Baptism of Fire (Playing With Hellfire Book 1)

by Jessie Thomas

  Midmorning sunbeams from the windows above my bed fell in rectangular slats on the hardwood floor and warmed my skin as I passed through them. Speckles of dust floated lazily in my wake, glittering as I disrupted their flight. Dressed in only a pair of light wash cropped jeans and a bra, I stood in front of the full-length mirror across from the bed. My hair was still damp from my shower, pushed over one shoulder in a tangle of loose waves. Aside from the purple half-circle shapes under my eyes I thought I looked okay—and that was really saying something, because I’d looked haggard as fuck during those lost few days in my apartment. Which somehow didn’t even touch how gaunt and dead-eyed my reflection had been under the unforgiving, antiseptic fluorescents at the hospital.

  Most of the bruises had healed, the worst ones no longer painful but just a little ugly, like the one that got cozy on my shoulder. The wound in my side no longer hurt as much as it used to, though I was overly cautious and babied it. At least it didn’t look as angry as before. The skin was red, slightly puckered, the misshapen scar pink and raised, somewhat tender to the touch. I didn’t mind it, really. Like everything else that was new after the fire, it became a part of me.

  Nightly training sessions with Javier had kicked my ass back into shape. There was an ache in my muscles, but it was a good ache, the kind that left me exhausted enough to pass out into a dreamless sleep as soon as I got home.

  There wasn’t time for nightmares to catch up. I had been too busy igniting fires from the ether until it became second nature, my skin alight, my soul embracing a power that felt like it was always meant to be mine. There used to be a lot of grousing at the firehouse when we were all roped into mandatory training, but I always secretly enjoyed it. And I’d been a pro at drills—the competitions were my favorite events; I never realized how dangerous my competitive streak was—so this felt like more of the same.

  After one more assessing glance at the scar that sliced up my side, I pulled on a black tank top and a light blouse that I kept unbuttoned. The fabric, while soft, hit the sensitive patch on my bicep that was still pink from last night’s training mishap. I flinched, remembering the way Javier’s fire had grazed my skin.

  Bare feet padding softly on the floor, I moved to the tiny hallway between the kitchen and the bathroom to the linen closet. Cardboard boxes were piled on the shelves above the spare towels, a couple of umbrellas, a broom and a sad-looking mop. Most of them had holiday decorations, but a few were relics salvaged from our family home in the suburbs. Rising on the tips of my toes, I pushed boxes aside until I found the right one with PICTURES scrawled on it in heavy permanent marker. I knelt in the middle of the hallway to dig through yearbooks and embarrassing high school memories captured on grainy Polaroids. The only remnants left of my childhood friendship with Javier were contained in an old shoebox, the lid long gone and the edges torn to shreds.

  I’d just deposited the shoebox onto the kitchen counter next to the pile of neglected mail when I heard my phone ping with a new text message. A sturdy, unopened envelope with the PFFD emblem fell onto the rug, but I let it stay where it landed to find my phone.

  It was Ramos. Hey. At Hell’s Kitchen. You still coming?

  Running late, sorry, I texted back, wincing. Be there in five.

  The trip down memory lane would have to wait.

  Swiping my wallet and keys from the kitchen counter, I was out the door at a brisk pace. I’d have to trust the heat of Perdition Falls to dry my hair on the walk over.

  “Fucking late.” I squinted at the sunlight that hit me in the face once I was outside, wishing I’d remembered a pair of shades. “Again.”

  Hell’s Kitchen was, as you’d probably expect, The Raze’s most infamous diner. The name elicited a lot of polite laughs from those who weren’t from around here, but if you spent more than a day in Perdition Falls, you’d notice that this city didn’t do anything with a deft hand. It was all or nothing. Cheesy name aside, Hell’s Kitchen was open nearly 24/7, which made it a refuge for people staggering in inebriated from the bars at four in the morning. Or, in my experience, firefighters who were starving after an endless shift. The food was good and cheap, and you could order anything your stomach desired no matter the time of day or night. And it was always so crowded with regulars that most of the tourists had been forced to scavenge elsewhere.

  The squat, rectangular building didn’t look like much, and its slightly seedy appearance might’ve been what kept the tourists at bay. A skeletal, hooded Grim Reaper perched on one side of the building, surrounded by painted orange and red flames climbing up the whitewashed bricks. The rest of it was all windows, the central hub of activity overflowing onto the large outdoor patio.

  “Hey, girl,” Bree Ramos called. “Saved you a seat.” She patted the empty chair under a red umbrella that offered relief from the sun.

  As she hugged me, delicately as she could, I caught a whiff of her citrus scented perfume. She held onto me for a long time, and I let her. I’d had a few best friends to fill the void when Javier left, some more permanent than others. Bree and I hadn’t been in the same class at the academy, but being the only women on our shift bonded us quickly. I’d missed her in the weeks away, and I’d started to feel the guilt of dismissing her messages.

  “I missed you,” she said. “You look good.”

  Ramos pulled away, one hand lingering on my arm. She smiled, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes, the edges tinged with heartache.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Missed you, too.”

  We sat down opposite each other at the circular table to have a glance at the menu even though we both had it memorized. The ice in Ramos’ lemonade clinked against the glass as it melted, her polished nails tapping a staccato rhythm on the tabletop. The place was already packed with the brunch/early lunch crowd, customers seated at the counter in front of the pass-through window where food was served to everyone eating outside on the patio. Almost all of the tables were full, with a few empty Adirondack chairs to spare.

  Usually, we were here after shift and still in our uniforms, so it was a rare occasion to be sharing a table during off-hours. Ramos’ hair had been freed from its regulation tight bun, black coils just long enough to brush her lean, muscled shoulders. She wore a seafoam green sundress, the color complimenting the bright eyeshadow dusted in the corners of her eyes.

  “How have things been at the house?” I asked.

  “Quiet,” she offered, resting her elbows onto the table. “Not like that—we’ve been busy, we’re always busy, but it’s been quiet. Different, you know? You can feel it. No one wants to really talk about it. But you can feel it.”

  “I figured it would be.”

  Ramos heaved a sigh. She pushed at the ice with a striped red straw, watching the melting cubes swirl around a slice of fresh lemon.

  “Last thing I ever said to Moretti,” she laughed, “I told him to go fuck himself. I’ve been thinking about that since the fire.” Ramos shook her head, eyes still following the slice of lemon. “I…really can’t stop thinking about it.”

  “You said it with love,” I assured. “He thought it was funny.”

  “He did.” She ducked her head and stared into her glass. “I hope he’s still laughing wherever he is. God, I just wish we’d gotten to you guys faster. I can’t stop running through it in my head, all the things I’d do different.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered, Bree. He was already gone.”

  She opened her mouth, a question on her lips that she couldn’t bring herself to ask. Or maybe a hundred, once I noticed the glint of hesitant curiosity in her pained expression. How had they swept it all under the rug?

  “Have you talked to Ally at all? She’s been asking about you.”

  “No,” I admitted. “How is she? And Aidan?”

  “I stop by whenever I can,” Ramos said. “She’s taking it a day at time. Some are better than others—you know how it is. Their baby boy is getting so big, I wish he’d stop growing so fast. Sometimes I
think it’s good that he doesn’t know what’s going on, but then I realize he’s not going to remember much. Or anything at all. And that…that just…” She trailed off. “It’s not fair to either of them.”

  Guilt swelled up in my chest and tried to smother my lungs.

  “It fucking sucks.”

  “We don’t have to talk about this,” she said. “I don’t even want to talk about it. I just miss you at the house, Nix. It’s not the same and the guys are driving me crazy. Even when they’re keeping their damn emotions bottled up, they find new ways to be obnoxious. I’ve been giving myself chores to keep a safe distance from their nonsense.”

  “They’re good at that.”

  I ordered a cup of coffee from the wait staff who breezed by our table.

  “No rush or anything,” Ramos took a sip of lemonade, “but when’re they gonna clear you to come back?”

  I scrambled for an excuse and crafted a lie instead. “Actually, they stuck me behind a desk with fire investigation.”

  Not exactly a total lie.

  “Seriously?” Her fingers perched on the end of her straw. “What’s that like? ‘Cause you’re not exactly a desk job kinda woman.”

  “I thought it’d be soul-sucking. That I’d hate it.”

  “And it…isn’t?” Ramos arched one of her eyebrows. “God, I hate to imagine what they do in that office. Or, really, what they don’t do.”

  “It keeps me busy,” I said. “These days, busy’s been good for me.”

  “Maybe with you in there, they’ll get off their lazy asses.”

  My phone buzzed on the tabletop at the same time my coffee arrived. I let the coffee simmer in its bright red mug—with its requisite devil horns and demonic tail sketched in black on the ceramic—to check the text message.

  How’s the arm?

  Javier.

  I tapped out a quick reply. Excruciating, thanks for asking.

  Reaching for the coffee, I pushed my phone away. “Sorry. Work stuff.”

  Ramos eyed me with suspicion. “Uh-huh. You’re gonna have to tell me all about work stuff sometime.”

  I avoided her prying with a wary sip of coffee that burned my tongue. The last thing I wanted to do was subject another close friend to the world this city was hiding.

  My phone buzzed again. Thanks for milking the hell out of this. Really makes me feel better.

  No problem, I answered. See you tonight.

  12

  When Javier told me to “come over to the house” and texted me his address, I’d been expecting one of those manicured brownstones or massive old Victorians or 1920s row houses on the outskirts of The Raze.

  What I hadn’t expected was an actual firehouse.

  From the looks of it, the old firehouse had been out of commission for a long time now, though the black lettering above the single bay had been preserved. ENGINE NO. 28. I couldn’t immediately tell how old the building was, but if I had to guess, it might’ve been one of the earlier houses from the late 1800s. We had a lot of those sprinkled throughout the city, some of them still in operation.

  A block of colorful Victorians and narrow residential houses from the ‘20s and ‘30s had sprung up around this one. The original brick, which leaned more toward orange than red, had survived relatively unharmed. Compared to its stately neighbors, the building was flat and square-shaped, the bay door and front entrance both painted dark teal instead of bright red. Whoever had repurposed it into a residential house had done so without sacrificing its vintage charm or history.

  It felt like I’d seen this place before. Maybe through someone else’s memories, maybe my own. It was always hard to tell.

  I sloshed across the street, my steel-toe boots wading through the water that had created a pond in the middle of the road. The buttery yellow light from the street lamps rippled in the slick pavement, and a chilly, hard rain pounded against the black vinyl shielding my head. I balanced the umbrella in one hand and adjusted the tote bag dangling from my shoulder as I walked up the driveway.

  There was a car-shaped silhouette parked under a gray tarp behind a dark blue mid-sized SUV. I skirted past it to reach the door to the left of the bay and knocked when I found there wasn’t a doorbell. Javier tugged open the door a moment later, ushering me inside and out of the rain. I shook out the excess water dripping off the ends of the collapsed umbrella before pulling it into the house with me.

  “Ah, don’t worry about it.” Javier took the umbrella and leaned it against the wall inside the front door. “Just making coffee now. You’re right on time for once.”

  “Shocking, I know,” I agreed. “It might be hard to believe, but I didn’t have a problem with chronic lateness before this whole thing.”

  “That’ll do it,” he said. “Don’t worry about it, Nix.”

  I wiped my soaked boots on the rug and bent to undo the laces.

  “Might want to keep those on,” Javier advised. It was only then that I’d noticed he was wearing a pair of heavy work boots with his dark jeans and a soft, dark gray shirt. He lifted one shoulder. “If we have to make a quick exit.”

  “They’re soaked…”

  “This place has seen worse.” His voice carried even though he’d dropped out of sight, disappearing from the narrow foyer toward the back of the house. “A little rainwater’s not gonna hurt. You take your coffee black, right?”

  My phone started vibrating in a side pocket. I fished it out, the name lit up on the screen making my insides cold. I remembered, then, that Javier had asked me about coffee.

  “Uh…yeah, thanks.”

  Ally Moretti.

  I declined the call, my stomach doing an uncomfortable somersault, nausea mixing with a wave of familiar anxiety. The floor under my boots threatened to give way. I inhaled a deep, calming breath and forced it to subside before I unraveled right here. Javier didn’t need to see that.

  I didn’t even want to see it.

  I moved into the house after him, one hand clutching the bag on my shoulder, the other shoved into my jeans pocket to hide the nervous shakes.

  “This place is beautiful,” I said, frantic for something else to latch onto to keep my mind from spiraling again.

  “Pay no attention to the dust,” he answered, voice echoing from somewhere. “I’m still moving in.”

  It struck me then how much Javier’s home reminded me of my factory-turned-apartment building, although his place seemed more put together—and less of a chaotic disaster, as of late—than mine. There were boxes and pieces of furniture still wrapped in plastic or draped in sheets, but it was mostly clean. The former single bay with its high ceiling now accommodated a huge living room, dining area, and kitchen. A flight of black metal stairs led up to a loft at the back of the house. The interior walls were all exposed orange-red brick, the floors polished cherry wood. The sparse, modern furniture that had been unpacked looked expensive compared to my antique store finds.

  I hadn’t noticed the black-and-ginger marbled cat lounging on the couch until it let out a high-pitched trill as I walked by. Two icy blue eyes blinked up at me from the black cushions, slowly, uninterested, or maybe reaching into the depths of my soul to judge if I was worthy.

  “Took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to put this place back together,” he said as he joined me in the living room.

  “You did all this yourself?”

  “Bought it for next to nothing—the city was about to tear it down. Condemned it and everything, didn’t want to spend the money to restore it. But I couldn’t let this place go.” He handed me a mug. I offered a soft thank you and cradled it between my palms.

  Javier’s voice grew quiet. “After they took it out of commission—don’t know why—my father bought the house for their headquarters while they fought the incendiaries in the early days. They didn’t get to use it for very long, but I guess it has a history that goes way back. No one else wanted it, so it just sat here for years.”

  “I knew it looked familiar,” I sai
d. “I must’ve seen it in a picture or something.”

  “Maybe you remembered it.” Javier sunk into the cushions of the couch with his coffee. The cat chirped again, got up, and after a lengthy stretch, padded over to Javier’s lap. “I remember it. And I remember the two of us being here. A lot.”

  “Your memories are better than mine. It’s probably the pictures.”

  “Got plenty of those, too,” he said. “Haven’t gotten around to unpacking them yet, but I’ll show you sometime.”

  The cat settled into his lap on its back, pawing at Javier’s shirt and nuzzling against his open palm. He scratched the cat’s chin absently while sipping his coffee.

  “I never would’ve pictured you as a cat guy.”

  “Yeah?” The cat latched onto Javier’s wrist as he continued petting it. “Smokey kinda came with the place. Wouldn’t leave, so I didn’t have much of a choice otherwise. It was her house first—hell, it’s still her house and I just happen to live here.”

  “Smokey, huh?”

  “Hey,” Javier warned, teasing. “She’s a firehouse cat. You should’ve seen her when I first got here. All covered in dirt and shit.”

  “Does she like new people? I don’t have much experience with cats.”

  “Takes her a while to warm up to visitors. Most of the time she couldn’t care less. She’s lazy that way. You’ll never see her. She’s usually up in the loft.”

  I inhaled the steam, fresh roasted coffee filling up my senses. Javier lavished his attention on the cat who’d become a puddle of dappled fur in his lap, his mug left on one of the side tables.

  A picture frame next to Javier’s mug caught my eye as I took a tentative sip, testing the temperature. It held a slightly faded photograph of a boy in an emerald green jersey whose beaming smile was missing a few teeth. A man with Javier’s wavy, dark hair stood behind him, both their hands planted on a soccer ball. The man was broader than Javier was now, both in build and the lines of his face. His father.