head and tossed it on the floor, only to pause mid-motion, her mind waking up enough to notice something odd.
She couldn’t hear the frogs. The endless and almost but not quite inaudible peep-peep-peep that kept her company every damn night since she got here.was silent.
No, she realized a second later. Not silent. Hidden behind a crackling noise, like static from a radio between channels, or a television station that had lost signal. But there was neither radio nor television here. Not even a computer. Not even a land-line. That had been the appeal of it. As far away from everything as she could get, down a mile-long private road, hidden among trees, the cottage was as isolated as she could manage on short notice.
So what was that noise?
The moment the smell reached her nose, she knew. Fire.
Jackie sat up in the bed, the pillow forgotten as she blinked into the pitch-dark room, trying to identify where the smell was coming from. The sound of crackling was everywhere and nowhere, surrounding her in the darkness and making it impossible to get her bearings in the unfamiliar room.
“Oh God,” she whispered, trying not to panic, trying to remember what she had ever learned about fires. In all the hotels she had stayed over the years, directions had been pasted on the door and she couldn’t remember a word of them. Windows? Pointless. The bedroom only had a single window, and it was a straight drop of two stories and more. Call for help, then. She reached out for the nightstand where her cell phone should be, only to remember that she had left it in her car—so if someone from work tried to reach her, even if her phone got a signal out here she could honestly say she hadn’t heard it ring.
No way to call for help. She was on her own.
All right. Fine. She took a breath and regretted it, the stink in the air more noticeable now that she was awake, her lungs itching with the irritation. Stay down, she remembered that. Heat rises, so stay low to the ground.
Rolling off the bed, Jackie went to her hands and knees on the floor, the braided rug scratchy under her palms. She thought about pulling the blanket with her, in case … she had no idea what she’d use it for, and left it on the bed. Keeping her face down, she crawled forward on her hands and knees, toward the door.
She should have been chilled, in the spring night air, wearing only a camisole and cotton sleep pants, but instead her skin felt warm, sweat forming at the bend of her knees and under her hairline. It was just four or five feet from bed to door, but the closer she got, the more a deep-seated almost animalistic instinct told her to back off, to stay away from the door, no matter that it was the only escape, the only way out.
Death, something deep in her psyche whispered. If she went out there, she would meet Death.
A frightened noise caught in her throat, and she scrabbled backward, even as the door blew open, the roar of the flames louder than anything she had ever heard, like a jet engine next to her ear or Niagara Falls thundering overhead. Thick smoke rushed into the room, long red licks of flame curling after them, reaching for her, hungry to consume everything inside. She coughed, her eyes watering, one arm raised to shield herself, impossibly, from the heat.
In the thick black smoke, something moved in the doorway.
Jackie’s breath caught in her chest, hoping against hope that someone, a hunter, a Good Samaritan, had seen the flames and come to help. Wiping the tears from her eyes, she dared to look again.
A figure stood there, a dark shadow outlined in flames.
No, it was made of flames.
She opened her mouth to scream, and the figure reached a hand out to her. The arm was corded with flame, the fingers and palm racing swirls of fire, like a tiny galaxy, deadly and beautiful. She stared at it, unable to move, and it reached again, grasping her arm.
She did scream then, expecting to feel it burn her down to the bone. But while the sensation was warm, it did not burn, and the fingers of flame wrapping around her bare arm felt like human flesh against her own.
“What?” Her voice caught, already rough from the smoke, and she coughed. The figure loomed over her and swooped down, covering her with its body even as the flames roared into the room, sweeping over everything, setting the furniture, the bed she had just been lying in, afire. She was trapped in a conflagration the likes of which she’d only ever seen in movies, and yet, somehow, she was not burned.
“Hold tight to me,” she heard the fire crackle in her ear, the heat of it making her hair move as though touched by a dry wind. “Hold tight, and don’t let go.”
Even as the voice gave her instructions, it straightened up, reaching its full height, maybe six or seven feet tall, so that she was caught up against its chest, her face turned into what should have been a wall of flame. She flinched; impossible not to flinch, fire that close to her face, but again it did not burn. There was warmth, a dry crackling heat, but no pain. If she didn’t think about the source, she could almost believe she was somewhere out in the desert, the sun turning her skin a golden caramel shade.
“The sun can kill you too,” she said, her voice not muffled at all despite being pressed up against the hard wall of fire, and she started to laugh. “This is either the worst stress nightmare I’ve ever had, or I’ve gone insane.”
“Imagine it’s a dream,” the fire told her. “If that helps.” The crackling, static-laced voice sounded more distant now, as though its attention were elsewhere, and Jackie started to lift her head, to see what it was doing.
“No,” it rebuked her. “Stay there.”
Cowed, she kept her head tucked, and her hands and legs drawn in against its body. If this was a nightmare, it was an awfully bossy one.
The fire raged around them, and it was all he could do to keep it from destroying the cottage entirely, sweeping over them in its need to touch and own and consume everything. The fire had started in the kitchen of the modest, four-room cabin; perhaps she had left the oven on, or there had been a rupture in the lines, causing a small explosion. Perfectly natural. Even the way it had spread, racing up the stairs rather than spreading along the rest of the first floor, could be explained by half a dozen natural causes, up to and including human folly or carelessness. But the way the fire resisted him, fighting against his attempts to block it, suggested that all was not as it seemed, here.
He had known something was wrong the moment he arrived, but it had taken him until now to recognize it.
Sparkfire trumped any natural blaze. When he raised a hand, a campfire purred like a housecat. When he slapped a backdraft, it cowered at his feet. When he had arrived the fire had already engaged more than half the house, but it should have taken him only moments to gain control over where the fire went, giving the owner a chance to escape and call for help. He hadn’t known why the sense had brought him here at all, at first glance; a single engine could have dealt with this.
But there had been no engine on the scene, and he had not heard the familiar rising call of an engine crew on its way. A glance around had shown him why: the cabin was isolated, on the edge what looked to be a state park of some kind. There might be no help coming.
Still, it should have been a simple matter to beat the flames back, find the owner of the sole heartbeat he could feel, a single note against the orchestration of the flames, and get them to safety. Should have been, but wasn’t. The flame clung to his feet when he walked, tugged at his arms and hips, slithered up his legs and tried to sway him to its embrace, to join with it
