Omnia Vincit Amor

Chapter 3

Lucy folded her legs under her body, and stared outside. The room was beginning to get slightly darker, so Ariu would be home soon. She could not get out of her luma's bedroom, because Ariu had locked her and Harlem in.

Lucy looked down. The air was smokier than usual, and it was very hot. She sighed, as she had done at least ten times in the last sixty seconds. She had already yelled for someone to come let her out. There were no other neighbors on their floor, but in this neighborhood, most people just stayed out of other people's business.

The window was open, but no fresh air was coming in. Harlem was in the form of a large bird, attempting to fan her. "I'm going to get Ariu for this one!" she told her daemon. The air tasted bad, and she had to speak louder to be heard over the loud sirens outside. She had been hearing them for a while, but she could only see they flashing lights reflecting off a neighboring building. It was very infuriating. She was hungry, and upset, and scared, and thirsty, and near to throwing a temper tantrum. "I'll tell Luma she locked us in!"

Harlem looked down at her. "She'll figure out some way to make us not tell. She always does."

"Yes. That's because Ariu's a witch. She goes to school for it." Lucy wrinkled her nose. "I can do magic already. And I don't need some growm-up telling me how to!"

"Really?" Harlem asked. "Then get us out of here!"

Lucy rolled her eyes. "You can quit fanning. It's really no use." She coughed, and then found that she couldn't stop coughing. Harlem looked around anxiously for water, but there was none to be found in the infinitesimal room. Dust fell from the ceiling gently. Like snow. It was even the grey colour of snow.

She stood up from the bed, and looked into the mirror. She was surprised that her hair looked like an old woman's. It was all dry, and grey, and powdery. Her clothes were covered with something that looked like ash. It was enough to make any normal little girl cry. Luckily Lucy never cried. She hadn't cried last year when she had broken her arm. If she cried now, Ariu might walk in and see. No sir! She was not going to get that satisfaction after leaving Lucy alone all day. Ariu was always trying to make Lucy cry, but it never worked. Ariu cried very frequently, and mostly over nothing important. Like if she had a fight with one of her friends, or failed a test, or was angry at Penny, or wanted to see her father, or wanted to leave Gitslent. Jeez, did she have a million reasons to cry or what? Lucy had just as many things that she could cry about, but she never did! Why should she? Who else would be upset if she cried. Only she would. And why make herself more upset? There was no sense in having any bad emotion at all.

"What's happening, Har?" the little girl asked, as he flipped through a series of increasingly bigger and more protective animals. He shook his head. He knew no more than she did. Both of them knew that something bad was going on outside. "Ariu?!" she yelled. "Mama!" No one answered her calls, and the black stuff was floating near the ceiling. "I don't like it Harlem..."

The wolf-shaped daemon snarled. "I don't either. But we can't do anything. We can't climb out of the window: it's too small. And we're locked in this room."

"Why did she lock us in?" Lucy exclaimed. "What is wrong with her? Now that she goes to magic school, she's too good to do anything with me. She just locks us in here! She never plays with us anymore!" In the corner of her mind, Lucy was certain that she was going to die. Maybe it was because she was keeping secrets. Maybe she wasn't being good to the Goddesses. Or maybe it was the sins of the entire city.

Lucy launched into another coughing fit, her eyes burning severely. She didn't know what was going on, but she wasn't going to stay to find out.

She dropped to the floor, underneath the cloud of what she recognized as smoke, but could not comprehend, wheezing as she crawled to the closet. Ariu's words rang through her ears, as though the older girl was in the room with her.

"If anything ever happens, don't you dare forget to take Luma's money jar. And take the family pictures. Give them both to me, or keep them to yourself if anything happens to me. Okay? Money will help us get a new job, or at least keep us fed, and pictures are like memories, only better, You wouldn't want to lose your memories, would you?"

Lucy grasped the jar and the box, and tucked one under each arm, and scooted back toward the door. Her head ached, but she could still hear her sister's voice in her head. "Lucy, in an emergency, the only person you need to save is you. Don't think about Luma or me. Just save yourself..." Ariu could be greedy, and pretentious, and stuck-up, and was always concerned with the money that Penny had saved up over all of the years. It was thousands of dollars, sent from someone from Penny's past. Penny refused to spend it, and just placed it in a jar. Although Ariu reminded Lucy to get it in an emergency often, she had never taken any of it. Lucy didn't know why. All Ariu would say on that subject was, "With Penny as our mother, we will undoubtedly have to use it someday. But I don't want that day to be very soon. So I'll hold off as long as I can."

"Why? Why don't you want to use the money?"

"Because you're more important than buying a CD I want, or going to the cinema."

That explained nothing.

Harlem became a rhinoceros, and butted the door open easily. Briefly, the girl wondered why they hadn't thought of that before. Lucy clung to her daemon as he went up the stairs. She had to pull herself up the ladder onto the roof, and she slipped off several times. The air quality was not much better on the roof, but as Lucy moved over to the edge of the roof she normally stood at, she found that the wind was blowing all of the smoke away from her. She could breath at least, although the heat was getting to be unbearable, especially on the concrete of the roof. She could see heat waves rising up. Obviously something was on fire. She stood on the edge of the roof, and stared down. It looked like the whole building was on fire.

Turning to her daemon, Lucy said, "This is it, then. I'll really never get out of this city." Then she pitched backward over the edge of the roof. With a howl, Harlem dragged her back up before he too passed out.

On the ground, Ariu had just come to, when a gasp went through the people crowded around the outside of her building. A firefighter was offering her water, and her hands were trembling, as she looked up. She saw her sister hanging over the edge! She screamed, and passed out again, spilling water all over her top.

Ariu was awake when the firefighter ran out of the building carrying the little girl. Lucy was hardly conscious, and looked more like a burnt animal than a human. Still, Ariu ran over, sobbing. "Oh Lucy!" she cried. "Oh Lucy! I'm so sorry!"

The girl smiled slightly, her blue eyes crinkling. "It wasn't your fault. If I was a better sister, this wouldn't have happened."

With that, the firefighter carried her off to the ambulance, leaving the jar and box with Ariu. Lucy comment just about broke Ariu's heart! Here she was, trying to keep her sister safe, by locking her in a burning building! What would Penny say when she found out? Ariu no longer cared. For now she had to get in that ambulance and ride to the hospital, and hope her sister would be okay. Then, she had to find some place for them to stay, with or without their mother, depending on if Penny even cared. Maybe she would see the burnt building and decide that this was her opportunity to leave. Ariu was disgusted because she could imagine her luma doing just that.

But she was also a bit upset at herself, for hoping that her mother might have been in the building, and maybe wouldn't come back.

Ariu sat in the hospital waiting room for a long time, with her daemon on her lap. At first she found it hard to stop crying. The nurse caring for Lucy said that the little girl would live, but Ariu was imagining the awful scars Lucy might have. And it was all her fault! What would possess her to lock her sister in a room in such an old building? Anything could have happened.

Then she began to think about how much the hospital stay and treatment would cost. It had to be expensive, because the only other people she saw in the hospital were rich people with their chauffeurs or servants there for plastic surgery or some minor sickness. These people looked at her with pity, but Ariu knew how they saw her. Doubly odd. She had a daemon, and lived in the slums of the inner city. There was no avoiding the glances they gave her. She knew that people of her class weren't supposed to seek help for injury. There were supposed to gracefully die, to spare the eyes of the bourgeoisie.

After several hours, a doctor walked out into the waiting room, wiping his hands on his white coat. "Ariu Sahren?" he called, reading off a clipboard hung from the nurses' station.

Ariu stood up, suddenly very nervous, ignoring the fact that he had entirely butchered her name. "Yes?"

The doctor looked at her warily, most likely wondering who was going to pay for Lucy's medicine. "You're Lucy's sister, correct?"

"Yes, I am. Is she going to be okay?" Ariu demanded, fighting to keep her voice under control.

"Oh yes. She'll be fine. Her burns were all superficial, and she didn't even have very much of those. She was mostly suffering from smoke inhalation. One of our mages treated her, and put her to sleep for the night. By morning, she should be perfectly well."

"So," Ariu said quietly, staring at the man's chest to avoid looking in his eyes. "I can pick her up in the morning then?"

"Yes."

"All right."

The doctor turned to leave. "Dr. Enring?" Ariu said, remembering the name tag clipped to the man's chest.

He turned. "Yes, Miss Sahren?"

"Is there a phone anywhere I can use?"

He directed her to the nurse's station, making a phone signal with his hand to one of the nurses.

The woman smiled gently at Ariu as she pointed toward the phone. "Dial 4 before the number," she said.

Ariu nodded, a bit enraged. They had given Lucy a mage! She had not asked for a magician, nor did she want one. Before she dialed, she set the money jar Lucy had handed her on the counter, and told herself to calm down. She ought to have been grateful that a mage had treated Lucy. Ariu herself was in training to become a mage, and had been in magic school enough to know that magic was much better at curing illness than a doctor. She would have been perfectly happy, had she not known that the hospital had not let a mage heal Lucy for the sake of her health, but because it was cheaper, since most people did not trust mages, and would not allow themselves to be healed by them. They had not thought she could pay for her sister's treatment!

Well, it was true that she herself had almost no money, and nothing of value to trade. She could have found a way, though. Or perhaps Penny could have…No, thought Ariu. Her mother would probably never come back. Hopefully.