Luminous Part 19

He knelt and picked up a small beaded pouch. Circles of polished mirror were st.i.tched carefully into the leather with bright red, black, and yellow thread. V lifted it up by its thong and cupped the tiny reflection to his eye, staring hard.

"Hang on," he muttered, and squeezed her hand. She didn't have time to squeeze back as they flipped over, spiraled under, and stepped out onto her carpet.

She didn't bother with explanations or with shyness or rebuke. Unzipping her skin, she marched toward her closet, shedding it along with her clothes as if it were nothing more than an undershirt, an afterthought. Consuela grabbed her fire-skin and welcomed it on.

It rushed over her gladly as she tipped back her head to revel in the wash of heat. Crackling from her toes, up her spine, and into her eyes, the fire plumed out the top of her head in a forelock of flame. She glanced at herself in the mirror with a satisfied smile, all but ignoring the awed look on V's face.

She was a terrible, beautiful, burning * Angel. *

V stood, transfixed. In his eyes, she saw it: she was his own private heaven, his own private h.e.l.l. He could not look away. His eyes burned inside her.

* Beautiful * Wild * Burning * Free *

* Angel. * Angel Bones. *

Consuela smiled, hearing herself through him. She took his hand, which did not burn. Her voice, roaring and airy, said, "Let's go."

He followed like a worshipper.

They sheared through the silvered gla.s.s. Returning, Consuela swooped in a hurricane dive, swiveling into the heart of the pyre. Racing along its insides, she felt the organic dwindle and burn-hides, pelts, wood, sinew-only the bits of metal and stone sang with heat, impervious to unmaking. Would that Joseph Crow had been the same. Perhaps he'd managed his bird form and taken wing? But no. She smelled the acid flux of burned feathers and sensed that the only living things crept deep beneath her, safely tucked under the earth.

She returned to the matter of the fire, scenting its beginnings; the foreign perfume of treachery, ferreting out its secrets better than any pyrotechnician could. She found the answer, but it brought her no joy.

Satisfied, Consuela leaped from the inferno, surprised by the gentle pang as she divorced herself from the parent flame. In this small way, perhaps, she understood V. The fire was her lover, her parent, her friend-all-encompa.s.sing and welcoming as no other human being had ever been except her father and her mother, far away in the realm of flesh. Fire had no prejudice, judgment, or reserve.

Fire was free. And d.a.m.ning.

V held the totem pouch like a talisman, looking half inclined to flee. From me? From Tender? From the scene of the crime? Consuela flung her arms in dismissive wings that roared, burning through the air. She was done with superst.i.tious guessing; she wanted facts.

"Give me the lighter," she said in a soft roar. V did.

Holding it in her palm, she turned the thing over, tasting its cheap, metal surface, kitten tongues of flame divining the microscopic truth. She even sniffed it to confirm the obvious-a sharp tickle of plastic and fuel-thankful that when she was in her preternatural skins she was more inured to human emotion, less easily affected by mortal things like suicide and murder. Her heart and tears were elsewhere. She handed back the lighter.

"This set the flame," Consuela said darkly. "I could taste it in fire."

V paled.

"No," he said weakly. "That's impossible."

"It is possible and it happened," she said under the flames. V shook his head as if he hadn't heard her at all. "Only your fingers have touched it. I can taste the oil."

V kept staring, his head barely shaking no.

"Why did you bring me here?" she asked. "Was it to confess?"

He curled like she'd physically punched him.

"No!" V snapped, and balled his fists. "I didn't do it! I'd know!" But he didn't sound so sure. He fell heavily to his knees, pitching forward in a sort of weird supplication. "I'd know! Wouldn't I? I'd know!"

But doubt sang under his words, a black undercurrent dragging him down. He pressed his head to the dirt, rapping his forehead against pebbles and gra.s.s, arms crossed over his stomach. Unfurling like great wings off of his back, the sound of metallic strings reverberated into pleas.

* I couldn't do this! * Joseph Crow * You told me * My only wish * Tender! * Only a dream * Another pain-nightmare * Pain * Fire * Burning . . . I didn't do this! * Please * No * No! * I DIDN'T DO THIS! I COULDN'T DO THIS AGAIN! *

The force of his denial pushed her backs, the unspoken words beat at the surface of her skin. Consuela stumbled, astonished.

Again?

V lifted his face, one hand in the dirt, and reached for her.

She surged. The flames waxed ominously. "Get away from me."

"No, please, listen . . ."

"Get away!"

She jerked her arm back, launching into a rainbow arc of flame and punching an acetylene trail through the Flow's deadened sky.

CONSUeLa seared through her open window, landing in a puff of ash. She grabbed Sissy's discarded bath towel and threw it angrily over the mirror, diving into her bedroom to do the same with her sheets. She smothered every shiny surface. As she went, her tears evaporated, throwing steam off her eyes.

A rushing-wind vacuum sound ended abruptly in a thump. Consuela swirled, staring hotly at her closet, where the freestanding mirror stood draped like a ghost.

"Bones?" V called through the flat plane. "Bones, are you there?"

He sounded a little panicked, a little hopeful, desperate.

Consuela's skin roared in response.

"Bones." He sounded thankful, exasperated. "Remove the sheet, please."

Consuela said nothing. She seethed. Burned.

"You're not mourning, are you?" V sounded more ashamed than annoyed. "I can't come into a house of mourning." Another swooshing impact, and not a ripple against the sheet. "Dammit, Bones. We can't afford to do this now!"

She wandered nearer to the bedsheet, inspecting it at a distance, hardly believing that such a little thing could keep him at bay.

"Bones," V called out again. "It's not safe. You're in danger . . ."

"From you?" She hadn't meant to snap back. Hadn't meant to speak at all.

"Dio mio cielo . . ." V muttered. "Can you please let me in?"

"Did you do it?" she shot back.

"No!" V said.

"But you're not sure," Consuela said. There was a short pause. "What happened, V?" Consuela asked. "Tell me what happened."

"I don't know! I don't remember any thing!" V insisted. "Can I come in?"

She shook her head needlessly. "Not until you explain."

"I never remember . . ." V started and sighed. ". . . when I go back." The last line was an admission of something close to repulsion. Guilt.

"I don't understand," she said, sitting in front of her shrouded mirror. "You mean when you try to save people?"

"No," his voice rasped. Without a face, he wasn't a gorgeous G.o.d, or an angel, he was just V.

"When the pain comes," V stammered. "Whenever anyone tries to bring me back, I'm pulled into the pain. You can't imagine . . . I can't stand it." Another soft thump on the inside of the mirror and she could all but picture him leaning against its flip side, speaking over his shoulder back at her. "I don't remember what happens in those in-between times, but I usually end up somewhere else in the Flow." His voice dropped off. "Like sleepwalking," he said.

* Lost without memory. Stinking of pain. *

Consuela hesitated, the flames of her fingers plucking the edge of the bedsheet as he talked.

"The Yad said I was subconsciously running to escape it, and that's why I ended up here in the first place." V sighed with a trembling ripple in his breath. "He kept saying that eventually, I'd have to stop running."

With a soft tug, she brought the sheet cascading down. She looked into her own reflection, knowing V sat on the other side.

"Then what?" Consuela asked the mirror.

V leaned through the silver pool, looking her right in the eye.

"Then I'd either live or die," V said.

She shook her head, sending up crackles and curls. "So you're in pain . . . ?" she said, awkwardly.

"All the time," he said. They both stood as he stepped in beside her. "It's low-key, dealable, but-" He unb.u.t.toned his shirt slowly, a ma.s.s of black bruises spread across his chest, but Consuela saw they weren't bruises; they were patches of darkness, like the shadows of the Flow etched on his flesh. "-I come out of it looking like this."

Consuela clenched her fingers to keep from touching him, but his eyes made it hard.

So she said, "Why?"

"I don't know. When I become aware of my body, I'm aware of more pain. If I can stay deep enough in the Flow, I can escape it for a while. But when my family tries to revive me, or the doctors get particularly creative . . ." V stopped, sensing something in Consuela's sudden stillness. His monologue slid into regret. He looked sorrier than ever.

"You didn't know that our bodies are still out there, did you?" he whispered. "That we're just souls stuck here waiting to die."

And although she wanted to deny it, it made perfect sense. Her soul, her self, was here-the rest had to be somewhere else. Back in the real world.

"And you're . . . where?" she asked.

"In an intensive burn ward," V said casually. "Suffering full-body burns." He glanced at his hands, his arms, then hers, aflame.

Consuela shuddered under the licking flames. "That's what you meant by 'again,'" she said. "You burned yourself."

The muscles around V's mouth trembled and he bit his lip to still it. His fist beat against his thigh and he dropped his head, nodding into his chest.

"It was an accident," he said. * Getting trapped there. The fire ... The fire just got away . . . * "I lost control of it." V cracked his neck. "They keep me under-way under-but in the Flow, I'm whole. I'm me. I have all my fingers and my hair and my face and my nose. But when they try to pull me back . . ." He shrugged. "I don't let them. I bow out."

* Coward. * No! * I can't take the pain. *

Consuela saw the husk of Joseph Crow's place in her mind. Did this mean Joseph Crow died in the real world? Or did Joseph Crow die here, first? Did he die there and, somehow, his death crossed over? Which world is the reflection and which one's real?

"Where am I?" she whispered to no one.

"In a hospital," V said. "Most of us are."

* I found you. *

She stared at him. "Where? How?"

V sighed. "Sissy has her computer," he said. "If it's out there, she can find it. Medical records, news reports-she can find anyone with enough information. And there aren't a lot of Consuela Louisa Aguilar Chavezes around." He rubbed his palms against his jeans as if trying to get warm despite being in the company of a living, burning thing. "So I found you. * The sh.e.l.l of you. * I hoped that bringing you to your body might help get you home."

"Would it?"

"Maybe. It always pulls me," V said. "That's why I avoid going as long as I can. But once you know where your body is, you can never not-know again. It haunts you like your own personal ghost. You're never wholly here again."

Consuela considered that and him. "Can I ask you something? "

"Anything."

She burned, hesitant and looming. "Who are your a.s.signments?" she asked quietly. "What's the pattern?"

He knew why she was asking; a ripple pa.s.sed over his mottled chest. He steeled himself before answering.

"I save those who are victims of their own choices."

Stunned, Consuela struggled to make that fit.

V waited a tense moment in silence. "Can I ask you a question? "

Consuela looked up.

"Are you ready to leave?" he asked.

Consuela swallowed, tasting her resolve with her tongue.

"No," she said, her voice warm. "I haven't saved you yet."

Something unspoken pa.s.sed between them.

Consuela stepped cautiously forward. V flinched. She wanted to say that she was being careful not to touch him-that although he would not burn, her fire might be a painful reminder-but the sentence only continued in her head: A reminder of pain. His pain. V's pain. Her thoughts fell neat as dominoes: Tender eats pain. Controls it. Tender needs pain. He can't help it, he's hungry. V is always in pain. Tender helps him. Tender needs to feed. V wants to escape the pain, but Tender wants . . . what?

Violins sobbed in unison, snapping her aware.

* Do it! Say it! * d.a.m.n me, Angel! * You can't save me! * No one can! *

She could. And she couldn't. It wasn't him.

Don't give up, V. Don't give up.