11 Finn #2
“The courtyard.” She pointed through the blown-out east wall, where the open square at the heart of the house was visible through the smoke.
“The collapse created a gap on the far side—I saw it coming in. If you go through the courtyard and come at them from the east wall instead of through the fall, you bypass the collapse entirely.”
“The courtyard’s fully involved. The structure fire and the ward-lattice have been feeding each other in there for twenty minutes—”
“I know what’s in the courtyard.” She met my eyes. “Fire doesn’t burn you, Finn.”
“Fire doesn’t burn me. If you’re suggesting you follow me through—”
“I’m not following you through. I’m going around.” She was already moving toward the blown-out wall, and I grabbed her arm—too hard, the wolf in me snarling at the idea of her running deeper into a collapsing structure while her body tried to eat itself alive.
“Sloane. Stop. Listen to me.”
She stopped. Not because of the grip. Because of my voice, and whatever was in it.
“Your fever is at a hundred and four minimum. I can feel it cooking you through the bond. You’ve been fighting and your hands are shaking. If you push into the east wing and the floor goes—”
“Then the floor goes and you pull me out.” Her jaw set. “Finn. There are two children behind that wall who are running out of air. I am not going to stand in a hallway and debate while they suffocate because my mate thinks I’m too sick to climb through a window.”
The word mate hit me like a fist. Not because it was new—because of how she said it. Like a credential. Like a rank she’d earned and would not have questioned.
“The east wing,” I said. “I go through the courtyard and come at them from the inside. You go around the outside and come in through the east window. We meet at the pocket.”
“Yes.”
“And when we get them out, you are done. You hear me? You are done fighting. You find cover and you let the fever land.”
“Conditional acceptance.” She pulled her arm free. “Depending on whether the fever gives a damn about your schedule.”
A beam groaned overhead. We were out of time.
“Go,” I said.
She went left. I went right, through the blown-out wall, into the courtyard.
The two fires, one of flame and one of broken magic, suddenly met in the open square at the heart of the house—
And the air went wrong. The pressure dropped. A hot wind came screaming in through every opening, and the fire in the courtyard stood up.
It stood up and it turned.
Forty years, I’d seen five of them. An ash devil—a rotating column of superheated ash and ember spun up out of everything a fire has already eaten. This one built out of the guts of the house.
And now I was seeing my second one in two days.
The crews cross themselves when they see one. They say it’s the burned dead getting up to walk.
It grew directly between me and the pocket where the family huddled.
The child screamed again behind the column.
I walked into it.
The ash devil swallowed me whole, gray and roaring, ember-light spinning past my face, the whole burning history of a hidden home turning around me in a column taller than the house had been—and it lay down against me the way it had before.
The heat bent. The ash came against my skin and clung, coating me to the shoulders, into my hair, filling the deepened lines of the oath at my wrists and throat, and it did not burn.
The ash knows its own.
That was all.
And then I was through the far wall of the column and dropping to my knees in the coffin-sized space where the hedge-witch had her body wrapped around two children, and her bloody face came up and she looked at me—and she didn’t scream.
She started crying. “You came,” she said. “You came.”
“I’m going to get you out.” I kept my voice level, the way I’d kept it on a thousand fire calls. Calm is contagious in a crisis. Panic is faster. “There’s a window on the east wall. My partner’s clearing it from outside right now. Can you stand?”
“My leg—” She shifted, and I saw the angle of her left ankle. Broken. The collapse had caught it. “The children can move. I can’t walk.”
“You don’t need to walk. Can the bigger one carry the smaller one for thirty seconds?”
The older child—a boy, maybe seven, soot-faced and rigid with a silence that I recognized, the silence of a kid who’d gone past terror into the cold stillness on the other side—looked up at me. His arms were already locked around the little girl.
“I’ve got her,” he said. His voice barely shook.
“Good man. Don’t let go.”
A crash from the east wall. Then Sloane’s voice, cutting through the roar: “Finn! Window’s clear! I can see them!”
I looked through the smoke. She’d come in through the east-side window—her body half through the frame, one hand braced on the sill, reaching into the pocket with the other.
The fire-light caught her face and she was incandescent—fever-flushed, ash-streaked, her gold eyes blazing in the smoke, and the Heat was rolling off her in waves I could taste twenty feet away, clove and copper and the sweet dangerous edge that meant her body was approaching the limit.