I glanced around; the office assistant was in the break room, making coffee.
“I told them the truth. They want to confirm with you. And probably talk to you because you’re into death, or whatever.”
“I’m notinto death.” Any of the sympathy that had tempered Artemis’s reactions to me this morning was gone. “I’m into uncovering the history of this town, you effing raccoon.” She stood and snapped her notebook shut.
“You still say ‘effing’?”
Artemis rolled her eyes and strode past me. “I don’t have time for this. TheDead Men Walkingcrew is coming this afternoon, and I have about a million things I need to put together before they get here. I know you don’t care about protecting anyone, but I do.”
“They’re still coming? After Masrell?”
“Of course. You think my mom would stop a nationally aired television show from filming in town?”
So Sadie was right—they were still going to bringDead Men Walkinghere, which meant the show’s fans would come,too, and the story of Masrell’s murder would spread. The last time firestarter attacks had hit headlines this big was thirty years ago, when Hermit Forester was still out and active.
“Whatever.” I pushed the office door open. “See you, buttface.”
“You’re the worst,” Artemis called back.
Instead of going straight back to class, I stopped in the restroom and shut myself in the third stall. The first stall was occupied by a blank-faced girl in a floral-print dress, staring into the toilet and flickering at her edges. I needed the second stall as a buffer.
If the police thought Artemis might know something more about me than where I’d been last night, they were really scraping the bottom of the barrel. Artemis and I were branches of a tree that had forked off in wildly different directions. Sometimes we weren’t part of the same tree at all. Sometimes I thought maybe we weren’t even the same species.
Artemis wasinto death, but not the way I’d implied. She’d been trained by her mother to help me hunt the way Aunt Greta had once helped my mom, though she could only sense the presence of ghosts, not see them. She’d been mentioned on the local news a few times for her research into historical sites around Addamsville and Harrisburg. Just looking at her, with her cashmere scarves and sleek, shiny hair and designer boots, you’d never guess she was into the supernatural at all. She looked more like a social media star.
No one would ever suspect Artemis of arson, despite that she’d been out last night, too. Even if they never found any evidence I’d set the fire at Masrell’s house, they’d still suspect me, becausefireandNovakwere the only things most people knew about me. They never tried to dig deeper, even when I went straight up to their doors and asked if they’d like me to show them myself.
I slumped against the scuffed stall wall. A rising tension headache pounded in my temple. Artemis was right. Protecting people was more important than what the town thought of me. It was exactly what Mom would have said, if she was around. I uncurled my right hand; only then did the prosthetics look natural under the glove. If Mom was around, I wouldn’t have lost any fingers. If Mom was around, she could tell me how to handle all of this, what to say, where to start.
But it had been five years since she disappeared. There was no telling when she would come back, which meant I had to deal with this firestarter myself before it hurt anyone else.
4
After a day of eavesdropping, I’d heard three decent theories about who had set the fire—besides myself—but only one of them was close to right.
The first was Pastor Keller. I totally believed Pastor Keller might emerge from Black Creek Church one day to burn people with the fires of heaven and cleanse them for their sins, but even if he was possessed by a firestarter, I’d seen him at 2:20 that morning, digging around in his trash with his usual audience of ghosts. The guy threw his glasses away once a week, minimum. He lived in an old house behind the veterinarian, across town from George Masrell, and ghosts didn’t hang out around firestarters.
The second suspects were the Birdies, who were onpeople’s lists for the same reason I was. They had a reputation for wrecking things. They weren’t known for fires, though. They took baseball bats to mailboxes, graffitied concession stands, and once put dead bluegills in all the air ducts in the high school. None of them were possessed, either. I’d seen them around school, and they’d been just as interested in the rumors as anyone else, and causing no trouble with the ghosts.
The third suspect, and the one who came the closest, was Hermit Forester. Thirty years ago, the Foresters had lived in a mansion in the woods, bigger even than the Goldmine houses. One night the mansion caught on fire, killing the oldest son and sending the rest of the family to live in town while their house was rebuilt. Kids nicknamed them “the Firestarters,” because it sounded close to “Foresters,” and kids can be so clever sometimes.
While they were here, a rash of arsons swept through Addamsville, killing some teenagers, an auto mechanic, five people in the old town hall, and three more members of the Forester family. That left only one of them to return to the woods and the rebuilt mansion, suspected but never convicted of any crime. Hermit Forester holed himself up while Addamsville dealt with the fallout of what the media dubbed “the Firestarter Murders.”
That was where Mom had gotten the name for the creatures. When I’d asked Jack and Norm if they’d talkedto Hermit Forester, I hadn’t been kidding. Forester wasn’t a firestarter, but his assistant, Bach, was. The ghosts had pointed Mom toward Forester and Bach when she’d gone hunting for the culprits of the Firestarter Murders, but she couldn’t get rid of them. Cutting off a firestarter’s head would neutralize the threat it posed, but then you had a head. To get rid of it for good, you had to send it back through the entrance it used to get into Addamsville. Mom had never found Bach’s entrance.
The fires had ended when Forester returned to his home in the woods, and in all the time I’d known Bach, he had never given off a whiff of danger. Mom had always said firestarters weren’t inherently evil creatures; we were their prey, like any other animal relationship, and Bach was like a fox adopted by a pack of rabbits. He had killed in the past, and there was no forgiving him for that. But I wasn’t sure he’d done this.
I sat in the Chevelle, tapping on the steering wheel while I waited for the parking lot to empty. One person was already dead. The firestarter that did it would be feeding on Masrell’s ghost right now, and would continue to do so for as long as it was allowed to remain in Addamsville. With one dead under its belt, it would easily have enough power to possess someone else. I squeezed my prosthetics through my glove. It was already worse than the last one I’d taken out, which hadn’t even killed one person.
I prowled through town with my gut doing somersaults.Even the Chevelle’s growling seemed a little subdued, like it knew where we were going and was trying to warn me what a bad idea it was.
George Masrell lived off a dirt road that trailed northeast, toward the junkyard. A long strand of trees had been planted to shield the junkyard and the east side from the tourists who drove into town on Valleywine Road.
I parked the Chevelle two streets away from Masrell’s house so the engine wouldn’t attract attention from the people still gathered outside. As I approached, my stomach turned over again, my hands tingled, and a small voice in the back of my head saidGet away get away get away from this place there was FIRE HERE.I tucked my hands into my jacket pockets, curling my prosthetics around so they fit, and pushed on.
The ruin of the house, still slightly smoking, was visible from the end of the street. Police tape cordoned off the yard. The roof and half the outer wall had gone down, leaving a gaping, blackened corpse. Withered beams speared out of the rubble like broken bones. The smell was the worst part of it, the part that had all my hairs standing on end and made me want to run for the hills. Burned wood, burned rubber, burned plastic.Fire lived here,it said.Fire destroyed here.
A fire truck and a police cruiser sat by the curb. A few firefighters poked in the wreckage. One spoke with Chief Rivera. The Chief was a short lady with a heavy brown coat,dark hair up in a bun, and aviators hiding her eyes despite the heavy cloud cover. I had literally never seen her crack a smile, and she definitely wouldn’t if she saw me lurking around, so I hunched my shoulders and ducked behind the cars lining the opposite side of the street.
