The Fire Artist Read online

  The Fire Artist is dedicated to my amazingly talented writer friends C. J. Omolulu and Courtney Summers. Thank you for helping me shape this story every step of the way.

  Contents

  1 Lightning Strikes the Heart

  2 Monsters and Makers

  3 The Aria Opportunity

  4 Snakes Flee

  5 Into the Swamp

  6 Ice Sister

  7 Secrets and Shortstops

  8 A New Trick

  9 Stage Name

  10 A Wish for Peace

  11 Last Night

  12 New York Minute

  13 Shiny Things

  14 Looking Out

  15 Thoughts and Actions

  16 Bound

  17 Shooting Star

  18 The Way It Is

  19 An Organ of Fire

  20 An Example of

  21 Master and Servant

  22 Ticking Clock

  23 Starlight

  24 A Gust of Wind

  25 Cooling Effect

  26 Stupid Wishes

  27 Better Luck Next Time

  28 Command

  29 Wish, Officially

  30 Reversal of Fortune

  31 Reflected Back

  32 The Only Payment

  33 New Life

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Daisy Whitney

  1

  Lightning Strikes the Heart

  A plume of flames erupts from my fingertips and rises high above me. As I widen my arms, the fire curves in a brilliant arc. More flames burst into the inky night at my command.

  I call them down, luring them back into my scarred and hardened palms, like scarves of silk being pulled back into a magician’s top hat.

  Then, with a graceful bend, I grasp a pair of arm’s-length chains I’ve left on the ground for this moment. I raise my arms above my head, wirelike whips in my hands now. A quick flick of my wrists and sparks race to the metal on the wires. A crack, then molten drops rain over me, a willowy canopy of sizzling hisses that light up the faces of the crowd. They are packed tightly into every inch of the bleachers, their bare arms glistening with sweat in the muggy night.

  My fireworks hail down from the cloudless sky, falling gently at first, then quickly, like bullets and gunfire. Another snap and sparks leap higher. And another, until I can no longer distinguish the crackling sound of the fire from the gasps and cheers of the crowd.

  On summer evenings like this, the metal bleachers are jammed with the young, old, and everyone in between, clasping tight their crinkled, hastily printed flyers advertising our lineup of fire, ice, earth, and wind. I’m the final act, and I’m nearly done, so I drop the chains to the ground and show my palms to the audience. I’m not the only one who can do this. But no one in or around Wonder, Florida, is tired of coming here to watch flames fly from human hands, with fire that flies higher, burns brighter, and curls tighter than any other fire artist’s in a long time.

  This is the big one, when I extinguish all the fire, the park goes dark for one long, silent moment, then a spectacular torch flares from me high into the sky. I glance at the onlookers. They are tense, jaws tight, bodies hunching forward in the stands. I look away, and it’s then that a pair of phantom fingers pinch a corner of my heart. My shoulders pull in as my chest constricts. My throat tightens for a moment.

  Like a glass being knocked off the corner of a counter, I’ve spilled fire all over the ground. I can’t blame it on stage fright. I’m not nervous.

  I’m losing my fire again. It’s not the first time. It won’t be the last.

  The fire skitters away from me, racing over the hard grass and packed dirt, hell-bent on the front row. I fall to my knees to coax the sparks back to my hands, before they burn off the feet of the girl with the ratty pink sneakers who has been kicking the ground absently as she watches. Now, fear fills her eyes, and she leaps up onto the bench. Her mother grabs her and holds her tight.

  My heart sputters, like it’s gasping for a last breath. There’s a hole in the show, a patch I must fill in. Like an actor forgetting a line and covering it up with an ad lib that doesn’t quite fit, I grasp the long ribbon of blazing orange and tug it back into my hands.

  As if I meant to nearly roast the audience.

  To maintain the illusion I jump back onto my feet, thrust my arms high in the air. I’m a gymnast who’s expertly dismounted, covering up the broken bone inside her. The little girl has tucked her head against her mother’s chest, but the mother is softening. It’s a show, after all, and I have shown them that my little stumble must have been scripted.

  Now there is clapping, and hollering, and so much whistling too. Fingers inside mouths making the sounds that draw taxis to the curbs in cities I’ve never been to. The audience is swallowed in cheers. They got their money’s worth and then some. Our shows don’t cost much, not at this level or this venue, a part-time ballpark a few miles from swampland and a few blocks from the abandoned amusement park that used to be Wonder’s greatest draw. Had this night been two years ago, we might have also heard the cranking of the roller-coaster cars chugging up tracks, or the groans of the circling Ferris wheel nearby. But the Eighth Wonder of the Modern World amusement park has since closed down, and all that’s left are the skeletons of the rides that peer over the wooden fences.

  Together, the ten of us in this latest cast of performance artists—including my best friend, Elise, who can harness the wind—lower our heads in unison, all while my heart thumps against my chest as if it has a repetitive injury, an insistent hiss in the pipes. My heart is not like the others’; it’s not whole.

  It’s missing parts.

  I walk inside to the locker rooms that house ballplayers on other nights, guys with big, broad chests and beefy arms and mouths that chew gum or spit tobacco. I slow down, waiting for Elise, and I pull her aside into a quiet corner.

  “It’s time for another renewal.”

  Her eyes are sad. “I know. I could tell when the fire jumped away.”

  “Will you do it for me again?”

  “You know I will. You don’t even have to ask. I always will,” Elise says, and I can hear the heaviness in her voice. “I’ll start tracking the morning storms for tomorrow.”

  The weather forecasters were right, but we’re behind the first flash storm. We catch a glimpse of a streak of lightning far off, and Elise jams the gas. But the thunder comes nearly forty-five seconds later.

  “It’s at least nine miles away!” I shout, even though I’m next to her in the front seat of her brown hatchback that used to be painted pink. “But there’s more coming. There has to be.”

  We fly down the Wilderness Waterway, sprinting past mangrove islets.

  Elise points. “There.”

  Lightning pierces the sky, ripping it apart with a bright scratch. We count out loud, reaching thirty seconds before the thunder rumbles toward us.

  “Closer,” I say, and Elise nods. She is pure determination now, focused and instinctual as we race toward the brewing storm. We cross into the curtain of rain, and she barely slows her car at all, cruising over the soon-to-be-slick highway as raindrops turn heavy and hammer the car. Elise’s parents gave her this car when she turned sixteen, a pink hatchback, since pink has always been her favorite color. She drove it in all its girly glory for a few months until she realized it would be far too conspicuous on days like this. She and I painted it brown one afternoon, and I bought her cherry ice cream when we finished. Her parents simply shrugged and figured her change of heart was the capriciousness of a teenager, when the truth is she changed it to protect me.

  To protect us. If she’s caught helping me, the consequences for her and her family could be dire.

  The rain pounds harder into the wind
shield, and Elise grips the wheel, her arms like steel cables as she steers through the wet onslaught.

  Another flash of lightning. Seconds later, a clap of thunder. She slows down and squeals to a stop on the side of the road, empty beach alongside us. She looks around, scanning the deserted beach to make sure we’re alone. Then she throws open her door, and I do the same, following her as she rushes across the sand, still glancing behind and around in case there’s someone who’d see us. But we’re all alone here. The air is electric. I keep pace with her, ankles digging into the sand as we run closer to the storm. There’s an outcrop of rocks near the edge of the water, and Elise races to it, giving us a shield in case anyone driving by can make out what we’re doing from a distance.

  I’m battered with rain when Elise stops short, breathing hard. She plants her feet firm and holds out her hands. Her palms are open wide, and, like a switch turned on, gusts of air burst forth from her, powerful blasts that stir the sand into swirling gales at our feet. She lifts up her hands, bringing them over her head, the squalls rising with her. I squint, trying to keep the sand out of my eyes.

  The wind she weaves intensifies. Her arms move as she fortifies her elemental creation, layer by layer. Some air artists can execute beautiful flips and twists in the air, can contort their bodies in strange and gorgeous ways through wispy blasts of air, but Elise’s gifts have always been more blunt. Her true ability is in the sheer strength of the air she can make, the way she can guide it with the precision of an atomic clock. Soon she’s crafting a miniature tornado around us, the wind a creature that bends at her command.

  She peers up at the gray and crying sky, then turns to me and gives a quick nod.

  All I have to do is stand and wait.

  When the next jagged needle rends the sky a few hundred feet away, she yanks her man-made air with the strength of an Olympic weight lifter. Her cocoon of wind tugs the lightning bolt into her orbit. With the control that I wish I had, she sends the razor edge of the bolt into my heart.

  In an instant, my nostrils fill with the smell of burning flesh. All the nearby air heats up, roaring up hundreds of degrees for a split second or more, and Elise runs out of the line of fire. There’s a choking in my chest as my heart digests the electric current. And just like that, it’s done. My heart is a ravenous beast, blind and hungry and needy as it gobbles a force of nature.

  Then comes the thunder. It howls in my ears, the sound wave vibrating through my molten insides.

  The crack deafens me, and everything goes dark as I collapse to the ground.

  2

  Monsters and Makers

  My chest caves in and back out. Hands shake my shoulders hard, the back of my head hitting the sand. I cough and gasp and flip to the side.

  Elise falls off me, panting, her own chest heaving too.

  She pushes her soaking wet hair away from her forehead. “You were unconscious for a couple minutes this time. I was shaking you. Trying to get you to come to. That’s the longest, Aria.”

  I cough a few more times, then rub a hand against my chest. It’s burning, like a fever. My toenails are toasty. My kneecap is broiling. Even my eyelashes are hot.

  The rain has slowed; it’s merely drizzling now, and the clouds are breaking, making way for the sun.

  “Sorry,” I manage to say as I pull myself up, sitting now. I’m always knocked unconscious after a lightning strike. No big surprise there.

  Elise drapes an arm around me. “Don’t say sorry. Are you okay?”

  I nod.

  “God. I’m a wreck. My heart is beating fifty thousand miles an hour. Do you have any idea how awful it is to strike your best friend with lightning?”

  I laugh weakly, making a wheezy sound. “Can’t say that I do.”

  “It’s totally traumatizing. I’m going to be in therapy for life, you know. I’m going to have some shrink when I’m old, and I’ll still be talking about you and how it was like killing you each time I replenished your fire.”

  “I’m sorry I made you do this. But you’re not killing me. It’s just a blackout for a few minutes.”

  “You didn’t make me, dummy. I wanted to. I’d do anything for you. You’re my Frankenstein.”

  “You’re my Frankenstein’s maker then.”

  Elise wraps me in a hug, holds me tight. “Actually, wasn’t Frankenstein the scientist? Didn’t we study that book in English class?”

  “Yeah, we did study it, but that doesn’t mean I paid attention.”

  “I’m sure you read the SparkNotes online.”

  “As always,” I say with a slight smile. Elise knows I’m hardly a model student. I haven’t had the time, and my family hasn’t pressured me when it comes to classes, grades, or school reports. All my pressure comes from my father and has to do with fire and art, not classic literature or trigonometry. My mom used to care. She used to sit down with me every night to work on spelling and vocabulary, on multiplication tables and long division, praising, always praising, when the grades came home.

  Now she’s sick, and she’s stopped caring. I’ve stopped trying so hard. Now I try for one thing, and one thing only—to get out of town.

  “Well, as I recall, Frankenstein was the doctor. Dr. Frankenstein,” Elise says.

  “I guess you’re Dr. Frankenstein then. I’m the monster.”

  “You’re my monster and I love you.”

  “I love you.”

  “Now, show me what you can do.”

  The beach is empty. I stand, clench my fists, then open them, unleashing a gorgeous torrent of flames. Elise laughs wildly as I extinguish the fresh, beautiful, and wholly new fire.

  “Daddy will love it,” I say sarcastically.

  Elise narrows her eyes, shakes her head. “You should give him a taste of his own medicine someday, Ar.”

  “Yeah, I should but I won’t.”

  I’m stronger than my father. My fire is far more powerful and potent than his ever was, and now his fire has faded, time suctioning it away as time does.

  Elise grasps my hand in hers and we return to her car. She shakes her head at me as she backs out of the spot and turns onto the road. “Someday, we won’t have to do this, right?”

  “Yeah. When they stop expecting me to make fire. When I’m in my midtwenties.” I touch Elise’s arm so she’s looking at me. “It’s never run out of me this fast, Elise. Never.”

  She squeezes my hand gently and doesn’t let go. “Don’t worry. I’ll always help you get it back.”

  “But what if you’re not here?”

  “We’ll find a way,” she says, then we return to the mainland, where I take her out for cherry ice cream. I order a lemon sherbet for myself. In a cup, rather than a cone. Even so, it melts quickly.

  Soon, we’re joined by Elise’s boyfriend, Kyle. He shows up in his tricked-out truck, tires jacked up high, the rims glistening and shiny.

  “Babe, I missed you today,” he says to Elise, and wraps her in his arms. Big and broad with close-cropped hair, he leans in to kiss her, and she kisses him back. I briefly wonder what it would be like to kiss like that, with abandon. Then I look away and tap on my phone, calling up a photo I found the other night, when I was looking at some snapshots of performers in the New York Leagues. One of the girls on the team has been posting pictures of herself with a new boy. A beautiful boy with dark hair and dark, brooding eyes. There’s a distance in those eyes, like he has secrets too.

  Secrets he keeps from her.

  Maybe I could join the Leagues and find a boy like this. A boy like me.

  I trace his face with my fingers, imagining what it would be like to be with someone who knew my secrets, who knew my half-baked heart and didn’t mind.

  Elise and Kyle stop kissing. “But I’m right here now,” she says with a smile that’s just for him.

  They’re so into each other it makes my chest hurt. It makes me feel hollow all over again because I don’t know how she does it. I don’t know how she gives so much, how she ca
n be so into him, and do so much for me at the same time. It’s as if Elise has this endless reserve inside her and she can keep tap-tap-tapping into it.

  “C’mon, lovebirds. We need to get to practice,” I say as I jam my phone into my pocket.

  3

  The Aria Opportunity

  Every inch of me is wet with my own sweat. You could wring me out and there would still be more. There will always be more, because my body temperature is higher than average all the time.

  But my fire is back, and that makes me happy, because it will make Daddy happy, and when Daddy’s happy I am safe.

  My fire is too intense though, as it always is after a renewal, until I can escape to the canals and let some loose. I spray a fireball at the flame-resistant concrete wall, specially built next to the park’s bull pen. Our little arena is also home to hopeful ballplayers trying to eke out runs and hits and strikeouts for their Triple-A team, even though baseball, like most other professional sports, is dying.

  The flames escape from my fingertips, then race toward the wall like a kamikaze fighter pilot. I swear I see the wall shake from the impact.

  “Damn, you have some serious power today,” Nava says. She’s perched on the metal bench. She wears a white T-shirt and pink basketball shorts. Her legs are all muscle, corded and sturdy. Her wild curls flare out from under the brim of her ball cap, a baby-blue mesh thing.

  “Too much,” I say under my breath as I throw another explosive fireball.

  This is how it goes. When my fire fades, I lose control. When I replenish my fire, I have far too much. I am an unnatural balance, swaying one way or the other. Tonight I’ll go to the canals to restore the precarious balance of me.

  “Why don’t we try just a tiny little flicker? You can work on your starlight,” Nava says gently.

  I bet Nava never saw these problems in her native Israel years ago. Her mother was a top-tier fire artist for years, performing into her early twenties. Nava is nineteen and she’s fire too, but she suffers from too much stage fright to perform herself, and she’s told me that’s one of the reasons she likes working with me—I don’t have any stage fright. Her family moved here, and she’s the fire coach for all the farm-league teams in southern Florida, traveling from ballpark to ballpark to guide the fire girls and boys she trains. Her mother coaches the rookies at a facility in Miami, where all the teams in the M.E. Leagues start training, even though the M.E. Leagues are headquartered in the former Middle East. There are other elemental arts leagues in the United States and around the world, but the one run by the M.E. is the largest and most prestigious. Those who are good enough to be recruited to the M.E. Leagues are then sent to the biggest cities in the United States, to Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and some even perform abroad. I have posters on my walls of some of the M.E. Leagues performers. They have stage names like Flame Rider and Night Wind.