Chapter 33
Smoke and ash sting Nelle’s eyes. She sits in stunned disbelief, blinded by the fire.
The fire.
The room is on fire.
Not real.
The bedsheets catch aflame.
This is New York, Jessie’s apartment, her new life with James. She is supposed to wake up, hungover, to the smell of Jessie’s chocolate-chip pancakes, not the smell of smoke.
A scream rips the air from another room, and Nelle’s blood ices over.
Real.
As if she has been floating on the ceiling, Nelle feels herself fall back into her body. With all the strength she can muster, she shoves James off the mattress. He rolls away with the blankets, collapsing on the floor with a harsh thud and a groan.
“What the—”
Fire climbs the walls, the ceiling, the floor, an unrecognizable hellscape, but James assesses the situation much faster than Nelle did, on his feet in an instant.
His hand finds hers, she snatches up her canvas bag with her journal inside, and they are out the door, sprinting into the living room.
Smoke clogs the room, but Nelle doesn’t need air to survive. She’s invincible. The others aren’t.
Nelle holds the back of James’s neck, pressing her forehead to his. “I can’t die, but you can, so you have to get out of this building right now.”
A far-off siren wails.
“But Jessie and Lena,” he says. “They’re back there.”
“I can’t die.” Nelle bites the words out. No time to argue with him, so she pushes him toward the apartment door and whirls back to save the others.
The flames flock to her in the narrow hall, but she runs through them, wincing at every lashing burn.
It’s a tunnel of fire, and she’s cutting straight through.
The metal doorknob to Jessie’s room scalds her palm, but Nelle has no choice.
Skin searing, she squeezes the knob and twists.
The bedroom is engulfed in fire, opaque with smoke.
Nelle enters cautiously, unable to see farther than a few feet. Luckily, New York apartments are small, so there’s not much ground to cover. She accidentally kicks something both solid and squishy and bends to feel a woman’s body. Another beside it.
Oh God. She leans down, smoke stinging her tear ducts, grabs their hands, and pulls.
“Come on,” she says through gritted teeth. “Come on.”
Jessie wheezes out a shredded cough, still somewhat conscious.
“Help me,” she croaks, nudging Lena’s motionless body.
Nelle scoops one arm under Lena’s shoulder, and Jessie takes her other side.
Lena is taller than both of them, so supporting her is an awkward act of pushing her upward between them.
Together, they move to the open door and pause at the fire raging in the hall.
Nelle can sprint through, but Jessie and Lena stand no chance.
“New plan,” Nelle says, her voice barely a rasp.
She retreats into the bedroom and hobbles with Lena and Jessie to the window, which reflects the orange firelight.
Nelle’s right hand fumbles around the edges for a lock until she finds the mechanism at the bottom, near the wooden sill lined with crystals.
She tries to twist it free, but it’s stuck.
“Is there a trick to get this open?” She grits her teeth and pulls, but Lena’s weight is dragging her down.
“I never could,” Jessie says. “The wood’s warped.”
“Can you hold her?”
Jessie struggles to keep Lena’s full body upright. Nelle clutches the lock and pulls, but her grip is too weak, or the window is sealed shut, because it just won’t budge. She cries, more from frustration now than smoke.
So she gets one night, and that’s it? One night with James, with Jessie, with Lena, pretending to live this new life, and then it’s all over, just like that?
Regret washes over her like acid rain, each droplet a painful reminder that none of this would have happened if she had taken Penelope’s advice.
She pounds her fists against the window, sobbing, trying to ignore Jessie’s pleas to keep trying, keep trying, as she sags under Lena.
But Nelle can’t open a window that won’t open.
And she can’t get two people safely through an apartment on fire.
Maybe James made it out.
Even with her unnatural abilities, the smoke is hurting Nelle faster than she can recover. She is too weak to stand, slipping into unconsciousness. She can’t quite heal quick enough.
When a pair of arms scoop her up, when she sees, through the haze, an angel in an oxygen mask, she can’t tell if it’s real or a dream.
The entire building is a feast for the flames.
James stands across the street, his view of the front steps obscured by a red fire truck.
Everything is chaos. Firemen and police swarm the scene, along with worried pedestrians and residents.
Hoses shoot thousands of gallons of water at his home.
Then, illuminated by the fire inside, Nelle appears in Jessie’s bedroom window like she’s inside an oven, backlit by orange, banging on the glass to get out.
“She’s up there!” he screams and points. “First bedroom on the left!”
Someone must hear him, because a pair of firefighters heads into the building. While the heartbeats pass, James waits, forced to watch Nelle’s pounding against the glass, softer each time. Until she stops. Until she collapses.
She can’t die, he thinks, his heart hammering. He needs to get up there. Give him a uniform, a mask, an oxygen tank, whatever they use to go in there so he can save his family. Nelle and Jessie and Lena need him.
He is about to steal a uniform and run back into the conflagration when a huddle of firefighters emerges from the building, carrying three women toward the open ambulances.
James sprints. All three women have been chewed up and spat out.
Their bodies are covered in ash and soot. Burns mar their arms and hands.
“Excuse me,” he says, hoping the firefighter can hear him over the pandemonium of sirens and screams and the crackle of gnawing fire. “Excuse me, that’s my cousin, that’s my family.”
He climbs into an ambulance and stands in a corner between Jessie’s gurney and Nelle’s spot on the bench. Lena goes to her own ambulance. The paramedics quickly check Nelle and James before rushing to Jessie.
James fumbles for Nelle’s hand, crushing it between his own. “Are you hurt?”
“I was,” she says. He examines her neck, her legs, her hands. No burns.
He turns to Jessie, unconscious, her clothes charred.
“She’s okay.” Nelle massages her throat. “Not sure about her lungs.”
“Lena?” he asks, trying to keep his attention off the paramedics swarming his cousin.
Nelle shakes her head. “I don’t know. She wasn’t moving.”
James can’t find it in himself to comfort her. All his energy is gone. He’s wearing a different body than he was hours ago, seeing all of this through new eyes.
The ambulance doors burst open—he didn’t even know they were moving—and the paramedics rush them into the ER. James insists he doesn’t need any treatment, but he is given no choice in the matter. The nurse who checks on him assesses minimal lung damage and diagnoses him with a sore throat.
“I am so deeply sorry,” she says before checking Nelle’s vital signs.
James’s heart twists. My home.
When he and Nelle are permitted to visit Jessie, she is already joking about the astronomical hospital bills she will have to pay. They see Lena next. She’s unconscious, but alive. The doctor says she should wake soon.
James wants to feel relieved, but he doesn’t.
He has crossed into a parallel dimension.
He stares at the tiles of the waiting-room floor.
His computer is gone to the flames. Photographs of him and Nelle.
And his typewritten manuscript—the only copy—of The Summer Curse.
He only ever transcribed the first chapters.
Thank God Jessie stores her art in the studio, but one silver lining doesn’t make up for all they lost. Hopelessness sucks the air from James’s lungs, grinds his spirit to dust. What is the point of anything when everything is gone?
But Jessie and Lena are still here, and that is a miracle in itself.
Nelle rounds the corner, wearing sweatpants from the gift shop and her maroon sweater from yesterday.
She tucks her hair behind her ears as she takes the vinyl chair beside James. “Any news?”
“Lena hasn’t woken yet. Jessie’s breathing is getting better.”
She sighs. “That’s good. Anything better is good.”
“Yeah.” James can’t find the desire to speak, so he doesn’t.
He stares at the wall and the mounted TV.
The news is on, an awful choice for an already grim setting, and the reporter is chatting to the camera from the still burning building on Bleecker Street.
Smoke pours above the rooftops as the sun rises in a pink sky.
He wants to throw up.
“James,” Nelle starts.
He peels his attention from the TV. “Yeah?”
“I need to end my life, and I want to do it in Lincoln.”
If he was standing, he would double over. The idea is preposterous. “What? Why?”
Nelle takes his hand. Her thumb traces the blue veins from his knuckles to his wrist to the sleeve of his gray sweatshirt. She groans to the overhead fluorescents. “It’s a long story.”
James gestures to the waiting room. “Nothing but time here.”
Nelle folds one knee over the other. “As you wish.”
And she launches into her tale, careful with her words. Describes her terrifying power. Her practice, learning how to move with just a thought, how to conjure anything by simply writing about it with her ink.
“It’s like real magic,” he says.
“No.” Her tone is cold. “Penelope was correct to call it a curse.”
She describes the flood in Barcelona. The man who slipped and died in London.
How she found Quill and Penelope in Edinburgh.
How he knew, because he almost shot and killed an innocent man, that he needed to end his life.
That he should never have been created in the first place.
She describes the wind atop Calton Hill.
How Quill was solid one second and smoke the next.
And how she has to do the same. But she wants to do it in Lincoln, in the ashes of the house on Blackwood Road.
“But you’ve learned from your mistakes,” James says. There has to be some way he can talk her out of this insanity. “You are more in control of your power than you’ve ever been, right?”
“Yeah, but—”
“So think of it as a gift,” he says. He needs her to stay. She said she was going to stay. “Think of it—”
“James, stop,” Nelle says. She unfolds their hands and runs her fingers through her hair. “It’s not a power, it’s not magic, it’s not a gift. It’s a burden I can’t get rid of. Not just to myself, but to you. To Jessie.”
“How?” he asks, incredulous. “How have you burdened any of us, Nelle? I love you. Jessie loves you. We want you with us.”
“I caused the fire, James.”
“You . . .” His voice dies. His brain stands still. Nelle’s admission feels like some sort of sick joke. “You what?”
Tears well up in her eyes. “I didn’t mean to.”
Holy shit, it’s not a joke.
“It was my dream,” she says. “I was dreaming about the night the house on Blackwood burned down, and when I woke up, the room was on fire.”
A sob rips through her, her face contorted with pain.
James’s heart cracks down the center. He pulls her in as she shudders, his own body racked with tears.
What can he say now? It sounds like her dream did cause the fire.
So what can he do if she wants to end her life?
What if she burns down every home they ever share?
God, he can’t even listen to himself think.
“Maybe you can learn to control your dreams, like when you’re awake, so you can sort between the thoughts that start fires and the thoughts that are just thoughts.”
Nelle’s finger grazes his cheekbone. “I love you.” Her face crumples again. “But I can’t risk you.”
And there is nothing left to say.