Chapter 7
Isla
I'm dressed in thirty seconds. Jeans, flannel, boots unlaced. I open the apartment door and Garrett fills the hallway.
"Get downstairs and stay inside."
He's moving fast for a seven-and-a-half-foot minotaur, his shoulders nearly touching both walls. He doesn't stop when he sees me.
"What's happening?"
"I said, stay inside."
He's already past me. I hear the front door slam and his footsteps hit gravel, and the alarm keeps screaming.
I don't stay inside.
The security floods on the residential wing throw white light across the lot, and Garrett stands on the gravel path between the garage and the front door.
He stands broadside with his feet planted and his head lowered, and the growl rolling out of him carries across the lot with a resonance I feel in the soles of my boots.
Behind him, the building where every woman and child on this compound sleeps.
A man runs. I catch him at the edge of the floodlight's reach—human, medium build, dark clothes, sprinting for the tree line like his life depends on it, because it does.
Jax closes on him from the garage side, the wolf shifter covering ground in strides that eat the distance, but the man hits the trees first and disappears into the dark.
Jax follows. The crashing through the underbrush fades into the tree line and then there's nothing.
Garrett hasn't moved. He holds his position between the building and whatever just happened, and that's when I look down at the gravel path and see the fuel cans.
Two of them. Five-gallon, red plastic, sitting upright on the path twenty feet from the front door.
One cap off, the other loose. The smell hits me before I process what I'm seeing—gasoline, the kind that coats your sinuses and sits on your tongue.
A dark stain spreads from the open can across the gravel in a line that runs toward the building.
He started pouring.
Whoever that man is, he walked onto this compound in the dark carrying ten gallons of fuel and started pouring it toward the building where the families sleep.
Sarah comes through the front door with Reeve on her hip. Her face shows nothing I can read in the dark, but she sees the fuel cans, the pour line and the direction it runs, and her arm tightens around her son.
"Get inside now," she says.
I pass Sarah on the porch and go through the front door.
The hallway fills with bodies. Jess has her son against her shoulder and her free hand on Morgan's back, guiding her toward the interior.
Morgan moves with both hands under her belly and the set of her jaw locked.
Ava follows with Ellie and Holly. Nina appears from the far room carrying her baby, and the baby cries the thin, startled cry of a child pulled out of sleep by a sound too big to understand.
"Interior rooms," I say. "Away from the outside walls. The fumes need to ventilate before anyone goes near that side of the building."
Jess looks at me.
"The bathroom on the hall has no exterior windows," she says. "Kids in there first."
We get them in. Reeve, Finn's son, Nina's baby, Lily half-asleep and asking questions nobody answers.
Kim lowers herself onto the bathroom floor with her back against the tub and both hands on her belly, and Morgan sits beside her on the closed toilet lid.
Holly leans against the doorframe, arms crossed.
I go back outside.
Garrett stands on the path. The two Cascades allies flank the building's corners, and Jax emerges from the tree line shaking his head.
"Lost him past the creek," he says. "Footprints go north through the drainage. Colt's cameras picked him up at 1:47 on the approach—auto-triggered the alarm."
Garrett nods. His eyes don't leave the perimeter.
The fumes sit heavy in the still air. I've handled diesel spills at the rescue center. A fuel tank leak from the backup generator two winters ago contaminated the soil near the fawn pen. The protocol is the same: contain the spread, absorb what you can, prevent ignition.
"Where's your fire suppression supply?" I ask Garrett.
He turns his head. Looks at me.
"Sand. Dry chemical. Whatever you use for fuel fires."
"Garage. West wall in the blue barrel."
I cross the lot. The garage sits dark, and I find the barrel by touch: fifty gallons of fire suppression sand, a scoop hanging from the rim. I fill a bucket. Then another. I carry them back to the gravel path, and Garrett takes one from my hand without a word.
We work. I spread sand over the pour line, starting at the leading edge where the gasoline runs closest to the compound, covering the wet ground in layers thick enough to absorb and smother.
Garrett handles the area around the cans.
Neither of us talks. The alarm stopped at some point—I don't remember when—and the compound sits in a silence.
Sand in my hands. Gasoline in my nose. The weight of the bucket pulling at my shoulders every time I bend.
I spread it anyway. I've cleaned contaminated soil at two in the morning with a headlamp and a shovel because an animal's drinking water sat downstream and nobody came.
This isn't different. The species in the building behind me are different, but the work is the same.
The fuel cans stay where they fell. Evidence. Jax photographs them from three angles with his phone.
I go inside and wash my hands at the kitchen sink until the gasoline smell fades. Then I stand there with the water running and my palms braced on the counter and breathe through my mouth until the shaking stops.
The sky lightens, and nobody in the kitchen has slept.
Sarah stands at the counter with her phone in her hand. Garrett leans in the kitchen doorway.
"I should call Knox."
"And tell him what?" Garrett's voice rumbles low enough that the kids in the next room won't hear. "He's in a ring in the mountains. He can't ride back, and if he tries, he could get himself killed."
"He'll want to know."
"He'll want to come home." Garrett shifts his weight against the frame. "I'll call the Cascades. Dravik's cousin runs a crew out of Tillamook, I'll see if we can get some extra bodies. Let Knox finish what he rode out there to do. Trust us to keep you protected like Knox trusts us."
Sarah looks at the phone. She sets it face-down on the counter. "I do trust you, Garrett. Knox is going to be pissed though."
"We handled it, but yes, heads will roll when he gets back."
Jess stands at the counter making coffee on autopilot. Her son sits on the floor pulling at her bootlace. She pours mugs without asking who wants one and sets them on the table, every hand reaches for one.
Kim sits beside Morgan. Her hand rests on her belly, and she picks up her coffee mug with the other hand and drinks.
Holly stands at the window with her mug, watching the lot.
Lily comes down the hallway with Nina's baby on her hip, fourteen going on twenty-five.
I sit at the table with them. Not one of us has slept.
Garrett steps outside to make the call. Through the window I watch him pace the lot with his phone to his ear, and ten minutes later he comes back in.
"Cascades crew out of Tillamook are sending six riders, they'll be here by noon.
" Sarah nods once. She handled the crisis.
He's handling what comes next. Nobody called Knox.
Jess sets a plate of toast on the table. Nobody asked for it but everybody eats.
I pick up my mug. The coffee tastes like the pot downstairs. Decent, strong, made by someone who fills this kitchen without negotiation. I drink it with the smell of gasoline fading from my skin.
Five days here. Nobody sat me down and told me how they chose their lives. I just knelt on the gravel with sand in my hands and helped keep their families safe, and somewhere between the fuel spill and the sunrise, this stopped being someone else's compound.
After toast I find Lily in the hallway with Reeve on her hip and Finn's son holding her hand.
"You guys want to come help me with the animals?" I ask.
Her face changes. The tight jaw, the too-old stance—it loosens and she nods.
The rehab enclosures sit behind the garage.
Three pens I built my second day here with wire Garrett cut to size without asking what it's for.
The hawk gets fed first because she's the worst patient, impatient and furious about the splinted wing.
I hand Lily the tongs and show her the angle so the hawk takes the mouse without startling.
She nails it on the first try. The owl takes his from the drop chute without fuss.
Finn's son presses his face against the mesh of the fox kit's pen and goes still for the first time since the alarm pulled him out of sleep.
The animals don't care about fuel cans or men in the dark. They eat. They settle. The kids settle with them.
I look at the empty field past the enclosures. Room for a flight cage. Ground pens. A place these kids could come that has nothing to do with fences and perimeter cameras.
The morning passes. I help Jess with the children and watch Garrett walk the perimeter with Jax, the two of them covering ground in slow sweeps, checking the fence line and the tree break for any sign of a second approach.
Later that night I walk through the front door and across the lot, past the sand-covered pour line and the gravel Jax raked over the worst of the stain, past the garage where Tom's workbench holds his labeled supplies and the pegboard hangs above it with hooks for every tool.
I reach the gate and stop.
The southern road runs straight from the compound toward the coast highway and bends out of sight at the tree line, and beyond the bend it connects to the mountain passes that climb south through the range to the Bloodstone valley.
I face the road. My hands hang in my pockets. The air smells like damp gravel and the last of the gasoline.
I check my phone for the first time since the alarm. One text from Tom, sent when they reached camp.
Behave.
I stand at the gate of a compound I helped defend last night and wait for the sound of engines from the south.