Echoes in the Ashes

Chapter9

Chapter Nine: Margaret

They loaded her into the ambulance under lights that turned the smoke overhead a sickly yellow, and Derek climbed in after her before anyone could tell him not to.

"Sir, you need to be looked at yourself—"

"In a minute." He crouched by the stretcher anyway, ignoring the burn on his forearm that had started to make itself known now that the adrenaline was fading, watching a paramedic fit an oxygen mask over the woman's face, watching her chest rise and fall in shallow, uneven pulls that didn't look like enough. "Who is she? Anyone got a name?"

"No ID on her yet," the paramedic said, working fast, fingers moving over vitals and lines with practiced speed. "Just this." He held up the leather satchel Derek had pried gently from her fingers on the way down — she'd held onto it even unconscious, some reflex too deep to let go even when everything else in her had already started giving up.

Derek took it without quite meaning to. It was heavier than it looked, the leather worn soft with decades of handling, a brass clasp gone green at the edges, the kind of object that had clearly been carried and protected and hidden long before tonight. He turned it once in his hands, some instinct telling him not to open the clasp, not yet, not without knowing what he'd be opening it into.

"Careful with that," the paramedic added, distracted, not looking up from the monitor. "She fought two firefighters trying to pry it loose back at the scene, before you arrived. Wouldn't let go for anything. We figured it was easier to let her keep it than risk her heart rate climbing any higher."

"Sats are climbing," the paramedic said, half to himself, half to Derek. "She's tougher than she looks. Talk to her if she comes around — keeps them oriented."

The ambulance lurched into motion, weaving down a road still lit orange on both sides.

The woman's eyes opened halfway a few minutes later — not fully conscious, not fully anywhere, her gaze swimming somewhere between the ceiling of the ambulance and somewhere much further away.

"Margaret," she murmured, unprompted, as if answering a question no one had asked. "My name is Margaret."

"Margaret." Derek leaned in, keeping his voice low and steady, the same voice he used on scared kids pulled from car wrecks. "I'm Derek. You're safe now. You're headed to the hospital, and I'm not going anywhere until you're there."

"Derek," she repeated, testing the word like it weighed something. Her eyes drifted, unfocused, then sharpened again on his face with an effort that visibly cost her. "That's not — that's not the name that should have—"

She stopped herself, coughing, the mask fogging with the force of it. The paramedic adjusted the flow and murmured something about not overexerting herself, and for a moment Margaret's eyes closed, her chest working hard just to keep pulling air.

Her hand found his wrist again, the same startling grip.

"Derek," she repeated, and something in the way she said it made the hair on his arms rise for the second time that night. Not like a stranger's name. Like a word she'd been carrying for a very long time and had finally been allowed to say out loud.

"You have my eyes," she said, and her voice cracked on it, half a laugh, half something closer to grief. "God help me, you have his eyes exactly."

"Whose eyes, Margaret?" Derek kept his tone gentle, though something cold was moving through his chest now, threading itself between his ribs. "Whose eyes do I have?"

Her grip tightened. Her gaze finally landed and held, clear for just a moment, the fog of smoke and shock burning off her like the last of the flames behind them.

"You shouldn't be using that name," she said. "Moss. That was never supposed to be your—"

A monitor beside her began to shriek.

"She's crashing," the paramedic snapped, already moving, already shoving Derek back out of the way with one arm while reaching for equipment with the other. "Sir, I need you clear, now—"

"Margaret." Derek fought to stay close, to hold on to whatever she'd been about to say, but hands were pulling him back, the ambulance was full of shouted numbers and tearing packaging, and Margaret's eyes had gone unfocused again, rolling back as the paramedic worked over her with brutal efficiency.

"Margaret, whose eyes—"

"Sir!" A hand on his chest, firm, final. "You need to sit down or you need to get out. Now."

Derek sat back hard against the ambulance wall, the satchel still clutched in his hands, his own heartbeat suddenly louder than the sirens outside.

He looked down at the bag. At the worn brass clasp. At the years of careful handling stitched into leather that someone had clearly protected like it mattered more than her own life.

Whatever was inside it, Margaret had been ready to burn alive rather than let it go. Two firefighters, according to the paramedic, hadn't been able to pry it from her hands even half-conscious. That wasn't panic. That wasn't shock. That was a decision, made a long time before tonight, that this particular object did not get left behind under any circumstances — not fire, not death, not anything.

And she had looked at his face — his ordinary, unremarkable face, the one Erin had once called reliable-looking in a tone that made it sound like an insult — and seen someone else entirely. Not a stranger who'd pulled her from a burning house. Someone she'd been looking for, or waiting for, or perhaps dreading having to finally face.

The ambulance hit a pothole and the whole vehicle jolted; Margaret didn't stir. Derek sat with the satchel in his lap the rest of the way, watching her chest rise and fall, and found he was afraid of two things at once — that she wouldn't wake up again, and that she would, and would finish the sentence she'd started.