“It’s fine. It looked the same when I stayed here with my parents.”
“Well, if you say so. Let’s get some sleep. I’m sure tomorrow is going to be a big day. Everyone is going to want to know where you went and why.”
Lily sighed. “I’m sure they will. I can say I’m not looking forward to explaining it to everyone.”
Emilia reached over and squeezed Lily’s hand before laying down on their hard makeshift bed.
The fire crackled and the room grew quiet. It didn’t take long before Lily’s breaths were long and even. Emilia was certain she was asleep.
She stared up at the rafters of the cabin, trying to imagine what it had been like for the old man and his wife who had built this place. She wondered if they had been sad to leave and where they were now.
It was a sad thing to think about, this little cabin abandoned in the middle of nowhere, a shelter to wayward travelers who needed somewhere out of the open to spend the night.
Emilia gave a little smile. It reminded her of her mother and sister. They were a small family in the middle of a big city, fending for themselves. She wondered if they still missed her. She certainly missed them.
She could still picture their laughing faces and imagine their voices as they told her about their day. She wondered if she’d be able to visit them again soon. Maybe her aunt would let her go back home now, since she was feeling better.
Emilia shook her head in the dark. She knew that the heat in Texas was one of the only things keeping her from having the issues she’d had with her health before. She sighed and closed her eyes, willing sleep to come. Hopefully, tomorrow would be a better day to make up for the awfulness of this one.
Lily was right, she didn’t need Derek. She was just fine with her cousins and her aunt.
Chapter 31
Emilia sniffed the air. Something wasn’t right. She blinked a couple of times, trying to clear the haze that she thought was in her head.
As she opened her eyes, she realized that the fog wasn’t just in her head, but all around her. Her body was screaming at her to get up and figure out what was going on, but she couldn’t seem to move.
She opened and closed her mouth, trying to say something, but words didn’t come. After what felt like forever, she was able to sit up. Her head was pounding, and her lungs felt as if they were burning. As she looked around, both panic and fear gripped her at once.
Smoke was engulfing the whole inside of the cabin. There wasn’t a bit of it that wasn’t filled with it. It wasn’t light smoke, either, it was heavy dark smoke that made everything seem so much larger and scarier than what Emilia had seen last night.
Her lungs were in so much pain, it hurt to pull in a breath. Emilia searched frantically for Lily. She could barely see her hand in front of her face. Feeling around, she located her cousin by touch. She shook Lily as hard as she could. “Lily, wake up! The house is on fire!”
Emilia felt as if she was shouting, but the voice that said the words sounded cracked and strained. Emilia kept trying until Lily moved under her hands. “Wh-what’s going on?”
“The house is on fire! There’s smoke everywhere.” Emilia couldn’t quite believe it herself, but this wasn’t a nightmare. The pain and smoke were real. Through the smoke, above and around them, she could see the orange glow of the flames as they licked the ceiling of the old wooden cabin.
The night before, it had seemed like a small space, but now it seemed as if there were a million different directions that they could go—and all of them seemed to be blocked by flames on the other side of the curtain of smoke.
Emilia pulled Lily to a sitting position. “We have to get out of here.”
“How did this happen? Why didn’t we wake up?”
Emilia shook her head, though she was almost certain her cousin couldn’t see her. She couldn’t be sure exactly how the fire had started, but she had a feeling it had to do with the fireplace that hadn’t been used in ages until they had started a fire there last night.
Lily coughed and Emilia helped her stand. Emilia let out a little shriek as a flaming piece of the roof fell right in front of them. The fire spread and began licking across the floor.
“Hurry!” Emilia pulled her cousin toward where she thought the door was. As they broke through the smoke, she realized she was right, but it did no good. A beam from the roof had fallen in front of the exit.
Emilia realized that Lily had sat down on the ground. “Lily! What are you doing? We have to go!”
Lily didn’t answer and panic gripped Emilia’s heart. She checked her cousin and saw that her eyes were closed, as if she was sleeping. She touched Lily’s chest and could feel that she was still breathing.
Emilia’s own lungs were fighting against the smoke. It was a pain she hadn’t felt in a long time, since she’d gotten pneumonia when she was seven.
Her entire body was beginning to lose strength. The idea of laying back down and resting was becoming incredibly tempting, though her adrenaline was telling her to save both Lily’s life and her own.
She turned toward the window. It was large enough for them to get through, and the path to it was free. She put her hands under Lily’s arms and began to pull her cousin toward the window. The flames were growing larger as they gobbled up the cabin walls and ceiling.
It was as if they were some ferocious monster who was starving, left without food until it had run across the cabin. Emilia prayed to God for strength as she dragged Lily to the window.
She needed strength and she needed help. How was she going to manage this alone? Emilia wasn’t as large as her cousin, and she was feeling the difference as she struggled to get Lily to safety.
She couldn’t stop to check if Lily was still breathing; she didn’t have time. She had to get Lily to safety before the roof collapsed completely.
Every once in a while, she would hear the thump of another piece falling. Already, there was a little hole in the roof through which she could see the sky.
She could tell that it was a beautiful morning. It wasn’t the type of morning when anyone would expect two young women to be trapped inside a burning cabin. Emilia remembered the woman at the candle shop.
She had predicted dangers like Indians and bandits. She hadn’t been wrong about the threat, but she had been wrong about which kind.
Emilia huffed out a painful breath of relief as she reached the window. She wrapped her sweater around her arm and then hit the window with her elbow as hard as she could.
The sound of breaking glass accompanied the sharp pain in her elbow. She wished that she would have gone in the other direction of the second window. She had noted the night before that the other window didn’t have any glass left.
She used a sweater Lily had brought to make sure that there was no glass on the edges of the window.
A beam from the roof fell a close distance behind them and Emilia winced. She wanted to get through the window first, then pull Lily through, but she knew Lily wouldn’t be able to stand up and she wouldn’t be able to pull her up from the floor.
Instead, she put Lily’s head and shoulders through the window and slowly pushed the rest of her through until she was laying on the ground. Emilia moved to follow her cousin when she realized her dress had gotten snagged on a piece of the roof leaning up against the wall.
As she turned to get her dress free, another beam crashed down from above. Emilia looked up to see it coming straight at her. Even though she tried to move out of the way, it fell directly onto her, pushing her backward toward the smoke and fire.
Emilia let out a scream of pain as the beam rolled down her waist and landed on her leg, pinning her to the ground.
She pulled at her leg, sending sharp knives of pain through her entire body. Her head throbbed and her vision blurred. “I can’t black out! I can do this,” she whispered to herself.
She conjured up visions of her mother and sister. She thought of her aunt Carolyn and the twins, and even Derek. She couldn’t
just die here. She couldn’t let her life end like this.
The smoke seemed to grow thicker by the second, and the edges of the beam on top of her leg began to burn. Emilia could feel that she wasn’t going to be able to get out from under the beam alone, but there was no one coming—and even if Lily managed to wake up in time, she wasn’t sure her cousin could get her out of here.
She took a deep breath and tried to focus on the situation. She wasn’t about to just give up. As long as she was conscious, she was going to try and find a way out.
Her eye caught sight of the sweater that she’d used to break the glass. It was laying within her reach.
She stretched out as far as she could until her fingers took hold of the soft material. She used it to swat out as many of the flames on the beam as she could. She would at least try to keep from her leg burning before she could get it out from under the beam.
Leaning forward, she placed her hands flat against the aged wood and pushed with all her might. When she stopped to draw in a breath, her lungs burned worse than they had before, and tears of pain stung her eyes. A fit of coughing threatened to make her black out.
She held back a sob and tried again. She pushed so hard that her muscles trembled, and her stomach hurt, but the beam only budged a little bit, making the pain in her leg worse.
Emilia tried over and over, hoping that the progress she was making would be faster than the fire that was making quick work of what remained of the cabin.
Finally, when her muscles felt as if they couldn’t push another second and she thought even the smallest breath would make her go unconscious, she let herself give up. She laid back on the floor and stared up at the sky through the hole in the roof. She could feel cool air wafting down through the hole and wondered how long it would last.
The flames were getting closer now. She could feel their heat on her cheeks, and she could see the orange color approaching without so much as turning her head. It seemed as if this was where it would end.
As terrible as it was, Emilia was surprised to find out that she felt better about it than she might have thought. She had lived a good life. She had known people who loved her.
Yes, there were things she hadn’t finished, there were things that hadn’t happened that she would have liked to have happen. But that didn’t matter now. What mattered were the memories she had created with the special people in her life.
What mattered were the promises she had kept and the times she had spent doing the things that she loved.
Emilia smiled as her eyes fluttered shut. She could rest now. She couldn’t get out. She had no control. She couldn’t help herself. There was something calming about that, something calming about not having control and accepting her fate.
“I’m sorry, Aunt Carolyn. I said I would come back, but I was wrong. Please forgive me. Goodbye, Mama. Goodbye, Mary. Goodbye, Lily. Goodbye Derek.”
Satisfied that she had said her goodbyes, she whispered up one last prayer to God and slipped into darkness.
Chapter 32
The sound of birds and the feeling of a soft breeze tickling her cheek woke Lily. For a moment, she thought the memories of the fire and the thick smoke were all a terrible dream and she was waking up in bed back in the cabin, with her brothers and mother in the next room.
She was quickly brought back to reality with the thudding headache, the burning pain in her eyes and throat, and the heat radiating off the surface beside her.
It was hard to orient herself and took several moments to realize what was happening. She was lying only about a foot away from the cabin, which was ablaze.
There really wasn’t much of it that wasn’t on fire. She scooted away from the building, feeling grateful that she had already been far enough away and that the large flames weren’t near her, or she would have been terribly burned.
She put a hand to her aching head and surveyed the area. “Emilia?” Her cousin had been with her in the fire. In fact, her last memory was of Emilia leading them towards the doorway.
“Emilia! Where are you?” Lily stood and nearly fell. Her legs were weak beneath her. She wondered what could have started the fire. She hadn’t noticed anything strange when they’d gone to bed.
She hadn’t heard a thing until Emilia was shaking her awake, yelling about the fire.
How had they gotten out? She didn’t remember anything else after they had been looking for the door. Lily coughed and thought back to her last memory. She’d closed her eyes. She couldn’t hold them open anymore.
If she had passed out, how had she gotten outside? Realization dawned on Lily as she looked at the place where she had been laying—she had been pushed out of the window.
She hurried back to where she had been laying and looked into the broken window. Just as she did so, a puff of smoke mixed with fire puffed against the opening, nearly searing Lily’s skin.
She jumped back with a shriek. She had been able to see for a split second, and that had been enough to see where Emilia was.
She was laying in what looked like a clearing within the fire, a peaceful look on her face, her eyes closed and a large beam laying across one of her legs. Lily’s stomach felt sick. Her cousin and best friend was still inside the burning cabin. If she didn’t do something quickly, Emilia would die.
She rushed toward the cabin but had to stop when the heat hit her face, repelling her. It was almost as if her body would not allow her to endanger herself like that. Panic gripped Lily. What could she do? How could she save Emilia?
“Emilia! Wake up!” she called out. She didn’t know if it would help, or if Emilia was awake or not. She had probably tried everything she could to get out from under that beam before she had gone unconscious. The idea of her cousin fighting against the beam in the fire alone while she was safely outside made Lily feel even worse. The only positive thing was that it appeared that she was in a spot where there was less smoke, and the fire hadn’t burned her up yet.
This was all her fault. If she hadn’t decided to run away to find answers, Emilia wouldn’t even be out here. From the beginning, Emilia had come after her to make sure that she was all right. How had she allowed her cousin to be put in danger like this?
Lily knew that she couldn’t have predicted the fire. But it could have been something else, like Indians or bandits. Either way, she had put her best friend, her cousin—her family—in danger, for something that, in comparison, seemed silly.
“Somebody, help!” Lily screamed at the top of her lungs. She felt frantic and didn’t know what to do.
They were too far away from the road for anyone to hear. Lily wasn’t sure there would even be anyone on the road even if it were close enough. She had been so terribly naïve. Why hadn’t she told anyone else where she was really going?
No one knew where they were. There was no one coming. This was up to her. She had to save Emilia. She pushed against the heat, feeling it consuming her as she got closer to the window. Just as her hand touched the window sill, she sank to her knees.
She wanted to.With every fiber of her being, she wanted to go back through that window and save Emilia, but she couldn’t. The heat was too strong. Sobs shook her body as she tried to force herself to go further. Would it really end this way?
Images of Emilia arriving in Texas flooded her mind. Showing Emilia around the ranch and their time at the barn dance… Emilia had been like the sister she had never had.
She had been able to trust her cousin from the moment she had stepped off of that train. Maybe, before Emilia had come to town, Lily had wondered if they would get along, or if she would like to have Emilia around, but she had been shown that her fears had no base.
An Enduring Love to Heal Her: A Historical Western Romance Book Page 24
