My busy-stress meter has gone down, and I’ve been able to get some writing done this past week. So here’s a piece from my WIP Igniting, which is a sister-novel of Shimmering. Somehow I’ve been able to focus on writing Igniting for an entire week without working on something else in between! Miracles do happen!
I kept questioning why Noah insisted we take a car out to the church rather than using one of his portals. But he kept giving me some lame excuse about how he was “kind of tired” or “didn’t feel like it”. When I looked to Sasha for help (yeah, I was desperate), she just gave me a sneer of superiority. A road trip with Noah I could survive. Sasha? Not so much.
So when the car came to a stop by the middle of a field, I found it difficult to not jump out as fast as I could. I searched the area for anything that might give me a clue to my past, but all I saw was some grass and large patches of dirt. “Why did we stop?”
“This is where the church was,” Noah said. “It might not look like much but—”
“It’s been sixteen years,” Sasha interrupted from the backseat of the SUV, “you think they didn’t clean up the area?”
“Why didn’t they rebuild the church?” I asked. I turned to face both of them, not wanting to stare at the emptiness that would always be my past. That seemed to always be my life.
“It was literally burned to the ground,” Sasha told me. “There wasn’t anything left to rebuild.”
I could hear the accusation in her tone. Instead I just shook my head and stepped out of the car, feeling the wind chill me to my bones. What day was it? I wondered. Was it still March? I couldn’t even remember.
“Wait here,” I heard Noah order just as I slammed the door. I crossed my arms tight over my chest, eyes searching the field. The sky was a light blue overhead, clouds rolling across as if on a mission. Off to rain on someone else today. Noah’s door opened and closed, and then he just stood quietly beside me.
Something about this place made my chest hurt. What would it have looked like if I had never come here?
I stepped forward onto the grass, feeling the dampness squish beneath my boots. How many people had died in the fire I set? I moved fast across the grass until I came to a large patch of dirt, where I imagined the church had been. The closer I got though the tighter my heart felt.
“They’re scorch marks,” I whispered, my voice almost cracking. “They didn’t rebuild it because they couldn’t.”
“It’s not your fault,” Noah said. “You were a baby.”
I could feel tears brimming on my eyes, and I couldn’t turn around to face him. The earth around me had been blackened, the ground so tainted these people couldn’t bring themselves to start again. They knew the fire wasn’t natural…they knew I wasn’t natural.
“How many?” I asked.
“Hmm?”
“How many died?” I finally found the courage to turn and look directly at Noah. His stoic expression reminded me that though he pretended not to, he was very good at hiding his feelings. Did I scare him like I did the others?
“You don’t know already?”
I shook my head. “Nobody ever said. I just knew there was a fire and that they considered me a miracle.” Some miracle I turned out to be.
D.L. Miles 