Chapter 1
Isolde
The gate to Bone Hollow doesn't pretend to be friendly. It's chain-link topped with razor wire, set into a granite-faced cut in the mountain road, with a guard shack the size of a confessional and a man inside it who watches me coming from a quarter mile away.
I don't slow down. I'm doing thirty-five on a road built for twenty. The truck's suspension is complaining and my coffee cup is rattling in the holder and I can see the man in the guard shack lift a radio to his mouth and say something into it that almost certainly contains the word her.
He's not wrong. He's just earlier than I expected.
I stop at the gate with the bumper four feet from the steel and I put my window down and I rest my left hand on the door frame so he can see it.
I want him to see my hands. Hands are the first thing a wary man looks for, and I want him to see that mine are scarred in a particular way and that I'm not reaching for anything.
He steps out of the shack. He's young — early twenties — wearing a leather vest with a single rocker that says PROSPECT and a sidearm holstered openly on his hip.
He's a wolf. I know this because I've been reading about the Sinners for six months and because his eyes catch the daylight and throw it back gold around the pupil.
Shifter, the literature calls it. I've never met one before today.
I assume I'm going to meet a lot of them in the next hour, assuming I get past the gate.
"Ma'am," he says. "You're on a private road."
"I know."
"You need to turn around."
"I need to speak to whoever in this compound handles your fire operations."
He blinks. His face doesn't change but his head tilts about a quarter inch and I can see him reorganize what he thought this conversation was. He was expecting a lost tourist. He's adjusting to me with admirable speed.
"My what?"
"Your fire operations," I say, slow and clear, like I'm at a witness stand. "Whoever sets your buildings on fire. Whoever burns your problems. I want to talk to him. Today. Now. I'll wait."
"Lady—"
"My name is Isolde Flynn. I'm a firefighter out of Stillwater Hollow, West Virginia, and I'm not here to give you a hard time.
I'm here because I have information your club needs and I think your club has information I need, and I'd rather have this conversation in your clubhouse than out in the world where things get messy.
I have ID. I have credentials. I'm not law enforcement.
I'm not press. I'm a private party with a problem that has your fingerprints on it, and if you don't open this gate and let me talk to whoever's in charge, the next person who comes up this road asking the same questions is going to be a federal investigator with a warrant, and you'll wish you'd taken your chances with me. "
The prospect stares at me.
Then, very slowly, he keys his radio without breaking eye contact.
"Got a situation at the gate," he says into it. "Female. Civilian. Fire department, says she's got information."
The radio crackles back. I can't make out the words but the prospect's mouth thins.
"Yeah," he says. "Yeah. Copy."
He clips the radio. He looks at me.
"Get out of the truck. Slowly. Hands where I can see them. Anything in your truck I'd find inconvenient, you mention it now."
"Two firearms," I say. "Both legal, both with multi-state permits. One in the glove box, one under the driver's seat. I'm leaving them. There's also fire investigation equipment in the back. Cameras. Chromatograph. Chemistry kit. None of it's a weapon."
"You can leave the truck here. You'll get a ride up."
I get out. He pats me down with brisk professionalism.
He doesn't enjoy it and neither do I. He confirms I'm not carrying.
He waves at the shack and a second prospect comes out — older, bearded, and driving a six-wheeled UTV that looks like it costs more than my truck.
I climb in. The bearded one doesn't speak to me.
The first prospect, the young one, gives me a long look that I can't quite read and then opens the gate.
We drive up the access road for about a mile.
The compound, when we crest the ridge and start down into the bowl, is bigger than I expected.
I'd seen aerial photos in the open-source intelligence I'd pulled together, but photos don't catch the way a place breathes, and Bone Hollow is breathing.
There's a main clubhouse — long, low, two stories, with a wide deck and a half dozen motorcycles parked in front.
There's a forge with smoke rising from its chimney.
There's a row of cabins along the eastern slope, well-kept, with garden boxes and laundry lines.
There's a fenced area where children are playing.
Children. I knew, of course, I'd read it, but the gut-punch of seeing the children is something else.
This isn't a clubhouse. This is a town.
The UTV pulls up to the main building. The bearded prospect gestures me out and points at the door without a word.
I climb the deck stairs. My boots are loud on the wood.
I'm aware of every set of eyes on me — and there are a lot of eyes on me, men coming out of buildings to watch, women pausing in mid-conversation, a kid stopping mid-throw to stare.
I'm not paranoid. I'm in a wolf compound and the entire compound knows I'm here.
They can probably smell what I am — the smoke ground into the leather of my jacket, the way grief sits in human sweat, the fact that I'm a firefighter and they're an arson-friendly motorcycle club and there is no plausible reason for me to be on these stairs.
I keep walking.
The bar inside is dim. It takes my eyes a second to adjust. When they do I see a long polished bar on the left, a row of booths on the right, a pool table in the back, and roughly twenty men in cuts watching me from various distances.
Some are sitting. Some are standing. Some have pool cues in their hands and have stopped mid-shot.
The atmosphere is the kind of quiet that you only get when a room full of predators is deciding whether something is prey.
A man behind the bar — older, gray-streaked beard, a vest with PRESIDENT on it — looks me over and jerks his head at a stool.
"Sit," he says. "I'm in church for another twenty minutes. You'll wait."
"I'll wait."
He pours me a glass of water without asking. He sets it in front of me. He says, "If you're armed, declare it now."
"I'm not. Your prospect at the gate confirmed."
He nods. He turns and walks through a door at the back of the bar that I assume leads to whatever meeting room they use for club business. The door closes behind him.
I drink my water.
The men in the bar stop pretending not to watch and just watch.
I can feel two dozen sets of eyes on the back of my neck.
I don't look up. I keep my eyes on the bar's surface, which is scarred and polished and dark with use, and I count my breaths and I run through what I'm going to say when whoever they bring me finally walks in.
I'm rehearsing the third version of my opening when the door behind me opens — not the back door, the front door — and a man walks in.
I don't look up at first because dozens of men have been walking in and out of the bar for ten minutes. But I feel him.
That's the only way I can describe it. He walks in and the air in the room changes temperature, half a degree maybe, less than that, just enough that the hairs on my forearms rise.
The chatter that had restarted in the bar dies, not all at once but in waves, like the men closest to him notice him first and stop talking, and the silence radiates outward.
I feel rather than see the room reorient.
I turn my head.
He's standing just inside the doorway, six feet of him, lean and dark-haired, with one hand resting against the frame.
He's wearing a black T-shirt and jeans and a cut with patches I'd memorized from the surveillance photos — Sergeant-at-Arms; Top Rocker; the small embroidered match-and-flame above his left breast pocket that the open source had identified as the personal sigil of the Sinners' arsonist.
Then I see his face and my stomach drops.
The right side of his face is scarred. I don't mean a small scar — I mean a landscape.
A topographical map of damage from the corner of his jaw climbing up under his ear and into his hairline and disappearing somewhere I can't see.
The skin is ridged, tight, slightly darker than the unburned half.
His right eyebrow is mostly gone, and what hair grows on the right side of his head is sparser.
The scar extends down his neck and disappears under his shirt, and based on the way it crawls into the open collar, I'd estimate it covers a third of his body.
He's burned.
He's been burned the same way my crew was burned. Not the same — survivable, somehow — but the same kind of fire. Hot. Sustained. The kind that wraps around a body and doesn't let go.
He looks at me. His eyes are amber. They aren't gold like the prospect at the gate. They're brown shading to a deep yellow at the center, and they hold a stillness I don't have words for.
He says, "You're in the wrong place."
It isn't a threat. It's a statement of fact, said softly, like he's pointing out a meteorological condition.
I stand up off the stool. My hand is shaking a little. I press it flat to the bar to still it.
"You're the arsonist," I say.
The bar goes still in a different way than before.
The men who'd been pretending to be relaxed are no longer pretending.
I'm aware of bodies orienting toward me — slow, casual movements that aren't casual at all.
I have made a tactical error. I'm aware of it.
I keep talking anyway because I drove eight hours to talk and I am going to talk.
He doesn't move. He looks at me for a long, slow moment, the kind of look a man gives a fire he hasn't decided how to put out.
Then he says, "I'm a lot of things. What do you want?"
He's not denying it.
I take a breath. I open the folder I've been carrying under my arm and I lay the first photograph on the bar. Burn scar. Charred mountainside. A skeleton of an engine half-buried in slag.
"I want to talk to you about a fire," I say.
"Two years ago. West Virginia. A wildfire that wasn't a wildfire.
Six firefighters died. I'm the one who got out.
I've spent two years tracing the chemistry, and the chemistry leads here, to you, to your formula, and to a compound that doesn't appear anywhere else in the world that I can find. I want to know who set it."
He hasn't moved. But his nostrils flare, once.
"Describe the compound," he says.
So I do. I give him the chromatography numbers.
The carbon ladder. The burn temperature.
The residue pattern. I lay each piece of paper on the bar like a card I'm playing.
I watch his face as I talk and I see his expression do something I didn't expect — not the smooth-faced denial I'd rehearsed against, not the smug confirmation I'd dreaded, but a slow tightening around the eyes that I'd describe, in any other man, as alarm.
When I finish, he's quiet for a beat.
Then he says, "That's not mine."
I almost laugh. It comes out as a sound that isn't quite a laugh. "It matches your work."
"It matches someone copying my work."
"That's convenient."
"It's not convenient. It's a problem." He pushes off the door frame and walks toward me.
The room watches. He stops two feet away, close enough that I can feel — and this is the part I won't be able to explain to anyone later — the warmth coming off him.
Not the warmth of a human body in a warm room.
Something else. The kind of warmth you feel walking past a radiator that hasn't quite been turned down for summer.
"My compound burns at twenty-two hundred Celsius and leaves a specific lattice in the carbon residue.
The temperature you're describing is wrong.
The lattice is wrong. The ignition geometry is wrong.
Someone reverse-engineered me, and they did a sloppy job, and they've been using the sloppy job to set fires that look like mine, and one of those fires killed your people. "
I stare at him.
He says, very quietly, "I didn't set that fire. But I'm going to find out who did. Because whoever did it is trying to hang it on me. And I take it personally when somebody tries to put my name on dead firefighters."
I don't know what to say.
I look down at the photographs on the bar.
I look at the burn scar of my mountainside, the slag of my crew's engine.
I look back up at him. He hasn't moved. He's still standing two feet from me, radiating heat I can feel through my jacket, and his amber eyes are steady and his face — the half of it that isn't ruined — is composed in a way that takes effort.
I can see the effort. He's holding something down. The composure costs him.
"How do I know you're not lying," I say. My voice doesn't shake. I'm proud of that.
"You don't. Yet." He turns his head a fraction toward the prospect behind the bar. "Bring Savage in here. Now. Tell him I need to talk to him before church ends. Tell him it's about the compound."
The prospect bolts.
He turns back to me. The amber eyes hold steady.
"You're not leaving this compound," he says. "Not until we figure out who killed your people. Because whoever it is, they're trying to burn us too. And I think you and I are going to be useful to each other in ways neither of us is going to like."
I find my voice.
"I came here to find a killer."
"Then you're in the right place." He almost smiles, and almost is more than I expected from a face this damaged. "Just not for the reasons you thought."
He gestures at the stool I just stood up from. "Sit. We're going to be here for a while."
I sit. My hand stops shaking. The room around me starts breathing again, men returning to their conversations in a low rumble that doesn't quite cover the fact that they're all still listening.
The water in my glass is sweating. I pick it up and drink it down because my throat is dry, and when I set the glass down I realize my hand has stopped shaking entirely.
The man across the bar from me — the arsonist, the burned man, the man whose name I don't yet know — pulls out the stool beside me, sits down, and turns the first photograph toward himself with two fingers.
"Tell me everything," he says. "Start with the wind."
So I do.