There was a wet nose in my eye socket. I shifted away, and a fever chill set my body shivering. Someone pulled my bedfurs tighter.

"Ad?" said a quiet voice.

"I told you to run," I mumbled.

"We did. We didn't catch it."

Thank the Lord. I wanted to cry from the hurricane of sweet relief Jem's words brought me, releasing a tension I didn't realize I was holding. The nose poked my stomach.

"Is that Grifo?" I reached out a shaky hand in the darkness. The air outside my covers was freezing. My hand met fur, then got licked. Grifo whined and stuck his nose in my face again. Jem pulled him away.

"Is he okay?" I croaked.

"Emma said it doesn't affect animals."

Emma had some explaining to do. "Where's is she?"

"Outside. She needed a moment to herself." Jem took my hand from Grifo's scruff and put it back under the bedfurs. I stopped shivering quite so hard.

"Help me up," I said.

He paused, then obliged. I huddled in my bedfurs against the wall behind me: a wall too straight to be stone. We were inside a house. There was a paleness where the roof should be—the cloudy night sky—but below that, I could see nothing but the half-black coals of a small campfire. It cast no light. I heard Jem reach for something.

"Emma said to drink this," he said, placing a cup in my hands. It was still warm, and the scent of tea mingled with a sourness I knew must be medicinal. I wrinkled my nose.

"I made it," said Jem.

I was glad the darkness hid the smile that tried to twitch my mouth. Emma was gifted with plant knowledge that nobody her age and training should have, and Jem haggled her into teaching him things every chance he got. His concoctions were easier on the mouth than anything made by his tutor, who had a high tolerance for bitterness and no sympathy for anyone who did not. I sipped the tea. The medicinal component was potent, but Jem had added a strong herb to cover it, and a sweetener, too. 

Emma knew a lot of things she shouldn't. My almost-smile faded again as my last memories before passing out resurfaced. I finished the cup and handed it back. "Alright. Explain."

"Don't take this out on Emma, okay?"

"I'll decide myself who I take it out on."

"Ad..."

"Explain."

He was responsible for Emma running back to the village to find me, and he knew it. If she had died, I would have murdered him myself. And I wanted to know what was going on.

Rather than answer, Jem shuffled about in the shadows. The campfire coals sparked as he tossed them a new bundle of fuel. I shielded my eyes against the light as a twig caught. Jem added wood until we had a small fire again. I lowered my hands. He held out his.

Black lines circled his wrists, barely visible against his dark skin. The bands varied in thickness, and dots, tick marks, and tiny interlocking triangles filled the spaces between them. Before I could process what I was looking at, Jem took my hands and pulled them into the light.

I had them, too. My tattoos were cuffs, three times as broad. Their edges had similar bands and patterns, but through their middles ran a blocky, curling design that some deep part of my brain told me meant fire. If I could have caught that part of my brain, I would have burned some answers out of it. I wasn't ready for this. The tattoos didn't smudge as I rubbed, then scratched at them. Something I desperately didn't want to acknowledge or believe was staring me straight in the face, and I couldn't wake up as I scratched harder, trying to break the dream with pain. Jem caught my hands and held them.

"She put these on me as soon as you shouted," he said. Calmly, like he was trying to calm me. "Then she went back for you. I wasn't fast enough to stop her."

I couldn't take my eyes off my wrists. This wasn't a dream.

"She doesn't know how she did it either, or what got into her," said Jem. "She was pretty shaken afterwards. She asked if I could watch you and went off alone." My head jerked up, and he added quickly, "With Grifo. Not alone alone. I wouldn't have let her do that."

Thank God. Or the Azteca gods, or whatever lived above. Hell, whatever lived down here. I would trust Jem normally, but right now I felt like a fried cricket with an alarm bell for a brain. I rested my head against the wall. "Jem, I saw a turkey."

I don't know how I expected him to respond. He just waited for me to keep talking.

"I turned around, and it was standing in the middle of the settlement. Then it turned to smoke."

"Like... it burned?" he said incredulously.

"No. Vanished. In a puff of smoke. That's when I screamed for you. Fuego hit me right after."

"Fuego was carried by a turkey."

"It had white eyes."

That same part of my brain sparked and died. Whatever thought passed through it evaporated before I could grab its tail end.

"That's... creepy. Are you sure it was a turkey?"

"No. But it sure looked like one."

I couldn't think about this right now. I was tired. The fever was fading, but for all the fire Emma had locked inside me, I couldn't get warm. I didn't want to lie down. Every touch of the ground brought memories of scorch marks and the grit of dirt between my fingers. Jem hesitated, then shifted me to the side and sat down beside me. I put my head on his shoulder and drifted off.

The fever was gone the next day, and I felt normal enough to get up. A good night's sleep had done wonders for my mental stability, or maybe it just took waking up to solidify that this was not a dream. I found Emma outside, sitting against the wall of the house. Her eyes darted to me as I slid down beside her.

"Want to talk?"

Her hand tightened around her pendants, and she looked at her toes. She wiggled them.

I ran both hands through my hair. "Thank you, by the way. And sorry for yelling at you when you came back for me yesterday. I got scared."

She gave a single nod.

"Do you remember anything about it?"

Silence.

I pushed up one of my jacket sleeves to reveal the tattoo on my wrist. "What does this one mean?"

"Fire."

"What about Jem's?"

Emma shrugged.

I was close enough to a teenage girl myself to read their unspoken language. "What's the matter?"

"It's not gone."

"What?"

"It's not gone. Fuego. You still have it."

Oh gods, I thought I was ready to deal with this. "But it's sealed, right?"

"Only for you. And for Jem."

"But..." Her jacket sleeves were a bit too short for her, and her wrist showed. She had no tattoos. "Why aren't you sick, then?"

Emma pulled her knees up to her chest and curled into them. "I don't know!"

And she burst into tears. The world began to spin, and I pressed my back against the wall to steady myself. Jem, please get back here.

He was the rational one. If he told me magic was real, I would now believe it. But he had left to scout and set snares before dawn, and he wouldn't be back for a while yet. I braced against the wall and put a hand on Emma's arm, but she swatted it off.

"Don't touch me! I don't want that again." She spat the word at my wrists, and it occurred to me just how frightening it must have been for her to do things out of her control.

Emma curled up again. Her voice was a whimper. "I don't know what I am."

I knew I was supposed to be comforting her, but a sick feeling was stealing up my stomach and I couldn't hold it down. "But Emma, you could tattoo the rest of the village like that, right? To make it safe for them?"

Emma leaped up, her voice a scream. "How am I supposed to do that when I don't know how I did it? I hate it! I don't want some other thing making me do stuff, and I've tried doing it again, but I can't! I can't do it!"

She bolted, and Grifo leaped awake and went after her. I was left alone. The horizon tilted again. I closed my eyes, but that made it worse. Now every direction was in motion, and my ears buzzed in protest of the unseated world. We would find a way. We had to. Why hadn't I wished my father goodbye? I had told my mother I loved her. But Lupe and Liliana and Rodolfo and Elías? Then an even harder gut punch: Miguel and Rosa? Would I never get to watch them grow up? Tía Rosario? Abuela Margarita? Abuelo Godofredo? Graciela? With every name, the world spun faster. My chest was tight, and starting to hurt like fire again. What if the seal broke? What if Jem's failed? What if Emma lost whatever was protecting her? My hands were hot. Hot like fire. Shaking.

There was a small, curious woof. I opened my eyes, ready to hug Grifo until this ended. I found a different dog in front of me. She tilted her head and woofed again. I didn't care who she was. She let me throw my arms around her neck and bury my face in her complete lack of fur. Her skin was warm and soft like tanned deerhide, and she smelled like a summer's evening. And smoke.

"Were these your people?" I murmured, and something in me broke. Her people had burned.

The dog woofed again and rested her chin on my shoulder while I cried. By the time I had exhausted myself, the tightness in my chest had dissipated and I could breathe again. No fire. No disease. I tried to add "no magic," but the thought fizzled. This was real.

I pulled back to look at the dog. She was handsome: sleekly built and a sooty, reddish brown all over, with serious eyes, comically large, upright ears, and a muzzle that was somehow both pointy and square. Her legs were slender, and her hairless tail was thin without being rat-like. She held herself with an elegance that did not say "street dog" to me.

"What's your name?" I said.

She cocked her head, and Chimalli popped into mine. I had no idea what it meant, and it wasn't Spanish—I heard two L sounds—but it sounded appropriate.

"Chimalli?" I said. Her tail wagged. I was getting a weird feeling that this was her actual name. "Aren't you cold?"

She didn't look cold. I petted her head to find it as warm as the rest of her. The memory of the burn shadow returned to me, and I shoved my hand into my glove again. Chimalli's nose followed it. She sniffed up my arm, into my hair, then across my coywolf hat. That wasn't as interesting, so she went back to my hair. Then she wagged her tail and trotted away. I jumped up. "Wait! Chimalli, vení!"

If she knew Spanish commands, she didn't respond. I gritted my teeth and tried in English. "Chimalli, come!"

It was usually a bad idea to chase a strange dog, but I was committed to this one. I ran after her behind the house.

She wasn't there.

I ran a full circle, back to my starting point, then jogged through the village. "Chimalli!"

I stopped and listened, but only the sigh of the breeze replied. My boots crunched in the rough dirt. Fine. I went back to my spot and tracked her to the back of the house. There, the prints disappeared.

There was no turn, like she had jumped. I ran around and checked the house's inside; the wall was low enough for a fit dog to clear. There were no prints inside. I returned to the end of the trail and searched for anything else that might have cut it: a piece of rubble she could have jumped to, or a patch too beaten to leave tracks. There was nothing of the sort.

Chimalli had vanished into thin air.

A/N: In need of something fluffier to decompress with? I gotchu.

Under Chateau Lights by authorelizasolares

Hopelessly single Julie pretends to date her friend Christian in order to get her mother off her case during the family Christmas trip. But while she's there, she runs into Ronan Tremblay, the only man she's ever loved. Going from zero dates to juggling two men at once might just be more than Julie can handle.

A Royal Internship by authorelizasolares (yes, two books from her)

What do you do when you're dumped by your fiance, your scholarship committee, and your internship all in the same week? Well, you take the only opportunity you can find in a last-ditch attempt to keep your future on track, of course. And pretending to date the prince of a small country is a small price to pay for public relations experience and all the money a person could need to become a lawyer. Right? Except perhaps it isn't because you're falling for your fake boyfriend and maybe, just maybe, he's falling for you too.