Baptism of Fire (Playing With Hellfire Book 1)

by Jessie Thomas

  Patterson was first up the front steps to the porch, the rest of us trailing behind, boots falling heavily on stairs that held all the structural integrity of wet cardboard. One of Ramos’ feet reduced a middle step to splinters. I heard the crackle of rotted wood and her sharp expletive from behind me.

  “That’s great,” she muttered, annoyance filtering through her mask. I turned to watch her clear the rest of the staircase without any more incidents. “This place should’ve been condemned.”

  “Watch your step,” Moretti laughed, bumping his shoulder into hers. We all filed into the smoky building through a doorway that looked like it’d been broken into long before we’d arrived. The doorframe was scarred and gouged, the dirty white paint weathered, sloughing off in thin flakes just like the exterior siding.

  “Go fuck yourself, Moretti.”

  “Damn.” He rubbed his shoulder as if the friendly barb had dug in. “That almost stung.”

  “Let’s go.” Patterson’s snippy tone was muffled in the confines of his mask. “Ramos, you’re with me on the first floor. Phoenix and Moretti can clear upstairs. Looks abandoned, but we’ve gotta be sure.”

  Moretti and I traded another long-suffering look. I was convinced that Patterson held a grudge against us. Our troublesome antics hadn’t survived the discipline instilled in us from academy training. Most of them, not all. Patterson could always find something to be salty about.

  Silently, we trudged up the stairs to the second floor while Patterson and Ramos disappeared into the dark. It had the sad appearance of most abandoned houses—dust-laden sheets thrown over broken furniture, a layer of old newspapers and garbage covering the floors like makeshift carpet, and the faint traces of some kind of unpleasant, musty odor. Broken glass crunched under my boots when I reached the landing of the second floor behind Moretti.

  He was already halfway down the hall, peeking into rooms and calling out to whoever might be squatting in this place. I stood where I was in the haze of gray smoke, something prickling along my skin through my clothes and gear. It was the weirdest feeling. Like the same static that would catch my fingertips when I’d stick my hands in front of the television screen as a kid. But there was something else there, beneath it. Part of me wanted to reach out to it, search for its source. I couldn’t explain it, but it seemed to want to coil around me.

  “Nix?” Moretti’s voice brought me back. The smoke now made visibility more difficult. He was just a dark outline, a shape in the gloom. “Are you all right?” He came down the hallway toward me again. The smoke billowed in thick plumes to surround us both, moving faster than it was just moments ago. But neither of us knew where it was coming from.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. My hands shook. “I’m—”

  Whatever I planned to tell him was interrupted by the sound of the ceiling creaking above our heads.

  “You hear that?”

  “Footsteps.” I nodded.

  “The attic,” Moretti said. “There’s another staircase at the end of the hallway. The door was open, but…”

  It was hard to believe that anyone would still be here with all of this smoke—that anyone would be in this place at all—but it wasn’t altogether unusual. It was easy to lose all common sense and rational thinking when you were panicked. Fear could be a good motivator for your flight response, but more often than not, it ended in terror and smoke inhalation.

  The strange feeling from before had vanished, but the leftover anxiety still had my stomach in a vice.

  “The fire could be in the attic,” Moretti said, huffing, taking the stairs two steps at a time.

  We ascended into darkness. In the upstairs hallway, there had still been a few weak slats of dim light coming through a window facing the street, but here it was nearly pitch black. I fumbled around on my coat and finally switched on my flashlight. A tarnished brass doorknob flashed when the bright beam found it. I knew Moretti had been fully prepared to kick it down, but the knob turned, the door squealing open without so much as a protest.

  “Fire department!” I yelled across the cavernous attic. “Let us know where you are!”

  I’d been hoping for a response. Hoping that the owner of the footsteps had just been confused in this maze of an attic, not passed out on the floor somewhere.

  Nothing.

  It was one of those old, spacious attics full of untouched boxes and more things under filthy sheets. That, on top of the dark, the balmy temperature, and the smoke, created plenty of opportunities for someone to get themselves trapped. I thought we’d find the source of the smoke here, too, but there wasn’t a trace of anything. No glimmer of flame. Not even the hiss and crackle of faulty wiring in the walls.

  “Probably passed out,” Moretti said. “I’ll take the right side—”

  “Wait.” An uneasy feeling blossomed in the pit of my stomach again.

  “What? Nix, let’s go…we don’t have a lot of time.”

  The floorboards groaned somewhere in a far, dark corner, and both our heads snapped in the same direction to seek it out. A shape, a movement in the murky black caught the edge of my periphery at about the same time. The beam of my flashlight bounced, unsteady, toward it as if the light itself hesitated to reveal whatever was in here with us. My own fear seemed a bit unreasonable—I’d cleared out plenty of rooms and hauled half-conscious victims from smoky, decrepit places just like this.

  But this feeling…it was ominous. A threat, maybe. I was getting all kinds of internal warning signals I couldn’t explain. Like my body had just moved way beyond the regular flight or fight response and had picked up on something more. And I’d never felt anything like it before, not even when we’d had dangerously close calls.

  The wavering beam from my flashlight finally landed on a person clad in black from the waist up. My heart leapt straight into my throat, the painful rhythm slamming against my temples, blocking out everything else. I only caught a shock of blond hair and the back of their head before they disappeared. Not into the darkness of the attic like a normal person might’ve assumed.

  They were just…gone.

  Vanished.

  2

  A current of air rippled across the attic, stifling hot as it fanned over us and forced the door to slam shut. An odd, pungent sulfuric odor came with it, but whoever had been up here a moment before was gone. There was nothing left of them except for shower of embers that followed in their wake. I watched them drift in the smoke like dust motes in a ray of sunlight, glowing orange before they blinked out of existence.

  The dark could play its tricks, too, in the same way that fear often did.

  But there’d only been light.

  We’d just watched an entire person evaporate in front of us. I saw weird shit on this job every single week. By nature, a lot of people in Perdition Falls had a certain weirdness about them—it was a strange city with an even stranger reputation. The weirdness came with the territory. You just kind of tolerated it after a while.

  But that…that was new.

  And something I couldn’t explain. I probably could’ve shoved it away, buried it somewhere to forget and lived the rest of my life without knowing. The two of us probably would’ve been better off. My first instinct, meanwhile, was to get the fuck out of here. Unfortunately for me, any immediate flight response had been overridden by years of protocol and job training.

  “You saw that, right?” I asked.

  Part of me wished that it’d just been some bizarre fever dream, a trick of the smoke, anything but real. Maybe we were both hallucinating.

  When I found him hovering near my left elbow, Moretti’s deep brown eyes had gone wide, his breath hissing through his mask in shallow gasps. “Holy shit.”

  “We have to clear the attic,” I reminded him. It was easier to focus on the job than dwell on why my hands had started shaking again and the sweat pooling at the small of my back had turned ice cold with a sudden rush of terror.

  “The hell was that?”

&nb
sp; “No time, Moretti.” I took a couple of wobbling steps, maneuvering around piles of dilapidated, moldy boxes. “Keep moving.”

  “Vic.” His voice sounded hoarse, strained with fear. “There’s no one else up here.”

  I tried to ignore the dread, the warning that still prickled across my skin. “We don’t know that.”

  He hadn’t moved an inch, rooted to the dusty floor of this godforsaken attic. I’d never seen him lose his shit like this. There’d been moments where the two of us, for our own reasons, had been immobilized by panic during our first months at the academy. It happened to the best of us. Hell, the first year on the job pushed you to your limits. Being shoved into claustrophobic hallways with a ton of gear on your back will do that to you, the first time or several. But not now, far removed from the training simulations, outside in the real world where it really counted with years of experience behind us.

  “We’ve gotta get out of here.” He was on the verge of hyperventilation, gasping in shuddering, uneven breaths.

  I had to pretend like I wasn’t just about to lose my shit two seconds ago. I wasn’t sure if he was going to buy it. Something about the rising, inexplicable heat—because it was getting hotter in this attic, and it wasn’t my nervous imagination playing games—made the anxiety brimming in my veins worse.

  “Hey, Moretti.” I kept my tone calm. Firm but not patronizing. That wouldn’t help the situation. Kicking past a dented cardboard box, I made my way back over to him and grabbed his arm. He wouldn’t look at me, those dark brown eyes pulled to the corner where the burst of embers had dissipated.

  “Hey…look at me.”

  He wouldn’t. He trembled under my careful hold.

  “I know neither of us can explain whatever we just saw,” I reasoned. “We’ll deal with it later, okay? Over breakfast, when you’ve got some coffee in you. But right now, I need you. I need you to hold it together so we can finish the job.”

  Moretti nodded, but his gaze still wasn’t focused.

  “Is that a yes? I need to hear you say it.” I tightened my grip on his arm for a second, giving it a squeeze.

  “Yeah.” He sighed and knocked himself out of his panicked trance with a slow, dazed shake of his head. He finally looked at me, though the wide-eyed expression hadn’t quite faded. I didn’t blame him for not letting go of his fear, but at the very least I needed him alert. “Yeah, I’m with you. Sorry, I’m—”

  The lock on the attic door clicked, cutting off whatever else he was going to say with an uncomfortable finality. No one had touched it, not from what I could tell. The damn thing had locked on its own. Moretti wanted to bolt toward it—he started to wrench himself free from my fingers, but I ended up getting dragged along with him, stumbling over my own boots and falling into his chest.

  Neither of us made to the door in enough time to kick it down.

  A familiar roar welled up from somewhere in the darkening smoke as the fire finally revealed itself. It appeared where before there had been nothing, no reason or cause for the flames to suddenly rise out of the dirty floorboards like they’d been summoned. I flinched at the abrupt surge of heat. The reaction seemed instantaneous: the flickering golden orange glow illuminated the room, blazing toward us. Moretti, who’d caught me when I fell into him, still had a desperate hold on my arms and tried to haul us both toward the locked door.

  The fire followed behind.

  In training, we were taught how to read the smoke and fire while working a scene. We’d learned to pay attention to how quickly the smoke moved, what the color and volume of it could tell us as a structure became engulfed. Fire, too, behaved in certain predictable ways. Knowing how it was going to react to the changing conditions meant life or death, for us and those unfortunate victims trapped in the thick of it. I knew how fire danced and toyed with oxygen. I’d seen the situation change in a single breath. That’s all it took.

  Fire had no regard for anything. Most of the time we were stupid enough to ignite it, play with it. And some of us had chosen to run into the heart of destruction and try to put a stop to it.

  This fire didn’t play by the rules.

  It had a mind of its own, snaking across the floor at a lightning-fast speed without any kind of accelerant. The flames spread as if they were sent with a purpose, as if they’d been directed by an invisible hand. They moved with us, a split second ahead of our steps, scorching the floor around our feet and trapping Moretti and me in a circle. The locked door was no longer an option. The flames had crawled along the floor from where they had us surrounded and climbed their way up the doorframe, eating away at everything in their path.

  Heat pressed against my lungs, almost suffocating, and I worried that it would be too much for our gear to handle. The floorboards started to creak and groan.

  We needed to move, and quickly.

  “The window?” I suggested.

  “There’s a window?”

  “It’s back there, but it’s boarded up.” I couldn’t keep the fear out of my voice now, not even for Moretti’s sake. It was probably useless to try. I made a halfhearted attempt to get control over my breathing, but there didn’t seem to be a point in that, either. We were both rattled. “I saw it earlier with my flashlight.”

  The floorboards were making noise under our boots, the wood weakening and popping as the fire continued to burn. With each snap of wood being devoured, my heart leapt painfully in my chest. I was afraid to move, to breathe.

  “Only choice we have left.” Moretti grabbed my hand and shoved me behind him—I would’ve given him an earful, but he was taller and broader and now was not the time—so that he could clear the circle of fire first and tug me along for the ride. The flames burned so damn hot that I didn’t expect either of us to get out unscathed.

  “All right, we’re going,” was Moretti’s only warning before he jumped.

  A sickening crack ricocheted off the walls, impossibly loud until it became the only sound I could hear. Shit.

  My stomach dropped when the floor gave way underneath us, plunging in a mess of charred splinters and flaming debris to the second story hallway. Moretti’s hand was ripped from mine somewhere in the fall. His glove slipped off his fingers and I realized it too late to react, the now unoccupied glove dangling uselessly in my own hand. Time seemed meaningless, caught between the few moments it took for the two of us to careen through the missing floor and an eternity.

  It was like I’d been forced to watch in horrific slow motion: Moretti’s silhouette tumbling through the dense, black smoke, the world collapsing around us, the scorching heat burying us from all sides until I couldn’t feel anything else. I thought I heard him yell my name, his voice frantic and swallowed up by the raging fire and the ringing in my ears. Maybe I called back to him. Maybe I screamed or cursed or didn’t make a sound. I reached out to grasp at something…anything on my way down but there was nothing left to hold onto. It’d all been consumed by the flames.

  The grimy carpet scattered with debris and smoldering ash rushed to meet my fall. Pain shot through my left side, the impact more violent than I expected. Once my back slammed into the floor, the air escaped my lungs. I sucked in a wheezing breath, panting, fighting to breathe again, when everything around me went black.

  There was no way to know for sure how long I’d been out. It could have been moments. Maybe two minutes or five. I blinked slowly, staring up at the gaping hole we’d dropped through that was now barely visible through the layer of blackening smoke, afraid to move as my body regained consciousness. Everything hurt. That was the first thing I felt—the pain of bruised, strained muscles, the agony that had traveled up my left side.

  The next thing was the heat. The upstairs hallway looked unrecognizable now, a narrow passage engulfed in fast-moving smoke and an inferno that blazed up the walls with an overpowering intensity that shouldn’t have been possible. I’d sweated through my clothes, the fabric drenched, my skin and hair dripping with salty perspiration. My helmet had
rolled away somewhere during the collision with the floor, and I knocked into Moretti’s with my elbow once I finally decided that lying there waiting for the house to come down on top of us wasn’t that great for self-preservation.

  Shit. Moretti.

  Over the steady whoosh of the flames demolishing the rooms around us, I heard the melodic chirp of his PASS alarm. A noise I dreaded hearing, a source of nightmares.

  And it got me moving.

  I sat up and almost regretted it, black spots dancing across my vision as a blinding, gnawing pain spiked through my side. Like it had torn its way in deep, shredding muscle and tissue and causing serious damage. With a shaking hand, I dragged my gloved fingers over my turnout coat to find some kind of debris—I had no damn idea what it was, and at this point I didn’t want to know—sticking out of my left side. I lifted my glove to my sightline to see it smeared with dark crimson.

  The gasping whine that echoed in my mask didn’t sound like me at all.

  Moretti’s alarm brought me back to my senses. No time.

  My pain didn’t matter, not now. I had to work through it.

  Groaning, I stayed low to the floor, crawling on all fours to where Moretti lay sprawled and motionless. Every movement pierced the jagged wound in my side, made the heat and the sweat and misery worse. I leaned over him, relieved when I saw the rise and fall of his chest. The orange glow from the fire highlighted the edges of his dark hair, traced the swell of his cheekbones with deep shadows. In the light, I noticed the bright red trickling down one side of his face from somewhere under his hairline.

  I tapped his cheek with an open palm. “Moretti,” I called. “Hey, Moretti…come on, open your eyes. Anthony, I need you to wake up.”

  Nothing.

  “Phoenix!” That was Ramos, her distant shout crackling over our radios. “Moretti! This place is starting to come down!” Well, shit, I hadn’t noticed.

  “You have to evacuate now,” Patterson ordered.