Her Fire
SUMMARY
His touch will be her annihilation.
Ila Baden is haunted by a book; a fragile, old, burned book left to rot in her late grandfather's attic. Though she feels an immediate draw to it, she ultimately has no use for an empty antique damaged beyond repair. She leaves it to be junked, but the ancient being for whom the tome is a conduit will not let her go so easily.
Idris is a ghost, a beast, a demon. He is everything Ila did not know she was missing, every dark faerie tale she wished were true. He is as kind as he is brutal, as tender as he is possessive. He scares her, captivates her, reignites the ashes of a long buried desire in her.
After all: Ila is his to love, to claim, to consume. His heart, his blood, his fated mate. Only in annihilation by his hand will she understand that everything she thought she knew about herself, her life, her very being, was nothing but a lie.
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CHAPTER 1
SHRRK.
For the hundredth time she traced a piece of bright white chalk over one of hundreds of gouged-out grooves in the dirty hardwood beneath her hands. Each movement brought with it a plume of dust and the pungent odor of wood-rot, and she fought not to gag on it.
It felt like she'd been here for days. Weeks. Months. Years, though it had only been an hour and a half at most.
Another stroke of her arm, and then another. The pale skin of her hands was made paler by the dusting of chalk, and as she leaned forward to reach a rune, she left a powdery handprint over the naked patterns. Her eyes watered from the dust, from the absurdity of what she was doing, and as she traced two more arcs, a tear slid down her cheek and hit the floor, disrupting one of the countless lines of chalk.
A familiar echo of pressure pressed in around her and reminded her why she was there. She paused when she felt it, when she smelled woodsmoke and the perfume of roses beneath the decay of a house long dead, and sat back on her heels. Her hands were shaking, her forearms stiff and sore. She blew a strand of frizzy white hair out of her eyes and stretched her back, looking over what she had left as she wiped at her face with the back of one hand.
Half of the summoning circle--a patchwork of patterns that almost spanned the width of the small living room, wall to bare wall--was still bereft of chalk.
Her right hand's knuckles and palm stung, and she took her minute reprieve to inspect it. She touched beneath one of the scrapes on her knuckles, and then stopped to assess her numb left hand. There were splinters embedded in the skin of her palm, and she cursed the lack of sensation as she plucked the most obvious one out.
She cast her gaze over the living room floor. Part of the mottled chalk handprints and knuckle imprints that overlaid sharp runes were now tinged pink from the cuts in her hands. Though, she doubted that a little blood would hurt whatever the end result of her task was. It might even make it better.
The echo pulsed, nearly in tune with her heartbeat, and she snapped out of her daze. She spared a glance down at an open notebook, at the word "Why?" written on an otherwise blank piece of lined paper. There was no written response, just like there hadn't been one when she'd checked ten minutes before, and it made her teeth grind together. Emotion was a jumbled mess to navigate when she wasn't in a strange house under strange pretenses, but even then she could count on anger to be what drove her forward.
But, instead of giving in to that anger, she closed her eyes and breathed. She focused on the soothing scents of smoke and flowers beneath the rot. She focused on the muffled sound of rain as it fell in sheets outside, and the not-so-muffled splatter of it as it poured into the house from a sagging hole in the entryway ceiling behind her. Most of all, she focused on the subtle shifts of pressure in the air; pressure that was not from the thunderstorm that battered the corpse of what had once been a home.
Writing hadn't worked this time. Maybe talking would be a better prompt.
"Why am I doing this, Idris?" She broke the silence with a voice scratchy from disuse. Another tear slid down her flushed cheek, her lilac eyes fluttered back open, and she dashed it away with too much haste.
She waited for several minutes. Of course, there was no answer. Beyond the thrumming in the air that could be mistaken for rain, she didn't really expect an answer from what haunted her.
She bent forward onto her hands and knees with the chalk in hand. Her tote and notebook scraped the wood as she carelessly moved them to her other side, and she looked at the half of the carvings she hadn't filled in with a low, bitter laugh.
Pop.
Thud.
An old, burned book hit the hardwood at an angle, skid, then came to a halt beneath an armchair. It kicked up a small puff of decades-old dust and flopped against the wooden leg, half open. Some of its less damaged pages wrinkled beneath the weight of the rest of the book, and not a moment later, it fell shut with a soft snap. With that snap, an accompanying crackle of energy flared through the stillness.
Another pop echoed in the muggy September evening, a whisper swallowed by silence. And in that silence, there was a new sound--soft shuffling a level down. In response, there was a pause that felt like held breath. The energy waited, and the book's cover moved enough for the charred, blackened pages to crinkle in a facsimile of fluttering.
Footsteps thudded up the stairs to the attic door, building the hum of activity to a desperate crescendo. It was only an echo of feeling now, a memory of being in this world, but it was enough. For now, it had to be enough.
A woman's voice came through the paint-chipped wood, muffled, and something crackled like a distant lit hearth. There was a soft flutter of breath that could almost be a sigh, and the energy grew frantic. Stronger.
The knob turned and rattled, a klaxon that told what was charged to become still. So it did. It melted back into the book, back into itself as though it had never tried to be tangible. With the last of the energy unbound to the book, it murmured the woman's name sweetly into the dark. Tested the sound in a space that did not belong to it, that it could not control, that it had not occupied for decades.
"Ila..."
In that same instant, Ila nudged the old wood door with her ratty black boot. It swung open too hard and hit the back wall with a bang, drowning out all other sound. She flinched and shuffled a box in her arms, her phone cradled on one shoulder against her cheek.
"Arthur, what do you want from me?" she asked, surveying the attic in the light that flooded in from the doorway and the weak sunlight coming in from a single small window.
She shifted her hold on the box, weighing where she might set it down with a critical eye--before she dumped it, unceremoniously, onto a coffee table three steps away from where she stood with a soft grunt. She turned and yanked on the pull-cord by the door, illuminating the space proper with the light of a single, naked bulb.
A gravelly voice came through on the other end of the phone line as she rubbed at the bridge of her nose beneath her glasses, then raked her long fingers through her mane of messy white curls. She blinked red-rimmed lilac eyes as she listened, and her expression morphed from irritated to incredulous.
Before she could think any better of it, she cut Arthur off with a low growl. "Absolutely not. The funeral is tomorrow, I'm coming into the shop Monday morning and not a second before."
Silence stretched between them, and Ila's heart was a frantic beat in her throat. Arthur had fired people for far less, she knew, but that could not stop her from voicing her anger to her boss now. Her grandfather had just died--she wasn't going to put grieving on hold to sell and repair antique books. The books could fucking wait an extra two days.
She started to pace the empty floor space of the attic as the man spoke again, softer this time, but she cut him off only a few words in. "No. No, I'm not having this conversation now--I appreciate that you were gracious enough to give me the time to take care of him, sir. But I'm not coming in to work sooner than we agreed."
She pulled the cellphone away from her face, and hung up just as Arthur sputtered out, "Ila, wait, I didn't mean--"
Ila stared at her phone until the screen went black, then continued staring at her reflection in the glass until it blurred. She blinked and touched her cheek.
That had been happening a lot for the last couple weeks. Completely random bouts of crying that she was, usually, the last to know about. It was normal, she knew, but that hadn't stopped her from berating herself over it. It had happened a few times in front of her grandfather, and she loathed that a dying man was the one to comfort her. It should have been the other way around, but she hadn't been strong enough in the face of his mortality.
A hard sigh left her, and she pocketed her phone in her faded black jeans and swiped her knuckles beneath her eyes. Grief was not a luxury she could currently afford; she had things to do and a limited time to do them in. She touched the silver, tiger-eye ring suspended by a thin silver chain around her pale throat. As she touched the grooves in the thick metal band and the delicate, silver antlers that held the stone in place, she felt a sense of quiet resolve wash over her.
After a few moments of fiddling, she sniffed and turned her head to look at the box she'd carried up with her. It was half-full of knit throws her late grandmother had made. Ila found them tucked in her untouched sewing room, and it was only as she was setting the box by the stairs that she realized she could fit a few photo albums inside without making it unreasonable to carry.
She cast her gaze out to the furniture-stuffed attic illuminated more by the single bulb above her head than the sun, now. The funeral was tomorrow, and then she had one more day to grab what she needed. Doing was paramount.
Again, her fingers ran through her white hair, then she tied it up into a sloppy, puffy ponytail with the hair tie on one wrist. A shower was in order once she was at the hotel to get rid of the grime from twelve hours of sorting through her grandparent's house. In the here and now, all she could do was keep her hair out of the way as she walked with a single-minded purpose towards a bookcase tucked catty-corner to one wall of the attic.
So it went for another hour, picking over books and photo albums and stacking them in a pile next to the box. Some, she knew to throw out outright. Like an old cookbook with half the pages torn out.
As she looked at it, a sudden, loud laugh left her--the pages that were missing were what she'd been finding tucked all over the kitchen earlier in the day. Finding those scattered around had baffled her for hours as she cleared out cabinets and scrubbed the place clean.
Grandma probably did that before she died, and Grandpa never touched it. That was one way to keep her alive, she supposed--but that didn't make it worthy of being kept, so she dumped it without ceremony into a pile in the corner, just like she'd trashed the individual pages.
Ila had gotten good at identifying pure trash, trash with sentimental value but not worth keeping, and sentimental objects that were worth keeping over the last few days. When she only had a week to clear out her childhood home, with no help beyond what she could reasonably take home herself and what the neighbors scattered around the mountain might want, well. That was a necessary skill to hone, and fast. The rest would get sold in the estate sale.
She rubbed her tired eyes as she stopped moving for the first time in a while and leaned against the heavy oak bookcase. Most of its contents were trash, and mostly not the sentimental kind, but at least it made her job a little easier than it otherwise could be. Something caught her eye as she let her gaze wander aimlessly over the shelves, and she paused to consider it. She stared at it for several seconds before she walked toward the box at her eye-level and picked it up.
"... Granddad, you didn't," she murmured, popping open a plain carboard box with "Ila's art" scrawled over the side.
Ila couldn't help but stifle a giggle as she plucked out the first thing on top of a stack of papers: a child's crude drawing of what looked like a black balloon dog, if not for the branches sticking up off the top of its head. No, not branches--antlers.
Everything else fell away as she set the box on a waist-high stack of plastic bins full of Christmas decorations that hadn't been touched in over a decade and rifled through its contents. Stacks upon stacks of a child's drawings of a solid black stag, of her and her parents, of her and her grandparents. Of her and the stag.
She'd forgotten about all of these, and as soon as she touched the first of what had to have been at least a dozen little staple-bound "books", she stopped. This was not trash, and it was coming with her.
Before she forgot, she made a quick dash down the stairs with the box in her arms and set it down in the small but growing pile of boxes she planned on taking home. Then, she flew back up the stairs two at a time, determined to get the last box sorted before she called it quits for the night. By the time she got back upstairs, she was panting, trembling, and realizing she'd forgotten to eat all day beyond a cup of yogurt that morning. That definitely meant this would be the last box.
As she caught her breath and scanned the forgotten furniture from her vantage point at the door, she found what she'd been looking for in the first place: photo albums. She walked toward the back of the attic, shimmied between a wood-framed, plush armchair and a table, and reached for the short stack with a soft grunt. There was a smaller one on top of three others that she wasn't sure she'd ever seen before, with a rose outlined in white on the cover. It didn't matter what it had in it, or even if it was empty; she wasn't going to get lost looking at photos up here for another half hour. It was coming with her, even if it was empty and she had to throw it out when she was home.
She wriggled back out of the tight space, then grit out a soft "god dammit" when one of the albums fell out of her stiff left hand and halfway under the green-cushioned chair. Without stopping, she dumped the other ones into the box and turned back to it, grinding her teeth.
Something warm and wet fell down her cheek, and it took her crossing the attic before she realized she was crying. Again.
Ila snatched the remaining album up off the floor, then banged her hand on the wood bottom of the chair for her trouble. She cursed at the pain that zipped up her scarred left arm, almost dropping the album for a second time. She couldn't feel much with that hand, but when she felt anything, of course it was an irritating reminder that at least some of the nerves in that arm were still alive. A little too alive sometimes.
She wiped under her eyes, frowned at the album, then set it in the box with the others. The painful zap dulled to an odd warmth, and she shook out her arm with a huff. That was going to make carrying this box slightly more difficult, but like everything else she'd done until now, she'd manage on her own.
Sweaty, exhausted, and with a headache brewing behind her strained eyes, Ila shuffled the box onto her hip and reached for the pull cord again. The too-bright bulb clicked off, and she let the humid dark swallow and soothe her. She welcomed the prickle of her hair standing on end, and nearly laughed when the feeling of being watched washed over her. The same thing had happened after Grandma died, and it brought with it an odd sense of comfort that made her heart ache.
"I'm visiting again tomorrow, Granddad. Sorry I cursed," Ila said with a sniff.
She opened the door into the soft glow of the hallway, then paused at the pressure change. She sniffed the air, and beneath the mustiness of a lifeless home, she smelled rain. The accompanying crackle of energy made her hair stand on end again, and the first flash of lighting cut out a bright silhouette of the single round window in the attic. Thunder rumbled somewhere in the distance, and she shut the door with a much gentler touch than how she'd opened it.
CHAPTER 2
That next day saw her dressed for the funeral in a modest black mourning dress, shielding her sensitive skin from the heat of the mid-morning September sun with a small black umbrella.
The service hadn't been a long one, and the gathering was small. He'd had friends in town, a couple sons with their own children he'd kept in contact with from a previous marriage. For every person she even vaguely recognized, there were five she didn't, so she stopped caring to analyze each face that greeted her with their condolences.
The last person to come up to her after the service was a man she thought she recognized, but couldn't be certain. A broad man, his skin dark and his face gentle, with a shock of short gray locs pulled back and tied into a small ponytail at the back of his head. His voice was smooth and soft as he offered her his hand.
"I'm so sorry, Ms. Abdallah. I was a friend of Hashir's. I don't know if you remember me, but--"
The recognition then was immediate, and she smiled as she shook his hand. "I do remember you, Johnathan. It's been a long time."
It had been a long enough time for his hair to go fully gray, for ever-deeper furrows to carve themselves into his skin. She remembered him with salt and pepper hair, with a still mostly black beard. His hands hadn't been quite so bony back then, but they had been just as steady and sure.
After a moment, she cleared her throat and wiped under her eyes with a cloth handkerchief he handed her without comment. "Sorry, it's Ms. Baden. I never got granddad's name when they adopted me."
His gray brows knit. "My mistake Ms. Baden--and, you can keep that." He nodded down at the cloth she tried to give back to him, and she mumbled a "thank you" as she wiped at her eyes again and sniffed.
"Stupidest thing, I forgot to bring mine." She swapped the umbrella and cloth between her hands and twirled the white chrysanthemum in her fingers. "I cabbed here."
Johnathan waved a hand at her, smiling, and they both fell silent. It was surreal for Ila, staring down at her distorted reflection in the polished cherry wood casket, a few flowers strewn over the top of it. It was surreal to stare at the wooden box and know that her grandfather's carbon shell remained there, that it kept some tangible idea of him tethered on earth. The last time she'd seen him, Hashir had breathed his last while she'd stroked his gaunt cheek and squeezed his hand in hers.
She felt Johnathan hesitantly set his palm on her shoulder, and she came to awareness that tears were rolling down her face. The hand holding the flower gripped the ring that served as a necklace pendant, and she took in a shuddering breath. It had been three days, but it felt like only three seconds since she felt his gnarled hand relax for one final time.
"Do you want to stay for a little longer? Say something?" Johnathan's voice was a quiet rumble that she almost didn't hear.
Ila blinked through her tears and let out a soft laugh. "I've said what I've needed to, I think."
With that, she let the flower fall from her fingertips and felt another piece of herself irrevocably changed by death's indifferent touch.
Johnathan took her to a small café a ten minute walk from the cemetery. It was one she recognized, one she'd been to a thousand times before, and a cloak of memory settled over her as they walked inside together.
"Just a coffee?" John asked, digging in his wallet for a ten dollar bill.
Ila nodded without comment, squinting around the space from behind her glasses as the tint changed from dark to clear. The decor was a little different than the last time she'd been there, what had to have been at least thirteen years before. Not so different as to be alien, but different enough that it threw her off-kilter. Had it really been that long since she'd left to go to a big city college?
John briefly touched her shoulder to get her attention. "Why don't you snag that booth back over there?" He pointed to the far corner of the café, the farthest corner from both the door and the other patrons milling about.
Ila mouthed "thank you" as he inclined his head, and walked to where he pointed. She scooted into one side of the booth, setting her purse and folded umbrella between her body and the wall. She dug through her bag for her phone, anxious in the aftermath of the funeral, and scrolled through her social media feeds as she waited for her impromptu companion.
Not thirty seconds later, he slid into the booth seat opposite her and folded his hands on the tabletop. He sighed, heavy, and tilted his head as she glanced up and shut her phone off. His watery gray eyes searched hers for a long moment, and he sniffed. "I'm sorry. I won't keep you for too long, but I thought you might like the distraction."
She shook her head, smiling sadly. "It's alright Johnathan--"
"Just John for you, Ms. Baden." He winked, and Ila's heart raced a little harder than she thought it ought to given the circumstances of their meeting. Shit.
She cleared her throat, drumming her nails on the plain wood tabletop. "Alright, John. And I do, very much." She felt her face heat, and cursed herself inwardly for her lack of pigment. She probably looked like a tomato now. "I've been hauling and sorting and throwing shi--stuff out for the last week or so, since Granddad passed, and...well."
If he was offended by her almost-swear, he didn't look it as he watched her and listened with rapt attention. Ila fidgeted with her gloves, clenching her left hand. That tingle hadn't left since she banged her hand the night before. Maybe it was the stress of the day so far, but it felt like it was getting worse. "I was just going to go back to doing that after the funeral, so it's nice to catch up with an old family friend."
John looked sheepish, almost bashful. Before he could reply properly, a number was called out from the cashier counter that made him check the receipt tucked under his hands.
"Oh, excuse me, that's us. Be right back." He flashed her a broad smile, and she felt her heart rate kick up again. Of course, of all the times a latent crush was going to resurface, it was going to be at the most inappropriate time for the most inappropriate person imaginable.
He's old enough to be your grandfather, a voice hissed in the back of her mind. She rubbed at her eyes beneath her glasses, then winced as another odd zap pulsed through what living nerves her left arm still had.
She took off both of her gloves as John came back with their drinks, and she was grateful that he hardly spared her scars a glance. Most of the time people would stare, and a lot of the time they weren't very polite about it.
"Coffee, two creams and one sugar?"
Ila nodded and smiled as he handed her the cardboard cup. "Thank you, that's perfect."
He groaned as he sat back down. "Better than mine. I should be watching my blood sugar, but the heart wants what the heart wants. And the heart wants a caramel coffee right now, despite what my doctor tells me."
She laughed, sudden and soft. It felt like the first human interaction she'd had in weeks that was uncomplicated by grief, uncomplicated by things left unsaid, and it was a breath of fresh air.
He smiled at her, showing teeth yellowed by age, and a hush fell over their booth. She kept stealing glances at him from beneath white lashes, kept contemplating the simple gold wedding band on his left hand.
As she sipped at her coffee, Johnathan glanced up at her and spoke. "What have you been up to all these years? Last time I saw you, I think you were off to college after your Grandma passed."
Ila set her cup down and cleared her throat, then counted each thing on her fingers. "I went to college...dropped out of college...didn't pursue my sought-after career as a novelist. But, I did get snatched up by my literary professor to work in his bookshop when he retired a year after I left school."
She tilted her head, her fingers drumming on the tabletop as she thought. "I've been there for maybe the last ten years? The Antiqui-teas Bookshop in the next county over."
Something sparked in Johnathan's eyes. "Ahh. I know of that place, always thought the name was funny. That's wonderful that he took you under his wing."
"Mhm. He's been, um," she took another small drink, "he's been mentoring me for the last five years on how to repair the older books. It's been very rewarding. I tend to like older things."
Before she could let those words sink in between them, especially as her face got redder and redder, she added in half of a rush, "Old books. Old bones. I-I have a cabinet of curiosities at home--big bookcase full of animal skulls and some taxidermy I've done."
He cocked his head, his tone humorous. "I hadn't pegged you as the taxidermy type. But I suppose there isn't really a type, is there?"
"You'd be surprised," she said, rolling her eyes and wrinkling her nose.
Ila grabbed her cup, but stopped just short of picking it up as a sudden, dizzying pain ricocheted through her arm. Her eyes widened, and she grit her teeth as the fingers on her left hand flexed and curled. It was a cascade of heat and cramping that left her breathless. It felt like fire, it felt like memory and nightmare, and in that split second she heard a dull roar in her ears as her gaze focused on the man across from her.
Johnathan almost sprang up to come around to her side of the booth to try and help, but she stopped him with a brief, jerky shake of her head as she came back to herself. She didn't know what the hell it was, but as soon as the worst of the pain hit its crescendo, it disappeared as fast as it appeared. There was a tingle left in the pain's wake, an echo of it that subtly zipped through her arm, and she clenched her stiff fingers as much as she could.
He stared at her, concern in the knit of his brow, and was quick to ask, "Are you okay, Ms. Baden?"
She blinked, and let out a soft pant as she stared down at her arm and relaxed her fingers. "Sorry. That--that happens sometimes. Move it wrong and it does that." She shook out her hand, then cleared her throat. "And, i-if I get to call you John, you get to call me Ila. Fair's fair."
He chuckled as he relaxed back into his seat, eying her hand. "Fair's fair then, Ila."
An uneasy silence fell over their booth, and Ila let the din of the café wash over her as she sipped her drink. What she'd just said was a lie, and the truth behind it worried her. Her arm had never done that before, had never flared into searing agony a day after she'd banged it hard enough for something within to register as half-alive. It was knots of deadened scar tissue from her fingers to her elbow that had only hurt a handful of times in the last twenty-plus years since the accident, and never like that.
She caught him staring at her exposed hand, and put it in her lap out of sight, her coffee cup held in her opposite hand that was bereft of notable scars. His fingers fidgeted on his own cup, and he averted his eyes and tugged at his shirt collar. Feeling emboldened by his slip, she tilted her head to the gold band on his left ring finger.
"Are you married?"
He looked down at the ring. "Ah, I was. My wife died a few years ago."
Ila winced, feeling even more weirded out by her attraction to the man in front of her with this information. Weirded out and ashamed as a sinister little hope fluttered to life in her chest. "Oh, I'm so sorry."
He looked up and smiled, his expression soft and sad. "It's alright, we saw it coming. It was a years-long battle with cancer."
Another silence filled by the thinned throng of patrons, where they focused on their own respective cups. Ila drained hers in the same instant John did his, and as he set the cardboard down with a soft tap, he said, "I have been lonely recently, you know... It's been nice to have your company today."
She nodded, a smile on her face even as she didn't feel it. It was a strange whiplash to go from an anxious hope to a subdued acceptance in the span of a single sentence. This man had been her grandfather's friend, someone she'd only seen briefly throughout her childhood and her teen years. It was silly to be hopeful for something even fleetingly more than what she was given now, and yet...
It was silly, it was absurd, and she did a double-take when he said, with more than a little feeling, "I think I'd...I think I'd like to see you again, if that's a possibility?"
Ila stilled. She swallowed, her white brows knit together, her lips parting. She struggled for several seconds to discern his meaning, to decode the finer details of his vague statement, and he put up one hand, lighter palm facing out.
He looked flustered, and that more than any words he could say gave her the answer she sought. "I mean. Friendly meetings. I don't mean to be so crass--"
"Hold on, John." She breathed, blinked, then said, "I'm not misinterpreting your original intent, am I? It's not just friendly, is it?"
He tugged his shirt collar, and his gray eyes averted to stare at the chrome canister of paper napkins against the washed out brick wall. He nodded, sighed, then said, "That's inappropriate of me, given the circumstances. I don't want you to feel taken advantage of, I'm sorry--"
She clenched her jaw. "John, I'm thirty three. I can make my own decisions. I wanted clarification, that's all."
Again, he looked sheepish. He slicked his bony hand over his tied-back, gray locs. "Of course, Ila. My apologies."
Ila took a deep breath, willing her heart rate to slow. She rubbed at the bridge of her nose, sent a prayer to whatever deity might hear her, and said, "I would be lying if I didn't say I'd had a crush on you since I was a teenager. This is just a bit of a shock, that's all."
She dropped her hand, staring at the man across from her. "If--if you'd like to see me again in that way, then yes. I would very much like to see you again too."
A different kind of anxiety coiled in her chest and squeezed her heart. A knowledge that, despite what she said now, he would forever remain a fantasy. She would not see this man again after today.
He surprised her with a radiant smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes. He surprised her even more when he said, "That's a relief. I thought maybe you'd think me some kind of lecherous old man."
She shrugged. "Maybe a little, but..." She winked, emboldened by his reciprocation. Though she hadn't expected it, she snatched up the opportunity to take advantage of it. "I like old things, especially lecherous old men."
He laughed and his hands settled on the tabletop inches from hers. She thought to reach and touch the top of his hand, to seal her fate, but she wanted to savor a few moments more of whatever this was between them. Flirting was a rare and dangerous game she played with her own heart.
Already, a melancholy settled over the waning rush of exhilaration that he reciprocated her desire even if it was only to stave off his loneliness. Perhaps he saw a kindred loneliness in her, too.
In a move that surprised her, that made her heart skip a beat in elation and horror, he laid his large, dark hand over hers on the table and squeezed gently. She blinked and waited for the inevitable--and as the seconds ticked by, she realized he was staring at her, waiting for her response.
She cleared her throat and glanced up to see him looking at her with worry. His hand was so relaxed and warm on hers, and it was so surreal that something so simple like this was so perfect, and--
"Are you alright, Ila?" His stormy eyes searched hers, his voice calm and gentle and not at all what she was expecting.
She offered a shy half-smile. "Sorry, this--this usually doesn't happen this way."
He squinted, and a flicker of confusion flitted across his handsome, lined face. His gaze began to wander, and he asked as he squeezed her hand, "How does it usually happen?"
Ila bit her lip, her teeth clicking on her labret piercing. In a move that surprised even herself, she laid her scarred hand over the top of his veined, gnarled one. She swallowed and opened her mouth to speak, but when she looked up, Johnathan was frozen in his seat, his eyes affixed on some point behind her.
She frowned and followed his gaze, but found nothing amiss. An empty booth on the adjacent wall. Someone eating a sandwich three tables over. Someone else coming out of the bathroom and paying neither of them any attention.
She turned back to him, and realized that his hand was shaking. She withdrew her touch, and he snapped back as though he'd been burned.
It wasn't worth it to ask if he was alright. A familiar anger twisted through her, spurred on the anxious drumbeat of her heart, and she didn't bother to keep any of it from her voice as she spoke through grit teeth. "Like that, John."
He seemed not to hear her. "I... I think I need to go, Ila."
This, this part was also expected. She fucking hated this part. "Do what you need to, John."
He grabbed his coat, sparing her the quickest of glances. "It was--it was nice to see you again."
She shut her eyes and struggled against the impulse to tell him to just get on with it and fuck off already. "Have a good rest of your day, Mr. Beauregard."
John didn't bother to respond, and as quickly as was socially acceptable, he hurried to the door and fled the café. Ila watched him go with a steely expression on her face. Beneath the heavy smell of fresh-roast coffee and baking pastries in the shop, the faintest whiff of a rose perfume tickled her nose.
She sniffed and dabbed beneath her eyes, warding off the angry tears as she called for a rideshare to take her back to her hotel.
CHAPTER 3
Ila jogged to the bus station as the clouds above her grew dark and heavy. It was misting when she got on the first bus down to central station, and pouring by the time she got off her second bus as close as possible to the address she'd been given. Even still, she had to walk a few blocks in the freezing rain, and she almost lost the house entirely. If it hadn't been for the numbers peeking out from behind a wall of trees and overgrowth, she would've walked right by it.
When she walked into the desiccated corpse of a home, she almost missed the small carvings in the living room floor. There was a ratty, heavily-patterned rug half covering them, dust and mildew and water stains all over the wood. Scuffs and scratches and evidence of squatters.
She'd only realized she was where she needed to be when the thudding ache swept up the inside of her scarred left arm. She looked down at it, hissing, and then saw the faint patterns beneath her feet. An order within the chaos, a purposeful brand buried beneath incidental scars.
As she filled it in with chalk, an excitement welled inside of her. An excitement tinged with flickers of horror, with flickers of an awareness of just how insane this all was. It was insane, and yet it was a compulsion. A need to see whatever this was through to the end, a hope that it would make sense when she got there. What she'd been through in the last few weeks demanded explanation, and an explanation was what she'd been offered.
Ila sat back for the half-dozenth time, her jacket discarded halfway inside of her backpack. There was only a sliver of the circle left for her to do, but her body ached from sitting in the same spot for as long as she had. She wiped at her forehead with the back of one hand, reached into her pack and grabbed her phone to check the time. A little past one o'clock. She memorized the time as she fanned herself, set her phone back inside, and got to her feet to survey what she'd done so far.
Up close, the patterns looked random and uncoordinated. She hadn't really paid attention to what they were when she'd found them, as what haunted her was more powerful here than he had been anywhere else, compelling her to act and only act. And now, as she took a few steps back towards the far wall, she could see the patterns for what they were in the gray gloom: A pair of intricate roses, their stems entwining in the center to form a dual helix. That helix broke to fan around the very center, then re-wound itself to the other side of the perimeter.
At some point in the twisting that she couldn't discern, the pattern broke into two separate helix that formed the outer edge of the circle. Within the circle there were runes that at first felt like they held no rhyme or reason. The whole circle took up most of the small living room floor, and the runes themselves had an order to their chaos. Swooping, curving rosebuds fanned out at one side of the circle, and around the perimeter there were more and more intricate symbols of roses bursting into full bloom until they coalesced around the two main flowers at one end.
None of it on its face felt like a summoning circle. It felt a lot like some of the more intricate patterning on the antiques she helped restore, or the nature-themed brocade patterns on some of her fancier clothes at home. It was only when she put it into the context of an abandoned home and a haunted book that she knew something was not right.
Ila stretched her legs while she was up, groaning at the way her vertebrae and knees popped, at the sensation of muscle that had been taut for hours being pleasantly stretched. She was almost done--the presence that led her here was thrumming in the air, an anxious energy that made her hair stand on end. He could no longer be mistaken for the weather.
"I want an answer, Idris," she said, voice abrupt in the quiet.
That echo of pressure increased incrementally as she spoke until it resumed an anxious hum like the whine of bright fluorescent lights.
Satisfied with her stretching, Ila sucked in a breath, let it out slowly, and walked back to her place in the center of the circle to finish what she started.
Gray pre-dawn light greeted Ila as she stepped out of a cab in front of her grandfather's home the morning after the funeral. She thanked the driver, watched them leave until she couldn't see the car anymore, then turned back to stare at the house.
Relief and anxiety fought for control of her as she walked up the cracked cobblestone walkway to the rickety old porch. This was the last time she'd ever step foot in this place again--she'd drained her savings to contract a company to handle the estate sale for her, being six hours away with no one left but her to settle Hashir Mohammad Abdullah's affairs.
She sniffed as she dug into her jeans pocket for the house keys. A quarter mile down the road, there was a house that had a few dozen acres for a small, family-owned farm. She heard a rooster crow his heart out in the morning stillness as she clicked open the lock and stepped inside. Of course, it was empty and quiet. All of the boxes she'd packed were exactly where she'd left them the day before, and she tapped at one of them with her boot.
With a sigh--she hadn't gotten much sleep the night before, and her head was starting to pound now--she pulled out her phone and opened her notes app. In it was a list of things she'd known for certain she wanted to take. To make the job a little easier, she'd squirreled away an hour or two every night for the last few weeks to make sure she had everything, and she ran through the list as she nudged open box flaps with her boot, then bent and shuffled through them with her hand.
"Photo albums, custom clocks, Grandma's carvings, Grandma's blankets, Grandpa's cookbook..." She rattled everything off to herself, partly to fill the suffocating silence, partly to ward off the odd feeling of being watched that had her hair standing on end.
Since Johnathan's abrupt but wholly expected departure from the café, there was a feeling she couldn't fully ignore that followed her. To quell some of her mounting anxiety, she called, "Hey, Granddad? I'm busy. I know you want to look out for me, but I have stuff to do."
The placebo effect was a magical thing. As soon as she said the words, that feeling finally left her and she breathed a sigh of relief. It was one less thing to worry about in the last few hours she had left to pack, and she continued to check off items on her list as she found them. Nearing the end of the last box, and the end of her list, she frowned. She scrolled back to the top, then mentally checked off each item. Blankets, books, albums, her old journals from highschool, little desk knick-knacks and her grandmother's sculptures. Old records and the record player. A ratty stag plush that she'd neglected to take with her when she moved out.
Ila's frown deepened. It was checked off, so she hadn't looked too hard, but she definitely hadn't touched or seen it in the boxes in the last forty minutes. She glanced down into each box again, knew it wasn't in any of them, and felt her heart skip a beat.
She'd held it yesterday evening, contemplated its black, glass eyes with the flutters of red sparkles trapped inside. She'd pet the knobbly, soft, silver antlers that had been fraying for the last decade. It smelled as it always had, like faint woodsmoke, and she'd set it down in one of the boxes just before Arthur called her.
She tried to remember if it had been with her anywhere else, and she carefully retraced her steps from the previous day. The task was easy at least; everything small was cleared into its own place. Either junked, set in the optimal places for sale, or coming with her. At worst, there were two mirrors and a few paintings she had to peer behind in the living room and a cabinet she crouched beside to look under in the dining room. The kitchen was empty with nowhere to hide. The rooms, too, were empty.
As it became more apparent the plush wasn't downstairs, in the bedrooms, or in the boxes, she made her way upstairs. At the end of the hallway, there was a slim little door to the attic that needed to be unlocked. Her hands shook, and it took her two tries to slide the key into the lock. When she finally did, when she finally felt the tumbler inside click, she let out a quiet, anxious laugh.
The door opened with a creak, and each step groaned beneath her boots. Early morning light flooded in from the single east-facing window, and she squinted as she reached above her head and felt for the pull cord. The bulb flickered twice before turning on, and she blinked at her dusty surroundings. First, she scanned the trash pile, then she looked at each piece of furniture and the bookshelves.
She paced around and around the attic, checking behind shelves and beneath two rickety tables and a chair. She found a box of plush toys that she'd already decided were junk, gave a frustrated sigh, and used her boot to slide the box across the hardwood. It caught at some point on its way to the corner, tipped, and spilled its soft contents.
Ila rubbed at her face and pinched the bridge of her nose. Not her problem. It was trash.
With another sigh, she flipped open a few more boxes in front of the bookshelf shoved catty-corner in the back of the space. It wasn't in there either. As she poked and prodded, she bumped the bookcase. It was enough to make some of the less stable books wobble, but nothing fell--until there was a loud crack against the hardwood.
Ila shot up with her hand over her heart and stifled a sharp inhale as she took two steps back. A marble rose rolled side to side in place before it stilled in front of her. It was part of a set that her mother had kept as paperweights of various sizes. If she thought to look a little harder, she might find four other roses just like this one scattered around the attic.
Her heart hammered in her throat, and she took a few deep breaths to quell her anxiety and the prickle of being watched again. She bent down to retrieve it, then turned the rose over in her hands a few times. It was pretty--white marble with streaks of rose quartz that faded to a soft uniform pink in the center. Now that it was a solid weight in her hands, she could remember holding it as a girl, but she couldn't remember the rose itself.
She checked the petals for chips, and was relieved to find none. As she looked at it, she swore she smelled roses again beneath the dust and the overwhelming smell of wood. Roses were becoming a theme over the last few days, and it was no surprise that she thought she smelled them now.
She set it back on the shelf to continue her search. It interrupted her again, not even a minute later. It fell off the shelf she'd placed it on and rolled about a foot away, stopping near a full-length mirror against the wall. Ila froze and watched it roll, her hair standing on end again. It had been nowhere near the edge of the shelf, and she was across the attic now. Could her footsteps have rattled the floor enough to make it fall?
Tentatively, she stepped toward it and picked it back up, turning it over in her hands again. She glanced at herself in the mirror and grimaced at her own appearance, taking in the deep shadows under her eyes and the blotchy flush over her cheeks. She looked bound for the grave after the events of the last few weeks, and the thought made her snort.
As she looked in the mirror, something amiss caught her attention. Across from where it sat against the wall, there was a green cushioned chair, and in that chair was something that she'd never seen before. She turned around to regard it, her brow knit.
An old book. An old, badly damaged book.
She wasn't a stranger to old, damaged books. In the last week alone she'd salvaged at least three dozen books that had belonged to various family members, and almost every single one had some form of smoke damage from a long-ago fire.
Her fear forgotten for the moment, she walked to the other side of the attic and set the marble rose on the cushion, and laid her hand on the leather cover of the book. Rather, what she thought was a leather cover--it was charred black, brittle and cracking, its page edges curling in on themselves.
She had experience with repairing normal book wear and tear, with repairing decades of neglect; she had experience with repairing severe water damage, and smoke damage, but burning...burning was a completely different animal, and she wasn't sure it was something that could be properly repaired without rebuilding the book from scratch. She was half surprised that it hadn't retained even a semblance of the front cover design, and she snorted to herself at the thought that this, too, might've had gilt roses on it at some point.
"What a mess," Ila mumbled and slid her fingers under the book to support it. A sense of serenity washed over her as the task presented itself--she knew how to deal with old, damaged books. She didn't know how to deal with the viscera of memory in a dead home.
She lifted it, pleased that it wasn't crumbling to pieces in her hands, and tried to gently pry the cover back from the first page. She winced as some of the curling pages crackled and shards of blackened paper fell to the floor. Despite that, it was a victory that the cover hadn't cracked off. It was so delicate that she opted to set it back down on the chair and kneel in front of it.
There was nothing there--no identifying marks, no publishing company. It was blank, anonymous, and as she slowly pried open other pages, she made a noise of confusion in the back of her throat. All of it that she could see was empty, and in the spaces where flame hadn't turned the pages to black ash, blotchy multi-color stains like lividity stared back at her. They looked, almost, like words.
Some part of her thought to bring this back with her, to breathe new life into the abused and abandoned hardcover if it was salvageable at all. But the rest of her had honed her discernment of what was trash and what wasn't to a razor's edge. This, unfortunately for her project brain going haywire, fell under the former category. She had enough books in need of repair back home and back at the shop.
With a frustrated noise, Ila shut the book again but lingered with her fingertips on the cover. Her left arm ached beneath the scars, but something about the charred leather under her hyper-sensitive fingertips made it lessen--probably because she was focused on ways that she might be able to fix it, focused on how she could justify taking it home with her. Even in this state, it called to her.
She stood, and before she forgot, grabbed the marble rose. If nothing else it could be a handy paperweight for her now, and she was suspicious of it falling off of another shelf if she set it somewhere else in the room.
One more time, she glanced around the space, then let out a soft breath. Her plush wasn't up here, but maybe it would turn up in one of the boxes. Something in the back of her mind told her it wouldn't, but she ignored that thought, even as it caused a tear she hadn't anticipated to fall down her cheek.
Ila wiped her face, then stared at the wetness on her hand as if it were a betrayal. She was a grown woman, not a girl. It was silly to be so sentimental over a stuffed animal she hadn't thought about in ten years.
Even as she chided herself for her longing, she touched the silver tiger-eye ring settled just below her collarbones.
CHAPTER 4
Six hours later saw Ila thumping her way up the stairs to her apartment. Part of her discernment was in knowing that she only had but so much room in whatever cab came and picked her up, and only but so much room in her apartment that she shared with a roommate. She had to make that space count.
After her eleventh and final trip up the stairs, she was breathless and shaking as she dug her keys out of her purse. She found them, almost dropped them, and was able to get them into the lock and turn. She pushed the door, then frowned when it wouldn't budge.
"Are you fucking kidding me?" She grit her teeth, twisted the knob, and pushed again. Still, nothing.
She had half a mind to kick the door as she jiggled the knob with a growl. The stupid thing had been fine for weeks before she left.
Ila locked the door, unlocked it again, and shoved. That time, it popped open with a shriek of protest and she sighed heavily. Dumping boxes into the living room was easy after that, and she thought to complain to management--again--that the damn door was sticking. But even the mere thought left her ready to collapse on the cheap laminate flooring and admit defeat.
As she went out to retrieve the second to last box, she made eye contact with the neighbor across the hall and bristled. The older woman averted her eyes, and Ila let out an exasperated snort when the door snapped shut.
Take a fucking picture, it'll last longer, she thought. Not the first time she'd caught her neighbors gawking at her, and it wouldn't be the last.
After she'd gotten everything inside and nudged the boxes into an orderly pile along one bare wall in the living room, she made her way to her bedroom. She flicked the lights on, scanned the space, and dumped her bags onto the floor next to her bed. Exhausted did not begin to cover how she felt. Beneath that bone-deep exhaustion, there was a sense of relief in being home again after weeks of staying with her dying grandfather.
Ila sat on the floor, zipped open her fraying black bag, and pulled out the first few things she had stuffed onto the top: her bathroom towel, toothbrush, hair brush, and the marble and quartz rose that had insisted on coming with her. She turned the smooth, heavy flower in her hands over and over again, tracing the edges of petals that felt sharp under her fingertips. It was pretty, she didn't regret grabbing it, and she'd find some use for it.
She set the rose down and glanced at her towel. She hadn't been able to bathe without constant anxiety in weeks. As she'd been taking care of Hashir, an emergency early one morning had her tripping out of the shower in nothing but a towel, her hair plastered to her skin and slick with conditioner. She'd slipped and crashed into a wall for her trouble, only to find out that it was a false alarm from a new nurse. Her showers since had been five minutes at most, and only after checking her grandfather a half dozen times. He found it irritating when he was awake for it, and the thought of one of his half-affectionate reprimands made her crack a smile.
An actual shower sounded nice.
Ila stayed under the spray of water long after she'd scrubbed the sweat and grime from her skin and hair, long after the shower had gone ice cold. The air conditioning was shit in the apartment, and the heat was suffocating even when cold air sputtered from the wall unit in the living room. It was a momentary respite, one that she wanted to savor while she could.
She stared at the tile in front of her as the freezing water pelted her skin. It was surreal to be home, surreal to not be on high alert for a change in her grandfather's condition. Surreal to realize with a pang in her chest that she'd never be able to see or call Hashir again.
Her hand braced on the tile as she leaned down to shut the water off. Her pruned fingertips caught her attention while she stepped out and grabbed her towel and fluffed her wet, white curls. She sniffed and buried her face against the soft material, wiping water out of her eyes, and stared at herself in the half-fogged bathroom mirror. She looked like hell--she felt like hell.
An actual shower in her actual home helped, but for all its help it couldn't wash away the bruising under her eyes or the sickly flush that crept along her pale skin. Only time and a return to normal could theoretically do that.
She wrapped the black towel around her petite frame, then perked up at a soft sound down the hallway. It was her text alert. She grabbed her dirty clothes, went to her room, and tossed them into a hamper set just inside her door. Her phone dinged again, and she picked it up at the same time as she sat on the edge of her bed.
EMILY Hey, are you home yet? EMILY I'm grabbing some pork pho from the place down the street after work, want anything?
At that instant, Ila's stomach gave a little lurch, and she winced.
ILA Thank god I don't have to cook now lol. Haven't eaten since yesterday. ILA Can just get me the usual?
As she waited for a reply, she grabbed the bottle of lotion set on her nightstand and frowned. Nearly empty. She was typing before she could think about it.
ILA Can you get some lotion from the corner store too? I'll pay you back.
Ila used what meager lotion she could get out of the bottle on her scars first and inspected her arm. Whatever that weird pain had been was gone now. She flexed and clenched her stiff fingers in a facsimile of making a fist, then rubbed more unscented lotion into her palm.
Ding.
EMILY Kk. Don't worry about paying me back with money, just make that insane butter chicken pasta in a week or two or smthn.
She tapped on one of the many pre-made popup responses with her pinky, resumed getting dressed, and started the long, tedious process of digging her clothes out of her luggage to put them away.
Knock.
The sound was soft and far-off. There was a nearly imperceptible shuffle of fabric, as if someone were walking around in the living room with her. She didn't remember laying down, and didn't remember Emily coming home.
Another soft knock, this time behind her. She was comfortable resting on the cushions though--the last few weeks had been so fucking exhausting. She needed the break, needed to be quiet and still for a little while.
Another rustle of fabric, and she tried to crack open an eye. Her eyelids were so heavy, and the dark was so inviting. There was someone leaning over her from behind the couch now, and a chill raced down her spine.
Cold breath fanned against her forehead, and she twitched and made a noise in the back of her throat that she hoped sounded like, "Go away, Em."
She felt something ice-cold touch her jaw. A voice that was not Emily's whispered above her. "Ila..."
Knock.
Ila jerked awake on the couch and flung herself into a sitting position. Her phone tumbled off of where it was plastered against the side of her face and into her lap.
Knock. Knock.
"Hey, Ila." Emily's voice was muffled through the door. "You in there?"
Ila let out a soft sigh as her heart calmed from its erratic pulse. She rubbed her eyes and adjusted her glasses, checked the time, and did a double-take; she'd been out for over an hour and Emily had texted her half a dozen updates as she'd come home.
"I uh. I forgot my keys. Can you let me in?"
Pins and needles flared to life through her shoulder as she sat up with a low groan, and she shivered in the heat. Napping always did weird shit to her, always made her feel like she had a miniature fever as she fought against an irritating grogginess that made her foggy and slow. Dreams that might as well be hallucinations were also not an uncommon occurrence.
She got up, walked to the door, unlocked and grabbed hold of the knob, twisted, and then yanked. It popped open with more ease than she was expecting, and her roommate's surprised expression greeted her as she stumbled a step back. She'd almost forgotten what she looked like, and was startled by her close-cropped, flaming red hair set next to her rich, dark skin with even darker freckles scattered all over her face.
She laughed. "Right, it's been sticking again too. Forgot to say anything."
As Emily walked inside, Ila rubbed at the bridge of her nose. She still wasn't awake. "Yeah, sorry, I dunno how long you were out there. I fell asleep."
"Oh don't worry, I wasn't there for very long at all. Maybe a minute of digging in my purse before I remembered I didn't have my keys." She turned the corner, and there was a plastic crinkle and a thump as she set the bags on the tile countertop.
Ila rounded the bend between the living room and the kitchen and opened her mouth to apologize for sleeping. Before she could, Emily continued, "I know what you're about to say. Shush. You've had a rough time, and I don't want an apology because you listened to your body for once. You look half dead."
She shut her mouth and shifted her weight. Emily pulled a takeout box out from one of the white plastic bags and shoved it into her hands. "Don't worry about cleaning up for a while, also. If I need your help I'll ask for it. Okay?"
"Okay." She smiled weakly as she set the container of food on the white-tile counter.
Emily watched her for a second, before she opened her arms. "Hug? You really look like you need it."
Ila did need it. She didn't realize just how badly she'd needed it until she hugged the other woman and, without prompt, began to sob against her shoulder.
One last stroke. One last sweeping arc of her arm, and the last line of chalk hit the first that she'd marked into the carved wood.
Ila stilled in the aftermath, waiting. Listening. Watching. For something specific that she didn't yet know. For something out of place. For anything at all. She waited until her outstretched arm shook hard enough for the stick of chalk to rattle against the wood. Then she sat back on her heels, blew out a breath, and tilted her head back to contract the over-stretched muscles between her shoulder blades.
Her eyes shut, and she sat in the stillness punctuated by water spilling in from the hole in the ceiling behind her. The rain slowed to a soft drizzle in the last hour, and thunder rumbled farther and farther away now.
She sniffed, coughed, tilted her head forward, and wiped her chalk-covered hands on her black tank top. The air pressure changed again, but not in the way she expected it would. It had buzzed with an energy that was hard to ignore, it had been infectious, it had made her heart race. It hit a whining crescendo when she'd started the task again, and then tapered. It tapered to that familiar echo, that familiar ache in her left arm, and then it was...gone.
And then he was gone.
As Ila sat there, she sniffed again, and all she could smell was dust. Dust, and rot, and mildew, and rain. She smelled the bittersweet decay of a dead house, and not the heavy, ashen woodsmoke she wanted. Not the light perfume of roses that followed her visitor wherever he went.
"God dammit!"
Her voice was a shout in the empty living room, one that bounced off bare walls. The chalk snapped in her hand, and she crushed it under her palm. A hard breath, and then another. She blinked and tears fell from her eyes, clinging to white lashes. They ran down her hot face and dripped off her jaw, disturbing the chalk beneath her. She was so tired.
Silence stretched for what felt to her like another lifetime. She let her tears fall without making a sound, before she laughed and wiped at her messy face. She'd lost so much time, so much energy, all for something that might not even be real. "What do you want from me, ghost?"
There was an almost imperceptible shuffle behind her. If she hadn't been paying attention, she wouldn't have caught it--but she had been, and every hair on her body stood on end as panic flared to life in her chest. Her limbs locked and prepared her to spring up and get out. It sounded tangible, it sounded solid.
Another shuffle, louder but not closer. Ila felt her chest get tight, and just as she was about to shout some kind of threat, a soft masculine voice rumbled in the dark behind her.
"You, Ila. I want you."