Page 24 of Watch Me Burn

Linda whips her head around, curls bouncing happily as she says, “Here we go, ladies. Welcome to Dyea.”

I peer through the frosted window; it’s easy since the heat from my cheek kept that part of the glass from fogging up. “We’re here?”

“Sure are. Come on. I’ll help you get your luggage out of the back.”

Elise goes first. It takes me a second to come completely back to the land of the fully conscious.

However, before I can get off of the shuttle, Linda stops me.

She points at my chest. “You’re Bridget, right?”

I’m not surprised she can guess which of us is the ‘human’ and which one of us is the vampire. Elise gracefully disembarked the bus to retrieve our luggage while I just bumped into the front seat, lost my footing, and nearly fell down the steps leading outside.

Plus, you know, there’s how I look like a normal person while Elise should be on a movie set somewhere instead of being dropped off outside of a former ghost town.

“Yeah.” I fluff my hair. It’s a smushed mess from my quick cat nap against the window pane. “That’s me.”

“Great. Hang tight a second, will ya? I’ve got something for you.”

She does? “Me?”

“Yup. I almost forgot. Madame Montvale told me to give this to you.” Linda grabs something from the dashboard. She passes over an envelope. “It’s a map to the underground cave system. If you’re not familiar with the area, you’d get lost without it. She said you’ll need it to find what you’re looking for.”

Everyone else seems to refer to Celeste as Madame Montvale except for Thorn and me. Probably because, as the leader of the Cadre, they’re on the same level. As for me, I’m just learning about where certain supes rank in their various hierarchies.She’s the head of the largest coven of the East Coast. For all I know, she’s like the witches’ governor and deserves the title.

But she was introduced to me as Celeste, and I have a hard time thinking about her as anything else. Still, I know who Linda means—and I know exactly what she’s talking about when she says that it might help me find what I’m looking for.

Fire opal grows in the caves. If I want to get rid of my powers, I need fire opal.

And now I have a map.

Well, to the caves, at least.

But how do we find the sanctuary?

CHAPTER 8

DYEA

The answer is with a bit of magic.

I hate that that’s how I have to explain it. After we were all set, Linda pointed us in the direction of the woods. Since the sanctuary knew we were coming, all we had to do was start walking and, if we were granted sanctuary by the land itself, we would find it.

When ten minutes go by and neither me or Elise have any clue what we’re doing, I’m just about ready to suggest heading back to the airport when, suddenly, I see a structure in the distance. Hoping that it’s not one of the buildings abandoned more than a century ago when the boomtown went bust, I point it out to Elise and we head there together.

One structure becomes two, and over the crunching of our shoes on the old layer of icy snow, I begin to hear sounds. Talking. Laughter. Sounds of a living community, and I really, really hope that they are alive and that we haven’t stumbled upon an actual ghost town.

We didn’t. As we walk past the back of two obviously lived-in homes—each a narrow, two-story cottage with large windows and wooden porch steps—we emerge into a small village that’sabout the length of five city blocks at most, with one large building at each end, and a scattering of homes creating an elongated oval inside of the trees.

I get the feeling that the magic brought us right where we needed to go, just like Linda said, because as soon as we appear, we catch the attention of two very different men who give the appearance that they’d been waiting for us.

One of them waves. He’s the smaller of the two, with a stout body, a beaming smile on his face, and a head of thick black hair that has a white stripe running right down the center of it.

Together, we head over to him—only to pause when the most rank stench seems to slam right into our nostrils.

It’s bad. Like, really bad. A combination of burnt garlic, rotten eggs, anddeathwith the strangest orange overtones to make it really godawful.

It takes everything in me not to clamp my hand over my nose, and the only reason I don’t do that is because it hits me a second later that the scene is coming from the smiling man with the black-and-white hair.

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