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Aubrey doesn’t get burnt anymore.
She used to, frequently, probably quite a bit more than the average person. Her hands bear the faint, puckered marks of long-healed burns, the lingering reminders of fumbled bits of flash paper and dropped lighters, though the largest one, on the back of her right hand, is from an accidental and unfortunate brush with a hot skillet.
She can remember the incidents, the story behind each and every scar, but she no longer remembers the pain. It feels so far away, so long ago, so far removed from her current state of being. That was then, and this is now; now, Aubrey sits in front of the open window in her room in Amnesty Lodge running her fingers through the small but sure blaze burning atop the wick of the candle she’s placed on the window sill. The flames dance and curl about her fingers, almost in a caress, with the enthusiasm of an animal begging to be petted and stroked, leaving her skin entirely unscathed. The temperature is akin to running her hand under a faucet to check the temperature of the water, and is just as soothing.
Watching the flames run off her hands like water off a duck’s back, savoring the privacy of the late hour, Aubrey lets herself have an indulgent thought. A fantasy. The same one she’s always having these days: herself, somehow transported backwards in time, to her childhood home set ablaze and crumbling under the weight of its own charred skeleton. Running inside, the flames licking at her but never connecting. Climbing the stairs two at a time, reaching her parents bedroom, pulling her mother outside. Happy-sad tears making tracks in the soot that covered both their faces.
Her mother succumbed to the smoke long before the fire reached her, the autopsy report said. A small comfort, everyone said. They’d had her mother cremated and she’d wanted to scream at the irony, and then she’d wanted to laugh, and she ended up doing neither.
She tries not to think about it. She doesn’t want to think about it. That was then, and this is now, and there’s no changing that.
She pulls her hand away from the candle, rubbing her thumb and forefinger together, and the flame dies down significantly, sputtering in the faint breeze coming through the open window. It’s a little too chilly to have the window open, really, but Aubrey likes the smell of the pines, the slightly damp earth a day after rainfall, and the way the breeze makes the curtains dance, floating like gossamer strands in her otherwise still bedroom. It’s worth putting up with a little bit of cold, for that.
Draping her arms over the windowsill and resting her chin in the crook of her elbow, Aubrey stares out into the night, gaze wandering to the empty patch of land that sits a few hundred yards from the edge of the pines, near Dani’s carefully cultivated vegetable garden. They’ve been talking about building a hutch and a run for Dr. Harris Bonkers there, when the weather warms up a bit, and Aubrey is lost in imagining him loping through the fresh springtime grass when she sees it.
A shape, a figure, moving in the dark, rounding the corner of the Lodge, headed towards the forest.
It startles her enough to sit up straight, hand half-open with the intention of flame at her fingertips, but in the next moment she recognizes the figure; it’s Duck, posture slightly hunched over, hands tucked deep in his pockets, moving with quiet purpose towards the woods.
She watches him with a shouted greeting in the back of her mouth, and swallows it as he gets farther away. He must not want to be seen, and she’s content to let him go on thinking that he hasn’t been, for the time being. He reaches the edge of the forest and takes a single long look around before he vanishes into the dark shadow of the pines.
Aubrey stands up slowly, leaning forward over the windowsill as if the few inches of distance will grant her a better view of him. There’s something odd about what she’s just seen, something she can’t quite put her finger on, but whatever it is churns unpleasantly in the bottom of her stomach.
“What are you doing, Duck?” she says aloud, the sound of her own voice startling her, just a bit, as it breaks the relative silence of the night.
She doesn’t doubt that Duck is the kind of man prone to taking long walks through the woods, but at night, with an Abomination on the loose? Fat chance. Monster hunting, then, but Aubrey’s never known him to voluntarily do so alone, especially now, with his Chosen powers apparently gone for good. He must not have wanted to wake her and Ned, and as touched as she is by that, she’s not about to let Duck get himself killed for being too nice.
(The image of Duck thrown through the air, smashed against a tree truck with a horrible crack plays in an unbidden loop in her mind as she scrambles for her shoes, tugs an old flannel pilfered from Barclay’s closet on over her tank top and pajama shorts.)
A minute later she’s pounding her fist against the door to Ned’s temporary room at the Lodge, smothering a smirk when she hears the intense, throaty snoring coming from within cut off with a surprised snort at her knock. The mattress creaks, and a few heavy footsteps later, the door swings open, revealing Ned, rubbing his face and still dressed his now heavily rumpled day clothes.
“Aubrey,” he says sluggishly, barely able to stumble through the word without cutting himself off with a yawn. “To what do I owe this extremely, extremely late night call?”
When she’d been getting dressed, she’d been sure that waking Ned and dragging him along with her was the best thing to do, but standing in front of him now she isn’t so sure. He looks exhausted and, though she’d never tell him this, old, in a way he never seems to look during the daytime, when his bluster and bravado are both turned up to eleven. His tired blinking reminds her of her father, after the funeral, and she has to shove the thought to the far recesses of her mind to be able to speak through the way her throat clenches around the memory.
“Sorry, Ned,” she says. “I wouldn’t have gotten you up if it wasn’t important. And I, uh, think it’s important?”
She quickly outlines what she’s just seen, and before she can say that she thinks they should go after Duck, Ned cuts her off with a long sigh.
“Let me get the Narf Blaster.”
Aubrey worries, initially, that she won’t be able to find the place where she saw Duck enter the woods; it’s extremely dark and extremely late, and every tree looks exactly like the one next to it.
The recent rainfall turns out to be to her advantage. The earth is soft, malleable, and Duck has left deep, distinct footprints behind him, right up to the edge of the woods. Once underneath the canopy of trees, the prints get harder to track, but not impossible, though it’s slow going as she and Ned squint around in the darkness and she curses herself for not bringing a flashlight until she remembers that, fucking duh, she has magical powers.
She lights up her left palm, eliciting a startled “Jesus,” from Ned and filling the little clearing they’re currently trekking through with warm yellow light. Something glints at the base of a nearby tree as she does so, reflecting, and she squats down next to it, carefully holding her blazing hand aloft. Ned bends down to watch as she reaches out her right hand and drags her first two fingers through a small pool of viscous, jet-black liquid.
She holds her right hand at eye level, watching the fluid drop sluggishly from her fingers onto the forest floor. It’s icy cold to the touch, odorless, and altogether intensely unsettling. Swallowing harshly, Aubrey wipes her fingers off on a leaf, taking care not to leave a single drop of the fluid on her skin, though the cold sensation lingers unpleasantly as she stands back up.
“We need to find Duck,” Aubrey says lowly, surprised at the shake in her own voice.
Ned opens his mouth to respond, but she never gets a chance to find out what he intends to say.
Instead, from somewhere in the forest, someone screams.
Ned is too old for this shit.
The sound of a pained, distinctly male scream emanating from somewhere nearby sends him leaping out of his skin, and he has to fumble to keep a grip on the Narf Blaster as it nearly slips out of his sweaty fingertips. He doesn’t have time to recover, to regain his dignity or his voice before Aubrey, her eyes gone the size of dinner plates, sprints off in the direction of the scream, taking their only source of light with her.
“Aubrey,” he means to shout, but only manages a choked whisper before he begins to stumble after her, instinctively flicking off the safety of the Narf Blaster. It’s a laughably futile gesture; his eyes are still frantically attempting to adjust to the sudden absence of Aubrey’s fire, and he can’t see a fucking thing.
He charges blindly through the forest, following the sound of Aubrey’s footsteps, nearly drowned out by the sound of his own harsh, shallow breathing as he runs. Branches seem to reach out to strike him from every direction, the ground an unending obstacle of roots and rocks and uneven earth, but miraculously, he doesn’t trip.
Until he does.
The toe of his boot catches and momentum drags his body forward, and he sprawls forward onto the muddy earth, his full weight landing on his chest and, fortunately, not his head. The impact rips the breath from his lungs and sends the Narf Blaster flying out of his grasp. For a minute all he can do is lie facedown and feel like he’s dying, like he’s broken every bone in his body, while stars burst and dissipate at the edges of his vision. Then his breath returns in a painful rush, and he just feels like a dumbass lying in the mud in the woods in the middle of the night.
He painstakingly drags himself onto his knees, feeling frantically around in the dark for the Narf Blaster, relief flooding him as his shaking fingers meet the plastic barrel. He scoops it up and clambers painfully to his feet, his entire body aching, and spends a long moment trying to collect himself, staring blankly into the pitch dark.
It’s only when his breathing evens out that he notices the silence, so intense and oppressive it’s as if someone has stuffed his ears full of cotton.
Nothing moves. Nothing breathes. The entire world is as silent as the grave.
“Aubrey?” Ned calls, half to see if she’s okay and half to see if he still can call out, if any noise can penetrate the vacuum that seems to have encased the world around him. His voice echoes, bounces off the trees before it fades back into nothingness.
A silent beat. Then two.
And then.
“Ned?”
It’s Aubrey’s voice, and yet so not Aubrey’s voice that it scares him, wavering and uncertain and fearful, all wrapped up in a forced, deliberate shroud of calm.
“Aubrey? Where are you?” he shouts back. Terror grips at him and he turns in a frantic circle, hunting for any spot of light, any whisper of sound.
“I’m here,” she says, in that same terrified calm tone, and without thinking he barrels towards the sound, pain and fatigue forgotten in the wake of pure, undiluted fear.
He doesn’t have to go far, this time. A few dozen yards away, he bursts from the dark canopy of pine trees into a moonlit clearing. The transition is so abrupt, so unanticipated, it leaves him feeling like he’s been stripped naked. Vulnerable. Exposed. Like waking up from a nightmare.
It takes him a moment to realize that this is the nightmare.
In the clearing, illuminated by the full moon overhead beaming down like a spotlight, stand Duck and Aubrey.
Aubrey, trembling and small, with Beacon’s blade pressed to her throat.
Duck, holding the sword, with eyes like pools of oil, bleeding and dripping down his cheeks, off of his chin.
Aubrey’s eyes, fire orange and hearth brown, meet Ned’s across the clearing, and, impossibly, she pulls her lips back in a shaky grin.
“Hey,” she says, her voice shaking with unshed tears. “I found Duck.”