until she began to grow dizzy and rolled right out of bed.
Landing on the floor jarred her fully awake and afforded her some meager ability to catch her breath. But the air that passed through her lips tasted dirty and felt hot. Instead of reviving her, it made her head ache and caused her to feel oddly lethargic. As she reeled awkwardly over onto her back, she wondered why she couldn’t see the hallway light that she always kept lit at night. Only then did she realize that what she was breathing wasn’t air at all—it was smoke. Thick, black smoke that eclipsed the hallway light, burned her eyes and threatened to suffocate her.
Fire. Good God, her house was on fire.
When the recognition of that finally registered, her mind scurried into action. Unfortunately, instead of rehearsing an escape route that she’d never bothered to plan anyway, all Lucy could think about was Mack.
Mack. Oh, God. Where was Mack?
The last time she’d seen him, he’d been stretched out on the couch in the living room, the television still tuned to the Bullets game in its fourth quarter. He’d been sleeping soundly, but she hadn’t had the heart to turn off the TV, knowing he preferred to doze in front of the flickering light. So she’d pulled the edge of the cotton throw over his feet to ward off the autumn chill, and she’d crept up to bed, knowing he’d join her there later when he awoke and realized she’d gone up without him.
She had to find him. She couldn’t leave the house without Mack. If anything happened to him, Lucy would die herself.
In a distant corner of her brain, she recalled something from elementary school about how if your house was on fire, you should crawl along the floor, where there was likely to be more air, and touch any doors to check for heat before you opened them. Most of all, she remembered, you shouldn’t panic. But when she rolled back over, the scratch of the rug against her belly made her remember something else, too. She remembered that she slept in the nude.
So much for not panicking.
She tried to get her bearings and forced all thought from her mind to focus instead on survival—her own and Mack’s. She always discarded her clothes on the chair by the bedroom door before she went to bed, and—gee, what a coincidence—the door was also the best exit from the smoke-filled room. Certainly that was the direction she needed to pursue if she was going to find Mack.
Slowly and deliberately, keeping her breathing as shallow and steady as she could, Lucy clawed at the rag rug beneath her, pulling her body along the floor toward the chair. She fumbled around for a few seconds before her fingers lit on the boxer shorts and T-shirt that lay there in a crumpled ball. When she snatched the garments down to the floor, her hand skimmed against a soft patch of fur, and she remembered the tattered teddy bear who perpetually occupied that chair as if it were a throne.
She couldn’t save much, Lucy thought as she reached up again, but by God, she would take care of the two things that mattered the most to her in the world. She was going to get Mack and Stevie the bear out of there. When all was said and done, they were all she had left in the world anyway.
It took her only a couple of seconds to struggle into her clothes, then, clutching Stevie savagely under one arm, she crawled out into the hall and immediately lost her way. She could tell neither where the fire was coming from, nor where the smoke was thinnest, nor could she detect any heat that might give her a clue.
Yet she knew she had to make her way downstairs. If Mack wasn’t in bed with her, chances were good that he was still sleeping on the couch. If everything worked out the way it was supposed to, she would find him, rouse him, and they could flee through the front door together. Only problem was, by now she was so disoriented that she wasn’t sure in which direction the stairs lay, let alone the front door.
It took her two tries and too many valuable minutes to find her way to the stairs. When she finally managed to locate them, she slithered like a snake, step by step, to the bottom. Toward the end she began to feel woozier and even more confused, and she bumped her chin hard on something when she lost her bearings.
For a moment Lucy simply lay sprawled on the floor at the foot of the steps, dizzy and disoriented, uncertain about exactly where she was. Her head was pounding, her mouth was dry and her chest felt as if it was going to explode. All around her was darkness and heat, and she didn’t know which way to go. Vaguely she heard a strange sound and registered it as the whisper of the fire consuming her house.
Funny how quiet that sound seemed, she thought as a buzzing swelled up from somewhere deep inside her brain. Her mind was reeling now, and her lungs felt as if they, too, were being eaten by hot flames. She’d always thought fire would be louder than this, hotter than this, faster than this. She didn’t realize it would be so...so...so...
Somewhere in the house glass shattered, the odd tinkling sound seeming clearer than anything she had ever heard. Her hand clenched convulsively on the ragged bear she had managed to cling to, and she gripped it as fiercely as Arthur would have seized the Holy Grail, had he ever found it. But Arthur never had. Arthur had gone to his death never knowing the fate of that thing he’d sought so faithfully, so relentlessly, all his life.
Lucy didn’t want that to happen to her. Stevie the bear was the only link she had to her own Grail, and she didn’t want to lose him or the prize he signified to her. In some deep, delirious part of her brain, she vowed to herself that if she managed to get out of this thing alive, she’d go after that prize—her Grail.
Somehow, if she managed to get out of this thing alive, Lucy would find her twin brother.
But her thoughts as she fought off unconsciousness weren’t for Stevie or her missing twin or the odd emptiness in her soul that had accompanied her all her life. Her only thoughts—indistinct and incoherent—were for Mack. Oh, God...she had to find Mack....
Boone Cagney heaved himself out of the cab of the bright red ladder truck, feeling, as always, that faint thrill deep down inside him where the little boy who’d always wanted to be a fireman still lived. Quickly, dispassionately, he surveyed the burning house.
Not as bad as some he’d seen, he noted as he immediately reached for his bunkers, but not much would be salvageable after the fire was out, either. With a competency and ablemindedness that had come with years of fighting fires, he donned roughly fifty pounds of protective gear—pants, coat, helmet and gloves. Finally, when he had his self-contained breathing apparatus in place, he forgot all about the fact that scarcely ten minutes ago, he’d been sound asleep, and he headed into the fray.
A handful of civilians mingled in the yards of neighboring houses, but he had no way of knowing yet if any of them were residents of the one that was on fire. Probably none of them were, because no one was acting hysterical—yet. Because it was just past 3:00 a.m., whoever lived here had more than likely been home when the fire broke out. The chances were good that they might even still be lying in bed overcome by smoke, oblivious to the fact that their house was burning down.
He made a quick survey of the grounds, noting there were no toys to indicate the presence of children, nor fences to indicate the presence of a pet. Which didn’t necessarily mean that there weren’t any, but it was a good sign. A pickup truck was parked in the driveway far enough back to be safe from the flames for now, one of those sporty models that weren’t meant for transporting anything much heavier than a good-sized golden retriever. Even in the dark, Boone could tell the color was one of those weird mixes of pink and purple, so he guessed that at least one of the occupants of the house was female.
Although a good part of the structure had already been engulfed
