Baptisms of Fire and Ice Read online

  Adara waited there, floating near the bottom of the pool, to see if the monster returned for another round. But long after the surface of the pool settled, the water riddled with wood chips and streaks of orange blood, the monster still did not come back.

  Adara gradually began to accept that she’d won. She’d beaten the ugly little beast that had tried to…drown her.

  Wait, wasn’t I almost out of air? she asked herself, finally realizing she’d been in the water for something close to five minutes on a single, half-realized breath.

  Confused, Adara brought her hand to her mouth. Or at least, she tried to. But what approached her mouth was not her hand. It wasn’t a hand at all. Rather, it was an approximation of a hand made of swirling water currents.

  She stared at the water hand, uncomprehending, and then looked down at her body. A body that was no longer made of bone and blood. A body that was now made entirely of water.

  Chapter Seven

  Adara’s mind went blank. She lay listlessly in the pool. Unable to comprehend what was happening to her. Unable to comprehend how something made of water could comprehend anything at all.

  After a minute or an hour or a day—she couldn’t tell the difference—that nagging voice that always bothered her in times of strife reared its ugly head. It told her she couldn’t just stay put and be part of a swimming pool for the rest of her existence.

  She had things to do, people to see, goals to achieve. And she couldn’t perform any of those tasks as a swirling water creature shaped like a woman. She had to swim to the surface, get out of the water, and try to revert back to the human body she’d always known.

  Clenching her water eyes shut, a strange experience that barely dimmed the light of day, Adara took a not-breath with her not-chest, adjusted her position, and headed toward the steps on the far side of the pool.

  Her movements couldn’t quite be called swimming. She didn’t flap her water arms and water legs to create thrust. Rather, her will to move seemed to form a tide in the pool that thrust her forward like a building ocean wave. This tide propelled her much faster than any human could swim, and she reached the steps in less than a second. Above her, the regular water sloshed over the rim of the pool, setting several foam noodles afloat.

  Adara waited for the water to settle, and then she climbed the steps. Though it was more like slinking up the steps, in a manner not dissimilar to that of a snake.

  When her water head reached the surface, she was surprised to find that it slipped right on out. Though the pool water clung to her like a veil, softening the edges of her humanoid shape.

  Pushing harder, she pulled her chest from the water, then her waist, then her hips. At that point, sticking so far out of the water with no support, she started to lose her balance. Which meant it was time to attempt the hard part: bracing her arms and legs, made entirely of water, against a hard surface.

  Beginning with her hands, she tipped herself over slowly, palms of swirling water outstretched, until she touched the concrete edge of the pool. Her hands immediately flattened into a puddle, and she withdrew them.

  She had felt some resistance though. More resistance than regular water would give against any surface.

  So she tried again. This time, she concentrated on retaining her form as she pressed her palms against the ground.

  Amazingly, her hands maintained their shape, and she felt a faint pressure against her fingers, the sign that her hands were holding some of her weight.

  Okay. So I can keep this shape out of the water, to some degree.

  The next part was marginally more difficult, as she had to make her feet brace against the steps even though her legs were fully submerged in the pool. Her water body didn’t want to differentiate itself that much from the pool water. It took Adara over ten tries before she felt her feet take on the bulk of her weight against the step beneath her.

  For a full minute after that, she allowed her water body to get used to the feeling of being separate from the rest of the pool. She didn’t want to risk losing what semisolid integrity she possessed when she tried to walk up the rest of the steps.

  When her body finally stopped tugging at her to become one with the pool again, she took a step up, lifting her thighs past the surface. That went well, so she took a second step, a third, a fourth, a fifth, and so on. Until she was only submerged to the ankles, and the bulk of her swirling water body stood freely in the air.

  All right, just two more steps, she assured herself. Get all the way out of the pool, and then you can assess what to do from there.

  Adara lifted one of her feet from the pool and set it on the hard concrete. As it took her weight, she carefully lifted her hands, making sure she was still balanced. All was well—or as well as it could be, given the circumstances. So she gathered the shreds of her courage and composure, and lifted her other foot.

  The instant her big toe exited the water, she became human again.

  The sudden transformation caused severe vertigo, and Adara floundered. She fell face first onto the concrete, banging her nose so hard it spurted blood.

  Cursing, she pinched her nose shut with one hand and used the other to roll onto her back. She heaved herself up into a sitting position, frantically patting herself down from her toes to the top of her head. Until she was a hundred percent sure that every part of her body had reverted to its original form.

  “Oh, thank god,” she said in a nasally voice. Then she leaned over and threw up the remains of her sandwich and ginger ale.

  Once her stomach was empty, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. The hand came away streaked with bile and blood. She started at the sight of the blood. Only to realize she’d let go of her nose during the vomiting session. Little red streams were still leaking from both nostrils.

  Adara prodded her nose and grimaced. It wasn’t broken, but it was going to bruise real good. A few hours from now, it’d look like she got punched in the face.

  Turning away from the sight of her steaming vomit pile, she shakily rose to her feet. As she straightened up, she eyed the pool, the surface beginning to settle from her exit.

  For a long, contemplative moment, Adara wondered if she should just repress the memories of everything that had happened over the past half hour. But as her gaze drifted up to the sky still heavily streaked with gray, and a certain star-shaped bruise on her back throbbed, she knew that wasn’t going to work.

  No matter how hard she tried to bury this, it would dig itself free and haunt the corners of her dreams for the rest of her life. She would never be at peace until she understood what had happened to her. Until she understood everything that had happened today.

  The impact event. The star patterns. The little monster. The water transformation.

  There was no way on earth, or beyond, that these things weren’t connected. Something had happened to this world, to her world, that had never happened before. And she felt with an abrupt sense of clarity that, like the ripples in the pool, disturbing the fine layer of ash, the repercussions from the event were only just beginning to appear.

  A dark chill ran through her, and she shivered.

  Her attention drifted to her sopping-wet clothes. Clothes that had, along with her body, been turned to water during her ordeal with the ugly creature. She couldn’t fathom how her clothes could phase between solid and liquid any more than she understood how her body could do so and still remain alive.

  But she accepted it. Accepted that her T-shirt and loose sweatpants, her sports bra and cotton underwear, could also become liquid under the influence of the…the what?

  What should she even call it? The mutant ability? The magic power? The alien meteorite quantum physics anomaly?

  Adara smacked her cheeks, producing a wet squelching noise. “Enough,” she said to herself. “That’s enough for now. Go home. Dry off. Change clothes. Curl up on the couch. Watch a movie. And calm the fuck down. That’s an order, Caine. An order.”

  The confidence in
her voice, a feigned confidence though it was, got her moving. She skirted the pool, maneuvered carefully over the pile of glass from the ruined patio table, and rounded the house. She stepped through the fence gate to the front yard, crept up to the corner of the house, and surveyed the street.

  No sign of the monster. No sign of the police. No sign of anyone.

  The echoes of wailing sirens from a mile or so to the north, along with a fresh plume of smoke rising from the ground, told her that Edgerton’s first responders were still working to put out the fires sparked by the impacts. Those who weren’t quelling the blazes were likely still collecting bodies from the impact zones.

  So her street was totally silent, people hiding in their homes, too timid to even peer past the curtains. Afraid that if they dared to look outside, they’d witness more terrifying things. More fires in the sky. More bodies on the ground.

  Adara marched all the way home unhindered and slammed the door shut behind her. Her body didn’t turn into water for the entire trip, not even a finger or a toe. Which was a good sign.

  She hoped.

  Chapter Eight

  By the time midnight rolled around, Adara had squandered a full third of her day watching a Disney movie marathon while huddled up on her couch under a thick quilt, sipping beer and shoveling popcorn into her gullet. She wore nothing but a tank top and a pair of boy shorts under the cover of the quilt, and her hair after a vigorous towel dry was a verifiable rat’s nest, but she didn’t give a crap that she looked like a lazy slob.

  As far as she was concerned, she had a right to look as she damn well pleased after all that she had been through over the past day. Especially when she was in her own home alone.

  Judge me, she thought, mentally challenging her sometimes nosy neighbors, most of whom she barely spoke with outside of morning pleasantries. I dare you to judge me after I turned into a puddle of living water. I’d like to see you stay calm and collected after that.

  It had taken the runtime of two movies after her return from the house of doom before Adara was able to string more than two coherent thoughts together. She still wasn’t confident about her ability to speak.

  Every time she reexamined her memories of the fight with the monster, she would start quaking uncontrollably. To the point where her teeth clattered together, threatening to knock her fillings right out of her gums.

  She knew the sharpness of the trauma would grow duller as it aged. But she couldn’t imagine that she’d forget enough of what had happened in that backyard pool for her to recall the experience without a shudder. And of course, there was the elephant in the room, its bulk haunting the corner of her mind’s eye no matter which way she turned her head.

  What if it happened again?

  What if she turned into water again, and another person saw her do it?

  There were a hundred and one movies that depicted exactly what would happen if somebody developed a magical power or a superhuman ability out of the blue. And they all added up to the same unfortunate answer. If Adara’s weird new ability ever became public knowledge, society would reject her, the government would try to spirit her off to a secret facility for experimentation, and she’d either die a prisoner or escape through the use of extreme and deadly violence, thus becoming a fugitive and a terror to all normal people.

  The idea of any of those possibilities coming to fruition made her popcorn-filled stomach twist into a knot. Wiping her buttery hands off with a crinkled napkin, she tossed her third popcorn bag onto the coffee table and called it quits.

  “You’re dwelling too much on the what-ifs,” she told herself. “Right now, you’re the only person in the world besides an ugly monster who knows you can turn into water. As long as you keep your new ‘power’ on the down low, the government won’t send the men in black suits and dark sunglasses to round you up like cattle. It’s simple. Very simple.”

  In theory, it was simple. But staying in solid form, she figured, depended on maintaining control of the mechanism that made her change. From her experience in the pool, she believed that some combination of stress, fear, and determination triggered the transformation. So logically, as long as she didn’t stumble into another life-or-death situation near a body of water, she should remain her warm-blooded and slightly squishy human self.

  The problem with that notion was that she knew, knew for sure, knew it down to her bones, that the ensuing weeks would not be peaceful times. The impact event was not the epilogue of some cosmic accident but rather the prelude to something otherworldly that no scientist would ever truly grasp in time to avert its consequences.

  The star-shaped bruise on her back and her new ability were proof enough that something very strange, very new, and very dangerous was currently unfolding. The scale of the impact event, a global disaster, was proof that the effects of this “something” would extend far beyond Adara Caine’s studio apartment in the small city of Edgerton, Massachusetts.

  There were going to be many stressful and scary situations in the near future, and if she managed them poorly, she’d expose herself for what she was.

  Of course, that begged the question: what exactly was she?

  Tired, she thought. I’m tired.

  Adara snatched the remote off the coffee table and exited the Netflix app that had been burning a hole in her broadband usage for the entire evening. She sat up straight, unfurled, and stretched her stiff legs. Then she unwrapped the quilt, folded it neatly, and hung it over the back of the couch.

  The quilt was the product of six months of her grandmother’s heartfelt labor and had been given to Adara on her fifteenth birthday. Less than a year later, the Alzheimer’s hit hard and fast, and replaced her nana with a husk that couldn’t even remember the name of her son, much less the existence of her teenage granddaughter.

  Adara always brought out the quilt when she was having a bad day. It made her recall the summers she’d spent at Nana’s house when she was little. Nana had lived in a small, cozy cottage on stilts a short walk from the beach. Each morning, she’d wake Adara up just before dawn, and they’d go down to the shore and watch the sun rise while they waded through the shallows.

  Those were simple, happy times, and the memories Adara had made during those halcyon days were a comforting presence even in the worst of situations.

  Adara patted the quilt. “Thanks, Nana.”

  Finishing the last pull of her beer, she gathered up her trash, went to the kitchen, and stuffed it all into the trashcan. Next, she washed her hands using sudsy dish soap—and watched her fingers for signs that her skin was turning into anything it was not supposed to be.

  It remained perfectly solid, however, and when Adara dried her hands using a dishtowel, the only problem she noted was that her skin was super dry. She needed to moisturize better.

  A chuckle escaped her lips. “Something to add to my post-apocalypse survival list. Lotion. And while I’m at it, I might as well add lip balm and condition—”

  A hard knock sounded at her door.

  Startled, Adara dropped the dishtowel and flattened herself against the half-wall that separated her kitchenette from the laundry nook. Which made her impossible to see through the window that looked out onto the balcony. The shade was drawn, but she’d left it sitting a couple inches above the windowsill. A determined person could crouch to take a peek into her apartment.

  She scolded herself for being so careless when the city was in a prime position to be plagued by looters and other unsavory characters. She should’ve taken in her balcony furniture, pulled the shade down all the way, and moved her doormat into the foyer. That would have made her apartment look unoccupied, a poor target for people seeking easy pickings.

  You had plenty of time to take proper precautions, she thought, and instead you watched Disney movies and hoped a security gate would keep the nasties away from you. Poor showing, Caine. You can do better. Dad would expect you to do better.

  Then again, her father would never have expected her to b
ecome some kind of water mutant, so…

  The knock sounded again, more insistent this time. Like the person on her balcony was in a hurry. She began to wonder if the uninvited guest was in fact someone she knew. Maybe a neighbor who needed help. Or even Enzo, who’d decided he couldn’t stand sleeping on that nasty lounge bed for a single night after all. But if it was someone she knew, then surely they’d have identified themselves by now.

  Who just knocked on somebody’s door at twenty past midnight, in a city in the middle of an emergency situation, without announcing their identity to the tenant? Any reasonable person would know they’d be perceived as a threat otherwise.

  The knock came a third time, loud enough to wake the dead.

  Adara couldn’t let the person stand out there all night banging on her door. The noise might draw attention from the police, and Adara did not want to become a focus of the city cops. She needed to learn who was on the other side of that door, and either let them in or shoo them away, with a threat of force, if necessary.

  Creeping around the half-wall, she made a beeline for the closet where she kept all her hiking supplies. She opened the door quietly, wincing as the hinges squeaked. She blindly groped around the interior so she didn’t have to turn on the bright naked bulb and potentially alert the intruder to her activity.

  After a frustrating fifteen seconds, she found what she was looking for. Her shotgun. And the box of birdshot shells resting underneath the shotgun’s stock.

  The gun wasn’t in the best shape—she really should have cleaned it the minute she returned home from the house of horrors—but she didn’t need it to function perfectly. She just needed it to look menacing. So she loaded it quickly and stuck a few spare shells into her waistband. Then, gun pointed at the floor, she crept toward the foyer.

  The fourth knock sounded like a battering ram. The entire door shook, and Adara swore she heard something snap, as if the door was actually beginning to break.