Smoke and Fire

Chapter 2

Hot soup sloshed over the rim of Asha's chipped porcelain cup as she dodged a cart barreling down Lexie Street. She bit the inside of her lip to keep from cursing and wiped the rapidly-cooling liquid on her pants. It wasn't a terrible burn but more got on her hand when she stooped through the crack in the boarded door and came into the factory and the skin was raw and red.

Joan waited for her, sitting on a pile of discarded clothes as he had every night for the last three days. He smiled impishly, pushing a pill bottle further into the depths of his makeshift bed; she smiled back and pretended not to notice. "It's turnip soup again."

"I don't care." He made room for her. Asha sat in the must and the dust like it didn't bother her. Joan took the soup with one hand and wrapped his other around Asha's waist. He jittered as he sipped the hot liquid too fast.

"Aren't you burning yourself?"

He acted like she hadn't spoken. "This is great."

It really wasn't. He was just hungry. It was nice to be needed and complimented, though. She supposed Father Brant needed her, too, but this felt different. Joan didn't need her to wipe his mouth or help him go to the bathroom. He needed her the way she needed him. Maybe.

"Do you think you'll go home?" If he was going to leave her, it was best to know now, so she could prepare herself for the heartbreak.

Joan tipped the cup all the way back and used his finger to scrape out the remaining dregs of turnip. He chewed and swallowed before he answered. "I don't have anything there, do I?"

She didn't know, he'd been pretty silent about everything that came before him robbing the apothecary. "You have a family..."

"What's so great about that?"

"I don't know," she stammered. "I've never had one." She'd only ever been Orphan Asha.

Joan looked past her to the weeping wall. "My dad kicked the shit out of me and my mom watched."

Asha skimmed the tips of her fingers over the concrete, feeling the stones and sand. "Not every family is like that."

Joan looked at her. "Not quite like that, no, I guess. But they're all screwed up in some way. My brother's friend fucked his dad's girlfriend and got her pregnant. When he found out, he threw him in Silver River." Where the waters ran through fields of Silver Dragon, a plant that was deadly toxic to anyone with even a drop of magic in them.

"I knew a brother and sister that rolled a liquor store last year and when the cops showed up, the brother got away but the sister didn't. He got one of his buddies to be an alibi and she got an extended sentence."

"Really?"

"Swear to God," he said with his hand over his heart. "Just because it's your blood doesn't mean nothing. Blood's like anything else, it turns just as soon as it has a reason to."

Asha was leaning into him, listening, without ever meaning to. He had a way of making her believe everything he said, a little bit of inflection, some confidence, and her eighteen years of melancholy seemed like they hadn't been worth much at all. And that was okay, somehow.

"You're probably better off without them," Joan finished. "Choose your own people."

She had, in a way. Father Brant and Bjorn. And maybe...

Asha settled back against Joan. "We have another room available above the church. You don't have to stay here." It was starting to get really cold. He would freeze to death if he didn't figure something out, and the youth shelters were hard to get into. And they didn't leave much room for mistakes. A person could get kicked out for even one wrong move. Joan looked like he'd made a lifetime of them.