Текст книги "Firestorm"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

Соавторы: Rachel Caine
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"What, the arm? Part of the job." Emily cocked a thumb at Imara, who had settled back in a corner, watching us. "Thought you said we weren't supposed to trust them anymore. What, you don't have to obey your own rules?"

I decided not to engage on that one. "You don't have a Djinn, right?"

"Never needed one." She sounded as if those who did were clearly lacking some important feature, like guts. "She going to go nuts and kill us?"

"Well, wouldn't that be exciting?" I sighed. "Imara? You going to go nuts and kill us?"

She thought about it. Gravely. "Not quite yet."

"Right. Keep us informed."

I thought for sure that Emily would bring up the resemblance between me and Imara, but she wasn't that observant. Her eyes darted between us for a few seconds, bright but not registering any connections, and then she decided to shift the conversational ground. "What do you know about fighting fires?"

"Pretty much what every Weather Warden knows." From the flash in her eyes, that wasn't something that met with her approval. "Maybe I can wing it."

Emily was old school. She fixed me with a narrow stare. "No, you won't wing it. I'll call up Paul and get a real Fire Warden up here."

"I thought Lewis was—"

"I don't take orders from Lewis Orwell." Didn't like him much, either, from the unpleasant twist of her mouth around his name. A lot of Earth Wardens didn't care for him, for some reason. I think it was because he kept showing them up. That would especially bother Emily, Miss I-don't-have-a-Djinn-because-I'm-too-badass-to-need-one. "Look, this is my territory. There's a chain of command. Lewis isn't even part of the Wardens, as far as I'm concerned; he turned his back on us long ago. If he's what we've got for leadership these days, we're in trouble."

"Lewis—"

She cut me off with a sharp gesture. "And the last I heard, youwere out of the Wardens completely. Anyway, it doesn't matter. I'm working too hard to keep things together around here to worry about politics. So don't bother with the campaign speeches. What are my chances of getting somebody who knows firefighting from a hole in the ground out here?"

"Chances?" If I kept repeating things, she had every right to stick me in a cage and call me a parrot. "Not too good. I think I'm what you're going to get."

She sniffed. "In other words, not much."

I kept my mouth shut and shook my head. She let out a long, slow breath and sat back in her slaughtered-cow chair. I wondered if she'd killed it herself. Well, that wasn't exactly fair. She was an Earth Warden. The cow had probably died of natural causes.

"I heard a rumor there was some other organization out there. Other than the Wardens," Emily said. "Any idea how to contact them?"

"Lewis was handling that. I don't know how far he got with it. How bad is this?"

"Bad," she said. "Real bad."

"Then we should get moving," I said, and levered myself to my feet. The world swam. I sat down again, and leaned my head back against the couch cushions and moaned. When I tried to adjust myself to a more comfortable position, the arm stabbed a protest into my shoulder. Some Earth Warden she was. Hadn't been trying very hard, had she?

Imara was next to me, down on one knee, one long, graceful hand on my shoulder. Sending waves of warmth through me. She wasn't a full Djinn, she couldn't really heal me, just take away the pain temporarily. Still felt nice, though. Nobody turns down magic morphine.

"You can't do this," she said. "You need rest."

"I'm good."

"No." She gave me a long, significant look from those breathtaking Djinn eyes. "I won't allow it."

I started to say, Who made you the mommy? but I wasn't about to let this degenerate into a mother-daughter squabble in front of Emily. Who was looking far too interested, anyway.

"Your Djinn there's probably right," Emily said. "Fact is, the shape you're in, I wouldn't recommend you take on a campfire, much less a forest fire," she said. "You took some pretty good knocks. A good hard impact, and you'll break those bones loose again. No help for it; it's going to hurt while it's healing."

Clearly, she wasn't Lewis in the healing department, which I couldn't really resent. She'd helped me out when I needed it.

And then she spoiled my attempt at charity by saying, "And besides, I really don't want to babysit you out there."

Imara oriented on Emily like a cruise missile. "She can do as she pleases." Typical kid. Whatever the adult's position was, take the opposing view. Hell, two seconds ago she'd been trying to talk me out of going.

Emily barely spared Imara a glance, which was pretty gutsy, considering. "Sure. She can please shut up while I borrow her Djinn for the duration."

Oh, crap. I remembered Emily back at Warden HQ, arguing for the release of more Djinn from the reserves. Of course she'd be all about co-opting Imara. I should have seen it coming. Would have, if I hadn't been half-crazy with pain.

Imara growled low in her throat. "I won't leave her," she said.

"Not your choice," I said sternly. "Look, Emily, I'm low on patience, I'm in pain, and no way are you using her to fight a forest fire. I appreciate what you've done for me, but—"

"I said, I'm taking your Djinn," Emily said bluntly. "You don't want to make me take it to a full-on fight. You'd lose, the condition you're in."

Imara moved, unasked, and came right up in Emily's space, close and—I was sure—burning up with menace. Emily went rigid with fear. As well she should. "Keep a leash on her," Emily said.

"Imara?" I asked. "Relax. We're just talking. Aren't we?"

Emily nodded jerkily. Angry. "Yes."

"Then I think I'm ready to leave," I said. "Imara, go get the car revved up, would you?"

"I don't like leaving you with her."

"Emily's a Warden," I said. "We understand each other."

Imara didn't like it, but she threw me a warning look, and vanished.

"You can't," Emily said flatly. "You're not strong enough to leave."

"Funny how that is. Your threat to steal Imara put all that in perspective." I proved it by getting to my feet. The world did that liquid-shimmy thing, but I stayed upright and reasonably stable. "You said you didn't have time for this, and neither do I. Good luck, Emily, whatever your crisis is right now. I'll find somebody who appreciates my help."

"Wait."

I didn't. I headed for the door. But when I got there, I found the handle wouldn't turn. Not at all. It wasn't the dead bolt… The metal was simply frozen in place.

I didn't bother to look behind me. "Emily," I said, "let's not do this. I'm tired, I'm cranky, I'm dirty, and my arm hurts like hell. I am notin the mood to play. Just let me get out of here, and I'll pretend that you're not begging for a fight, because by God if you want one, you're threatening the right girl."

Earth Wardens have power over growing things, living things, and also over metals and woods. The door wasn't going to open if Emily didn't want it to do so, not unless an Earth Warden with greater abilities stepped in. And it was unlikely I'd be able to blow it open, either, not without bringing the whole house down with it. Our powers weren't necessarily the kind that canceled each other out. Imara was an ace in the hole, of course, but I hesitated to put her to use. I wasn't really interested in damaging one of the few surviving Wardens, given the current state of the world.

"Sorry," Emily said. "I've got some real problems here. You can be of use."

I sighed and turned around to face her. "Okay, then, let me ask you this: How am I supposed to trust a Warden who holds back on the healing just to bogart my Djinn? Because you could have at least fixed the arm, Emily. That was a low blow."

She went just a shade paler, but held her ground. She'd never lacked in guts… just brains. "They say you're behind all this."

"All of what?"

"Bad Bob. The rips in the aetheric. The Djinn going crazy. Is it true?"

That hit me with a cold, hard shock… Definitely, I'd been responsible for Bad Bob getting his comeuppance, not that many people were ever going to believe he'd actually deserved it. And David and I together had been responsible for the poisoning of the aetheric, when he'd created me as a Djinn. And as for the Djinn going nuts—well, I wasn't sure I had sole responsibility for all that, but I probably couldn't sidestep it altogether, either. If it hadn't been for my actions, and David's actions, Jonathan wouldn't be dead right now, the Djinn agreement would still be peacefully in place, and the Earth would be sleeping quietly.

I elected not to say any of that, however. I just set my jaw and stared back at her, daring her to continue.

"The fire's across the border, in Canada," she said. "It started small, but it's growing. The Wardens overseeing that territory are dead. Lewissays they can't spare anybody else, last time I checked. I'm on my way there, and I need your Djinn. I'm not going to apologize for doing what's necessary."

"She's not my Djinn," I said. "Nobody owns them anymore."

"Yeah. Yet you're riding around with one as your chauffeur."

"It's complicated."

"Obviously. And there are major population centers in the path of a Class Four wildfire. That's a little complicated, too." She hesitated, then locked her eyes on mine. Surly and difficult, she might be, but I had never known her to be a liar. "I need your help. It's just me and another Fire Warden who's already there. Those people need somebody to save them, and we're it."

Truth was, I agreed with her. If I turned my back on people who actually needed saving, I was losing my way. Losing my honor. Something inside me insisted that you couldn't save humanity by sacrificing your principles.

I didn't like the way Emily had elected to do this, but I could understand why she'd mousetrapped me. She was desperate. I'd have done the same thing, in her place. Because the lives I'd save would be more important than the nebulous big picture. Maybe that made me weak. Maybe that made me unsuitable for the role of great hero. Lewis would have walked away without hesitation—with regret, not hesitation—but I wasn't, and could never be, Lewis.

"I'm not putting Imara in danger," I said.

"But—"

"She's my daughter, Emily. My daughter."

Emily's mouth opened in surprise, then closed. She finally, reluctantly, nodded.

"Tell me what you need," I said. "I'll do what I can."

"You'd damn well better."

"Oh, and—?" I made a gesture with my sore arm. She looked ashamed. Briefly.

"Might as well," she said, and reached out to finish up the healing. "You're no good to me passed out."

Imara wasn't any too supportive of my decision to hang around and brush up on my firefighting. "This isn't a good idea," she said. "You're not well. And the fire's too big."

We were standing outside, by the car. I put a hand on the smooth, satin finish, then scrubbed away my fingerprints. "You're probably right," I said. "But I can't walk away from it, either. Emily might be a bitch, but she's right. And I'm a Warden. I'm sworn to protect."

"There are others to do this kind of thing."

"Others who aren't here. I'm here. And it's my job, Imara." I looked up at her, and saw the worry on her face. "Relax, kiddo. It's not my first dance. Not my last, either. Emily's a very competent Fire Warden, and if there's a Fire Warden already working on this, I can work the weather angle. We can end this thing."

Her eyes went distant for a few seconds, then snapped back. "There are no Djinn," she said.

"What?"

"No Djinn near the fire," she said. I must have looked blank. "Djinn are drawn to fire. The bigger, the better. They leave human form and… bathe in it, I guess you'd say. Renew themselves. You remember what it was like to feel sunlight in Djinn form?"

Slow, sweet, orgasmic pleasure. Yeah, I remembered.

"If the Djinn aren't coming to thisfire," she said, "that means there is something else happening here. It isn't natural. And it isn't—it isn't safe."

"Not for you," I agreed. "If the Djinn are staying away, I want you to do the same thing. Stay away. In fact, stay here and watch the car. Or go talk to your father, find out what we can do since we didn't exactly knock it out of the park in Seacasket. Right?"

"I'm not leaving you!"

I reached out and fitted my hands around her cheeks. Djinn skin, burning hot. "Yes," I said. "You are. I need you to find out what we do next, Imara. That's very important. In fact, it's absolutely critical."

"But—"

"Don't make me order you around." I pulled her into a fierce, warm hug. "Just go. I'll be all right."

"Is it because—I know I'm not—not as powerful as I should be. As you need—"

"No!" I pulled back and smoothed hair away from her face. "Honey, no. None of this is your fault. You're the only good thing that's come out of all this. Okay?"

She nodded slightly, but I could tell she didn't believe me. My Djinn child was getting a full-on inferiority complex. More than human, less than full Djinn. That was a burden I wasn't sure how to help her carry.

"Go find your father," I said. "Explain to him what happened with Ashan. Find out what we should do next. Okay?"

"Okay," she said, and stepped back. "Mom… be careful."

And then she was gone, blipped out without another sound. I heaved a sigh and turned to see Emily, on her porch, staring at me accusingly. I hadn't heard her come out.

"We really could have used her," she said.

"Imara's the only Djinn in the world we can trust right now. I'd rather not throw her at every single challenge. Besides, we can handle this on our own."

"You hope." She looked surly about it.

"What happened to I don't need a Djinn to solve my problems'?" I asked. "Buck up, Auntie Em. We're going to have an adventure."

I swear, her scowl could have fractured glass.

Imara, not being in much need of transportation, had left the Camaro sitting in the driveway. It was a choice between that and Emily's battle-scarred SUV, with a four-wheel drive that had seen hard use. We didn't, strictly speaking, actually have to go to the site of the fire; Wardens often did their work remotely. But if this fire was as dangerous as she seemed to think, then being on the ground might be the only way to react quickly enough. Fire was the trickiest of all the elements. Even more than storms, fire had an intelligence, a malevolence. A desire to hurt. The bigger the fire, the smarter and angrier it became. Bad combination.

I chose the SUV. The Camaro really wasn't the kind of car I wanted to subject to off-road conditions.

Emily lived in a tiny little burg called Smyrna Mills, which was mostly distinguished by Smyrna Street—we were out of town in less time than it took to flash a blinker, and heading south to I-95. The other Warden, it turned out, was a country music fan; I wasn't. I mostly spent the time on the drive to Houlton and the Canadian border thinking and watching the skies. They didn't look good. The aetheric was in a boil, everything disturbed; flashbulbs of power were popping all over the place as Wardens tried to deal with their local problems, but it wasn't really a local issue. It was bigger. Nastier. And it was going to get worse.

I really didn't have any business taking a side trip like this, but I couldn't think what else I could have done. Walk away from thousands of lost lives? I'd be crawling, not walking, if I did that. And none of it would matter from that point on, because I would have lost my way completely.

As we approached the border crossing, I remembered something with a sick, falling jolt. "Um, Em? Little problem."

"Which is?"

"No passport."

"What? Where is it?"

"In Florida. With everything else I own that hasn't washed away." She was staring at me as if she couldn't believe I'd leave home without it. "I wasn't planning on any international trips."

She shook her head and took a quick turn-off on a narrow trail into the woods. "Hold on."

I grabbed the roll bar as we started bouncing along at speed through the wilderness. Four-wheeling at its finest. I had no idea where we were going, or whether Emily had the slightest idea of direction, but she didn't seem worried.

"Thing is," she said, whipping the wheel to the left to avoid a tree stump, "normally I wouldn't be able to slip around behind them like this, but it's chaotic right now. If they do manage to stop us, shut up and let me do the talking."

I planned on it.

No Mounties materialized out of the trees to flag us down. Thirty minutes of twisting back road—and no road—later, we emerged from the trees and hit Canadian Highway 2, turning north.

I lost track of our route somewhere around Presque Isle; Emily, on her cell phone, followed back roads in response to directions. We got stopped by a police blockade; whatever Emily said, they let us past. The roads got progressively more challenging on the suspension. I hung on to the panic strap on the passenger side and tried not to think about the residual pain in my healing arm.

I was feeling more than a little nervous, out here in the wilderness, and I wasn't really dressed for firefighting, either. Someday, I promised myself, you'll be able to get back to a normal life. Nice clothes. Bikini on the beach. Shoes that don't have sale tags.

I closed my eyes, but when I did, I didn't see visions of Jimmy Choos or Manolo Blahniks, but David's face, the way he'd been the first time I'd seen him. That sweet, ironic smile. The deep brown eyes, flecked with copper. Angular cheekbones just begging to be stroked.

That smile.

I missed him so much, it felt like a physical pain, brought tears to clog my throat. We hadn't had a chance, had we? So little time to know each other, to find our balance. The world just kept pushing, pushing, pushing. I wanted it to stop. I wanted quiet, and I wanted a place where I could be in his arms, wrapped in silence and peace.

And I wasn't sure that was ever going to happen, especially now that we were two steps from the end of the world.

The SUV hit a particularly axle-rattling bump on the dirt fire road. I opened my eyes and saw a storm cloud looming over the tops of the huge trees.

No, not a storm cloud.

Smoke. Black and thick and pendulous.

A deer bounded out of the underbrush and rushed past us, staying out of our way somehow—it looked wild and terrified. Emily slowed the truck to a crawl. Other wildlife was coming down the road—rabbits, a bear cub, a huge lumbering mama bear behind it hurrying it along. More deer, leaping ahead of the pack.

Emily braked. The fleeing animals ran under the truck, if they were small enough; the larger ones went around. The bear passed close enough to my window that I could smell the hot rank odor of her fur, and hear her heavy chuffing breath.

"We have to go on foot," Emily said. "The other Warden is up ahead."

"Why can't we drive?" Because this was about as close to a big huge bear as I really wanted to get. Emily spared me an irritated glance.

"If I take it farther in, the fire could get around us, the gas in this truck could explode," she said. "I'm assuming you don't want to be in it at the time. Besides, I like my truck."

The exploding part made an impression on me. I unbuckled and scrambled out of the truck, careful of my feet, but it looked like the evacuation had slowed down. A couple of late-breaking gray rabbits broke right at my appearance, and some field mice ran under the truck. No additional bears, thank goodness.

The air felt heavy and hot. There was a steady furnace breeze blowing toward us. It was a tiny little hint of the forces already at work—the fire, which had already been burning for hours, would have created a huge updraft, which would have shoved cooler air in front of it outward in a circle. Cooler air, being heavier, would have been forced out in concentric waves as the temperature increased. It would look like a frozen nuclear explosion, with a hot central column and the rings emanating out.

The breeze was just the forerunner of what was behind it.

Hell.

People think they understand what a forest fire is. They don't. At a certain point, fire becomes semiliquid—plasmatic—and it behaves like liquid, becomes heavy with its own energy, rolls and floods through dry brush, consuming everything in its path. It saps every single ounce of moisture from the air, leaving it dead and dry; its own energy release whips the winds higher, spreading it like a virus. It can jump and encircle an area like an invading army before anyone can see it coming, and then the rising temperature will cook anything caught inside before the flames close in. Most people trapped in fires die of the smoke or superheated air, which cooks their lungs into leather from inside on the first indrawn breath. It's an awful way to die, suffocating, but it's still better than the fire rolling over you and burning out every nerve ending in slow, awful progression.

The only mercy fire shows is that after your nerves burn, you can't feel the rest of it. You can't feel your body being turned to cooked meat and ash. And you're probably—although not certainly—dead before your internal organs burst, and your brain's superheated liquids blow open your skull.

No, the lastthing I wanted to do was die of fire. The very last. Even drowning would be better.

And I was starting to wonder why in the hell I'd agreed to this. Pragmatism was starting to get the better of altruism.

As if she sensed it, Emily looked at me over the hood of the SUV, mouth twisted into an unpleasant grin. "You like doing this from a nice, safe distance, don't you?" she asked. "Some nice conference room where you can't feel the cinders on your back."

"If you had any sense, that's how you'd like it, too," I said. "But I'm not letting you do this by yourself."

"That's sweet. You afraid for me?"

"No, but you said it yourself: There are way too many lives depending on this. This is important." I swallowed hard. There was a sound out there in the forest, a roaring that I didn't need to be a Fire Warden to know wasn't right. Not right at all. "Let's just get it done, if we're going to do it. I've got places to be."

"Shoe shopping?" she said archly. My reputation preceded me. "Fine. Watch yourself—I'm not going to have time to keep your ass out of trouble. You see a bear or a mountain lion, freeze, turn profile, and if it charges you, curl into a ball and get under the truck. They probably will ignore you, given the fire, but you don't want to run from them. They do enjoy the exercise."

I gulped. Audibly. She smiled. I wondered if she was just needling me, but then I decided she wasn't. She'd take her responsibilities more or less seriously, out here.

"What I need from you is to hang back here and do what you can to get a decent rain going. Counteract the prevailing winds. Think you can do that?"

I could do that in my sleep. I confined myself to a quick nod, gathered up my hair in one hand and tied it back with a rubber band from my pocket. The way the wind was swirling, that last thing I wanted was to obscure my vision. Too many things could sneak up on me. Fire, for one. Or bears. The bears were worrying me. Badly.

"Take two steps to your left," Emily said.

"Why?" I froze, staring at her. She nodded down at the ground.

There was a timber rattler gliding along the ground right by my foot. I jumped out of the way with a little shriek, hands held high. "Snake! Snake!"

"No shit," she said dryly. "Trust me, she's not paying attention to you. She's got plenty of problems of her own. Not so quick a traveler as the larger critters. She'll have a job of it to try to get out of here in time, poor girl."

I watched the snake wiggle its—her—way down the road. Emily was right; the reptile didn't pay me any attention. Good. On the plus side, now I wasn't nearly so worried about bears. Bears didn't sneak up on your feet like that.

When I looked up again, Emily was striding along the road, straight for the fire. "Hey!" I called after her. She didn't answer. I suppose she really didn't need to answer; I knew what I was tasked to do, she knew what she was doing, and there wasn't a lot left to discuss.

Still, when she looked back, I said, "Good luck. I'll do whatever I can."

She had a surprisingly sweet smile, when she wanted to. "I know," she said. "You're a Warden."

I sat down on the bumper of the SUV and contemplated the sky.

The fire wasn't big enough yet to truly drive the system—weather systems are massive, full of energy of their own, and it would take a real out-of-control wildfire for that synergy of elements to take on an unstoppably deadly partnership. But the weather wasn't feeling particularly cooperative, either. The heat from the fire definitely had it feeling its oats, and the evaporation of moisture was creating low-level disturbances. Lots of cumulonimbus action forming, but it was hanging out on the fringes, getting pushed along by the warmer air of the fire. I needed to pull it in and start squeezing those moisture-rich clouds for rain.

First things first: I had to pump more moisture back into the air, keep the underbrush from drying out quite so quickly so that it wouldn't just continue to explode into flame. There was a lake five miles to the east of where we stood; I went up in the aetheric and soared across the fire, which looked like a giant twisting tangle of ghosts, twisting and mating and soundlessly screaming. On the aetheric, you couldn't feel the heat, but you definitely felt the forces at work; it translated as pressure on me, a resistance that was hard to push through. I made it and touched down for a landing—still in spirit-form. I was at the edge of a glowing, whispering fog that was, back in the real world, a nice place to boat and fish.

Ever seen one of those fog fountains? They sell them in stores now, complete with transducers that create fog from water. Simple process. All you have to do is bombard the water with ultrasonic pulses, and it breaks up into fog. Not quite without cost—six hundred calories of heat per gram of water, in terms of energy—but a nice benefit. As mist evaporates, energy exchange results in temperature reductions, too. With the humidity as low as it was in the vicinity of the fire, mist evaporation would bring down the temperature by about twenty degrees.

I started shaking up the water.

Mist began rising almost immediately… thick, milky tendrils off the surface of the lake. I kept it going, piling mist in layers until it was as thick as foam on a latte and as tall as a three-story building. I'd drained the lake level by quite a bit, but if the fire reached the shore, the evaporation would occur anyway, and for a lot less constructive a reason.

When I had enough airborne moisture, I sent wind to blow it toward the unburned areas around the fire. Just a strong breeze, and I kept careful hold of it; it wouldn't do any good to send my carefully made fog right into the blaze itself, where it would be instantly zapped. No, I pushed it just far enough to layer it over the outlying underbrush, a thick wet blanket that would make it much more difficult for the advance scout sparks to take hold.

Once that was done, I shot up into the clouds. I'd long ago learned to deal with the dizziness of altitude, but this was just plain disorienting… I could see the heat rising up from the twisted trauma of the forest being destroyed below me, and it came in waves of red and pink and purple, like some crazy 70s acid trip. I hadn't usually been this close. It was—different.

I decided not to look down. My business was with what was overhead, in any case.

The updraft was making inroads, getting the attention of the weather system, but it was more of an annoying dinner guest than a partner in crime so far. If I could turn the weather system against the fire, so much the better, but if I couldn't, then at least I could cut off any kind of sympathetic energy exchange that could make both more dangerous.

I lowered the temperature at the higher elevations, forcing the moisture in the air closer together. My goal was rain, but I wasn't sure if there was enough aggregated moisture to really bring it off, without feeding the process out of the ocean. That would take time I wasn't sure we had. Best to get started with what there was, then work on the supply lines to keep it going.

Even a good downpour wasn't going to put out this kind of a fire, not as well-established as it was, but it could help contain it. With a decent Fire Warden—which Emily was, as far as I remembered, in addition to being an outstanding Earth Warden—this could come to a peaceful conclusion.

If everything went right.

Of course, there was no reason everything shouldgo right. Especially not now, with everything I'd grown up knowing as fact turned into rapidly shifting fiction. The laws of nature were only laws so long as nature intended them to be. And I wasn't sure where we stood anymore.

The rain started to fall—not a downpour, but a nice steady shower, anyway. It would raise the humidity and bring down the temperature, and if it couldn't douse the fire, at the very least it could soak the surrounding areas and intensify the fog layers.

It was, I decided, a pretty damn good job.

I let go on the aetheric and plummeted back down into my body, a scary thrill ride of fast-moving colors and a sense of imminent disaster that ended suddenly—and safely—as I found myself back in my body again. I sighed, breathed deep, and gagged on the taste of smoke.

And I opened my eyes and realized the trees right in front of me were burning.

"Shit!" I screamed, and slid off the bumper of the SUV. The air was intensely hot, well over a hundred degrees; my clothes were dripping with sweat. While I'd been doing all that careful manipulation, the fire had slipped up like the serial killer in the movies, and as I looked wildly around, I saw that the fire was leaping from one treetop to the next. The rain—which hadn't yet reached this spot—was doing its job; it just wasn't doing it fast enough.

The underbrush was a wall of fire that roared like a jet engine, sucking in air. I covered my head as sparks drifted down out of the sky and sizzled holes in my shirt. I smelled burned hair. I willed my Fire sense into action, covering myself; I wasn't sure if that extended to hair, but dammit, I had way too many hair issues already. Having it scorched again wasn't going to make things better…