Chapter 47
Reed
The barn’s on fire.
Behind me, Ash and Bram are already at the door, and the bond lights up with three other people’s fear all at once. I have to wall it off just to keep my own head.
“Nobody runs in there,” I shout. “Hear me? Nobody runs in there. Luna. Call nine-one-one. Tell them structure fire, cider barn, possible accelerant, then the address. Don’t forget ‘accelerant’, it makes them come faster. Don’t hang up until they tell you to.”
Then I’m out the door and across the yard, and the heat finds my face before I’m halfway. The sound is the part nobody warns you about. A low freight-train breathing, the fire dragging air in through a door that’s standing open.
Bram and Ash are half a step behind me, and I look back at them.
Did one of them leave a door open?
Later for that. Move.
The main disconnect is in a gray box on the barn’s south wall. I pull down the lever and the yard lights die. Good. Now, when water goes on this thing, it won’t risk dropping us all where we stand.
Ash is going for the closed door next to me, his hand almost on the handle.
“ASH.” I sprint and manage to reach him.
I grab him by the waist and take us both two steps back.
“I said nobody runs in there! You open that, you die. Feel it.” I press his own palm to the wood for half a second and rip it off again.
“It’s breathing. Give it air from the wrong side and it comes out the door to meet you.
The cider is not worth your life. Look at me. It’s not.”
Something in his face goes loose, something I have never once seen on Ash. “But the deadline,” he says. His eyes are bright and wet. “Reed.”
“I know, man.” I get my forehead against his, my hand behind his head, and my own eyes are stinging too. Bram closes in and puts a hand on each of our backs. “I know.”
I give it one second, letting myself feel the loss, the fear... Then I breathe out and put it down, getting my head back in the moment.
Because here’s the math: the fire seems to be in the center bay, and it wants to travel.
Two ways it can go. East, into the old timber and the press and a hundred years of my family nailed up on a wall.
West, ten feet of open air and then the cold storage, where eight hundred and forty bottles of the only thing standing between us and bankruptcy are sitting in the dark.
I can’t save the line. The line’s already a memory. But might be able to keep the fire from eating everything else.
The barn’s got a hose bib and fifty feet of garden hose, which isn’t much but...
“Bram. Cold storage, west wall, anything on it that’ll catch, get it off.
” He moves. I drag the hose to the gap between the buildings and put water on the cold-storage wall, on the dirt, on the heat already shivering across those ten feet toward two million dollars of contract.
Keep it wet. Keep it wet. Buy the minutes.
And then, after what feels like an eternity, sirens. I have never in my life been this glad to hear the thing I’m usually the one turning on.
They pour out fast, no wasted motion. Hollis is already stripping the line off the truck, and Dale’s at the pump panel bringing the water up from the truck.
“It started in the bottling line, center bay,” I tell him. “Somebody used accelerant. The south door’s been propped open, so it’s getting air, watch which way it pulls. East end’s where it wants to run. West is the cold storage, ten feet off, I’ve been keeping the wall wet.”
He looks at me a half-second longer than the words need. “Good size-up. Gear’s on the truck. Get dressed, you’re with me.”
After that it’s all heat and weight and the hiss of the line, Hollis’ fist steering me by the collar, my whole body running the drill it spent years learning.
By the time the sky starts thinking about rain, it’s over. And I walk what’s left of the barn with a flashlight.
East end first. The press sits in its corner, gone black with soot. A hundred and some years and it might wipe clean. The photographs by the door are curled at the corners, the glass crazed on a couple, but, miraculously, all of them still there.
I put my hand flat on the workbench Dad built. It’s warm but not burned.
Then I make myself turn and look at the middle.
The bottling line is gone. The steel’s slumped, the belts are a black puddle, the control box is a hole in the air. Slag. The thing we needed to fill the last hundred and sixty bottles is a stain on the slab.
Bram’s crouched at the south door with his phone out, taking pictures. I come stand over him. A red plastic gas can lies on its side just inside the door, which is propped wide with a cinder block.
“Don’t touch it,” he says.
“I know what it is,” I say, clenching my teeth.
“I know you know.” He stands, and his jaw’s doing the thing. “I have to call this in as what it is now. Arson.” He pauses. “Pretty sure we already know who did it.”
Derek.
I clench my fists.
***
Hollis finds me by the fire truck engine. He grips the back of my neck, and for a second neither of us says anything.
“What the hell are we gonna do about the deadline,” I say, my voice trembling.
“I don’t know, brother.” His hand tightens. “But me and the boys’ll be here for you, you hear? Whatever it takes. In the meantime you’re getting those lungs checked tonight, and that one’s not a suggestion.”
“Yeah.” My throat’s raw from more than smoke. “Appreciate it, man. I mean it.”
He thumps my shoulder once and lets go.
Then the engine rolls out, and the boys go the way they came, until there’s nobody left at all but my brothers, Luna—standing small at the edge of the gravel with her arms wrapped tight around herself, staring at the smoking skeleton of the building—and a wet, black barn.
I desperately want to say something, to crack a joke just to bring my pack’s shoulders down.
But nothing comes.
“The bottles are fine,” I say instead. Flat. “They’re in the cold storage. The wall never got warm enough to touch them, I checked. The product’s good.”
Bram looks up.
“But we can’t bottle the last hundred and sixty without a line,” I keep going.
“And you don’t buy and install a new one in the days we’ve got left, not with the time those bottles still need for fermentation before they ship.
So as of right now the Holt contract is a hundred and sixty bottles short of two million dollars. ”
Ash makes a sound. I look over.
He’s down on the cinder block by the door, elbows on his knees, head hanging, both hands laced over the back of his neck, his shoulders going.
I go sit on the wet ground beside him, putting my shoulder against his shoulder so he can feel that somebody’s there.
And I’m not the only one. Bram lowers himself down on Ash’s other side, slow, that big steady hand spreading flat between his shoulder blades. Luna folds down into the wet ash in front of him without a word, both her small hands coming up to take his face and tip it until he looks at her.
His voice comes out wrecked. “Our great-grandparents built this barn.”
And then I feel it start. Low, from Luna.
A purr, soft at first and then steadier, the sound climbing up out of her chest and into the quiet.
It isn’t a thing she’s deciding to do. I can feel that much through the bond, the same way I feel her grief laid right down next to ours.
She isn’t telling us it’s okay. It isn’t okay, and she knows it.
She’s just down here in it with us, feeling exactly what we feel and letting us feel that she feels it.
And it works. Some knot under my sternum eases off a degree. Bram’s breathing slows. Ash turns his face into her palm. The four of us sit in the wet and the ruin with the bond running warm and raw between us, and for a minute none of us has to be anything for anybody. We just hold on.
Then eventually Bram stands up.
“I’ve got accelerant, forced entry, a propped door,” he says, low.
“And a camera near a side fence caught him walking in. He’s more finished than he already was.
” He drags a hand down his face. “I’ve spent two weeks waiting on a warrant to do this the clean way.
We don’t have two weeks anymore. We find him now, before he vanishes again. ”
Ash looks up. “The clean way literally burned us.”
I stand up. “Let’s stop waiting.”
He nods, slow. “He’s slippery, but he can’t have gone far.”
And that’s when Bram’s phone goes off.
He frowns at the screen. “Dispatch,” he says, and answers it. “Miller.”
My alpha hearing picks up the voice a woman on the other end.
“... came in just now, off the tip line. Ray Potts. Yeah, him. Says he’s looking dead at the man off the flyer you’ve been distributing. Out at the Gas-N-Go, gassing up a silver car, out-of-county plates. Right now.”