Page 1 of Wildfire Witch

NIX

I didn’t cometo Seattle to be yelled at for some minimum wage job. But life took strange turns, and no one understood that better than me, as the old gran at the bar waved her coffee around as punctuation for her ongoing tirade.

There were trails of steam leaking from her reusable cup. “Are you even listening to me?” she demanded, reaching a new octave of outrage when I steamed milk in the middle of her rant.

“That’s as hot as I can make it, ma’am,” I repeated myself to her in a dull tone. I wasn’t paid enough to start a Friday morning this way.

“Bullshit! It’s barely warm!”

This is what I got for using my magic. Any time I saw her bedazzled monstrosity of a cup, with its glitteryAgneson the side done up with pink cursive letters, I prepared myself to sneak a bit of magic under the counter. Most of the time, I got away with it.

Agnes was a regular, unfortunately, noticing that her coffee was nice and nuclear hot when I was working. She had a terrible case of an old person’s mouth, able to tolerate temperatures that would melt a lesser woman.

But today, I couldn’t flash heat her beverage. My manager was not so secretly on her phone several paces away and I couldn’t risk her recording the spark of light in my palm. She bowed her head now, studiously ignoring Agnes. If I tried to get her attention for help, she’d just tell me to remake the beverage.

Maybe I should’ve done that, rather than square up over the inferior temperature of the café’s machines. “Look, ma’am, there are other people waiting for their drinks,” I stated.

There was a murmur of discontent behind her. Eight people were waiting, in fact, and I was the only barista making drinks while the inexperienced new hire manned the register and heated food.

Aiming to make it only seven people waiting, I placed the next drink up on the bar and shouted the recipient’s name. Clearly I’d misjudged Agnes’s caffeine-deprived rage, as she smacked it. The top popped off and hot coffee splashed the front of my apron.

I gaped at her, my anger mounting. “Make mine right, first!” She snapped.

Something within me shifted at that moment and my hands shook violently. The sounds of tired jazz from the overhead speaker faded into the white noise of an irritated customer jumping to my defense.

Someone’s cold hand landed on my shoulder. It was the manager, trying to push me aside with an expression of falsesympathy. Her lips formed words, but I didn’t know what she was trying to say.

All I could hear was thewhooshof fire.

Flames unfurled their metaphorical wings within my chest, filling my lungs with char. I gripped my throat with sizzling fingers, choking on the taste of ashes.

Oh fuck, not now. Not in front of all these people.

My curse didn’t time itself for my convenience. I had hazy memories of other times this had happened. I’d burned to death in classrooms, while fast asleep in halfway homes, and during my ill-informed attempts to break my curse without proper protection.

I may no longer remember how many lifetimes I’ve experienced, but I knew they all ended the same way.

“Fire!” a man bellowed.

My free hand clutched the espresso machine and flames rapidly consumed it, accelerating as the magic flowed from my palm uncontrollably.

“Aodhnait! Wake up!”I shouted in my head…at the phoenix spirit trapped within my heart.

If she replied, this life could still be salvaged. I’d called her back from the edge before…but most of the time, she was so consumed by a mindless fervor that she was simply an unforgiving blaze inside me.

My manager sprayed my arm with foam from an extinguisher and I jerked. My hand and wrist stung with the familiarsensation of a painful burn, but I jolted back in control of my magic and stopped leaking flames.

“What did you do?” she gasped, dousing the machines to reduce some of the fire catching behind the bar. It flickered into the cabinets and spread, smothering us both with thick black smoke. Coughing, she grabbed my shoulder and dragged me away from the fire.

Aodhnait’s presence rose to the forefront of my mind as we abandoned the café. I could’ve smiled with relief, despite the situation, to feel her shift. Even though we often argued, she was a curl of warm and golden flame in the darkness of my thoughts; a point of safety in many lives plagued by uncertainty.“Are you all right?”she asked.

“I’m going to need a new job,”I told her.

My life waslike an incomplete puzzle. I figured that every time I died and was reborn, one of the pieces that made me, well…me, was incinerated. The one constant was Aodhnait, who died and came back with me. I knew her name like it was branded on me, even the spelling, though it was pronounced ay-neht.

She remembered more than I did. At least, that’s what she wanted me to think. Through her, I knew we were cursed to occupy the same body. Though she could perceive the world through my every sense and experience, she defined herself as a spirit stuck inside my beating heart.

Butwhy? Neither of us knew anymore.

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