Consumed By a Fire
an excerpt

Tobias looked at the girl. Really looked. Once the images in his head crackled together, his jaw dropped in surprise. Slowly, carefully, he asked, “Are you related to anybody named Clare, or Clara?”

The mysterious brunette dropped her eyes to the table. “Toby, I am Clara. I think I kind of blew up a time machine.”

Tobias read, drew, and wrote comic books. He had a passing acquaintance with the bizarre, and he liked to think he handled out of the ordinary situations fairly well. In real life, however? Sitting in front of him like a sci-fi novel gone horribly wrong?

This was just too weird.

“No,” he breathed. Despite himself, he leaned closer, trying to match memory to presence. “There’s just no way.”

Clara reached up with both hands to touch her neck, a frustrated gesture Tobias remembered his brother adopting in his teens. “Ugh, how are you going to believe me? I was one of Eric’s best friends. He had real long hair, a nice smile. Got into trouble too many times to count. I taught him to swear in Russian when he kept getting busted for language at school. I went over to your guys’ house almost every day in high school because my family drove me nuts. And now you sit here, and tell me you don’t remember me, when I remember a time when you barely came up to my waist? Please,” she softly added. “You’ve gotta remember. There were so many news stories that I read up on in the library. Everyone thought I was dead.”

Tobias shook his head, trying to dislodge the niggling doubts lodged between his ears. “No. Clara was kidnapped thirty years ago. It practically destroyed my brother, it did break up her whole family. She vanished in the middle of the day and was never seen again.”

The teenager banged a fist on the table. “For chrissakes, I took Mike’s motorcycle! I was pissed off and all of my friends were busy, and all I wanted to do was get some time alone! I went to the mountains,” she told him in a slightly calmer voice. “The weather was nice and I already knew how to work a motorcycle because of Eric and Louise. I found some old cabin. There were these guys arguing in it. One of them snuck up behind me and grabbed me.” She shuddered. “They sent me to a lab of theirs while they tried to figure out who I was. I didn’t want them to know my dad was Sergei Azylkiyasov. It took three days for the news to hit the press, and four for me to escape.”

Tobias snorted, trying to cover his growing dismay with angry humor. “Nice story, but time travel is not a tale I’m about to accept any day soon. If you’re homeless, or just some kind of foolish runaway with a fondness for terrible old spy movies—“

She grinned suddenly. “I can prove it.”

Tobias leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest. He gave her a ‘this had better be good’ sort of look and waited.

The girl—she really did look a great deal like Clara Something-or-other—plucked a napkin from the wood holder on the table and stood a little ways away from it. Stuffing the napkin into her jacket pocket, she hunched forward slightly, sniffed, and scowled.

“What’s that smell? Can’t you smell it? I tell you, it’s like this every day, I get to cleaning the house and there’s a bad smell from the neighbors. It has to be the dogs. They have so many dogs, you know, it’s so unhealthy for them to have so many dogs. But they don’t seem to notice, and in the meantime there’s just that smell I have to live with…”

As she spoke, the girl shuffled around the kitchen, scrubbing at dust spots on the countertop in the manner of an older Korean woman Toby knew very well. She even had the gait right, a tiny stride that barely picked her feet off the carpet.

“…and I said to him, ‘AJ, you’ve got a real good store here, and I love the way you run it—oh, there’s a bug here. Nasty bug, I hate these little flies that get into everything—well anyway, I tell him…” The brunette trailed off, noting the complete and utter shock printed across Toby’s face. “Well? Remember me now?”

Very gently, as though he were afraid something valuable would fall out en route, Toby laid his forehead flat against the scratched wood of the table. “Clara was very good at imitations,” he said dazedly.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her pump a fist into the air in a gesture of victory. “Oh, thank God, I knew you'd remember! Toby, you’ve got to help me.”