Twisted Firestarter
Chapter Eleven
TWISTED FIRESTARTER
Keir
T he first thing Keir realized as the door shut behind him was that he wasn’t in the library.
He wasn’t certain how he knew it. The room was pitch dark, the air unmoving. Somehow, he could sense that the space wasn’t large enough. Somehow, he could feel the walls closing in.
The second thing he realized was that he was alone.
“Alison?” he called. The sound was muffled, strangely quiet in this space.
Keir felt behind him for the wall. It was there, which came as somewhat of a surprise. He felt the texture of the wallpaper, something vaguely floral. He reached lower and touched wood paneling. This wasn’t the corridor he’d come from, although he’d known that already.
He must have taken a wrong turn in the dark.
He reached the edge of a frame. He felt the inside of it, hoping for a chalkboard, but found the smooth contours of an oil painting.
There was a change in the air in the room. It was subtle, like the soft breeze when someone walks by. He felt the weight of them, the warmth.
It was not Alison.
Moving slowly, he reached into his pocket for the match he’d been given by Dean Whittaker. He knelt to the ground; the floor was stone in this room.
He struck the match.
There was the sound of muffled laughter. Male, young. From its warmth, possibly a dwarf.
A prank, Keir realized. One of the young freshers with an overactive imagination. Keir was accustomed to pranks. Charlotte had enjoyed them almost from the time she could walk: leaving sticky pudding in Keir’s chair, replacing sugar with salt, even locking him into one of the many rooms of Weldan House from time to time.
“Very funny,” he said as he lit the candle.
He jumped. There was movement behind him.
No, it was only his shadow. It moved with him as he turned, the candlelight flickering.
He was in a small room. An office, it seemed like. There were a pair of armed chairs facing a mahogany desk, a large shelf full of books, and a globe in the corner. The painting he had felt before hung near the doorway.
He tried the handle, but it was locked, of course.
“Alison? Can you hear me? I’m trapped in an office.”
He heard movement from the hallway beyond. Probably the prankster. “It’s a very funny joke, but you’ve had your fun. Let me out of here.”
At least there were no windows in the room. As far as places to be during a storm went, it wasn’t a bad option.
The issue was Alison.
She was out in the hall alone in the dark. He hoped she’d managed to light her candle; she had less experience with them, having been raised in the city. Of course, Alison could probably light it with her magic if she needed to.
He could have as well, he realized.
Keir had known the truth of his magic long before the fairy had told Alison. He could feel it in him since the vine, looking for an escape.
He had denied it. Why would it offer itself to him now and not when he needed it? Why had it denied him the chance to save an innocent child?
If the magic—the old magic, funny how quickly they’d stopped calling it “old,” how quickly they had embraced it as part of the now—had a will of its own, Keir certainly couldn’t understand it.
A part of him wanted nothing to do with it at all.
But then there was Alison. She was his light in the darkness. She seemed to have some intuitive sense about things that Keir couldn’t comprehend. There was a way that the world just responded to her, a way it seemed to move and bend around her, that Keir greatly envied. But more than envy, he was grateful to be part of it. And he’d do anything, anything to protect it. To protect her.
No matter what it cost him.
Though it pained him to do so, Keir reached out into the world with the sense he knew was there, the sense that had been revealed to him in all its terrible glory by the fairies.
At first, he felt nothing, not even Alison’s familiar presence on the other side of the wall.
Then he felt it.
There was something holding him here, and it was full of malice.
Keir did not scare easily, but even he was disturbed by the sudden, certain knowledge of something there in the darkness that wanted him—what, tortured? Dead? It was impossible to say, but he could feel that it wanted him, him specifically, for reasons he could not fathom.
However, and perhaps the presence couldn’t understand this, this knowledge was also a comfort to him. Though the presence had no love for anyone, it seemed Alison was safe, at least from this particular threat.
The presence was in the room with him, and it was for him alone to face.
Keir turned his sense to the door: not locked, held closed by magic. Twisted, dark magic: the kind that had been bent in the way Keir had tried to bend it. Magic that endured, that had corrupted.
As he felt for some kind of opening, he noticed the painting on the wall.
It was a strange painting, unusually macabre for the setting. The college was filled with portraits of scholars and kings, paintings of pastoral settings and historic battles, mythological lovers and religious idols. The usual. But this painting was bizarre.
There was a banquet in the woods, a group of figures seated at a table under the trees. It wasn’t unlike the place where they dined with the fairies. In fact, it was exactly like that place. The more that Keir looked at it, the more that he recognized. There were Mab and Genn, although that wasn’t truly surprising. There were legends of fairies living forever in their fairy realms, and if Keir had learned one thing this year, it was that most legends were true.
But there was the dwarf he’d danced with. And there, was that Idris? Rinka, Alison, everyone there but him.
The plates on the table were full, but it wasn’t the feast he knew.
It was a body, dismembered and bloody, each plate filled with a different limb or organ.
In front of Alison was his head.
At this, he laughed. “You should have gone with the heart,” said Keir to the unseen presence. “It would have been a better choice, metaphorically speaking.”
The painting ignited.
Excellent work, Keir thought. You’ve angered the ghost.
“I take it back,” he said, looking around the room for something to put the fire out. Flames had covered the entire frame in the matter of seconds. “It was a very good scare. Very creepy.”
Smoke was beginning to fill the room. He didn’t know if this was real—he suspected it wasn’t—but it wouldn’t matter if he passed out before he could save himself from the fire.
“Alison!” he shouted. He searched through the door for her presence, and this time, through a hole the flames had burnt, he found it.
“Keir, I’m here,” she said. Her voice was so quiet he could barely make it out. “I can’t get the door open.”
“It’s magic,” he said.
“I know,” said Alison. “But I can’t stop it. I can’t feel you. I can’t feel anything. There was something here before, but it’s gone now.”
“It’s in the room with me,” he said. “And the fire.”
“Fire? Keir!”
Keir could feel her beating against the magical barrier to no avail. It wasn’t here for her.
It was here for him.
“Stay there, I’m going to try something,” said Keir.
The flames were consuming the floral wallpaper and crawling down the panels of wood. Everything in this room was made to burn.
Keir reached out into the hallway. Alison’s magic was there, cool and calming as a mirror-still lake on a summer’s day. This moment frightened him more than anything this presence, this ghost, had shown him.
He needed to do this. Not just to save his own life, although that was a powerful motivator. He couldn’t leave Alison alone. He saw her beautiful face standing over him. Saw the tears spring into her blue eyes. Heard her anguished cry. He knew what would happen if he failed.
He could not fail.
He grabbed onto the magic. He felt Alison’s power flow through him, felt the surge of it through his body.
He turned to the flames and snuffed them out.
He turned to the door and wrenched it open.
The air changed. The presence had gone. Keir picked up the candlestick from where he’d left it on the floor. Nothing was burnt. The painting on the wall was untarnished—a scene of an elvish ship on stormy seas.
Alison ran into the room, practically knocking the candle from his hand.
“What in the name of the Gods happened? There was a fire?” asked Alison.
He put his arm around her shoulder. “I think you were right about this place. There is something strange happening here.”