Flame Caller by Jon Messenger

sign of his own insecurities and that he was probably
reading too much into her expressions, but he couldn’t stop his
mind from delving into the details of the night.
    The sun finally set over the island,
casting his room into darkness. He had some lanterns strategically
placed around his room but didn’t bother lighting them. He almost
wished the other Wind Warriors had splurged for portable generators
so he could at least have some basic electricity. It was amazing
how much he longed for the simple amenities. It was a sign of his
generation, he knew. If he were back home, he’d be clinging to his
cell phone like it was all that was keeping him afloat in a sea of
technology. Thinking about it, Xander realized that he didn’t
necessarily miss the technology. He had been managing just fine
without it, just like he was doing without television or computer
games. He no longer felt like he needed technology, but on nights
like this when he was so incredibly bored, he really, really wished
he had access to some video games to pass the time.
    Sighing, he climbed out of bed. Sleep
wasn’t going to come any time soon and it seemed like a waste to
spend his evening lying around. Not that there was much else to do
on the island other than walk the cobblestone streets, but it
seemed a far better option than lying in bed until he passed out
from sheer boredom.
    He considered checking on Sammy. She
would have been back at her home for an hour or so by then. She was
probably asleep, he realized. She had barely seemed able to keep
her eyes open when she was leaving after dinner.
    Xander frowned. Checking on her
wouldn’t be worth his time. Best-case scenario was that he found
her asleep, recovering from whatever illness suddenly struck her.
Worst-case scenario was that he accidentally woke her and had to
face the wrath of an angry woman and Fire Warrior.
    Whatever was wrong with her, he hoped
it wasn’t serious. He had never considered her getting sick. He had
always just assumed that her internal fire would burn away any
germs. Realistically, it would have to, he realized. She had been
raised in a cavern underground. It was practically an isolation
chamber where the germs of the outside world didn’t dare to
go.
    Did she even have immunities to most
of the basic illnesses that he had and gotten over when he was a
kid? Or worse, did her higher body temperature actually just work
like an incubation chamber for bacteria?
    Xander suddenly wished he had never
taken college biology.
    The room was growing far too dark to
sit in with any practicality. Despite his eyes adjusting to the
dark fairly quickly, the room seemed morose and—despite his
hesitation to admit it—haunted.
    He walked toward the windows. He had
closed the shutters on the windows that morning when he went to
train to keep out the virtually constant sea spray. He had made the
mistake of leaving his windows open after first arriving on the
island and quickly realized that leaving them open here was like
leaving his car window cracked during an unexpected summer shower.
His clothes had been drenched that afternoon and he hadn’t made
that mistake again.
    He hadn’t bothered to open the windows
again after training that day because he was too distracted with
dinner preparations.
    As he approached the shuttered window,
he caught a whiff of something unexpected. The smell wafted through
the closed shutters—an odd combination of campfire and sulfur. His
blood ran cold as the smell of rotten eggs permeated his room. He
had smelled that before when encountering Fire Warriors.
    As his hand was closing over the
shutter’s handle, a sharp pain stabbed into his gut. The pain
buckled his knees and he moaned as he slid down to the floor. His
head lowered toward the hard ground as it felt like the knife in
his stomach was twisted sharply upward, aiming for his
heart.
    He had felt the twisting in his guts
before whenever a Fire Warrior was using their abilities nearby but
this