And then, weirdly enough, something in the fire begins to twitch. I stumble forward to the edge of the flames.
I seem to have feet again. And hands. And they’re not burning. They’re bright like the fire. I lurch forward a few steps and trip over something.
It’s the wood around the bonfire.
A second later, I’m out of the flames and glowing red like a goddamn piece of charcoal.
Everything is too bright. I can’t see anything but my own luminous body, incandescent with
heat. I don’t know what else to do, so I walk a few more steps.
I begin to shiver. It’s a frigid world outside of the fire and I can feel my skin cooling rapidly.
Eventually, I can see again. Nine people stare at me like I’m Jesus returned to Earth or the beast from twenty thousand fathoms.
One more step and I fall to my knees. But it’s okay. I can get up again. And I felt the ground. It was hard and now my new damn knees hurt.
Candy runs over and puts out a hand.
“Stark?” she says.
She reaches for my arm and then snatches her hand away like she touched a hot skillet.
Ray and Vidocq throw freezing buckets of water over me. I stand there naked and steaming, white vapor curling off me as I cool.
Soon, the steam disappears.
Candy touches me again. Smiles. Throws her arms around me.
That’s something I didn’t think I’d ever feel again.
I look at my right hand. It looks like a real hand again and not a mummified tarantula. Pale scars still crisscross my body. My breath comes easily and when I touch my chest, I can feel my heart beating.
“Will somebody give this fucker a robe or something so he doesn’t stand there feeling himself up all night?” says Kasabian.
Candy gives me a beaten-up robe we stole from the Chateau Marmont when we squatted there last year. I can feel the soft fabric against my skin, the grit of the parking lot under my feet.
“Stark?” says Allegra. “Can you talk?”
It takes me a couple of tries, but I manage to get out, “I think I’m okay.”
People crowd around me. Hugs. Pats on the back. Kasabian and Alessa stand apart from the congratulations, which is probably best for all of us.
Behind me, the bonfire is just about out, like all of its heat went into my body and when I walked away from it, all its power came with me. In a few more seconds, it dies completely. Carlos and Vidocq dump buckets of water on the embers.
Ray and Brigitte show me a couple of pages scrawled with tight handwriting. My eyes don’t focus well enough yet to read it.
“What does it say?”
“It’s the spell we used to bring you back,” says Ray.
“What kind is it? Resurrection? Spirit binding?”
Brigitte covers her mouth when she laughs. Ray looks a little embarrassed.
“It’s not either of those,” he says. “It was used by farmers in Eastern Europe in times of famine.”
Brigitte says, “It restores spoiled meat to an edible condition.”