Chapter 29 - Soren
At first, running through the forest is difficult, as we have to dodge the burning trees and roots, the low-lying plants that trip us up.
We’re used to making our way through fires like this, but this is different.
There’s something in the air, in the way the forest cowers, that communicates a deeper, more malicious presence.
Before, I could almost get lost in the motions of fighting the daemon fire and forget what it was, forget that it was different than a normal fire in more than just behavior and intensity.
It comes from somewhere else. Somewhere other than this world, the hells beyond our plane. And when it’s pulled in here, it reacts violently. Daemon energy often starts fires upon contact with our world because it’s too intense, and it doesn’t belong here.
And now, more than ever, I’m remembering that fact.
This fire reminds me of that very first one that took the town by surprise, razing through everything and leaving nothing but ash in its place.
For days after that, the members of our pack wandered the streets in a daze, searching for things that were long gone, swallowed and destroyed by the flames.
“On your ten,” Lachlan says from behind me, his hand swinging out to my arm, finding me and grounding me in time and space.
The smoke around us is so thick and black that it’s like we’re wandering through the forest in the deepest part of the night, or trying to make our way through it on another planet without a sun at all.
It’s disorienting, but helpful when we communicate with each other. In our haste, we left our comms back in the station, so all we have now is our voices. And I’m afraid that if I open my mouth to shout, I might breathe in too much smoke and collapse.
“Thanks,” I murmur, though I know Lachlan can’t hear it.
The thing most people don’t realize about fires is that they’re loud.
The trees groaning, creaking. The rush of hot air from the temperature change.
The wind blowing through the area, whistling through the branches.
Once, I heard someone from the Midwest say that a tornado sounds like a train.
That if you wake up in the middle of the night and hear a train, you should be scared.
A fire sounds like standing under a helicopter or behind a jet engine. All that exhaust and hot air from behind an engine, but times a million. Like sitting in the center of a convection oven.
It doesn’t help that it’s an unseasonably hot day, that the air seems to spark with every step we take, almost like it’s carrying extra magic, bleeding out from whatever is happening with the girls.
The wind, combined with the dark and the smoke, is like being in a tunnel full of debris, the smell of burnt objects ingrained in your nostrils.
Disorienting. Maybe it’s exactly what it would feel like to be caught up in a tornado, sucked up into the sky, not knowing which way was up and feeling random, destroyed bits of your life flying around you as you flail.
In our human forms, our senses are still sharp, but not quite as good as they would be if we shifted.
But we can’t shift, or we won’t be able to use the packs of extinguishers on our backs, the thick, suffocating stuff we spray in wide arcs on either side of us, pushing through the forest and doing what we can to snuff out the blue flames around us.
For the first ten minutes, we make impossibly slow progress, each of us frustrated and ready to move, but just trying to stay alive and avoid the falling branches.
As we get closer and closer to the ridge, it gets easier to run, to push ahead.
Because there are no trees left to run around.
The daemon fire burns so bright and so hot, the entire canopy has been reduced to the finest silver ash.
We tromp through it like soldiers on the beach, the stuff flying into the air, spinning and shimmering.
It would be beautiful if it weren’t the aftermath of such destruction.
If it didn’t remind me of racing home in high school, barely making it to the house in time to find Gramps trapped in the flames, pushing aside a fallen beam to pick him up and carry him out.
If this ash didn’t make me think of that first fire, everything we lost, the way Aurela retreated, and I never saw her in town after that—then, it might be pretty.
But more than all that, the stuff drifting through the air with the embers and smoke is making my lungs feel small, tight in my chest. Occasionally, I try to cough to loosen up the feeling, but I work to keep my muscles tight, or I might actually hack up a lung.
I had asthma as a kid. Sometimes, and especially when we’re firefighting, it gets bad enough that I feel like I might suffocate completely. I try not to let the guys see how much it affects me, but they notice, thumping me on the back, even though it doesn’t do much to help.
“Aurela!”
We come flying up onto the ridge just as she leaves the ground. Though I’m focused on my mate, I can’t ignore the hellish landscape around me, the fissures in the ground, spreading from the cliff’s edge and all the way to the forest, dividing the space into cracked, scattered pieces.
Blue flames dance between the cracks, hot air blasting from them. It’s impossible to breathe, impossible to think. The smell of sulfur is hot and thick, smoke sitting heavy in the air, so each breath I take burns on the way in.
“There!” Kalen says, pointing, and I can barely hear him over the roar of the fire. When we follow his hand, we see several fire daemons beating on something. It must be the girls.
Together, we run toward it and realize what’s going on.
Maeve is unconscious on the ground, Phina leaning over her, Valerie straining with her hands up over her head, desperately trying to keep a protective barrier up over the three of them.
The three women are sweating profusely, and when Valerie sees us, her concentration slips, her hands faltering and dropping closer to her head.
“Valerie!” Lachlan bellows, shifting beside me, running as fast as he can.
We all follow suit, shifting and racing through the space, jumping over the crevices and through the fire.
The smell of burning fur joins the others in the air, the scent reminding me of when the fire hit Lachlan’s house.
When Tara nearly burned Felix alive, his coat and skin turning black from the trauma.
Tara…Aurela.
Kalen, Xeran, and Lachlan go toward their mates and Maeve, but I veer to the left, heading for the cliff’s edge, some of the smoke clearing so I can see the wide open air beyond it. The lake is in the distance, gray and tumultuous, churning behind the girls.
Obviously, I’m aware of magic, and I’ve seen several displays of it that have rewired my attitude toward it. Phina and Nora are plenty powerful. In fact, Nora saved herself on this very ridge by catching herself with magic to keep from falling.
But this is something else. I can feel the magic cracking in the air, the raw energy like just before a thunderstorm when you can taste the potential for lightning, the hair standing up on the backs of your arms.
My mate is suspended in the air, her golden hair blowing in the wind. She’s shouting something at the ball of blue flames across from her, but I can’t hear a word they’re saying.
I feel helpless, useless, standing on the edge of the cliff, unable to do anything to help her. I reach back for the nozzle, wondering if I could get some of it on Tara like I did last time. If it got her down, that would give Aurela enough time to escape.
For what feels like an eternity but is likely only seconds, I watch them, heart thundering, shouting into the din for Aurela to come back down.
It doesn’t even register; my voice whipped away by the wind, the roar of noises behind me.
Logically, I know that if there’s nothing I can do to help Aurela, I should go back to the others, help them fight the fire daemons.
But staring at her in the sky is like staring at the pot, waiting for it to boil.
It’s as if I keep my eye on her, I can stop anything from happening to her.
If I look away from her, I have the certainty that she’s going to fall, crash into the lake below. That Tara will find a way to hurt her.
“Aurela!”
Despite the noise, I hear a voice rip through the space that I recognize instantly. I spin around to see Shae and Frederic racing through the flames, their clothes tattered and torn.
“No,” Shae whispers, but as she gets close, I put an arm out, worried she might run right over the edge of the cliff. She turns to me, her gaze panicked, her eyes wet, likely stinging from the fire. “Can you get her down here?”
“I…” A few days ago, I was at Shae’s place, hearing how I wasn’t good enough, and now we’re standing here together, watching her daughter take on the woman who’s been starting the fires and destroying our town. “I think we have to trust her.”
“I knew this would happen!” Frederic shouts, pacing, his hands shaking in a way I recognize—he’ll shift any second from the emotions. “That damned magic! I knew it would come to something like this!”
“Soren, watch out!”
I spin with the Cambiases to find three fire daemons approaching, trapping us between them and the cliff’s edge, their massive arms waving like tentacles crafted from the blaze.
Lachlan comes flying in, turning and sliding in front of the three of us, then launching into one of the daemons without preamble. With the thing knocked back, Kalen arrives, spraying his extinguisher up and over the creature.
Frederic looks at me, then shifts into his wolf form. He launches himself at the daemon, even as Shae screams for him to stop, and I blast the thing with an extinguisher, the thick muck coating it and putting it out in a great, heaving gasp of smoke.
I hate them. At least, I thought I hated them. But as more fire daemons rise from the ground, shifting mightily in the direction of Tara and Aurela, I realize we’re all going to have to work together to save the girl we love.