Annie had managed to wrestle Artie out of his seatbelt and halfway out of the car, and was now just standing there, blood on her hands and forearms, hands hooked under Artie’s arms. He still wasn’t moving, and although he was breathing, he wasn’t conscious enough to be projecting thoughts outside his little bubble of personal space. My blood had clotted over the cuts on his face, stopping the bleeding. That was a small improvement.
“I wish Sam were here,” said Annie, adjusting her stance to avoid dumping Artie on the ground. “He’s stronger than I am.”
“Sam’s the boyfriend,” explained Elsie, moving to help Annie by sliding her arms under Artie’s middle. “He’s a former carnie.”
“There’s no such thing as a former carnie,” said Annie primly. “He’s just temporarily a carnie without a carnival. And forever, unless he decides he wants to go home and take over from his grandmother.”
“Uh-huh,” said Elsie. Working together, the two of them were able to slide Artie out of the driver’s seat and get him into a comfortable carrying position. “Sarah, can you get whatever the two of you are going to want from the car, please? Artie will never let me hear the end of it if we set the thing on fire with his comic books in the backseat or something.”
“Sure,” I said, with an uneasy glance at the unconscious Artie. My fingers twitched with the desire to touch him, just long enough to find the distant shadows of his thoughts and reassure myself that he hadn’t gotten worse. I couldn’t. I’d be in the way, and if he had gotten worse . . .
We needed to get him home. We needed to get him to where he could get help. There was nothing we could do here, except grab our things and go, and all I’d do was slow us down. I climbed into the car through the still-open driver’s-side backdoor, feeling around on the seat for anything Artie might be planning to keep. I found a plastic bag of comics, as predicted; a first aid kit, which could be useful, and more, had probably been tailored to his specific physiology; a jacket of his, which I shrugged on despite not feeling cold the way true mammals do; and my own backpack, still tucked into the front footwell. I went around the car and leaned in through Artie’s door for that, not feeling like participating in the seat-climbing Olympics twice in one night.
Artie’s phone was in the cupholder. I took that as well, tucking it, his keys, and the phone charger into the pocket of his jacket. There was glass everywhere in the front seat, pooled around the spaces where his body had been. My seat was oddly clear, like the glass had been somehow shunted around me, rather than slicing into me when it went flying. That was odd. I brushed it carefully aside to make it easier for me to get out of the car without cutting myself.
Annie was waiting outside; Artie was nowhere to be seen. I must have looked alarmed, because she held up her hands and said, “Relax. Elsie is hauling him up to her car; you’re going to have to ride with him in the backseat. Hope you’re okay with close quarters.” She wiggled her eyebrows, a broad motion that needed no nuance to be understood.
“Don’t be weird,” I said.
“Being weird is, like, ninety percent of my day,” said Annie. She raised both hands, palms once again turned upward. “Move away from the car, okay? This is pretty cool, but you’re not fireproof.”
“Are you?”
Annie nodded distractedly, most of her focus on the air above her hands. “As long as the fire remembers how to be mine, I am. Once it grows into something else, it can hurt me, but when it starts, it starts in my bones, and it loves me too much to do me any damage.”
The world seemed to tense for a moment, and I got a flash of what I could only describe as calculus, like someone was revising the equations that made up the universe. My eyes itched the way they usually did when I was actively using my powers. And two small balls of fire appeared above Annie’s hands, burning white-hot despite their apparent lack of fuel.
“All sorcerers are elementalists,” she said, as casually as if she weren’t holding two impossible fireballs with her bare hands. “Not the classic ‘earth, air, fire, water’ gig, but sort of physical forces. Heat, cold, gravity, that sort of thing. I got heat. So did Grandpa Thomas. His journals are full of useful tips about how to make your own burn cream from things you probably have in the herb garden, and how to convince the chaperones you need new sheets because of ‘nocturnal emissions,’ not because you set them on fire in the middle of the night.” She sounded amused and disgusted at the same time. “Guess growing up a Covenant boy makes suddenly becoming one of the things you were raised to hunt a little hard on the psyche. He was an amazingly good liar.”
I took a step back. She might not have been bothered by the heat boiling off her palms, but I could feel my hair starting to frizz, and had no desire to be caught in what she was about to do.
“Almost ready,” said Annie. The fire above her hands grew in both size and heat, edges becoming blue-white, crackling growing louder. She rolled her hands over, the fire dancing along the backs of her fingers, before flicking the balls into the car. They balanced for a moment on the seats, like they were going to go for a drive. Then they burst, spreading flames everywhere, transforming the interior into an inferno.
“Wow,” I whispered.
“I’m getting better at it,” said Annie. “It used to be pretty random whether I got fire when I asked for it or not. Go help Elsie, okay? I’ll be up in a minute.”
There was something in her voice that told me not to argue. “Okay,” I said, and turned and fled, leaving my cousin and her pet conflagration behind.
Elsie had her headlights on, as well as the light inside the car itself, creating a safe oasis of civilization in the middle of the deep dark woods. She was leaning against the hood, texting furiously, when I came scrambling up the incline. She raised her head, nodded to me, and turned her attention back to her phone.
“Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Kevin are standing by for our arrival,” she said. “Mom and Dad are on their way here, to make sure the scene is sterilized before they join us at the compound. Did Annie set the car on fire?”
“She did,” I said. “She’s still down there. Why—”
“Once she’s sure the car is burnt enough not to be a problem anymore, she’ll call the fire back into her body,” said Elsie. “She couldn’t contain like, a forest fire or anything, but something as small as burning out a car, the fire won’t have time to forget who it belongs to. That way, we don’t have to worry about accidentally burning down Portland or anything. Global climate change means we have to be responsible about our pyrokinesis.” She laughed, sudden and bright and absolutely mirthless.
I winced. “He’s going to be okay, Elsie. I promise.”
“Did you turn into a Caladrius while I wasn’t looking?” She lowered her phone. “Because unless you have special healing powers that you’ve never mentioned before, you can’t promise anything. My baby brother has head trauma. People can die from head trauma.”