And beyond them, the fire raged, uncontrolled.
I couldn’t make out anything that made me think of a house. It looked like the earth had opened and bellowed out a ball of fire, the flame reaching for the sky. The heat of it beat against my bare face, my arms. Sweat broke out on the back of my neck, trickled down my spine. I couldn’t breathe, the air was too hot, almost thick with the heat. I coughed, unable to look away from the flames. Then I saw the shapes the chief had mentioned.
The figures were nothing distinctive, just shadows among the flames. If someone had said it was nothing more than an illusion from the flickering firelight, I might have believed it, but the more I stared, the more I thought I saw stretching hands with curved talons and gaping mouths with jagged fangs. I tore my gaze away.
And found Falin staring at me, not the fire.
“What do you see?” he asked in a voice barely above a whisper, and I realized why he hadn’t objected, even once, to me following him all the way to the front of a potential crime scene. I could see through glamour, and he was one of the few people who knew that fact.
Taking an overheated gulp of air, I braced myself for lowering my shields in a location with a possibility of fresh corpses nearby. Releasing the breath, I pried apart the vines enclosing my psyche.
As if the wind blowing across from the land of the dead had snuffed it out, the fire vanished, the heat disappearing between one heartbeat and the next, and, in my eyesight at least, the street turned significantly darker. The sweat forming on my skin chilled, and I shivered.
“Glamour. It’s all glamour.”
I let my senses stretch. The fire chief had indicated that the two children were still inside, but no grave essence clawed at me. If they were in there, they were alive. Thank goodness. But how much longer could they last in that inferno?
I searched the house with both my senses and my sight that currently reached across planes and pierced glamour. Unless a fae had, for unknown reasons, decided to summon a glamoured fire on this family, this had to be the result of a Glitter user’s fears. I’d seen one other Glitter crime scene, and I’d heard accounts of two Glitter-glamour attacks, but I would never have guessed glamour could do so much damage. In my gravesight, the houses on either side of the Wilson residence were dilapidated, decayed, but the Wilson house was devastated. The glamoured fire appeared to have reduced the house to little more than rubble and ash. A few walls still stood, but most had crumbled. It was worse, I knew, seeing it across the planes, but still, the damage was beyond repair.
I shook my head, and my eyes skittered over a soft yellow glow emanating from somewhere in the center of the ruins, behind a wall that looked far more solid than the ones around it. I stopped, trying to focus on the glow. I could catch only small glimpses, but it looked like a . . .
“Soul. Falin, someone is still alive in there.” I squinted. “Maybe two someones. The kids.” I stepped toward the house.
Falin caught my arm, stopping me.
“What are you doing? They’re still alive in there, but who knows for how much longer.” I tried to jerk my arm away, but he held on tight.
He pulled me closer to him and dropped his voice to a harsh whisper. “You can’t just walk into a burning building.”
“But it isn’t burning. The fire is glamour.” And I couldn’t see it anymore. Couldn’t feel the heat or smell the smoke. It no longer existed for me, or at least, it didn’t as long as I gazed across planes.
“Okay, so you can break the glamour, but did it do real damage to the building?” He pointed to the crumbling rubble pile that had once been a house. “What if the ceiling collapses on you?”
I hadn’t considered that.
I stopped trying to jerk my arm away and turned back to try to study the glints of soul light. How much longer could the kids survive in there? How had they survived this long? I had to find out what was happening.
I let more of my psyche cross over to the land of the dead. Cold wind whipped around me, tousling my hair and ripping at my clothes. Now that I wasn’t struggling, Falin dropped my arm and stepped back, flexing his hand as if I’d burned him. As open as my psyche was, it was more likely I’d chilled him.
“Roy,” I said, not caring if my voice carried to those watching. Then I waited.