Faerie Winter - Janni Lee Simner [14]
Mom fought me. “I won’t”—she was coughing, too—“lose another firestarter.”
Ethan’s sleeves ignited, and flames raced up his arms. He threw his head back and laughed. Mom struggled toward him, though Matthew, too, had hold of her now.
I wouldn’t lose her. “Mom. Tara. Come here.” Mom stiffened in my grasp. “Come with me, Mom.” I choked on the words, but I felt the power in them. I dragged her down stairs I could barely see through the smoke, and this time she didn’t fight me. She couldn’t fight, not while my magic held her. Matthew staggered after us as we ran through the living room and into the open air. Cold slammed into me as I stumbled outside and down a shorter set of stairs. I drew gasping breaths.
Mom fell, coughing, to her knees just a few feet from the house. I crouched beside her. Smoke billowed from our upper windows and drifted over pink clouds that streaked the twilight sky. Matthew and I helped Mom to her feet. She took a step toward the house, then stopped, trembling. My magic held her still. Her back went rigid. “Let me go.”
Through the smoke, the windows glowed with orange light. I wasn’t about to let Mom back in there. “Stay here, Mom.” I left her with Matthew and ran toward the open door.
“Ethan!” My throat was raw with smoke and calling. I wasn’t sure he would hear, but I felt a cold thread of power pulsing between us once more. “Ethan, come here!”
Ethan burst through the doorway and down the outside stairs, his nightshirt aflame. Matthew ran past me, threw him to the ground, and rolled him in the snow. Ethan wept as the flames went out, and the magic between us snapped so fast I stumbled.
Snow began to fall. Ethan gasped and staggered to his feet, his charred nightshirt falling away from his unburned skin. His gaze focused on the orange glow in the windows. “Not again,” he whispered, and he raised his blistered, bleeding hands to the sky.
Fire burst through the windows. It flowed, like a molten waterfall, toward Ethan’s palms, and it sank through his skin the way water soaked into dry earth. All at once, the fire went out. Ethan took a single step forward and fell, face-first, into the snow.
His back and arms, which had been unharmed moments before, were now a mess of red blisters and fire-blackened skin. Snowflakes sizzled as they hit his charred flesh. Matthew and I tried to sit him up. He groaned and curled away from us, pulling his bleeding hands over his head. Kate ran to us with a blanket.
I was suddenly aware of the townsfolk ringed around us. They carried water buckets and ladders, as if ready to try to put the fire out. A short distance away, Hope’s little sister stared at the house, hands outstretched. Hope tapped the younger girl’s shoulder, and she let her hands drop. The snow stopped. Hope’s sister was a waterworker. She’d been trying to put the fire out, too.
Only there was no fire, not anymore. Kate looked at Ethan, frowned, and drew the blanket away, spreading it on the ground in front of him. The boy’s chest was blackened as well, and the touch of wool on his burns would hurt him more than the cold. A burned-meat smell drifted through the air, strong as the smell of charred wood from my house.
“Let me go, Liza.” Mom’s voice came from behind me. I’d forgotten she stood there, my magic yet holding her. I turned. Her hands and face were blackened with soot, and her sweater was damp with melting snow.
“Let me go so I can see to him.” Mom’s voice shook.
She was all right. I let out a long breath and felt the magic between us fall away. Mom stumbled forward; I caught her. She flinched as if she were the one who’d been burned.
“Mom?”
She backed away, eyes wide and frightened. “Not you, Lizzy. Please not you.” Her shoulders trembled as she knelt by Ethan’s side, and I knew I’d get no thanks for saving her.
“You should have let the house burn,” she whispered to the boy. “You shouldn’t have taken the fire into yourself.”
Was that what Ethan had done? He moaned. Was that why the fire he’d called out of our house had burned him, while