I held on to his arm. “Luis.” I didn’t need to say more, and he didn’t need to do more than shake his head to reject my concern. “Very well,” I said.
My fingers felt burned when they left his skin; he was warm, so warm it felt wrong to me. Effort and power, consuming him from within.
He would not stop. I understood that very well.
It took the rest of the afternoon, and the sun was slipping below the horizon when Luis finally sighed, removed his hand from the girl’s forehead, and tried to get up. Tried, and failed. I grabbed his arm as he began to slide off the bed; I couldn’t hold him, but I broke his momentum from a fall to a controlled slide to a sitting position on the floor. Someone had refilled the water pitcher, and I grabbed it and moved around the bed toward him. My legs trembled violently, and I had to stop and brace myself against the wall for a moment as dark spots swam and drifted in my eyes. I then summoned up all the energy left in me to drop down next to Luis’s side.
I didn’t spill the water.
“You okay?” he asked me in a faint, rough voice. I handed him the carafe, and he guzzled down more than half its contents without a pause. “We need food. Protein and carbs, the more the better.”
I took the water from him and finished it before asking, in a voice I hardly recognized as my own, “The girl?”
Luis gave me a slow, exhausted smile. “She’ll be okay,” he said. The smile, warm and sweet, faded too quickly. “Physically, anyway. No idea what happened to bring her to this. Could be too bad to get over it as easily as this.”
If thishad been easy, I could not imagine hard. I started to get up, but my legs wouldn’t respond. Luis took my hand.
I tried to pull away, but even in his weakened state, Luis was a strong man. “No,” I said. “You’ve spent too much power already.”
“You need it more than I do right now.” His last reserves of power cascaded into me, flooding warm through my nerves, sparking waves of pleasure as it passed. An echo only—he had little to give me, but it was enough to sustain me for another day, perhaps two, until he recovered.
If I didn’t use my power recklessly.
I didn’t mean to do it, but my hand seemed to move of its own volition, breaking away from his grip and moving up to touch his face.
Luis’s eyes widened, and for an instant we were staring at each other with all the doors open, all the walls thrown down.
Then I dropped my hand, dragged myself to my feet, and walked off in search of the proteins and carbohydrates his body so desperately needed to replace. I met Detective Halley in the hall heading toward the room, laden with a tray full of food. Hamburgers, hot dogs, some sort of stew in a bowl.
“She going to make it?” Halley asked, holding on to the tray.
“Are you withholding food from us if she doesn’t?”
He blinked, shook his head, and handed the food to me. “You tried. Can’t ask more than that, I guess.”
“Then I am pleased to tell you that Luis believes she will recover.” I started to take the food into the room, then turned back to him and asked, “How did you know?”
“Know what?”
“That we would need this.”
He shrugged. “I asked my sister- in-law. She said if you made it through, you’d be hungry as a cloud of locusts.”
Halley, I decided, would be allowed to live after all.
The girl woke up after a deep, but natural, sleep. That was not significant.
What was significant was howshe woke up . . . crying, screaming, panicked, and desperate.
Her distress set the room on fire.
It happened very quickly—one moment the child was shrieking in terror, and the next, the bedding around her burst into hot orange flames. So did the cushions on the chairs nearby, and the cheerful yellow curtains draping the windows. Colorful characters charred on the walls.
This was the worst thing that could happen. Luis’s powers were focused around Earth; a Weather Warden could have found ways to shut down this sort of event, but for an Earth Warden it was much more difficult.
My powers were limited by Luis’s, though I could wield them more creatively; I quickly altered the composition of our skin and lungs to make us fire- resistant, though making us fireproof was beyond my capabilities. It was good that I did this, because Luis plunged into the flames, grabbed the child, and pulled her off the bed and into his arms. If he’d been a normal human, he would have sustained terrible burns.
The moment the girl was in Luis’s arms, the flames began to die away, hissing and sputtering into nothing an instant before the overhead fire-suppression system began raining and sounding its alarm. I cut the flow of power, and Luis’s body and mine reverted to their normal states.
“What the hell . . . ?” A crowd of people had formed in the doorway to the room, but two broke away from the pack to rush inside, looking very much in command. One, dressed in a white coat, I assumed was a doctor; the other was, of course, Detective Halley. It was Halley who’d spoken. “What happened in here?”
The doctor ignored such concerns and moved to take the girl from Luis’s arms. “No,” Luis said. “Not a good idea.”
“I need to examine her for burns!”
“She’s not hurt. She’s just scared.”
“And dangerous,” I said. “And wrong.”
Luis’s gaze brushed mine. He knew what was wrong with her her, just as I did; the child’s powers should have been dormant until her body had time to grow the channels through which they would run. She was too young— fartoo young—to bear this kind of burden. It would be difficult enough at adolescence, with the sort of raw ability she had just demonstrated.
“How did this happen?” I asked him quietly. Luis cradled the child in his arms, and she clung to him with her small arms around his neck, blue eyes wide and terrified. I retrieved a thick, nubby blanket from the closet, which was the only place in the room that had been protected from both the flames and water dousing, and took it to Luis. He wrapped it tight around the girl.
“I didn’t mean to,” she whispered, very seriously. “I really didn’t.”
“I know, mija,” he said. “Don’t you worry, nobody blames you. I’m Luis. What’s your name?”
She considered the question very seriously before answering, “Pammy.”
“Pammy, what’s your last name?”
“What’s yours?” she asked. Luis smiled.
“Rocha.”
“That’s a funny name.”
“Maybe so. It’s Spanish. Is yours funny?”
“Gegenwaller,” she said, very proudly. “It’s German.”
Luis shot a glance toward Detective Halley, who nodded and pushed his way out of the crowd in the doorway. He had the information he needed, and he would begin his search. “Pammy Gegenwaller,” he said, “where are your parents?”
Her face just shut down, becoming a still, empty mask far too old and experienced for her few years. “They’re not important,” she said. “The lady said so.”
“The lady,” I said. “Who is the lady?”
Pammy turned her face away, pressing it against Lu-is’s neck.
“Hey,” he said, and jiggled her gently in his arms.
“That’s Cassiel. She’s nice. She won’t hurt you.”
“She will,” Pammy said. “Just like the lady.”
Some of the paralysis among the medical staff finally broke, and as if by common consent, a swarm of them broke the invisible barrier at the threshold and surged around us. A nurse plucked Pammy from Luis’s arms, and as she yelled in protest I saw a flash of pain and fear go across his face. “Wait!” he snapped. The nurse paused, frowning, struggling to hold the flailing child. Luis put a hand on Pammy’s forehead and murmured, “Sleep now, sweetheart. You’re safe. You have to trust these people, they want to make you better. Okay?”
He was using his powers in a strong but subtle way, a kind of sedation that swept over the girl and relaxed her body. Her eyes drifted closed, and she rested her head on the nurse’s shoulder.