"I said she bore no stain on her soul. That is no longer the case," the Star said. The Paladin nodded, and launched herself at the Fire Woman.
It was obvious the knight was getting the worst of it. They rolled around on the ground, pummeling and punching each other, all subtlety lost. The Paladin's armor grew blackened and burnt beyond the battering it had already endured at Heather Duke's hands.
Heather gave Martha a hard stare. "Got any other bright ideas, Dunnstock?"
"She taught me almost nothing I could use against fire," Martha confessed. "I guess there was a reason for that."
"You don't have to be useless either," Heather told J.D. "My power changed when I came to this world. Yours should have too. My grandmother wanted you to keep the useless power, so she could trade you in a bargain - " He scowled to be reminded of that. He looked weak just watching the Fire Woman, as if every stain of guilt and rage and greed she wore on her black soul poisoned him as well. "Shit or get off the pot, Dean. There's something else you can do."
Heather ran toward the fight. She put herself between the Paladin and the Fire Woman. Heather Chandler risking her own life for an already dead person she doesn't even know, how stupid is that. She mustered what she had left and struck back against the one who had stolen her power.
Then a rippling black hole opened in the air, around the Fire Woman's shoulder. She writhed. Heather ignored the pain from her burns and glared in cold-eyed triumph that her gamble paid off.
"I told you so," she snapped.
"Don't get used to it, Chandler." Another black lesion opened by the Fire Woman's body. She writhed and drew back from it. J.D. could hurt her, and Heather widened the breach.
In truth, what J.D.'s power had transmuted into scared Heather, not that she'd ever admit it. The ghost darkly prophesied that he was destined to kill, commit murder on a massive scale. This ability seemed the embodiment of the destruction and despair Martha saw within him. He'll lose it when he leaves this world, Heather told herself.
The Fire Woman fought back. She'd already defeated the Paladin. One last twist and the knight was flung aside like a rag doll, soaring into the air and falling with a clank. Martha rushed to bend over her, doing what she could.
Heather's enemy regathered her power, glowing like a star shot through by darkness. Fire and ash, merged together again. Heather couldn't breathe; the air was too hot. Flames sizzled on her arms, burns so painful she could only keep standing by reminding herself they'd be healed if she won.
For once, Heather and J.D. fought on the same side. He opened those sick black lesions, like gates into pure nothingness, giving the Fire Woman pain. Heather's fire worked with it as if they'd practiced in tandem.
Black holes opened around the Fire Woman to imprison her form. Sheets of returned fire stopped her blows. She didn't seem discouraged. She paused, stuck in place with an arm in the air and a leg awkward behind her, like a Nutcracker dancer frozen between toy soldiers and candycane fairies.
Then Heather saw her change. The humanoid shape grew and thinned into something much more terrible. An elongated face with sharp teeth and twin horns, a long thin body made from twisted black and white-gold strands. It glowed with fiery scales. It flew, spinning and rolling in the air, free from anything that would constrain it. It was a creature out of nightmares. Here there be dragons.
It dived down, mouth breathing a gout of white-hot fire. They'd been fools to think they could stand against something this powerful in the first place. They did what they could to slow the destruction, but they smelt their own flesh burn. Martha did nothing, too much busy with keeping the Paladin un-dead.
Heather turned to J.D., in the middle of torrents of flame. "We're losing," she said.
"There's no we," the dragon's head hissed. "It's you I want, Heather. Don't make him sacrifice himself for you."
"Not about - sacrifice." J.D. cut off the dragon's mouth with one of his dark gateways. The head snaked around it. " ... I don't walk away from people like you."
The burning tail knocked him to the ground. Heather saw him struggle back to his hands and knees, still trying to fight. He was the sort of person who'd always try to fight, as long as you pointed him at something outside his bleak existence.
It was Heather's power that hurt him. "I know what I have to do, Grandma. You taught me to be greedy. You've made plenty of trades to get you here - so I'm making one now. I trade my power for a gate into my world, and a few minutes' worth of time."
The dragon began a screech. But then the working began. There was a vague look of approval on the Star's face that Heather didn't deign to notice. Her own power - the power that her grandmother had swapped with her - was stripped away.
The dragon had nothing left. It writhed in the air as if it was being eaten up from within.
"Heather Chandler," Heather said. "The ghost. I set you free from the thorns and I know your true name. Come here."
The flapper girl appeared above what was left of the Fire Woman, grey-white and drained of color, her unfashionable dress still loose about her. She wore a terrible smile on her face. "Welcome home, Mother," she said. She descended on her.
Other forces, material and immaterial, gathered in the unearthly sky like coloured ripples over a dark grey ground. Past bargains, trades, covenants the Fire Woman had made in her many journeys here, all to secure power. Now she was powerless, and all her debts fell due. Heather turned away as the dragon writhed, torn and hunted and destroyed from all directions. The deals she had created rebounded on her own head.
Heather grabbed at J.D.'s sleeve. "You have to come with me," she said. "You can't expect me to take care of your damn hamster. Everyone knows I kill houseplants. Heather McNamara used to have this cactus, she went on vacation and left it with me ... she doesn't have it any more."
J.D. shook his head. That wasn't enough, he seemed to say.
"There is something you like," Heather said, trying to force fire into her words. "You like fighting with me. Make that enough." Fighting with was a good description - deliberately ambiguous.
The silver gate was open behind them. Heather glared at him, refusing to let go of his black sleeve. Burn scars marked his face and neck and she probably mirrored his damage.
"You go ahead," he said. He returned her look at last. "Don't worry."
Colours flowed around Heather, first a rainbow and then dizzying white light. Her feet were wrapped around a chair leg. Bewildered, she lifted her hands to stare hard at them and make doubly sure they were really her own. She plucked a curl in her hair and let it spring back. The body of an old woman lay face down on the table, and around her Heather's friends all stirred awake - except for the boy in black.
"I'm alive," Heather Chandler said.