The Fire Artist (4 page)

Most artists show their powers sometime around age thirteen. Not me. I didn’t spark. I didn’t set the world on fire.

Nor had I exhibited any signs over the years. I was nothing like my brother, who was so clearly a fire artist before he came into his powers. Xavier would play too close to the bonfires at beach parties, would traipse around the grill at barbecues, never once burning a finger, because fire could never hurt him.

I should have been the same, my dad contended. He was certain that he had passed on his powers to me, as he had to Xavier. My father’s own fire burned out in his twenties, when most gifts fade. But back in the day he’d been a powerful fire-eater and then a fire artist, performing in a circus for a few years before he met my mom. Before there were Leagues. Before there were opportunities to make serious money. One night he took me into the garage, shut the door to the house, and pressed the button to close the big door.

“Aria, sometimes we need to help the fire come out,” he told me as he took a box of matches from his worktable, neat and organized with the tools he needed for his car tinkering. “It won’t hurt though, because fire can’t hurt you,” he said, trying to reassure me.

“What are you going to do, Daddy?”

He clapped a hand on my shoulder and spoke in a gentle voice. “The fire is in you.” He pointed at my chest. “It is. It’s deep inside you, like it was in me. It’s just stuck. And we need to help it come out.”

“Why is it stuck?”

He shook his head. He looked sad, maybe even despondent, as if this question was the very thing that had kept him awake at night.

“I don’t know, sweetheart. But I swear this won’t hurt. Fire never hurt me. And you are fire, like me. I know you’re fire. You have to be. We just have to remind your body. Sometimes as parents, we have to do hard things for our kids. We have to do hard things to help them become strong. Like my dad did for me.”

He’d never spoken much about my grandfather, but he was a stern man, a cold man. My grandmother had died when my dad was younger. The little bits and pieces I cobbled together over the years led me to believe that my grandfather had changed then—become cruel, devastated by the loss. The few times I’d been to my grandfather’s house my dad had flinched, involuntarily, each time he walked past his father, making me think his dad had probably hit him. To help him become stronger, I suppose. As my dad wanted to do for Xavi. But whenever my father spoke of his dad, there was no recrimination in his voice. Only a sort of stoic reverence for his father. As if his own father’s hard-line ways were the only way.

My dad never hit me. He had a different solution. He struck the first match and held my right hand tight in his. I squirmed. He held tighter. “This won’t hurt.”

“But what if it’s not stuck? What if I’m nothing?”

His eyes flared with equal parts fear and anger. “It’s not possible. You just need help. That’s all you need.”

He held the match against my palm, and I yelped instantly. I tried to pull my hand away, but he was stronger, and he held on tighter, until the wood stick burned to a nub against my skin. “It won’t hurt,” he said, louder.

I begged him to stop, through tears and through whimpers, but he shushed me, assuring me that it was fine; it was all fine.

I wondered if that’s what his dad said to him when he hit him to keep him in line.

“This is how we have to do it,” he said to me. “And you only think it hurts, but it doesn’t hurt. Fire never hurts a true
fire artist, and you are a true fire artist. This will only make you stronger.”

He lied. The fire hurt because I wasn’t a true fire artist.

Over the next few nights, he went through an entire box of kitchen matches, then over the weeks that followed, he moved on to candles, then the long metal sticks with cotton swabs at the top for fire-eaters.

He was wrong when he said
this won’t hurt
. My hands did hurt. Every second of every day. They were blistered and red, and he covered my palms in salves and ointments and wrapped bandages around them when I went to school. At night he unwrapped them, each night his eyes wilder and more desperate than the last. He wanted another fire child more than anything in the world, since Xavi—locked up then—was no longer performing. He especially wanted the money that a fire child could bring in the Leagues.

In his warped sense of the world, he was doing the right thing. I knew he believed that. I knew the pained looks on his face were real. He wanted to help me. He didn’t know any other way.

At night, I would go to bed and hope to find a granter. I’d imagine I’d simply run across one the next day. Maybe in a lamp hidden on an old dusty shelf. Maybe in a bottle washed up on the beach. If I found one, I’d wish for him to stop. I’d wish for fire. I’d wish for everything to be different.

I tried one more time to make him stop. “Daddy, I’m nothing. I didn’t get the gene. I’m not anything, okay?”

A deviant tear slid down his stubbled cheek. “Don’t talk
that way. You’re just a late bloomer. You just need help. Xavi made fire, majestic and beautiful, and you can do the same, and you can join the Leagues and then we can finally get out. Things can finally be easy. Don’t you see? With Xavi in …” He stopped, shook his head. I’d rarely seen my father cry before, but there he was in tears, telling me I was our only hope, our only way out of our lot in life, he said. After my brother abused his powers, couldn’t I just try harder to be a good fire girl? Couldn’t I just focus and concentrate and will the fire out of me?

As if this were math. As if this were fractions. I just needed a bit more practice. Except there was no fire in me to ignite. There was no genetic store waiting to be tapped. So I found another way to become fire.

The way that is killing me.

The first person I told about my scarred hands was Elise.

The second person was the Lady of the Swamp. Though I didn’t actually have to tell her. She knew instantly that the scars—the skin of my palms whiter and more rigid than they should be, the backs of my hands marked with pale pink worms of hardened flesh—weren’t from fire inside me. She could read the craters and ridges like they were the road map to all my secrets and shame.

I found the Lady because I couldn’t take it anymore. My hands were red and tender. I could barely hold on to pencils anymore to do my homework. My hairbrush hurt to use. But as he burned me each night, I grew tougher, stronger, more determined to discover another way to become a fire artist. I started making plans to find the Lady. As the flames carved their way into my hands, I gritted my teeth, tightened my jaw, and ran through the details of how I’d take money from my mom’s secret stash on her bookshelves, catch a bus to the Everglades,
find an airboat, and track down the Lady of the Swamp. I worked out all the specifics night after night as he set me on fire. One Saturday when he was at work and my mom was in her chair, I waded through the swamp deep into the Everglades, the water like quicksand, because the airboat could go no farther, and even if it could, the Lady of the Swamp didn’t let airboats near her home, tucked under canopies of green trees and overgrown with marsh. Her home could be reached only by those crazy enough to brave the alligators and snakes that slunk through her watery front yard.

Or desperate enough.

“You must need something very badly,” the Lady said when she saw me trudging through the swamp more than three years ago.

“I do.”

“Your hands,” she began after taking one piercing look at them.

The Lady knew everything about the elements. It was said she once possessed all the elemental arts—she could cause tremors in the earth, she could weave the wind to do her bidding, she could unleash flames from her hands that towered higher than the tallest buildings, and she could douse them with waves the most daring surfers would trade years off their lives to ride.

All I knew was what Xavi had dug up for me when I’d asked him casually what he knew. He told me that the Lady lived deep in the wetlands with only an alligator as her companion. A snow gator, he was called, because his amphibian skin was ice-cold. The legend was, her snow gator once ate an ice artist, a breed of water artist so rare they’re hardly ever seen in the
elemental Leagues. It was said too that the Lady won him in some sort of bet with a granter.

When the Lady saw me, she reached out her hand and pulled me from the muck and onto her porch. The gator slept on the other side of her. He didn’t even shift his eyes.

“No one has come to find me in many years,” the Lady said as she sat back down on the porch swing. She patted the slatted wood, and I sat next to her. She was weathered, with crags and crannies scored into her face, and deep copper eyes that had to have seen everything. “And rarely do girls venture here. How old are you?” she asked me.

“Thirteen.”

She raised an eyebrow and cocked her head, waiting for more.

“And six months,” I added.

“Ah. I see. Have you been visited by the arts yet?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think I ever will be.”

“Why are you here then? I’m not a granter. I can’t wish the elements for you.”

Granters were even harder to find, and you had to have something to barter with if you wanted a wish from one. I had nothing then because I was nothing then. But yet, I’d heard enough around town, and from my brother. When I visited him every weekend, walking past the crisscrossed metal gates of the prison, guards watching nearby, he whispered to me all the stories of the Lady, the stories of granters and the twisted, unsanctioned ways that elemental artists had used, gained, or spent their gifts. Stories he heard from the other abusers of elements who were locked up with him on the other side of the gates.

“The scientists don’t know everything, ma’am. Do they?” I said to the Lady.

She shook her head. “Of course not.”

“They think you can only be born with fire. Or air or water or earth. But it’s just a guess. No one has proved anything about where the arts come from.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t think it’s just genetic. If it were only about genes, the Leagues wouldn’t have laws against stealing the elements,” I said, because I knew the hard-and-fast rule of the entire elemental arts circuit—thou shalt not steal. If you were caught stealing the elements, you’d be barred from the Leagues for life, and so would everyone else in your family. A punishment that carried through the ages.

The corner of her lips quirked up. “Smart girl.”

“How do you do it? How do you steal fire?”

“Why do you need it?”

I held up my hands. Fire artists always had some burns on their hands until they learned to control their fire. Although true fire artists weren’t hurt by their fire, they still had the physical markings. But no one had ever been burned like I was. I told her why my hands were so scarred.

“You need fire for protection, then. From your father.”

“Yes.” I needed to make my own fire so he would stop setting me aflame. So I could have hands that worked. “I have to know the other ways.”

“You do. You do have to know. You have to protect yourself from him, and you have two choices when the fire doesn’t
come from within,” she said. “You can trade for it with a granter, or you can steal it from the sky.”

“How do you steal it?”

“There is only one way to steal it. Only one way for you to bring fire into your body so you can make it with your body.”

“Please tell me.” My voice was a plea, quivering and desperate.

“I will tell you, child,” she said, as she reached down to scratch her pet.

My eyes widened as she touched him.

She smiled at me. “You should pet him.”

I looked at her nervously.

“Yes. Pet him,” she said, and it was the only time she spoke harshly to me.

Later I came to understand that this was the test of my worthiness. Neither granters nor the Lady gave up wishes or knowledge for free. I’d come to her for answers, for a last-ditch hope. I had to show I was brave enough. I had to do what Florida kids are taught to never do. Touch a gator.

“Someday,” she continued, “I might need someone to take care of him. When I no longer can.”

And that was the exchange. I had to promise to look after her pet when she no longer could. It was an easy term to agree to.

“I’ll help. I’ll take care of him.”

Then I petted the gator. The strange thing was—he wasn’t fearsome. I never once thought he’d snap my hand off. The gator opened an eye lazily. There was no malice, no predatory instinct
shining in his eyes. I touched the top of his scaly head between those golden brown orbs of eyes. He arched his head against my hand, as a cat would. His skin was rough, like my hand, and he was ice-cold.

The Lady nodded and I put my hand back in my lap, wondering what I’d just shown her.

“Do you know an air artist who’d do anything for you? Someone you’d trust with your life?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Then the Lady detailed exactly how to steal fire, like Prometheus did when he stole from the gods. Only I wouldn’t be stealing it for all mankind. I’d be stealing it to save myself. She told me in painstaking detail how to catch lightning, how to capture it in a net of air, how to send it careening into my body.

“You must hit the heart. Only the heart.”

“Why?” My voice shook.

“Why? You ask why? What if the lightning hit your arm? What if it entered your belly? Or your elbow? Do you think you could make fire from your elbow?” She laughed, but she wasn’t laughing at me. “If you want to be transformed into a fire girl, then you have to be transformed. And so does the lightning.”

“What does that mean?”

“You can’t make beautiful plumes of fire with ordinary lightning. If you were just struck, even in the heart, you’d simply be one of those people who’s struck by lightning. Someone whose body runs a few degrees higher. You’d be someone who loses a bit of hearing. Or maybe some peripheral vision. You don’t want to be a lightning-strike survivor, Aria. You want to
be a fire artist. You want to change your DNA.” She tapped my chest, poking her knobby finger against my sternum. “And so the lightning must meet the air first. The air from another elemental artist. The man-made air turns the lightning into a
carrier
of elemental gifts, and when it hits your heart, the fire then becomes yours. A part of you. It becomes everything you want it to be.”