Fire by Sara B. Elfgren & Mats Strandberg Read Free Book Online Page B

something else,’ he says, addressing his lap.
    By now, Vanessa has to fight not to understand. Hopeless, it’s like fighting off a heavy lorry with a fly swat.
    A dark head suddenly pops up next to the dashboard.
    It is a woman, who slides up on to the passenger seat and kisses Nicke on the mouth. He shakes his head and laughs. And then kisses her back.
    Vanessa retreats. She can’t stand watching this for another instant. She clenches her jaw to keep her nausea down, turns her bike, leaps into the saddle and pedals away with an energy she lacked just moments ago.

7
    The black smoke is whirling around Minoo.
    Anna-Karin, Ida, Linnéa and Vanessa are somewhere nearby. All helpless. Everything depends on Minoo now. She alone is left.
    Alone with Max.
    He stands in front of her with the black smoke eddying around him. Dark waves of hair frame his beautiful face.
    ‘I know you don’t understand now,’ he says, ‘but all I want … the only thing I’ve ever wanted … is for us to be together.’
    The smoke swirls, grows denser around them. They are pulled towards each other and Minoo knows now that something isn’t working the way it should. At this point she should resist and the battle shift in her favour.
    But it isn’t happening.
    She tries to put up a fight, but is powerless. And suddenly Max is standing very close to her. His eyes are black and shiny, like a bird’s.
    ‘We belong together.’
    He bends over her and kisses her with ice-cold, moist lips.
    Minoo opens her eyes. Woken by a kiss.
    It wasn’t like that at all, she tries to persuade herself. I was victorious. I saved the others.
    She turns to lie on her side and stares out into the dark room.
    Is something moving over there? Have the shadows of the night taken on a deeper shade of darkness?
    The black smoke.
    Minoo sits up in bed.
    She can see it clearly now. A black cloud, shuddering as it hangs in the air. A long tentacle of smoke is creeping out of the room and into the corridor.
    Minoo’s feet are caught in the ruffled sheet and she has to struggle to free herself before she can follow the black smoke. It has wound its way along the white wall of the corridor outside her room and crawled across the floorboards towards Mum and Dad’s bedroom.
    Minoo goes to look in through the open door.
    Mum and Dad are lying on their backs in bed. The smoke envelops them, pulsating as if it were alive. But her parents’ eyes are staring unseeing into the darkness.
    ‘You killed them.’
    Minoo turns around.
    Max is standing in the corridor. He looks at her with the black eyes of a bird.
    ‘You knew all along that this would happen. You haven’t even tried to get the measure of your powers, because you guessed what you would discover.’
    He holds out his hand.
    ‘We belong together.’
    And she knows it is true.
    The alarm tone from Minoo’s mobile pulls her out of her sleep.
    She sits up in bed and scrutinises her room.
    No black smoke anywhere.
    She gets up and walks along the corridor. Noises from the kitchen. Everything as usual.
    It didn’t happen. Not for real, she thinks.
    But she cannot make the dream go away.
    Anna-Karin’s mum is reading at the kitchen table. Her dark hair is pulled back in a bunch. The smoke from her cigarette is snaking upwards through the already stale air. Opposite her, Anna-Karin is prodding at her yoghurt, watching as tiny air bubbles rise.
    The Enfelsfors Herald rustles as Mum slowly turns the pages. She sucks up every word, as eagerly as she sucks up the poisons in her fags.
    The silence in the kitchen is somehow made more tangible by the noises of traffic and people in the street outside. Being alone in town feels so much lonelier than being alone in the countryside.
    Pepper pads into the kitchen and sniffs at his food bowl without much interest. Then he wanders off into the hall where he navigates between the removal firm’s boxes, still not unpacked after months and months. Anna-Karin feels a pang of bad