Phoenix

Soft fingers stroked my hair. I blinked, but my eyes didn’t seem to be working right. Was I in the river?

“I’m so sorry, Phoenix,” Mom said. She was murky. Was she in the river too? Her eyes were red.

“Hey Mom,” I said groggily. I was so cold, it hurt to move. My faced itched, but I couldn’t scratch it. “Why are you so sad?”

She clenched her lips and shook her head.

Stupid, I thought. You’re in the hospital because they think you tried to kill yourself and you’re dumb enough to ask your mom why she’s sad.

“King got hit by a car this morning,” she said.

My stomach lurched.

Might. King.

“When it rains, it pours,” Mom laughed. Sorrow welled in the laughter, leeching through the sound, making it more of a sob than a laugh. “Especially for us. All we need is for Princess to colic and then...”

“Mom,” I said through uncontrollable shivers. My throat was tight, my jaw clenched. My skin itched.

Like fire.

I cleared my throat to try again and shook with the cold. “Mom, you’re really not being funny.”

“I know,” she whispered. “There’s nothing to laugh about any more. Dad and Lexia and King, all dead. You’re in here. Our family is falling apart.”

“Mom,” I said, teeth chattering. “It’s going to be okay. I’m getting out of here soon and--”

“Phoenix,” she said, her sad eyes looking down at me. “You’re not getting out of here. You’re being transferred to a long term care center in Seattle.”

“What?” I said, trying to sit up. Fire roared across my skin. The burning sensation seemed right, somehow. I started to sweat even before I stopped shivering, pinpricks of ice among the flames. “I can’t go to Seattle.”

I had to go find that stupid Scepter. In Utah.

Phoenix the Scarred.

“You were screaming about spiders, son,” Mom said. Her red-rimmed eyes were wide, her dark hair going every direction. “You said you had spiders all over you. You broke out in a rash.”

“A rash?” I asked. Did that explain the burning? The cold clenched around me again and I laid back down.

“Well,” she said, “how else do you explain it? You’re covered in red bumps. They look like...”

“Bites,” Dr. Banks finished for her. She stood in the doorway, glasses perched on her nose and a clip board nestled in the crook of her arm.

“Well, yes,” Mom said, turning from me to him, and then back to me. “But how could they be? Unless you suddenly got fleas. And you didn’t.”

“They’re psycho-symptomatic,” Dr. Banks said. “Just like the way you are shivering. You said something about a river after we put you out. Your condition is getting worse. And the facility here just can’t help you anymore. I need you closer to my main practice. In Seattle.”

“So I have to go to Seattle because I was yelling about spiders,” I said, my jaw and abs spasming. I had to work hard to keep breathing. Cold pressed down on me like a giant fist on my chest.

“It won’t be all bad,” Mom soothed. “They can take care of you there, figure out what’s wrong, help you get better.”

“Mom,” I said, “I’m fine. I need to get out of this place. I want to go home.”

“Besides,” she said, seeming not to have heard me, “then I can go help Sage with the baby and see you every day. It all works out.” Her shadowy form nodded. I could see her trying to convince herself.

I didn’t know what to say to that. Anything I said would make it worse. Did it matter that in my fantasyland I had been covered in spiders? More fuel for the fire.

That word again. That feeling: fire.

Fire is a part of me. I hate fire. I have to fight the Darkness.

“When are you transferring me?” I asked Dr. Banks. He flipped through the clipboard as though it held the answer I didn’t want to know.

“Tomorrow,” Mom answered for him. “I’m going to go home and pack some things for you. And then I’ll be here first thing in the morning to get you and we’ll head out.”

Panic roared through me, warring with the cold. This wasn’t right. This couldn’t be happening. It wasn’t my fault that strange stuff kept happening to me.

Maybe this wasn’t all in my head. My heart slowed a little at that thought. What if it wasn’t all in head?

Peace swept through me, calmness like floating down a river.

Then this doesn’t matter. Nothing in this world matters. None of this is real.

I leaned back on my pillow, shivering despite the blankets covering me. I needed to get back to Eloria. I closed my eyes, trying to will myself back there.

Cold ripped through me. My bones felt like they’d been dipped in liquid nitrogen. I tried to gasp, but icy water filled my mouth, choking me. Mechanically, my arms floundered, my feet kicked. My head broke the surface and I coughed, gagging.

A whispering slithering grind filled my ears. The spiders. I gulped air and submerged again, letting the swift current carry me away. The frigid water made my eyes ache behind my eyelids. I came up for air and sound flooded into my ears again.

“Phoenix!” It was Lexia’s voice. “Phoenix, are you all right?”

“Yes!” I yelled back.

Kill her, the Darkness urged.

“I do not hear them anymore,” Lexia gasped. The current ripped us downstream

“How close are they?” I said into the night. “Can we get out of this water yet?”

“Not yet,” she said.

We drifted in icy silence until my teeth stopped chattering. The water was starting to feel warm when Lexia finally let us get out. We pulled ourselves to the bank and clambered up the side, numb hands grabbing at willows, trying to avoid prickly olive as we climbed.

“What are we going to do now?” I asked through chattering teeth. “We’re going to freeze to death.”

“No we are not,” Lexia said, rubbing her upper arms with her hands. Even in the low light, her hands looked blue. “You are going to set the whole forest on fire and we are going to be toasty warm.”

“I can’t,” I said, holding myself against the cold. The words barely escaped my involuntarily clenched jaw. “I don’t know how.”

“I wish Eremil was here to beat on you until you remembered how,” she said. Her voice chattered through clenched teeth. “But I suppose it would not help. The Darkness is in your mind. You cannot light a flame any more than I can.”

I wished I could, and that was new. As much as I hated it, I’d give anything for a fire right now. I flexed my scarred hands. I couldn’t feel my fingers. My body felt as stiff as glass. All of my muscles knotted as tight as they could, trying to generate some warmth. My teeth stopped chattering. I made myself follow Lexia. Her wet clothes steamed.

The moon was pale and weak overhead, the light being swallowed by inky darkness all around it. The canopy of aspens and pines cast pitch black shadows. My breath didn’t puff in the cold air. I wasn’t warm enough to make steam. I felt like death, my joints stiff, my clothing freezing to my skin. Branches reached out of the darkness to tear at my face and my clothes.

“Come on,” Lexia said through chattering teeth. Ice crystals in her hair sparkled dimly.

We are going to die, I thought.

“Hope, Phoenix,” Lexia said. “Have hope.” It was a little eerie how she always seemed to be reading my mind. Could I not have one private thought?

“No,” she replied, just as naturally as if I’d spoken out loud.

She held a hand out to me. I looked at her hand and thought of Jewel.

Why should I suddenly think of Jewel? Why should I be thinking of her now with ice crystals forming on my face? I should be figuring out how to unleash magic. But there it was: I wanted to sit by Jewel in trigonometry and watch as her eyebrows made that crease between her eyes. I wanted to watch her draw morbid cartoons. I wanted her to wear my coat so that I could smell her on it when she gave it back.

I took Lexia’s hand. Her fingers clenched convulsively around mine, in a cold-induced spasm. She smiled at me, her body shaking.

“Hope has been lost from this land for a long time,” I said. The words were right and wrong at the same time.

“Let’s get a move on,” Lexia said, dropping my hand and moving forward

They say when you’re drowning, you remember your whole life in an instant. Maybe freezing to death was the same, because I had all these images floating through my brain. I remembered Lexia and Eremil, our life here in Eloria. I remembered breaking horses and hunting game with Eremil. I remembered a hundred nights spent under the stars, adventure after adventure. I remembered the weight of the constant threat of the Darkness on me. I remembered battles and balls, feasts and war. I saw Eremil wrestling and training with weapons. I saw him hanging in my shadow, always two steps back, ready to tear anybody to shreds if they so much as threatened me, just as his father had done for my father. And then I realized what I wasn’t seeing. It would have freaked me out if I wasn’t about ready to lie down and die. This was the replay of my life, my brain winding down knowing it would die. None of my memories had anything to do with the real world. Not one.

I tried to force myself to find them. I searched through my mind for images of the real world, but all I could come up with was a few classes and basketball practice. I knew Pete was my best friend, that we spent almost all of our time together, but I couldn’t remember anything real farther back than the last couple days, at least not with clarity. Like I knew that Pete had been at Lexia’s funeral, but I couldn’t remember if there was a luncheon afterward. And I couldn’t remember anything else about it. It seemed like I would remember something like that.

I shook myself.

What was going on here?

A hand on my chest made me stop walking. I looked up from my study of the ground into Lexia’s silver eyes. She smiled slightly.

“Have you found the hole in her lie?” she asked me, cocking her head to the side. She shivered violently, but smiled through it.

“I...” I started but couldn’t think of a way to put the words together.

“Think on your soul,” she said quietly.

“My soul?” I asked. “What—“

“Shhh,” she said. “Do not talk. Think.” She turned and kept walking through the frozen forest.

My soul. My soul was tied directly to magic, at least in this world. I stretched my scarred, cold, stiff hands. I remembered wanting those scars to mark me as something special, to give me power beyond mortal men. But they were just scars. And I was just Phoenix Carter. There was nothing special about me besides the fact that I was stuck in a psych ward waiting to be transferred to a mental hospital for long-term care.

“No,” Lexia said, turning suddenly to face me again. Her eyes burned into mine and it seemed like the heat from them spread through my chest. “Think about your soul.”

I breathed in and out.

My soul is fire.

My breath rose in a great steamy cloud around my head.

“You are fighting the lie,” Lexia breathed. There was hope in her face. A chill wind cut through her platinum hair and her body convulsed even more violently with the increased cold.

My breath puffed white in the dark night.

My soul.

Fire is a part of me, a part of my soul, seared into my flesh.

I remembered the way it felt to release my magic, to see flames dancing and curling and the way it felt to shape them with my mind.

I could control it as naturally as breathing.

I licked my lips. “Get something dry,” I said.

Lexia smiled crookedly with bluish lips and snapped a branch off of a dead tree.

“You can do it,” she said.

As naturally as breathing.

I breathed out.

Kill her, the Darkness urged and the world tilted.

Alarms tore through the darkness. Lights blazed on and overhead sprinklers poured cold water down on me.

“No!” I yelled. Fire smoldered to steaming ash under the stream of the sprinklers. Tongues of flame licked the drapes, blackening the ceiling tiles. I lay strapped to the hospital bed again, the leather restraints chaffing my scarred wrist.

The room was hot, sweltering even, with the sprinklers dumping water down on me. Smoke and steam and water choked me.

How was I going to get out?

Then the door burst open and the round nurse Ellie came bounding in. She didn’t say anything, but her wide eyes took in the smoke and the smoldering sheets.

“I thought… “ she huffed. “I—What?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I get that a lot.”

She didn’t waste any time. She tore the blankets from the bed and started undoing the restraints.

I coughed in response.

She finished with the last restraint and grabbed my arm to pull me from the ruined bed. I limped along beside her. My legs ached with cold.

There is nothing quite as pathetic as the scene which greeted me: frenzied hospital staff trying to get the crazy kids to the evacuation point. In the night. In the dark. In the freezing Eastern Washington winter.

It was hard to say who was more panicked, the staff or the crazies. The whispering girl with the patchy hair stood still, screaming her guts out. The pudgy boy from group was soaked, his robe clinging to him as he shivered violently. The anorexic girl watched with big, empty eyes looking as though she didn’t know where she was. Ellie ran off to join the rest of the staff. In wet scrubs, they formed a kind of human corral around the kids, trying to head off any runners.