Embers by Laura Bickle Read Free Book Online

tongues of light on the ceiling. She pulled a piece of debris from the floor drain and the dingy water began to slowly sluice away from the concrete floor. She hoped it wasn’t here, but if it was, she needed to find it.

    Anya paced out the size of the basement, estimating where the center lay. She paused, squinting, scraping sludge away in the receding water. Her breath caught in her throat as she cleared the ash to reveal a symbol etched in the concrete, right where she hoped it wouldn’t be, in the exact center of the floor.

    A curving, serpentine shape, like a wave, had been dug into the concrete. The end of the shape was capped with a pair of curved horns. Anya took off her gloves, felt the mark. The edges were perfectly smooth; she could think of no tool that would not leave a mark in hardened concrete. Like a huge brand, the black mark stretched for three feet on the floor.

    Her arsonist had been here. This was his work.

    She could feel heat radiating from the mark through the fingertips of her gloves. Hesitantly, she stripped them off, let her fingers run over the sinuous line. It tingled when she touched it. . . not unlike the feeling she’d had in her hands when she touched the Coke machine inhabited by the little girl.

    Around her neck, she felt her necklace warm as Sparky shifted in his sleep. She felt a tentative salamander toe on her collarbone.

    “Not now,” she whispered.

    Sparky withdrew and curled back up, but she heard a growl reverberating through his chest.

    “That’ll be fifteen dollars, miss.”

    She turned to the source of the thin, whistling voice, tripping in the ashy muck. The ghostly outline of an old man bent over the metal canister of a vacuum cleaner. The hose had melted away, and the shape was barely recognizable under the char. But the old man bent over it with a screwdriver and looked right at her.

    “It just needed a new filter. It got gummed up on the filth down here.”

    Sparky uncurled, draping himself around her shoulders. She could feel him breathing, but he didn’t seem alarmed enough to rouse himself to greet the spirit or to assume his full, threatening size.

    Anya approached the old man cautiously. “Thank you very much.”

    He tipped his hat. “You’re welcome, miss.” Anya could see that he wore a repairman’s uniform. “I haven’t gotten much business down here, until lately.”

    “I see that.” Anya smiled at him. “How long have you been down here?”

    The spirit looked at his watch, rubbing his beard. “Twenty-three years. Seven more until retirement.”

    “That’s a long time.”

    The spirit shrugged. “I keep busy, tinkering with my junk.” He gestured around him at the broken parts and gears littering the floor. He began to whistle, and he turned back to his work. “ Soon it’ll be lawnmower season. Business will pick up then.”

    “Did you have. . . a customer last night?”

    He stopped whistling, and his brow wrinkled. “Yes. There was a man.” He continued fussing over the vacuum canister. “A tall man with eyes like burning coals.”

    “Do you know what he wanted?”

    The spirit stood up, and rubbed the back of his head. “No. I laid low. After-hours customers are always trouble.”

    “Are you all alone here?”

    “It’s just me. Nice and quiet here.” He looked around at the devastation. “Until recently.”

    She edged closer to him. “Why are you all alone? Why haven’t you left?”

    His face froze, and a twinge of fear lanced across his leathery face. “I’m afraid of elevators.” The spirit turned away, faded into the wall.

    She shivered, wondering if that had been how the repairman had died—in an accident with the rickety elevator.

    Anya didn’t like her day job and her night work to intersect. She liked these things to be in two separate boxes in her head, not touching. But the buzzing feeling in her fingertips remained as her camera flashed over and over, illuminating the strangely beautiful