Page 11 of Embers of Midnight
Not yet. Fine. Not yet. Then move.
The forest thins without warning. Snow lightens. The creek bends away and leaves a flat of pale under the sky. Clearing. I step out and every muscle that has been holding in, in, in meets open space and uncoils by reflex. My mane throws a low wave. Heat breathes off me in a sheet. The air steams like the world is sighing through its teeth.
The clearing looks old. No tracks. No brush high enough to hide a fox, just dead yellow grass trapped under crust and a few stubs of last year’s stubborn plants. I stop in the center because my brain thinks maybe if I stand here, I’ll be a problem worth solving.
Try again.I lower my head. The grass at my feet is a pale mat under frost. I nudge it with my lips and watch it brown and curl at the touch like I’m exhaling August on it. My stomach tightens at the idea of chewing that rope again. Still, I take a mouthful because I can learn. Maybe my body was just being dramatic.
It tastes like boiled lawn. I work my jaw and my throat makes an executive decision not to cooperate. I spit. A wet, stringy clump hits the snow and steams like a failed spell.
Betrayed by biology. Again.
I try a second mouthful because I am nothing if not committed to bad ideas in the name of data. It goes worse. My body retches in an elegant, full-body heave that would be embarrassing if anyone but the trees were watching. I turn my head and cough the mess into the crust where it glues down like shame.
The knot of hunger tightens to a blade point. The rest of me tightens back. I plant my hooves and breathe short, hard lines. The horn thrums, low and steady, like a tuning fork looking for a note.
I am not eating grass. I’m not doing the carnivore thing either. I will bully physics until it gives me—
A fly of heat sparks under my skin, small and mean. It jumps from rib to rib like a match head. I snort, just to, I don’t know, reset the world for a second.
The snort lands like a thrown switch.
A column of fire rips out of my mouth and up and forward in a single, obscene bloom. It hits the dead grass and the crust and the very air and turns everything to light.
There is no warning between less and too much. One breath, I’m a girl trapped in a bad biology experiment; the next, I’m a flamethrower that found religion. Heat slams the clearing flat. The snow doesn’t melt, not at first; itcollapses. The top layer goes glossy, then sinks. The grass doesn’t char; it slumps like plastic in an oven, strings pulling long before they snap.
The nearest trees take it on the chin. Bark softens and slides in slow globs. Sap pops like tiny fireworks. Needles flare and then liquefy into dark, sweet-smelling ribbons that drip and hiss when they hit what used to be snow. The sound is everywhere: crack, hiss, pop, a wet kind of roar like rain made of heat.
I jerk my head back so fast my neck snaps with it and the column cuts off. The afterimage paints itself on the inside of my eyelids and refuses to be reasonable. Silence falls hard, then staggers under all the small noises of a world realizing it just got punched. The center of the clearing is a black, shining pool with a skin that writhes. Heat comes off it in waves that bulge the air.
What did you do.
Panic goes for my legs. They consider running. I stop them because leaving this to become a story the wind tells feels like a new kind of cowardice. I planted the match. I don’t get to pretend I’m not holding it.
Pull it back. If you can spit it out, maybe you can call it in. Come on. Come on.
I set my hooves like I’m bracing for a hit. I breathe slow and deep until breath hurts. I think the opposite of flaring, the opposite of throwing—of gathering. The horn hum rises, a pitch that tingles in my teeth. I angle it at the mess I made, like a hook I might slide under. Heat licks my lips from the inside, eager as a dog I never wanted and now own.
Back. Back to me.
Nothing happens.
I close my eyes because the sight of what I did is making me stupid. I picture a hand over a candle, a palm lowering to tame a jumpy flame. Lower. Lower. Not to smother. To claim. I make my breath the only drum left and match it: in two, hold one, out two, hold one. The horn’s hum slews higher. Pressure gathers behind my eyes until my vision edges white even with them closed.
Heat moves.
It doesn’t rush so much asfold. The air bends toward me in a way I can taste—metallic, dry, ancient. Flames that were walking up bark turn slow and then crawl backward like film in reverse. The shiny skin in the clearing ripples and shrinks at the edges, pulling into itself like it’s changed its mind about existing. Smoke funnels thin and low, spidering along the ground towardmy chest where the heat lives and has been waiting with its arms open.
It hurts. Not burn hurt. Pressure hurt. The kind of ache you get from holding a door closed against a big, friendly, stupid dog while you fish for your keys. I keep breathing. In. Hold. Out. Hold. The horn sings so high it’s a vibration more than a sound. It feels like someone drawing a wire through my sinuses and polishing bone on the way.
The last of the flame peels off a branch that used to be a tree and slides into me like a long, hot breath I should not enjoy and do anyway because relief is a bully. The clearing sags into a boiled, black dish with a ruffled edge. The trees around it are a ring of glossy scars. The air has that weird, sucked-empty feeling of a room after someone said the worst thing they ever will.
I stand there shaking on four legs too proud to wobble and too tired not to. My tongue feels like cotton that went through a kiln. My throat tastes like pennies and pine sugar and shame.
Okay. You didn’t burn the entire forest down. You just… melted a watercolor. Whoops. My bad.
The thought cracks something loose. It sounds like a laugh. The sound that comes out of me is not a laugh; it’s a breath that jumps on the way out and throws a little harmless flame that dies immediately because apparently I have learned nothing.
I back away from the ruined center until the snow under me is still snow. The cold can’t quite find me. It tries anyway; I respectthe hustle. My legs, those treacherous, miracle sticks, decide to fold. I let them. I turn and find a wind-thrown tree half-buried in a drift, trunk at a cocky angle like it didn’t go down without making a point. I approach and lower myself until my shoulder hits wood with a dull thump. The bark is cold and rough. I breathe my heat into it out of spite until it warms an inch and pretend that counts as kindness.
