Then there was fire.
A cloud of red flames billowed from the kitchen in cinematic glory, like it should have been a special effect in a movie. It washed through the room, pushing air and heat in front of it before dissipating. The table tipped, flew, and hit a wall. Ben and I dove for each other, crouching over and protecting each other. The Ouija board flew away, the planchette careening off another wall. Chairs launched and scattered, and Gary and Tina seemed to fly with them. Feeling cornered, I wanted to snarl. Wolf wanted to burst out and face the enemy. But there was no enemy, at least not one we could see. Not one we could face.
I wanted to say it was a gas-line explosion, that somebody had lit a match near a leaking stove. Old building like this, anything could happen. Funny that it chose that exact moment to ignite.
“Everybody out, get out!” Ben shouted. He grabbed my shirt and shoved me toward the front door.
“Where’s Gary? Gary!” Tina wailed.
“Tina! Come on!” It was Jules, clutching at her like Ben was clutching at me. He’d rushed in from outside.
“Gary’s hurt!” Tina called.
I saw Gary curled up by the wall, unconscious. He might have landed wrong, might have hit his head. Tina went and crouched by him, trying to pull his arm and drag him toward the door, but she didn’t have the strength. Jules helped her. The two of them pulled his arms over their shoulders.
Fear rattled me, and Wolf said to run, run. I looked back, saw flames in the kitchen, felt the heat, smelled it growing stronger, and despaired. Something in me snapped: No, this wasn’t going to happen, not my haven. This was my territory; I had to protect it. It couldn’t burn, I wouldn’t let it.
I squirmed out of Ben’s grasp and lunged for the fire extinguisher behind the bar.
“Kitty!” Ben shouted.
The walls were exposed brick. They wouldn’t burn, not right away, but the furniture and fixtures were another story. The blast had been quick, more sound than fury, but flames had taken hold, crawling toward the shelves of alcohol. I did battle, spraying foam wherever I saw fire. I wasn’t even thinking, so lost in the moment, the smells of fire, chemicals, and panic, to think about what I was doing. To think about the heat scorching my hair and roasting my skin.
Ben wrapped his arm around me and hauled me back. “We have to get out of here!”
“No!” I screamed. No explanation, no pleas about how I couldn’t lose this place. Just no. I fought him, kicking and elbowing as the chemical spray from the extinguisher bobbed and faltered. I was at the door of the kitchen now, where a dozen small fires ate away at whatever combustible material lay exposed: aprons, boxes and bags of ingredients, cooking supplies, blackened and disintegrating. Fires from hell. I couldn’t identify what fueled the flames; I just wanted to fight them.
Then Ben was standing beside me with a second extinguisher from the door of the kitchen.
I didn’t know how long we fought to save our restaurant and haven. The next thing I knew, a pair of firemen had grabbed hold of us and hauled us out of there. No arguing with them, but Ben snarled, like his wolf had come to the fore, and I bared my teeth. We were tired by then, hurt, and I at least used all my remaining strength to keep Wolf under control, no matter how wild I felt.
Outside, Ben and I huddled together.
“You okay?” he said, his voice shaky, scratching from the smoke.
I needed a moment to answer. “You keeping it together?”
“Yeah, I think. But I want to claw something.”
“Yeah.”
Paramedics started pawing at us, and I tried to push them away. Even if I was hurt, I’d heal soon enough; I’d come to appreciate that part of being a werewolf. They insisted on putting masks over our faces and feeding us oxygen, and I did feel burned. I felt hurt. But the pain, the sensations, were detached. I didn’t dare look at myself—seeing the burns would make them start hurting. So I ignored them.
I looked for the Paradox crew.
They had sprawled on the sidewalk nearby, gathered around Gary, who lay flat on the sidewalk. A bloody spot was visible above his brow. He must have hit something hard on his way down, but it seemed to be clotted, matted with hair, rather than gushing blood. I hoped that was a good sign. A couple of paramedics were working on him, without the urgency that would have meant his situation was critical. And yes, the camera crew was still filming.
Jules wandered over to us.
“How is he?” I asked.
“Alive,” Jules said. “Probably a bad concussion. They’re taking him in for X-rays.”
We all looked parboiled, skin red and sweating, streaked with soot, hair and clothing singed and smoking. We looked shell-shocked. Disaster survivors.
“Why the hell didn’t you get out of there?” Jules said.
“I couldn’t lose the place,” I said and realized I was crying. The tears carried soot and smoke from my eyes. I could feel the grit scratching at me.
“Stupid,” Ben grumbled at me. “It was stupid, Kitty. It’s just a place. We can rebuild a place.”
“And a few burns aren’t going to kill me.”
“Being a werewolf is no excuse for staying inside a burning building!” Ben said.
“What happened?” I said. “What the hell happened in there? Did anyone see anything? Did the cameras pick up anything?”
Jules shook his head. “I don’t know. It happened fast. There was a fireball from the kitchen.”
“Gas explosion,” Ben said, echoing my earlier thought.
“Maybe,” Jules said.
“But not really,” I said.
“Of course not,” Jules grumbled. “Coincidence only goes so far.”
Paramedics loaded Gary into an ambulance, while Tina and Jules left for the hospital with him. Yet another guy in a uniform poked at me, and I had to concentrate not to snarl. I was still sitting on the sidewalk, in the dark, listening to water spray and firefighters holler at each other. The oxygen mask lay in my lap. I’d dropped it.
Wolf was cowed. Far past wanting to shape-shift and run away to protect myself, I was in shock, numb, hugging myself. It had been a while since Wolf was so scared and confused that quivering seemed the best option.
“Ma’am, you need to go to the hospital.”
“No, I don’t. I’ll be fine.”
“You’ve got second-degree burns on your arms, ma’am.”
“Really?” I looked. My arms were red. Very red. Bad sunburn red. But didn’t second-degree mean blisters?
The paramedic stared at my arms, as well. He blinked a couple of times. Then he shook his head. “I could have sworn that was a lot worse a minute ago.”
“Maybe you’re just stressed,” I said. He went away, shaking his head.
The fire was almost out, and the building itself remained intact. The investigators had already had their first look and gave us their impression: There hadn’t been an explosion, so it probably wasn’t a gas leak. Just fire. I hoped all this meant we could make repairs and reopen quickly. But how was I going to explain this to Shaun?
Ben talked to the police and fire investigators about what we were doing here and proved that we owned the place, so no one would get hauled off on trespassing or vandalism charges.
“The police want to take a look at all the video footage, to see if they can figure out what happened. I have to say I’m looking forward to reading that report,” he said.
“I’m not sure how much more of this I can take,” I whined. My fury had drained away along with the rush of adrenaline. “It’s going to keep coming after us. It’s going to keep... destroying things, until...” Until it destroyed us. I didn’t want to say it.
He put his arm around me, tucked my head on his shoulder, kissed my hair. “I wish I had some suggestions. But this is way out of my league. All I really want to do right now is go run.” His body was stiff, hands clenched even as they rested against me from the tension of keeping his wolf under control. He hadn’t gotten to the numb stage, ap
parently.
I didn’t want to sit around and wait to see what disaster happened next. “Come on,” I said, pushing myself off his shoulder to stand up, then tugging on him to get him to his feet. “Let’s go see how Gary’s doing.”
Chapter 7
Gary Janson had a concussion. He hadn’t suffered anything as serious as a skull fracture or bleeding in the brain, but the length of time he’d spent unconscious had the doctors worried, so they were keeping him in the hospital under observation. Before we arrived at the hospital, he’d woken up, been aware of his surroundings and of his team gathered around him. But he didn’t remember what had happened, and he’d seemed confused at some of the doctor’s questions. He hadn’t been able to answer the classic “How many fingers am I holding up?” for example. Still, the doctor expected him to recover, given time and rest.
The cameras had followed us to the hospital and spent time getting video of the doctor explaining Gary’s injuries. I wanted to corner the show’s cameramen and ask if they were really wanting to put all this into the show. It seemed sensationalist, even by my standards.
We found Tina and Jules in a nearby waiting room, sitting hunched in their chairs, looking bereft. Jules had taken off his glasses to rub his eyes. I hated to break the mood, but I was still under attack, and my restaurant had almost burned down. I had to find out if Tina’s little experiment had accomplished anything.
“So,” I said, scuffing my feet. “Can I assume the Ouija board just pissed this thing off?”
They looked at me like I’d turned green. Ben had wandered off to read a public health notice hanging on the wall—pretending like he didn’t know me. Then they sputtered with laughter. Tina held a hand over her mouth and turned red, almost crying from trying to keep from laughing, and Jules just shook his head.
“Bloody hell,” the Brit said. “I have never seen anything like that!”
Either this was a lot of pent-up stress getting loose, or I was confused.
“I can’t believe it. When I said it was dangerous I was talking demonic possession. I’ve never had anything like that happen before,” Tina said, gasping for breath. “We almost died. And Gary—oh, my God!”
Stress, I decided. I wondered if I should say something.
“And you—” Jules pointed at his colleague. “What was that? What are you, some kind of psychic? Medium? Have you been holding out on us?”
Tina stopped laughing. Because Jules reminded us of what had happened right before the fire.
The room went quiet, and Jules stared at her. She stared back, looking like she’d been hit by a truck. Jules’s eyes were wide with revelation.
I stepped in. “Maybe we should all talk about this over coffee.” I raised my brows hopefully.
The hospital cafeteria had just opened—it was something like five in the morning—so we went there.
Jules, completely sober now after whatever post-traumatic hysteria had gripped him, almost sounded betrayed. “Tina, I’ve never seen anybody work a Ouija board like that.”
“And you can tell what I am just by looking at me,” I said.
Jules again, even more insistent: “What’s your angle on all this? What aren’t you telling us?”
I felt like I had a front-row seat to my own private reality-TV show; too bad the cameras hadn’t followed us here.
They communicated by stares. Jules leaned over the table, demanding an explanation from Tina with his accusing gaze. Tina turned sullen, like she was a kid who’d just gotten in trouble for something.
“I’ve been doing it since I was a kid,” she said at last, voice soft, all humor gone. “And not just with the board, but with dowsing, automatic writing, runes, most of the old tricks. It all works. I walk into a house, and I know if it’s haunted or not because it talks to me. Things talk to me. I sense things. Ghosts, spirits. Whatever.”
The old tricks Tina mentioned—using rods or pen and paper to communicate with the spirit world, reading tea leaves, shapes in a plume of smoke—they were old tricks exactly because they must have worked for someone, at some time. But it wasn’t a science, because the results weren’t reproducible. The methods worked for some people and not for others, and even those people with talent didn’t have it all the time. With the Age of Reason and rise of science, what couldn’t be dissected and explained was discredited and abandoned. Still, the tricks lingered, and thousands of people clung to them, used them—or abused them—because they so desperately wanted them to work.
What happened when someone like Tina came along? Someone who actually could make the tricks work? And what did that say about the world?
We stared at her.
“Really,” Jules said flatly.
“Really,” she said, echoing. “I don’t advertise it because of people like you, who assume everyone who picks up a forked stick or holds a séance is faking it.”
I bet she used her looks and humor, as well, to distract from those moments when she stared out into space, as if listening. She was the show’s eye candy; she couldn’t possibly be its resident psychic.
Paradox PI had a resident psychic. A real one. I so wanted to be the one to break that story.
“So, Tina,” I said, trying to sound encouraging. “I’d love to have you on the show next week to talk about this, how you discovered this, what it’s been like to live with it—”
“No,” she said. Didn’t even think about it.
“Why does everyone always tell me no like that?” I said. “Am I really that bad?”
Ben patted my hand. “I think it’s the predatorial gleam in your eye when you ask them.”
“What gleam?” I grumbled. Okay, so there might have been a little predatorial gleam.
“Gary doesn’t know?” Jules said. “All this time you’ve had this information, this access, and you’ve let us mess around with our cameras and microphones and infrared monitors and EMF readings?”
“Because even if you and Gary believed me, I have no way of proving what I know. So I keep my mouth shut. So the legitimate paranormal investigative community will take us seriously, as you’re always saying.”
“Then why reveal yourself now?” he said. “Why give away the secret now?”
“Because this isn’t about the TV show anymore—this thing is dangerous. I thought I could help. That I might be able to do some good.” She crossed her arms and looked away. I wondered if she regretted revealing herself.
Jules sat back, rubbing his face and staring into space. “God. God.” I worried that something in his brain might have snapped.
“Jules? You okay?” I said.
His smile was sad. He spoke to Tina. “You know, I’m not surprised. I’ve worked so hard, searching for evidence. I’ve tried to be so thorough. But you’ve always seemed to have this talent. That’s why the show works, not because of my methodology, but because of your talent. Things just happen when you’re around. What I wouldn’t give for an ounce, a microgram, of what you have. To be able to touch it, just a little bit. I’ve been looking for it my whole life, and I’m as far away from it as ever.”
“Try walking into an old church, and the whole thing just presses on you like a weight because there’s so much there,” Tina said. “I hate it, Jules. I’d give it to you in a heartbeat.”
And that was how we all grew closer and learned to share in a very special episode of Paradox PI.
“I hate to interrupt,” I said. “But we’re still not any closer to figuring out what it is that’s after me. Did you get anything out of that séance?”
“Besides the fact that there’s some seriously pissed-off mojo floating around you?” Tina said.
“That’s obvious and not helpful,” I said. “Did you sense anything?”
“Yes. No.” She furrowed her brow and shook her head. “I’ve never felt anything like it.”
“Well, we know a few things about it,” Jules said. “It’s violent, destructive, and associated with fire. I could do some research. I’d need t
o get back to some of my books, contact some people I know in the SPR.”
Tina smiled the smile that had probably helped get her the job on the show. “See, we need you!”
“Huh?” Jules said.
“You were worried that we didn’t need you because you aren’t psychic, but you know way more than the rest of us. I could never do that kind of research.”
Jules smirked. “Thanks for the pep talk.”
I said, “Tina. You felt this thing, or whatever it is that psychics do. What’s it like?”
Tina shrugged. “Probably nothing you don’t already know about it. Heat. Malice. Fire. Destruction. It’s what ties all this together, isn’t it?”
My head ached, I was so exhausted. I seemed to remember eating something today, but I couldn’t remember what. And I was scared to go home. Scared to stay here. Just scared.
“Maybe we should get some sleep,” I said. “Maybe this will seem clearer in the morning.” And maybe pigs would fly.
“It’s noon in Britain,” Jules said. “I’ll make some calls and see if some of my contacts have any information.”
“I’ll go check on Gary,” Tina said.
We parted reluctantly, even though we all needed to sleep, even though no amount of hashing it out over coffee would solve the problem. But there was safety in numbers. Comfort in the shared experience. We could look each other in the eyes and know that it really happened, that we weren’t going crazy. We promised to leave our cell phones on and call the minute, the second, anything weird happened.
When we arrived home, I half expected to see the condo spewing flames and surrounded by fire trucks. But it was quiet.
The best part about having Ben around—rather, one of the best parts—was finding myself in his arms at the end of a really rough day. Assuming, of course, that arguing with him hadn’t been part of what made the day rough. Usually, though, I could count on him to hold me and tell me everything was going to be fine. Even if the tone in his voice wasn’t convincing. That night, he was cold and clinging to me as much as I was clinging to him. Neither of us fell asleep easily, and we woke up far earlier than we wanted to.
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