She had geared up almost entirely, staring at the hulking remains of a barn just off the road that would be her pyre in an hour’s time, when the true dread of what she was about to have to do hit her.
“I... I can’t do this...” she said, feeling her hands start to shake as she tried to draw on the heavy, fireproof gloves.
“Nonesense,” Oz chided, once again slapping her on the shoulder. “Of course you can, Ondine. You already have.” He sounded cheerful enough, but he knew intimately what she was hanging up on. He had expected it to be a problem. It was the problem he would have had.
“I meant watch him walk away with my baby again,” she said, eyes wide and unseeing as she stared at the structure in sheer terror.
“So did I,” he affirmed, gently. “You can do this, Ondine.”
She positioned herself in the hay loft, pulled herself to the very edges of perception, her very first and most powerful spell, and waited.
Her own screaming and pleading jolted through her like electricity, and it took all she had to let him complete his devil-sent mission and, yes, walk away carrying the screaming, kicking, reaching Erica.
In the end, though, the story played out as it had, and she found herself crashing to the ground as the hayloft gave way, and found that the act of saving herself required far less conscious thought than she would have believed.
The actions came as though she were working through a script – of course they did, she had thought through every instant of this moment thousands of times now, both sleeping and waking, voluntarily under counseling and involuntarily while screaming soundlessly into a pillow. Mind you, in those tortured memories she had been thinking them from the perspective of the charred, limp, yet somehow still living, body now in her arms as she walked out into the night.
When the lights of the ambulance hit them, Ondine released Mandy, and faded away into the treeline, securing her place in local legend as the Phantom Firefighter.
“Well?” asked Oz, as she emerged from the trees.
“Well, what?” she demanded, stripping out of her soot- and bloodstained gear and stuffing them into her Wet Duffle before getting anywhere near the pretty car. “I haven’t just vanished in a puff of smoke, have I, so I guess I must have been right.” Accepting the wet towel he handed her and wiping the sweat and fear from her scarred skin, Ondine leaned against the floral-patterned trunk and looked up at the sky, blackened by the smoke from her own cremation. “Take me home, Dad...”
He had. They had retraced the whole strange trip through the ominous portal, and then, he had driven her to her home, and they had ordered in the steak. He sat with her that night, let her talk out the endless thought-loops that accompanies a first timetravel experience, and then told her the next morning that Arthur had been taken prisoner by the Cascadians, and was possibly not coming back.
He had, of course, come back.
Erica was twelve when she revealed herself to him. The last doctor at the maternity clinic in the town he had relocated to had resigned abruptly, citing ‘inhospitable working environment’ and unrelenting protests by townspeople. When Ondine requested transfer there, her head of medicine looked at her as though she had a death wish, but wrote the glowing letter of recommendation. The clinic, of course, was glad to receive any doctor at all, let alone one who arrived on her first day in her Army Dress Greens and Specialist beret, to stand arms crossed in front of the gate and bar his entrance.
It was, of course, Arthur, who had been spending his Saturdays marching back and forth across the driveway waving signs with graphic pictures and angry slogans about god to block entrance to women who, while maybe seeking services to end unwanted pregnancies, were just as likely to be trying to make it to an appointment for a checkup on a fragile and very much wanted one. He had, of course, “brought his kids with him again!” as Lana had so frustratedly put it when she peeked through the blinds that morning to see the three blue-clad figures climbing out of the sedan across the street. Lana had offered to go scare him off, having dealt with him before, but Ondine had declined the help, and went out the door herself to stand in his way.
She confronted him using the only voice she knew he feared. “You need to go away, and you need to stay away.” It wasn’t hard to mimic Oz. For Ondine, it wasn’t hard to mimic anyone, really, to the point where she wasn’t sure what her voice actually was. For a very long time, she had sounded like Arthur.
It hadn’t been nice to use his voice when calling Mark about the barn, but it had simply happened.
She pulled every ounce of Oz she had absorbed in the years since reenlisting into her frame, setting her shoulders and jaw as square as she could and attempting to add bulk and weight to her presence.
“And, you especially need to never bring your wife and daughter here again unless it is for my care as a doctor. Is that clear, Cole?” The look on his face was worth the thousand nights of screaming nightmares she had endured since she had tried to take their daughter and leave him, that night on the Old Highway 95. “GO.”
Hildie had given her a smile and a thumb’s up from behind him, while Erica had stared, wide eyed and speechless, into her face. Arthur had frothed in impotent rage, but what power he had once held over Mandy did not hold sway over Ondine.
“YOU– ” he gasped out the accusation, face contorted into something subhuman. “BRIDE OF LUCIFER!”
– Ondine grasped hard to the wall on either side of the bathroom mirror she had just wiped down of condensation, gasping for breath, and staring into her own reflection, counting the places she had made her body her own. Shaved head, fuck what hair still grew. Nose ring, silver and ruby. Earrings, five up each ear. Pentagram branded into the skin under her left collar bone after the night of the Deus Ex Machina, blotting out the oval scar where the dogtags he had placed back around her neck before lighting the pyre had burned into her the night in the barnfire, permanent reminder that she would own her Wixenhood, come what may.
“Breathe, Ondine,” she reminded herself, speaking aloud to drown out the repetition of Arthur’s cursing. “He can’t touch you anymore. You are more than his wife.” And then, finally, finally, “Your baby is out of his hands. And he is about to die.”
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