Page 4 of Mated in Flames

Warwick

The sun beats down harshly on my back and I stretch, wiping sweat from my brow. Beside me, Dane huffs a laugh.

“Too hot for you?” he teases.

I laugh, too. Since coming to Australia a few years ago, Dane and I had fallen in love with the small town of Mundaring, and our carefully cultivated farm. It was peaceful out here, somewhere that the rest of the world couldn’t touch us.

The summers, though, were brutally hot. It was perfect. Despite what Dane and I pretended, we both knew that the heat didn’t really touch either of us. In fact, we thrived in this sort of weather, though the effort of physical exertion in this sort of heat was nothing to scoff at.

“You’re the one who took your shirt off,” I say, nudging him. “Looks like you’re the one who can’t handle the heat.”

“No, I can’t handle the sweat,” Dane says, wrinkling his nose. “It smells.”

That, I can definitely agree with. Our bodies still sweat, and the smell of it soaking into the material of our clothes was unpleasant to our sensitive noses.

I relax my back and lean down to pick up the bundle of hay that I had been carrying with me. The sun has gotten to its highest point in the sky, and there’s still so much work to be done on the farm.

It’s as I’m moving across the front yard that I notice movement across the road. This automatically crosses my attention; it hadn’t been so long ago that the place was crowded with ambulances and police for a day or two before the old man that lived there had disappeared. In the days since, someone had turned up in the morning every day to look after the animals there before leaving it empty once more.

Today, though, it’s different. It’s mid-afternoon and someone is still there; I can see them weaving among the crops and hauling a large bucket. Curious, I creep forward and head to the front gate.

It’s a woman, her face twisting in concentration and her hat jammed low on her head to try and keep out of the sun. Unlike Dane and I, it’s clear that the hot weather does not entirely agree with her, and her face is flushed red. Strands of long dark hair, escaping the ponytail sitting low on her neck, escaped from beneath the hat.

Then she turned, scowling down at something on the ground. Her green eyes were bright and snapping with her anger and I can’t help but stare, caught by their emerald gleam.

She turned around again and I shook my head, blinking.

If she’s here, then maybe she’s taken over the farm now? It would definitely make more sense for someone to live there personally. Since I’m certain my original neighbour has passed away, maybe this woman is a relative that inherited the property.

Though, she definitely isn’t someone I’ve seen before. In a matter of security for Dane and I, we’ve kept a close eye on our neighbour over the years, and this woman hasn’t visited him in all that time.

I watched her disappear around the side of the house and then turned away too, making my way back to where Dane was mucking out the pig sty.

“Hey, I think we’ve got a new neighbour,” I say.

“What?” Dane asks sharply, standing straight. “How do you know?”

“There’s someone over there, a woman,” I reply.

“I’d hoped the place would stay empty,” Dane mutters. “That would be so much easier for us.”

“Dane, if we want to blend here, we need to stop being so wary of everyone,” I tell him. “Yesterday, I overheard the grocery store owner talking about us; it’s actually more suspicious that we keep to ourselves like we do.”

“You go play nice with the locals if you want to,” Dane snorts. “I’m perfectly happy staying away.”

I give a wry smile. Dane has always been like this. Even among our own kind, he was antisocial and rude. I suppose I shouldn’t have expected more from him when we’re among humans, the beings that could, and did, almost hunt our kind to extinction.

I roll my shoulders. They feel raw, reminding me of how long it has been since I last stretched my hidden wings. But it was, unfortunately, far too dangerous.

“Ready to care for the chicks?” Dane asks after a moment.

We make our way into the barn. This is the place we don’t allow anyone else to see, because it would prove, once and for all, that we weren’t as human as we pretended.

Dane and I are human phoenixes. It’s been a hard life, and our parents were killed in a raid by Hunters when we were small, forcing us to flee. Since then, we’ve never come across another human phoenix, though we know they must be out there somewhere.

However, we have come across other phoenix creatures, creatures that we had only before heard tell of in the stories our parents had once told us. Birds that could fly into the sun, if they so wished, sea animals that glowed like flame beneath the water, foxes that could sprout wings and fly. They all had one thing in common; they, like us, were born with the power of the phoenix.

It was for these creatures that my brother and I had started this farm. We wanted to protect them, and the small town of Mundaring had provided us with the perfect cover. They didn’t need much care, either; all they needed was plenty of warmth and a mixture of trail mix made up of ash and oats. When they are old enough and strong enough to survive, we let them go out into the world to live their lives, hopefully free from those that would destroy them.

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