by Nora Roberts
the moonlight.
Death waited patiently.
He got out, his head turning right, left, as he continued to call Dolly’s name. As he continued up the road.
Yes, it was easy after all.
“An eye for an eye.”
Latterly looked over, his face struck with terror as shadow moved to moonlight.
The first bullet struck him in the center of the forehead, a small black hole that turned terror to blank shock. The second pierced his heart, releasing a slow trickle of blood that gleamed black in the shimmer of light.
Easy. A steady hand, a just heart.
No shock, no grief, no trembling, not this time.
A long way to drag a body, but it had to be done right, didn’t it? Anything worth doing was worth doing well. And the forest at night held such beauty, such mystery. Peace. Yes, for a little while, peace.
All the effort came to nothing in that moment when the body rested at the burn site, on the pyre, already prepared.
Reverend Latterly didn’t look so good, didn’t look so pious now with his clothes and flesh torn and dirty from the trail.
A click of the lighter, that’s all it took to send him to hell.
Flames kindled with a whoosh as they gulped fuel and oxygen. Burning the body as the soul would burn. Peace settled while the fire climbed and spread.
How did it feel to murder and burn?
It felt right.
20
The fire chewed its way east, consuming forest and meadow, its head a rage of hunger and greedy glee leading the body across two states.
Gull dug his spikes into a lodgepole pine, climbing up, up into a sky of sooty red. Sweat dripped down his face to soak the bandanna he’d tied on like a latter-day outlaw as he ground the teeth of his saw through bark and wood. Logs tumbled, crashed below as he worked his way down.
The blaze they sought to cage danced, leaped nimbly up trees to string their branches with light as it roared its song.
He hit the ground, unhooked his harness, then moved down the saw line.
He knew Rowan worked the head. Word traveled down the crew, and the jumpers from Idaho had twice had to retreat due to unstable winds.
He heard the roll of thunder, watched the tanker pitch through the smoke. So far the dragon seemed to swallow the retardant like candy.
He’d lost track of the hours spent in the belly of the beast since the siren had sounded that morning. Only that morning, looking into Rowan’s eyes as she moved under him, feeling her body rise and fall beneath him. Only that morning he’d had the taste of her skin, warm from sleep, on his tongue.
Now he tasted smoke. Now he felt the ground move as another sacrificial tree fell to earth. He looked into the eyes of the enemy, and knew her lust.
What he didn’t know, as he set down his saw to gulp down water, was if it was day or night. And what did it matter? The only world that mattered lived in this perpetual red twilight.
“We’re moving east.” Dobie jogged out of the smoke, his eyes red-rimmed over his bandanna. “Gibbons is taking us east, digging line as we go. The hoses are holding her back on the right flank at Pack Creek, and the mud knocked her back some.”
“Okay.” Gull grabbed his gear.
“I volunteered you and me to go on south through the burnout and scout spots and snags along the rim, circle on up toward the head.”
“That was real considerate of you to include me in your mission.”
“Somebody’s got to do it, son.” Those red-rimmed eyes laughed. “It’s a longer trip, but I bet we beat the rest of the crew to the head, get back into the real action sooner.”
“Maybe. The head’s where I want to be.”
“Fighting ass-to-ass with your woman. Let’s get humping.”
Spots bloomed like flowers, burst like grenades, simmered like shallow pools. The wind colluded, thickened the smoke, giving loft to sailing firebrands.
Gull smothered, dug, doused, beat, then laughed his way through the nasty work as Dobie started naming the spots.
“Fucking Assistant Principal Brewster!” Dobie stomped out the licking flames. “Suspended me for smoking in the bathroom.”
“High school sucks.”
“Middle school. I got an early start.”
“Priming your lungs for your life’s work,” Gull decided as he moved on to another.
“That’s fucking Gigi Japper. Let me at her. She dumped me for a ball player.”
“Middle school?”
“Last year. Bastard plays slow-pitch softball. Can you beat that? Slow-pitch softball. How does that count for anything?”
“You’re better off without her.”
“Damn straight. Well, Captain, I believe we’ve secured this line, and recommend we cut across from here and start scouting north. I’m still looking for crazy old Mr. Cotter, used to shoot at my dog just because the pup liked to shit in his petunias.”
“We’ll beat the hell out of old Mr. Cotter together.”
“That’s a true friend.”
They ate lunch, dinner, breakfast—who the hell knew?—on the quickstep hike, chowing down on Hooah! bars, peanut-butter crackers, and the single apple from Gull’s pack they passed back and forth.
“I love this job,” Dobie told him. “I didn’t know as I would. I knew I could do it, knew I would. Figured I’d like it okay. But I didn’t know it’s what I was after. Didn’t know I was after anything.”
“If it gets its hooks in you, you know it’s what you were after.” That, Gull thought, covered smoke jumping and women.
Murdered trees stood, black skeletons in the thinning smoke. Wind trickled through, sending them to moan, scooping up ash that swirled like dirty fairy dust.
“It’s like one of those end-of-the-world movies,” Dobie decided. “Where some meteor destroys most every goddamn thing, and what’s left are mutant scavengers and a handful of brave warriors trying to protect the innocent. We can be the warriors.”
“I was counting on being a mutant, but all right. Look at that.” Gull pointed east where the sky glowed red above towers of flame. “Half the time I can’t understand how I can hate it and still think it’s beautiful.”
“I felt that way about fucking Gigi Japper.”
Laughing, somehow completely happy to be hot and filthy alongside his strangely endearing friend, Gull studied the fire as they hiked—the breadth of it, the colors and tones, the shapes.
On impulse, he pulled his camera out of his PG bag. A photo couldn’t translate its terrifying magnificence, but it would remind him, over the winter. It would remind him.
Dobie stepped into the frame, set his Pulaski on his shoulder, spread his legs, fixed a fierce expression on his face. “Now, take a picture. ‘Dragon-slayer.’ ”
Actually, Gull thought when he framed it in, the title seemed both apt and accurate. He took two. “Eat your heart out, Gigi.”
“Fucking A! Come on, son, time’s a’wasting.”
He took off with a swagger as Gull secured his camera.
“Gull.”
“Yeah.” He glanced up from zipping his PG bag to see Dobie in nearly the same pose, reversed with his back to him. “Camera’s secured, handsome.”
“You better come on over here. Take a look at this.”
Alerted by the tone, Gull moved fast, stared when Dobie pointed. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Aw, shit.”
The remains lay, a grim signpost on the charred trail.
“Jesus, Gull, looks like the mutants have been through here.” Dobie staggered a few feet away, braced his hands on his knees, and puked up his energy bars.
“Like Dolly,” Gull murmured. “Except . . .”
“Christ, I feel like a pussy. Losing my lunch.” Bone-white beneath the layer of soot, Dobie took a pull of water, spat it out. “He started the fire, the cocksucker, right here. Like with Dolly.” He rinsed again, spat again, then drank. “He did all this.”
“Yeah, except
I don’t think he did this to try to hide the body, or destroy it. Maybe it’s so we’d find it, or for attention, or because the son of a bitch likes fire. And it’s not like Dolly because this one’s got what’s got to be a bullet hole dead in the forehead.”
Bracing himself, Dobie stepped over again, looked. “Christ, I think you’re right about that.”
“I guess I should’ve taken that bet.” Gull pulled out his radio. “Because I don’t think we’re going to get back to action before the rest of the crew.”
While they waited, Dobie took two mini bottles of Kentucky bourbon from his bag, took a swig. “Who do you think it is?” he asked, and passed the second bottle to Gull.
“Maybe we’ve just got some homicidal firebug picking people at random. More likely it’s somebody connected to Dolly.”
“Jesus please us, I hope it’s not her ma. I really hope it’s not her ma. Somebody’s got to take care of that baby.”
“I saw her mother that day she and the preacher came to thank L.B. for hiring Dolly again. She’s short, little like Dolly was. I think what’s there’s too tall. Pretty tall, I think.”
“Her daddy, maybe.”
“Maybe.”
“If I hadn’t volunteered us, somebody else would’ve found it. It’s right on the damn trail. Ro said Dolly was off it. Right on the trail. The rangers would’ve found it if we hadn’t. It really makes you think about what the fire’ll do to you, it gets the chance.”
Gull looked out at the red, the black, the stubborn lashing gold. And downed the bourbon.
The rangers let them go to rejoin the war. The fury built up in Gull all the way up to that snarling, snapping head. He channeled that fury into the attack so every strike of his ax fed his anger. This war wasn’t fought against God or nature or fate, but against the human being who’d given birth to the fire for his own pleasure or purpose or weakness.
For those hours the battle burned, he didn’t care about the reasons why. He only cared about stopping it.
“Take a breath,” Rowan told him. “We’ve got her now. You can feel it. Take a breath, Gull. This isn’t a one-man show.”
“I’ll take a breath when she’s down.”
“Look, I know how you feel. I know exactly how—”
“I’m not in the mood to be reasonable.” He pushed her hand off his arm, eyes hot and vivid. “I’m in the mood to kill this bitch. We can discuss our mutual traumas later. Now let me do my job.”
“Okay, fine. We need men up on that ridge digging line before she rides this wind and shifts this way for fresh eats and builds again.”
“All right.”
“Take Dobie, Matt, Libby and Stovic.”
NIGHT, HE THOUGHT—or morning, probably—when he dragged himself to the creek. The fire trembled in its death throes, coughing and sputtering. Overhead, stars winked hopefully through thinning smoke.
He pulled off his boots, his socks, and stuck his abused feet in the gorgeously cool water. The postfire chatter ran behind him in voices raw with smoke and adrenaline. Jokes, insults, rewinds of the long fight. And the expected what-the-fuck? question about what he and Dobie had found.
More work waited, but would keep until daybreak. The fire hadn’t lain down to rest. She’d lain down to die.
Rowan sat down beside him, dropped an MRE in his lap, pushed a drink into his hand. “They dropped a nice load down for camp, so I made you dinner.”
“A woman’s work is never done.”
“More in the mood to be reasonable, I see.”
“I needed to burn it off.”
“I know.” She touched a hand to his briefly, then picked up the fork to shovel in beef stew. “I put some of Dobie’s famous Tabasco in this. Nice kick.”
“I was taking his picture. Him standing there in the black, and behind him the fire, and the sky. Surreal. I’d just taken his picture when we found it. It didn’t get to me, really, until we started up to meet you, and it just got bigger and bigger in me. Christ, I wasn’t even thinking about some guy burned to bone after taking a shot in the head.”
“Shot?”
Gull nodded. “Yeah, but I wasn’t thinking about him. All I could think about was this, and us. All the loss and waste, the risks, the sweat and blood. And for what, Ro? Since I couldn’t beat the hell out of whoever caused it, I had to beat the hell out of the fire.”
“Matt got hung up on the jump. He let down okay, but it could’ve gone bad. A widowmaker as thick as my arm nearly hit Elf when we had to retreat, and Yangtree’s got a Pulaski gash on his calf to go with his swollen knee. One of the Idaho crew took a bad fall, broke his leg. You were right to be mad.”
For a while, they ate in silence. “They want you back in the morning, you and Dobie, so DiCicco and Quinniock can talk to you. I can pack out with you.”
He glanced over, grateful—grateful enough not to mention she was taking care of him. “That’d be good.”
“I figured you’re pretty tired, so I can save you the time popping your tent. You can share mine.”
“That’d be even better. I love this job,” he said after a moment, thinking of Dobie. “I don’t know why exactly but what this bastard’s done makes me love it even more. The cops have to find him, catch him, stop him. But we’re the ones cleaning up his goddamn mess. We’re the ones doing whatever it takes to keep it from being worse. The wild doesn’t mean anything to him, what lives in it, lives off it. It means something to us.”
He looked at her then, slowly leaned in to take her lips in a kiss of surprising gentleness. “I found you in the wild, Rowan. That’s a hell of a thing.”
She smiled, a little uncertainly. “I wasn’t lost.”
“Neither was I. But I’m found, too, just the same.”
When they walked the short distance to the tents, they crossed paths with Libby.
“How you doing, Gull?”
“Okay. Better since I hear I get to skate out of mop-up. Have you seen Dobie?”
“Yeah, he just turned in. He was feeling . . . I guess you know. Matt and I sat up with him awhile after the rest bunked down. He’s doing okay.”
“You did good work today, Barbie,” Rowan told her.
“Never plan to do any other kind. Good night.”
Rowan yawned her way into the tent and, with her mind and body already shutting down, worked off her boots. “Don’t wake me unless there’s a bear attack. In fact, even then.”
She stripped down to her tank and panties. As she rolled toward the sleeping bag, Gull considered.
“You know, thirty seconds ago I figure I was too tired to scratch my own ass. And now, strangely, I’m filled with this renewed energy.”
She opened one eye, shut it again. “Do what you gotta do. Just don’t wake me up doing it.”
He climbed in beside her, smiling, drew her already limp-with-sleep body to his. When he closed his eyes he thought of her, of nothing but her, and slid quietly into the dark.
IT WAS HER KNEE pressing firmly into his crotch that woke him. His eyes crossed before they opened. Easing back relieved the worst
