Smoke and Fire

Chapter 8

Asha watched the sun sink from her windowsill and imagined stepping out beneath the navy sky. It gave her chills. She told herself it was because the Crimson Guard came out at night and she didn't want to test the limits of the Bokor's magic unnecessarily, but when she closed her eyes, it wasn't the Captain's icy blues she saw peering at her, it was the Bokor's moonstone white and the darkness he kept at his side, the creatures that saw without eyes. Her greatest benefactor was simultaneously her greatest horror.

Joan wasn't as conflicted when he came to her an hour later, sweating and twitching, wanting his fix, and though Asha begged him not to venture back to the slums in the dark, he did anyway. Shadows folded around him and took him from view.

Several times, when the moon would come out from the clouds and shine as bright as a pearl, Asha almost felt brave enough to follow. She would put on her coat and race down the stairs, but when she threw open the door and looked at the expansive night and imagined all the monsters it could hide, she was paralyzed. A tree croaked in the wind and she was reminded of the dry clatter inside the Bokor's tent as it was folding into the ground. Into nothing. And trying to take her with it.

She retreated into the church's drafty vestibule and waited Joan out there.

He returned just before dawn, hazy-eyed and stumbling. Asha tried to be furious with him, but she was so happy to see him, the anger just sort of fizzled out. He reported everything in the slums was as it'd been. People were back in their stalls and their tents and on their corners, and no one said a thing about the night the streets went dark and empty. Teddy's mutilated body stayed out of the newspapers, too. Asha scoured for days afterwards.

People continued to go missing from the slums, but no one seemed to care. It was like no one minded it happening if the missing persons were those that grossed below the lower-middle class. It was frustrating. But Asha also couldn't help but feel relieved in an awful way. It wasn't her being wiped off the face of the earth. She told herself her lack of empathy was because Father Brant, Bjorn and Joan needed her, but she knew it was selfish at its core. She didn't want to totally disappear. Not like the Bokor said.

Bjorn was quiet for the latter half of winter, which Asha suspected was normal after you threatened and then buried someone you thought you could have, maybe, loved as much as you hated, but his quietness moved into spring and then summer and morphed into something perilous. He scowled more and when he wasn't scowling, he was drunk or stoned. He'd stay out all night and sometimes, he'd come back with deep bruises on his face and his knuckles would be torn open. She wanted to ask him what was going on, but Bjorn wasn't the kind of person you just casually asked a question like that.

It wasn't until July when she had a minute confrontation with him.

She was staring at her ceiling, wondering if it could look back at her, as the walls of the Bokor's tent had, when she heard the front door of the church open and Bjorn's heavy footfalls on the stairs. She listened for Joan's, too, but Bjorn was alone. It was such an unusual occurrence, Asha found herself investigating. Her head felt cobwebby when she stood. She hadn't been sleeping as much as she should. Couldn't. Not if she didn't want to be plagued by pale slimy monsters hiding in the dark.

Bjorn was banging around in his room. She was extra quiet going to him as if her overcompensation would make up for his lack of courtesy.

Asha pushed open his door gently and peered inside. He'd lit his oil lamp; it's light made shadows on the floor.

Bjorn's back was to her. He was soaked in sweat and there was blood down the side of his face; she could see it when he turned his cheek.

"You're hurt." Asha invited herself in with her hand outstretched. She wasn't sure what she was going to do with it. Bjorn would never accept healing magic, and he wasn't the kind of man to let people fawn over him.