The Fire God

Chapter Twenty-Six

An idea had occurred to me.
"You look like yourself," Syllie said.
"I always look like myself."
"No, you've been weird. But today, you have that dower brow. You look like you."
"You told me once that you would provide anything I wanted as a member of your superhero group."
He shrugged. "Yeah.
So I told him.
Syllie shrieked, "You want what?"
"A defibrillator." My head was muddled, but the memory of relief echoed. Clarissa's tears were ringing in my ears. "If I can make my heart beat for a while, inject some of the salve directly into my heart—"
"That won't hurt you?"
"As long as I miss the original wound, it shouldn't upset me," I said. "I know where the incision is." The cut was the one thing I always felt and my fingers danced over the spot. "I can use the defibrillator to make my heart start beating again." I licked my lips for a moment. "I—I loved Clarissa. If I can make my heart beat, make my body remember—"
"Yes," Syllie said.
*****
Syllie seemed to like the notion that I would love Clarissa. "Look, he wants to get better, do better. I'd get him anything if I thought it would help."
"Yeah, but a defibrillator?" It was Max objecting.
"Tiff's right. He's hurting and he doesn't know how to stop it. He thinks this could help. The sooner we fix him, the sooner we get back to hunting down Asperia and her goons."
*****
My confidence waned when I read the directions for the defibrillator. It said that it couldn't resuscitate the dead. I worried that it wouldn't work on my heart. But the sluicing must have been close enough to a beat to accept the jolt. My heart would fall back into a regular rhythm.
I was a drug addict with the machine. I would jab the syringe into my heart, jolt it awake with the electrical shock, a mini Dr. Frankenstein, and get high on my own adrenaline and the release in my brain. I'd gotten so used to the headache, my constant companion, that I forgot it was there. I was relieved to be free of it, even if only for a few hours. At first, I thrilled at sleeping next to Clarissa, but then the salve would be used up. It was either another dose, or the crash into the reckless soul I'd become.
Movie Monday had also become Mongolia Monday.
"You smell like Syllie," I said to Tiffany, taking a whiff of her. "Silly, silly girl. No more whores in Mansion Jollington. No more jollies for Jolly." The joke made me laugh at myself. "Now you're the only whore in the house."
"I'm so sick of the mood, Mricky," Tiffany growled at me. She was leaning on a pine tree and a wapiti calf was rubbing her thigh.
"It was five hundred years before conscience seized me last time," I said. "Buck up, buttercup. We've got a few more centuries to go."
I was blasting shots of fire into the snow. Besides Tiffany's little friend, we were alone.
The hope that my request had brought out of Syllie waned as my sanity deteriorated. My mood had become more erratic. I scratched "doomed" on my arm with the dragon blade. I wrote it in the mother tongue, so it wouldn't upset Clarissa. I was only a little more intrigued that Vadya didn't return to us. I wondered if she hadn't gone back to New York, sought out her mortal husband and children.
I was trying to ween myself off the defibrillator. I had adapted before. I had to learn again. I spent nights wandering alleys, seeking out rats, mice, cats, dogs, anything that moved. If I could get my hands on it, I'd practice blasting the flame directly into its brain. If I couldn't, then I'd taunt it, box it in with the fire I threw until I finally blasted the animal into a charred carcass.
No matter how I tried to quit, I would return to the salve and the shock.
Until it ran out.
Dirk tried to keep Aditi away from me. She was no longer whispering excuses for me. Her tears were wordless. Max was doing the same with Clarissa, but his efforts were less successful. Mike hovered near me, kept an eye on anyone who got too close. A wise man, who recognized how dangerous I was.
I sat in Clarissa's apartment for hours stabbing a kitchen knife into my thigh. Anything to distract from the constricting in my brain and the tension in my limbs. Hector, the kitten, was batting his paw at the blade, then at my hand. I knocked the fuzzball away from me. He leaped back up, so I grabbed him by the eye sockets, pushed his eyes out. The animal yowled, tried to trounce away from me, but I took it up by the tail, sliced it open from belly to chin, ripped its skin off, all the while the animal screamed. I put my finger on its heart, brought the temperature from 98 degrees to 400, measured its shrieks and howls. Then I turned the gelatinous innards into soupy goo and burned its body.
I tossed it aside.
Clarissa's cat. I had just murdered the thing. She treated it like it was equal to human beings. Wrong time for the fit of conscience to hit. I gathered up its remains, tore out of the insulae. I stuffed its body into the dumpster, began to formulate the lie I would tell. Except Clarissa wasn't blind like her brother. She saw everything. She chose to forgive.
I darted aimlessly. Hours, perhaps days, though I didn't take in the rising and falling of the sun. Without Clarissa's alliteration, I couldn't track the days of the week and that slipped away. First, I took out the unicorn horn, cloaked myself so the sister horns couldn't trace me. I sought out a café, sipped at the cup of tea as I wrote on a napkin.