ASH (Bone Hollow Sinners MC #14)

Prologue

Isolde

The ashes are always cold when I come back.

That's the thing they don't tell you about wildfire sites.

The fire burns hot enough to melt aluminum and warp steel, hot enough to fuse soil into glass beads if it sits in one place long enough, but once it's done, once it's eaten everything it can eat and moved on, what it leaves behind is colder than anywhere else on the mountain.

The trees don't shade. The earth doesn't hold warmth.

There's nothing left to soak up the sun and give it back, so the wind moves through the dead like it's grieving.

I stand at what used to be the command post and let the cold work into my boots.

It's the second anniversary today. Two years since Captain Holt called for evacuation and didn't make it back to his own truck.

Two years since Rodriguez radioed in that the fire had jumped the line, his voice cracking on the second syllable because he was already running.

Two years since Kim — twenty-three years old, freckled, with a laugh you could hear three rooms over — said the words I haven't been able to delete from my phone.

I pull it out of my pocket now. Cracked screen. Battery at sixty-two percent. The audio file is the third one in my saved folder, after voicemails from my mother and an old recording of Rodriguez singing in a karaoke bar in Lexington. I press play.

There's Holt first. Calm voice, clipped, military.

He gives the order to fall back to Anchor Point Two.

There's the rasp of his radio handing off and someone in the background — could be Diaz, could be Whitlock — saying something about wind direction.

Then Rodriguez, half a minute later, the static eating his consonants.

"It jumped. The line's gone. I'm at the south slope and the line is — Captain, the line is gone, we need to —"

The recording skips a beat. I always brace for it. I always brace and it always hits me anyway.

Then Kim. The youngest. Was the youngest. Her voice is high and tight and almost confused, like she's just realized something she doesn't want to say out loud and can't help it.

"It's everywhere. It's coming from the wrong direction. Someone lit this."

Static. A pop that might be radio failure or might be the body cam she was wearing reaching the temperature where its plastic housing surrendered. Static. Static. Nothing.

I stop the recording. I always stop it there. I've never let it run past that point because what comes after is just hiss for forty seconds and then the audio cuts out automatically when the file runs out of room.

The hillside in front of me is a graveyard pretending to be a forest. Charred trunks like rotten teeth.

The skeleton of Engine 4, the one Holt rode in on, half-buried in slag where the bulldozers shoved it during cleanup.

Most of the burn scar has been bulldozed over and replanted with sapling pine that has not, in two summers, gotten higher than my knee, but there are pockets — corners the heavy equipment couldn't reach — where you can still see the original wound.

Black ground. White ash in the cracks. Twisted lumps of melted equipment that I can identify the way a pathologist identifies bone.

That was a helmet. That was a tank fitting. That was a radio.

I sit down on the dirt where the command tent was pitched. I don't pray. I'm not religious in any way I could name. But I sit with them for a while and I tell them, again, what I've been telling them for two years.

I tell them I haven't stopped. I tell them I know it wasn't lightning.

I tell them I've been following the chemistry, and the chemistry has a name and a place even if I don't have the face yet.

I tell them I'm sorry I didn't get to them faster, sorry I only got Rodriguez out, sorry that the only crew member I saved hates me a little now because I dragged him through fire and the burns took his left hand from him in pieces.

He won't talk to me anymore. Rodriguez. The one I saved.

He left the department a year ago and moved to Albuquerque to live with his sister and he doesn't answer my calls and I don't blame him because every time he sees my face he sees the fire that took his fingers.

Survivor's guilt is supposed to be the prerogative of the living.

It turns out it can also be a wall between the living.

I'm not bitter about it. He survived. That's the math I cared about.

He gets to be a person who doesn't want to talk to me.

That's a luxury six other people don't have.

I look at my hand.

The scar runs from the base of my thumb to my wrist, a pink-and-white rope of healed tissue that aches in cold weather and remembers things my brain has tried to forget.

I burned it through my glove pulling Rodriguez out.

The leather had partially melted into my palm by the time I got him to the staging area, and the medics had to peel it off in pieces.

I refused painkillers until they'd loaded the other survivors.

There weren't any other survivors. I refused painkillers until I'd given my statement.

They gave them to me anyway. I woke up two days later in a hospital in Charleston and I started investigating from the bed.

Two years of work fits in three banker's boxes in the back of my truck.

Fire investigation reports from fourteen separate jurisdictions, half of them pulled through favors, the other half through Freedom of Information requests so persistent that I now have a dedicated paralegal at the regional fire marshal's office who picks up when I call.

Accelerant chromatography results from twelve of those fourteen scenes — the other two were too thoroughly destroyed to recover anything.

Photographs. Wind data. Topographical surveys.

A map of West Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee and Virginia with red pins on it and a pattern that's been clarifying itself in my head for six months now, ever since I figured out how to look at it.

The pattern is a name. The name is a town. The town is called Bone Hollow.

I haven't slept properly in two years. I sleep in two-hour increments because that's how long it takes my dreams to find me and wake me up.

I run. I work. I read fire science papers until my eyes burn worse than the smoke ever did.

I keep a journal because the trauma counselor told me to and I write in it because she's earnest and kind and I don't want to disappoint her, but what I write isn't feelings.

What I write is investigation notes. What I write is suspect lists.

What I write is a chemical formula I've been trying to crack for ten months, a compound that burns hot and clean and leaves a specific carbon ladder in its residue that I've never seen in any commercial accelerant and that doesn't appear in any of the FBI reference databases.

I've started calling it the Hollow Compound, because it's all roads to Bone Hollow, and because it leaves a hollow in everything it touches.

The wind picks up. I tilt my face into it.

There's a particular skill to reading wind.

They teach it in fire academy but only the people who already have the sense for it ever get good at it.

The wind tells you what the fire wants. Today's wind is dry and steady from the southwest, ten to twelve knots, low humidity, and if there were a fire here right now it would run north-northeast at a rate of about half a mile per hour through this kind of fuel load.

I know this because I've spent fifteen years learning fire's grammar.

The fire that killed my crew was speaking a different grammar.

That's the thing the investigators missed.

They saw a hot summer and a dry stretch and an electrical storm forty miles east the night before, and they wrote it up as natural cause.

They saw what wildfire is supposed to look like.

They didn't see what this one didn't look like.

They didn't see that it started from three points simultaneously, when natural wildfire almost never does that.

They didn't see that the initial burn ran against the prevailing wind for the first six minutes — against the wind, which violates physics unless something is actively pushing the fire faster than the air can dissipate the heat.

They didn't see the chromatography on the soil samples because the soil samples got contaminated, allegedly, in transport, and were never re-tested.

I tested them. I drove to the lab in Morgantown myself with samples I'd taken in the first hour before the official investigators arrived, samples I'd kept in a personal evidence locker because something in my gut told me to.

The lab tech who ran them for me has since retired and won't return my calls because the report I asked her for got someone unhappy somewhere.

The Hollow Compound was in those samples. Every one of them.

I stand up. My knees crack. I'm thirty-one years old and I move like I'm fifty because grief is heavy and I carry it in my joints.

The truck is parked at the foot of the access road.

I walk down to it slowly, taking my time, letting the burn scar of the hillside say goodbye the way the wind says goodbye to dry grass.

I don't know when I'll be back. The plan, as much as I have a plan, is to come back when I can stand here and tell them his name.

The man who lit the fire. The hands that built the device.

The mouth that spoke the order, if there was an order.

I want a name to put on the marker I'll build for them someday when I have a yard of my own and the right kind of stone.

I get in the truck. My equipment is in the back.

Thermal cameras, accelerant detection kits, a portable gas chromatograph that I had to mortgage half my pension to buy.

A toolbox full of evidence collection supplies.

A first-aid kit large enough to be insulting.

A duffle of clothes. Two firearms — both legally registered, both for which I have multi-state carry permits because the lawyer who helped me set up the trip warned me what kind of country I was driving into.

The kind of country where outlaw motorcycle clubs run the back roads. The kind of country where the law looks the other way for the right favors. The kind of country where a woman alone asking questions about fires gets answers that come in the shape of a problem.

I'm not stupid. I know what I'm walking into.

I turn the key. The engine catches on the second try.

The radio comes on at a low murmur — a country station, the only thing that gets reception out here in these mountains — and someone is singing about a heart on fire, and I almost laugh because the universe has a sense of humor and it isn't a kind one.

I look at the hillside in the rearview mirror as I pull out.

"I'm coming back with a name," I say. To the dead. To the cold air. To the part of me that died with them and the part that didn't and still has work to do. "I promise."

The road south is two-lane and curving. The mountains get bigger.

The trees get thicker. The towns get smaller and the gas stations sparser, and somewhere ahead of me, in a holler folded between two ridges, a man who knows fire better than anyone in these mountains is going about his day with no idea that a firefighter is driving toward him with two years of grief and a name on her lips that's about to become his problem.

I drive into the dark.

The mountains close over the road like a hand.