Kean parked behind four other vehicles, including Gawain’s Explorer, and shook his head. “Looks like the whole damn coven came for the show.”
He hopped out of the truck, slammed the door, and shielded his eyes from the rain of ash to look directly into the blaze. Sweet Cosmos did she blaze. The Guild was a low, round building with a conical glass roof. It had been built out of the natural woods of the island. Add to that the grove of fruit trees encircling it and the wild-growing pines just beyond, and the heart of Evergreen Cove’s Zyne community had just become a hellhole.
Kean grimaced. How ironic. That’s what they got for harboring a killer in their midst and not having the courage to face it. Bri’s fingers lighted on his forearm. He turned his gaze to her wide, searching eyes. She was a pale angel in dark snow, with the firelight on her cheeks and the sunrise in her hair. The sight tore at his chest.
She will be the death of me.
He couldn’t protect her and do his job at the same time. Kean gritted his teeth and looked back at the fire, then at his friends and neighbors gathered to watch more than a hundred years of shared history burn on a funeral pyre and crumble to nothing.
And that was the best-case scenario.
The first engine was already dousing the trees in the interface zone. On an island more than sixty percent covered with forest, containment was priority one. Losing the building was inevitable. The best they could hope for was to keep the fire from devouring the surrounding brush and breaking loose. If it went wild, they’d have to call in a Helitack from the mainland, which could take an hour or more — plenty of time for the flames to eat their way to a more populated area. ECFD, even with extra volunteers, didn’t have the manpower required to stage a large-scale evacuation. People would lose their homes, or worse.
He couldn’t stand by and let that happen. Not even for Bri.
Kean tucked her close to his body, squeezed, and then braced her shoulders. “I’ve gotta go, baby.”
Bri stared back at him. So many thoughts seemed to swirl in the depths of her gaze. Trying to track them made him dizzy. She looked as though she wanted to tell him something important, but she just blinked and said, “I know.”
Kean grunted with the effort of letting her go and forced himself to turn away. He clipped across the field, cursing himself with every step, not allowing himself to look back. As he drew closer to the ripples of heat and the angry hiss of the inferno, he found his center. This was what he did, what he lived for. Bri was almost as safe as she could be, surrounded by so many people.
He ran into Dave Mossby at the second truck, also out of uniform. Dave looked worried, but neither of them spoke as they snatched another hose and a set of adapters from the truck’s side compartment. Kean scanned the formation of black and yellow uniforms criss-crossing in front of the Guild’s smoky mouth. He spotted Andy, already suited up, about to lope into the hot zone. He clenched his jaw and let go of the urge run over and drag the eager kid back by his suspenders. He just had to trust he’d trained Andy well enough. Trial by fire. This sort of blaze was at once a fireman’s worst fear and favorite fantasy: an obscenely huge version of the perfect Boy Scout tipi-fire.
Kean and Dave worked quickly to hook the pump up to a three-way hose. Kean hustled behind the building to hook it up and turn it on. The air in the clearing hung thick with smoke. As water skirted the edge of the tree line, steam billowed in sheets. His power flared in response to his spiking adrenaline. It took tight control to keep from fading back to the truck to gear up. The muscles in his legs ticked with urgency as he walked. Dave joined him at the truck locker as he started changing.
“Hey man, I’m not suiting up. Gawain wants Summoners to try to belay the wind and call for rain.”
“Sure.” Kean nodded and pulled on his boots. It made sense. Not how he would approach the problem, but Kean could admit that of the two of them, Gawain had a cooler head in a crisis.
Dave’s normally cheerful face had a bitter twist to it, as though he knew the Sheriff was a touchy subject. “It’s a damn shame, losing you and Astrid. I know a lot of people ain’t got nice things to say right now, but I wanted you to know I think it’s a damn shame.”
Kean didn’t look back up, but nodded again, clenching his jaw. Most of the island’s politics the past few years had left a bad taste in his mouth, but there were still people like Dave — people who remembered that being Zyne made them all brothers and sisters. It was for those people that he had to lay his qualms aside and do the right thing. Maybe someday, when they weren’t blinded by fear, when Gawain wasn’t stuffing a line of bullshit down their throats, the rest of the coven would come to see that Bri wasn’t the cause of their problems, just the misfortunate victim.
He finished dressing and ducked toward the melee, his focus all on the flames. Until he felt a brush of something against his shields. Something beyond the heat, something unfamiliar. He pivoted on his heel and scanned the woods, which were veiled in steam. He closed out the engulfing roar of the inferno and the hollering of his teammates and reached out with all of his senses. Something tickled against his mental probe before flitting deeper into the trees. Kean honed in on the feeling — an oily, scratchy sting. He’d never encountered such a force before, but it was evil. Pure, undiluted evil. His breath caught.
It could be the killer.
He’d started the other fire. Why not this one? And he might be only yards away, hiding like the eel he was. Kean paused under a group of tall cedars and pulsed his probes again. Still there. He just couldn’t quite get a handle on where, exactly. He let out a slow, measured breath and opened his senses wider.
“Fitzgerald.” The Sheriff appeared in front of him, the energy of his fade-in making Kean’s vision slash white before he could snap his shields back into place.
Kean glared at Gawain, then noted the other man’s face was three shades of red and dripping with sweat. His over-starched uniform was soaked through, clinging to his heaving chest.
“Need your help,” Gawain panted out. “Can’t move them all in time.”
From the way Gawain’s eyes bulged, Kean guessed the “them” was the coven’s cache of priceless spellbooks and artifacts, stored in the underground chambers below the Guild. As coven Sigma, those artifacts were entrusted by the Synod into Gawain’s keeping.
“There’s someone out here,” Kean said, his voice so low he was almost growling. The loss of a few scrolls and goblets was nothing compared to what the source of that evil might do if he let it escape. He took two long strides away from Gawain, deeper into the forest.
“Please!”
He turned to look his old comrade and Sigma in the eye, mostly to warn him not to get in the way. And partially because he’d never heard Gawain say please. Not to him.
“I’ll owe you,” Gawain said through gritted teeth. “On my oath. Anything that doesn’t break the Threefold Law.”
Kean yanked back on his protective instincts to look at things rationally. It was hard. He was not a very rational man, especially with the call of the fire simmering in his blood, and the cause of all this strife almost within his grasp. Then there was the fact that he’d left Bri unprotected…
Was he that sure of what he was sensing? Sure enough to justify deserting the entire coven? He’d be screwing them all over if he turned his back on Gawain now. Losing the Legacy meant Gawain’s ass, but it still belonged to the whole coven. Protect the Legacy was the first and most important of the vows he’d taken upon initiation. Plus, given what he and Bri and Astrid were facing, it might not be a bad idea to have a favor from Gawain up his sleeve. But what if he let the killer get away? Bri meant more to him than anything, and she could be next.
With an echoing roar, the glass ceiling of the Guild imploded. The flames burst free, reaching into the sky like hands out of hell.
“Think faster!” Gawain barked.
“All right!” Kean snarled back. “You better remember this when it’s time to pay up.”
***
Bri couldn’t bear to see another building go up in flames. She’d stirred from her soundest sleep in years to find Kean sliding out of bed, his scent and warmth still everywhere, her muscles languid from a night of lovemaking. The next thing she knew, Kean was bidding her farewell, his eyes burning with a different sort of passion — the kind only battle could quench. She wanted to beg him not to leave, to tell him everything about her visions and the demon, about his own death. But her Inner Eye had flared with warning, a white-hot sensation in her forehead. She couldn’t risk revealing the wrong thing at the wrong moment and making things worse. She had to let him go.
That didn’t mean she had to watch.
As soon as Kean left her side, taking his shields with him, chaos fell around her like a net, suffocating, tangling her senses. Men in yellow and black ran from one end of the clearing to the other, shouting orders, throwing hand signals, moving like a hive of angry bees. They cut back brush, doused with hoses, and fought the fire for every inch. The stout, round building at the center of the clearing roared its fury. Smoke slithered around their knees, hugging the ground unnaturally, a dark promise carrying more heat, more choking fumes.
Fear closed up her throat as she stood at the edge of the huddled onlookers. Like her, most of them had been roused out of bed, their hair mussed and shirts un-tucked. She recognized several of them — her fourth grade teacher, the woman who used to cut her mother’s hair, the man who sold Bri her first car. Few of them paid her any mind, absorbed as they were in the blaze. Those who did notice her watching pelted her with cold, hard, glares. This is your fault, they said silently with their hunched shoulders and shuffling feet. We want nothing to do with you.
The clearing filled with smoke, and it reminded Bri of Mr. Moaggen’s limp body, of Vivianne’s flesh melting away. She suddenly needed to taste fresh air, to feel the cool salt breeze on her face. Sucking in a ragged breath and coughing it out, she ducked towards the nearby trees and followed a well-worn path leading to the water’s edge.
The path wound past giant nested boulders and thickets of brush, insulating the raging blast behind her, leaving only a dull roar punctuated by sharp cracks of snapping wood. Bri slowed, afraid she would trip over a rock in the dim light.
When the path broke through the trees at the cliff edge, thousands of sparkling suns reflected off the silver water, momentarily blinding her. The ground beneath her feet quaked as a rumbling crash echoed from the clearing. A giant puff of foreboding smoke rose into the sky. Birds broke from the trees all around her, and Bri spun in surprise.
Then she saw him: the unmistakable silhouette of a man, less than ten feet away, black against the dusky horizon.
Oh, no, came her first thought, and then, Oh, Gods.
The rustle of wings battered the swaying form, and the wind shifted, turning it. It. Not a man — a body. Hanging upside down from a tree by one ankle. A dark coat flipped up over its head, dragging across the ground.
Bri stumbled forward, partly from the momentum of her knees buckling, and partly out of instinct. She knew she should turn around, run, scream for help. But terror and anguish churned inside of her and became a tsunami driving her forward. What she saw couldn’t be real.
Just touch it, and make it untrue.
This couldn’t be real. She’d stopped it. She’d re-written the future. She saw a different future, and her visions had always come true.
Not real. Not real.
She fell to her hands and knees, too late to see she’d landed in a splotch of blood-soaked grass. Red painted her hands as she reached out for a fistful of the coat. A tremor ripped through her as she clasped familiar herringbone wool.
“No.” The figure slowly swung around. First a hand dragged into view — a tan wrist covered in wheat-colored hair, wearing a gold watch.
No!
Bri flipped back and crab-walked until her bad shoulder jammed into the tree trunk. She tried to scream, but choked on her tongue as tears poured down her face and throat in torrents. She gargled out a high keening noise as Eric’s body spun to face her. He looked just as he had when she last saw him. Not a scratch or bruise marring his perfect face, his hair still gelled into place. His expression was slack, disturbingly peaceful, and far too young to be frozen forever in death. A fly buzzed from his open mouth, and her stomach heaved.
Blood dripped from his shoulders to the earth below, though no open wounds were visible. The same wetness made her fingers slick as she dug them into the dirt at her sides. Bri’s vision swam, tilted. Then she realized Eric’s crisp white shirt had been torn open, and words were painted onto his tawny skin in blood. Upside down, so they were readable with him hanging there.
DIE FOR THEM
When it broke free, Briana’s scream spiraled into the sky like a bolt of lightning, cleaving her heart in two.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Kean lay on the steaming ground beside Gawain, buried under an armfull of ritual tools that glowed red hot against his suit and scrolls that were singed and flaking at the edges. He shoved the heap away and sat up, yanking off his helmet.
Gawain’s head lolled in Kean’s direction, his skin and uniform blackened. Bright pink lips pulled back to reveal gleaming white teeth as he issued a sound that was half-groan, half guffaw.
Kean shook his head, holding back his own chuckle. The air between them was less charged than it had been in a long time in light of a very simple truth: they were both crazy motherfuckers. Lucky to be alive. Naturally, the high of such a near-brush with death, with all appendages still intact, was contagious, and soon they were grinning at each other like a couple of loons.
Fifty yards away, the rest of the Guild’s foundation gave out. The tunnels they had just escaped swallowed the mass of the building like a giant flaming throat, then issued a belch of thick black smoke. Water streamed in high arcs from all directions, crossing in the center like a grotesque fountain over the black, steaming pit.
Then, it was quiet.
Kean climbed to his feet and helped Gawain up with one hand. Their grip held firm long enough for Gawain to square his shoulders, long enough for his carefree smile to slip away and his serious mien to clamp down on his brows. He looked at their joined hands thoughtfully for a moment, and then pulled his away. “This doesn’t change anything, Fitzgerald.”
“Nope. It doesn’t.” Jaw clenched, Kean shrugged out of his jacket. One moment of good humor wasn’t enough to turn over all the bad ground between them. “You still owe me.”
Gawain’s cool gaze narrowed and he squinted towards the crowd of coven members on the far side of the field.
Kean followed suit, looking for Bri. He didn’t see her. Maybe she’d gone back to the truck. The hoses slowed their frantic spraying, and everyone in the clearing seemed to let out a collective breath. Gawain was already on his way to face the shock-stricken public. Damage control. If there was one thing their current Sigma excelled at, it was telling them what they wanted to hear. Which left Kean to gather and clean up the pieces of North Wake’s Legacy scattered at his feet.
He bent over, muttering to himself, and a shrill scream pierced the dreary calm. Kean’s spine went stiff enough to snap. Gawain whirled on his heel and met Kean’s frantic gaze for half a heartbeat. They faded in unison to the far side of the trees.
Bri screamed again at the sight of both of them, then fell into sobs and lunged forward, hugging Kean’s knees. He scooped her up and his ribcage felt too tight to hold his lungs. She was covered in blood. Gawain patted her down as she squirmed, trying to glue herself to the front of Kean’s body. Her arms roped around his neck like a harness.
“It’s not hers.” Confusion clouded Gawain’s expression for an instant, then he glanced over Kean’s shoulder and his gaze went stone cold.
Bri’s cries dropped to whimpers, which she pressed into
Kean’s neck. He turned to see a body swinging from the tree. It took him a moment to process what he was looking at, a moment longer than Gawain.
Fuck.
“Look what she’s brought upon us,” the Sheriff said.
Kean shook his head, expecting his eyes to start throwing sparks. Don’t go there, he willed Gawain for once in his life to know what was good for him. He couldn’t blame this on Bri. “You’re the one who doesn’t have a handle on your own coven. Think about it, Gawain. Only a Zyne would know how to evade the wards and alarms.”
Gawain spoke through gritted teeth, the vein in his temple visibly throbbing. “That’s her boyfriend, you idiot! Who do you think that warning is for? Do you have any idea who he is?”
Kean flinched and spun back towards the body, studying it. He’d never seen the man before, not even in a photograph. He was handsome. Rich looking. Dead. Bri had gone absolutely still, confirmation enough that Gawain wasn’t mistaken. He read the painted warning again, the threat given new meaning and importance knowing it was meant for Bri.
And you let the bastard get away.
Because of Gawain. He eased Bri to her feet and shuffled her behind him, then faced off with the Sheriff, who had a far too predatory gleam in his eye to ignore. “None of this is her fault.”
“You’re dumber than I thought. You get a little piece of ass and you’re ready to go down swinging for the bitch.”
“Shut it!” He took a half-step closer, forcing Gawain to tip his head back to meet the pain Kean was promising with his glare.
Rain of Ash: Skydancer Book 1 (The Zyne Legacy) Page 20
