buildings to go.

“Give me your keys.” Though Anya was a big fan of kicking in doors for fun and stress relief, there was no point in being inefficient.

Anya ran to the building, clumsy in her booted feet. The uniform scraped against her burns. She never remembered her uniform being this heavy before.

The waitress’s unit was a ground-floor apartment. A plume of smoke drifted from two doors down, and the fire had spread to the roof shingles. She smelled burning tar. With clumsy gloved fingers, she jammed the key into the lock. She hoped with all her might that the woman had crate-trained her dogs, and that she would find a wire cage in the living room that she could simply pick up and carry out.

No such luck. The door opened to reveal a small apartment with a galley kitchen, a pretty decorative fireplace, chintz couch, and no dogs.

She tried whistling. “Here, doggies, c’mon!” She thunked through the apartment, hearing fire crackling in the units above her. There wasn’t much time. She looked under the couch, under the desk, and finally under the bed in the bedroom. No dogs.

“Sparky, I need your help,” Anya hissed.

Sparky unwound himself from the copper collar around her neck, then scrambled up from her fire-coat collar. His tongue coiled, tasting the smoke.