Angel Fire by Valmore Daniels (electric book reader .TXT) 📖

get their own way with force. But Barry had gone beyond this; he had come to a point where he was ruled by animal jealousy.

Staying meant disaster, and that was a certainty. Or I could hit the road and try to build a life somewhere else; start over. It meant leaving behind my friends, abandoning what was left of my family, and that was the toughest part of it. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I packed, but I knew I was making the right decision.

With a deep sob, I wiped the tears from my eyes, threw on my jacket, and walked out.

I got three steps into the parking lot when a familiar voice sliced through the night and stopped me dead in my tracks.

 

Chapter Thirteen

“So you’re just going to cut and run?” Aunt Martha asked me, her voice tight. I could sense her disappointment, and for that I felt a deep shame.

She sat on the wooden bench outside the office that Uncle Edward had hand-carved twenty years ago. Wearing a light red jacket over her nightgown to protect her from the chill air, she looked homey and comforting. Narrowed eyes and pursed lips told me she was anything but relaxed.

In her hands she held two steaming mugs.

Tentatively, I approached the bench. Aunt Martha scooted over and made room for me. When I sat down with a heavy sigh, she handed me a mug. It was hot chocolate—with marshmallows.

A teardrop fell into my drink; I wiped the next one away with the back of my hand.

“It’s just too hard, Aunt Martha. It’s not working out.”

“Pish-posh,” she declared. “What’s life without a little adversity?”

When I glanced up at her, her eyes had softened. She winked and took a sip of hot chocolate.

I said, “You have no idea what happened tonight.”

“I don’t?” she asked. But I could see in her face that she did. The corner of her mouth lifted in a smile. “No need for a newspaper in a small town,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked, alarmed. I could only guess what she had heard.

Aunt Martha said, “I’ve known old Jack Creel for years. He called not ten minutes ago.”

“What did he say?”

The hot chocolate was cooling quickly in the night air, so I gulped it down before it got too cold.

“He said you were pretty much minding your own business, just having fun with your friends, and Barry showed up and made an ass of himself again.”

“Yeah. I kick myself every time he comes around. Whatever possessed me to marry that jerk…?”

“Your mother was impetuous when she was a teenager,” said Aunt Martha. “Trouble was her middle name, and you inherited that. There’s a wild streak runs through your side of the family.”

“Not Uncle Edward—”

“No. He’s the total opposite of his sister.” She shook her head and smiled. “When she spent that summer away, I’m sure your grandparents were as much relieved as they were distraught.”

A maudlin silence hung between us then as we remembered my mother. The conversation wasn’t helping me; I was feeling even more downhearted than after the run-in with Barry.

“So, tell me,” Aunt Martha said in a measured voice. “What else happened tonight?”

A cold chill ran down my spine. “What do you mean? With Neil?”

“No, though anytime you want to have a birds and bees talk, or even a gossip, I’m not too old to chew the fat. No, I meant with Barry.”

There was a very distinct and recognizable tone in her voice. She always used that tone when she knew the answer to a question before she even asked it.

My gut cramped. Did she know my secret? Of course she wasn’t talking about that, I told myself. How could she know?

I raced through my memories, searching for any sign or reference that Aunt Martha knew about this power that had afflicted me for the past ten years. As far as I could remember, I had not breathed a word of this thing inside me to any living soul except one: my cellmate, Kyra Michelson, and she had taken my secret to the grave.

No. Aunt Martha had no clue about my inner demons. I had admitted nothing during the trial. I said nothing when I set Barry’s wrists on fire the night before last, and I had kept silent about the shattered glasses and boiling drinks at the bar tonight. I had kept my mouth shut every time I’d had a flare up. I took the label ‘firebug’ and didn’t deny it. At least with a pyromaniac there was a natural explanation for what they did. In my case, I had no explanation for what made me do the things I did.

Aunt Martha was a good soul. If she had any idea of the destruction I had caused, or was capable of committing, she would turn me right back in to the authorities. Who wouldn’t?

“What do you mean, with Barry?” I asked.

“Old Jack. If there’s one thing you can say about him, he never exaggerates. If anything, he’s known for his lack of detail. I remember once he had a cast on his arm. When I asked him what happened, he just said, ‘Got me a cast.’ I asked why he got a cast and he said, ‘Broke my arm, why else would I get a cast?’ So when he kept on and on tonight about your little to-do with Barry, I knew he wasn’t making it up.”

“…Oh?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Glasses don’t burst and shatter unless they’re dropped, or if some opera singer screams her head off. Or if it reaches a certain heat.”

“Aunt Martha—”

“Plus I heard about the other night, and I saw the bandages on Barry’s hands earlier today when I went grocery shopping.”

My mind raced. “I—”

“And I know, deep in my soul, it wasn’t your fault what happened to your parents.”

I couldn’t breathe. My mouth opened, but there was no air in my lungs to make the words come out.

Aunt Martha said, “I had hoped it would skip you. But I guess not. Darcy, I think it’s time you knew some of your family’s history.”

“What?” My mind raced in a hundred directions.

“Now, your Uncle Edward, bless his soul, has no clue about this, and it doesn’t concern him. So what I tell you here stays between us. All right?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t ask me if it’s genetics or any of that scientific stuff,” she said. “I don’t know for sure one way or another; I only know what I’ve been told and what I’ve read. Your family bloodline is … special. It doesn’t happen in every generation, but once in a while, certain circumstances arise and…”

She took a sip of her hot chocolate while she considered her words. “Maybe it’s the hand of God, or the Devil. Maybe it’s a blessing, or a curse. Maybe it’s just a quirk of nature. I don’t know.”

“My mother—”

“Whatever it is, it didn’t happen to your mother or uncle. It didn’t happen to your grandmother. But her mother had an ability not found in normal folk.”

I blinked. “My great-grandmother? She died before I was born. In her sleep.”

“That’s right.” Aunt Martha nodded.

I searched my memory. “My mom talked about her some. But I never heard anything … about any affliction she had.”

This was the first time I had heard about or even imagined anyone else having this power. At the best of times I found it hard to believe that I had this condition; more than once I thought I was simply insane and my mind was making this up because I couldn’t face the truth. Hearing that someone else—a member of my family, no less—shared this burden was even more difficult to believe. Half of me thought I had stepped into a nightmare of my own making. This thing affected other people?

“Ability,” Aunt Martha corrected me. “She managed to control it; and she kept the secret to herself. Well, mostly.”

“How do you know about this?”

Aunt Martha lifted her mug and finished the last of her drink. After wiping her lips with the back of her sleeve, she answered me.

“Your mother made me promise to keep it a secret. You see, after you were born, her mother told her a story; and before that, after your grandmother had your mother, your great-grandmother told her. And that’s how it’s been.

“Ellie didn’t believe a word of it, of course. But after your grandmother died, when she was helping clean out your grandparents’ attic, she found an old tattered journal. Your great-grandmother, Beatrice, had written in it since she was a girl.”

“Where is it now?” I asked, barely able to contain my excitement.

“It was in your house that night. I’m sorry.”

Destroyed. For a moment, there had been a glimmer of hope that I might get some answers. But with the journal incinerated, I was back to square one.

“After reading it,” Aunt Martha continued, “Ellie realized that the story had been true all along. But by then, you were already born. Your mother showed no signs of the ability, but she was afraid for you. Since we were close, she felt she could confide in me.”

“Confide what?” I was practically jumping out of my skin.

“She called it ‘angel’s fire,’ your great-grandmother did. Very religious woman, Beatrice was. She believed she was being punished by a fallen angel.”

“An angel?” I said in a low voice, watching Aunt Martha’s reaction. I could never tell if she truly believed in hellfire and all that nonsense. I always thought those religious stories were more like morality tales told to children.

Aunt Martha said, “From what your mother told me, if someone in your family line is going to develop the ability, it only happens under very specific circumstances.”

I struggled to absorb all this new information. “What circumstances?”

“In her journal,” she told me, “Beatrice wrote something along the lines of ‘When the bond of blood is broken, a fallen angel will rise to punish the offender.’ I can’t remember it word for word.”

I had a sinking sensation, a flash of vertigo, when my brain made the connection.

Aunt Martha had dropped breadcrumbs one by one, hoping it would lead me to the conclusion. I had never even thought about it before; but the connection was crystal clear.

The bond of blood. Not my parents. They were alive when the power sprang out of me. That bond was broken before the fire…

“Oh, God,” I said.

“I suspected it. It’s true, isn’t it?” she asked me, never taking her eyes off me for a moment.

“Yeah.” My voice was tiny, weak, despairing.

Aunt Martha leaned over and wrapped her thick arms around me, pulled me into her deep bosom. “Oh, child, I’m so sorry.”

But I could not respond through the sudden flood of tears.

 

Chapter Fourteen

The night air bit through our clothes, and when my sobs turned to an occasional sniffle, Aunt Martha led me around the motel to the bungalow and into the kitchen.

I left my duffel bag at the door.

Once she had me tucked into a wide-winged sofa, she threw a quilt over me, handed me a cup of herbal tea and listened as I spilled my guts.

* * *

I’ve painted Barry with a very harsh brush, and he had become every bit the caricature of a jealous man there was. But to be fair, he’d had some good qualities that initially attracted me to him. Aside from my youthful rebellion, I wasn’t stupid enough to marry him based solely on what kind of reaction I could get out of my folks.

For example, one night at a