Page 5 of Sold Rejected Mate
“Hey,” he says when I cut the engine to the Jeep and hop out, hauling my gear out from the back. “You ready, man?”
Before I can answer him, I pause, the strangest sensation rolling over me. I straighten up and look out at the motel, at the row of doors and windows, the curtains pulled tight. Something acidic, slightly minty, hangs in the wind.
Have Xeran’s brothers been here recently?
Xeran knows that they’re involved with the fires, that they were helping their uncle to sell faulty insurance, start the fires, swoop in, and purchase the land. I glance up at the road exiting town into the sharp incline of trees.
The first fire is up there. Did Xeran’s brothers start it?
“Lachlan?” Felix asks, and I realize I never answered him. “You good?”
“Yeah, just give me three minutes,” I say, breathing hard as I wrestle the stuff out of my bag and start to yank it on. Whatever the strange feeling is that I’m having, I can’t focus on it now.
A second later, Xeran comes around the corner in the fire engine, not bothering to park
“Let’s go!” he shouts.
Everything’s ready except my oxygen. I’ll do it in the truck.
We race down the empty street with the sirens wailing, the lights painting the trees around us in red and blue. Felix sits across from me in the cabin, his usual easy grin replaced by the intensity he gets before a dangerous call.
“Doesn’t need saying twice!” Xeran shouts, twisting in his seat to look at us as Kalen drives the engine. “Watch each other’s backs. Don’t expect a pattern. If something feels off, radio immediately.”
We get to the edge of the wave, hop out of the engine, and split into two groups. Soren and I in one, and Xeran, Kalen, and Felix in the other.
Like always, we try to circle around the daemon fire, smothering it with the extinguisher in the packs on our backs. It’s a thick, goopy material made from mixing ash with daemon fire and water. A mixture we figured out back in high school, right after the fires started.
In that one good summer before Xeran’s dad died, Xeran left town, and everything went to shit.
The familiar weight of my axe bounces against my leg as Soren and I walk east, hoping to surround the thing, keep it from moving any closer to town.
We’re still trying to rebuild from the last time.
Up ahead of us, there’s a glow on the horizon. Not the orange-red of normal fire, but something deeper, more violet, like a bruised sky. When we finally get over the crest, the sight of the fire takes my breath away.
Flames reach up into the night sky like grasping fingers, pleading for an escape. Moving with purpose, with creative license. Normal fires follow fuel and wind—they obey physics. But this one pulses like something alive
“Fucking hell,” Soren mutters, and I check my breathing apparatus one last time before we dive in.
The heat hits in waves, even though the protective gear. Searing, melting. Enough to make your body cook from the inside out, like a baked potato.
No human could fight this fire for long and survive. It’s part of the reason why wildfires have been spreading so rampantly—the humans are finding it harder and harder to keep up with daemon fire, not knowing what it is that they’re really up against.
We work hard, sweating and swearing as we spray the extinguisher and stifle the flames, listening to them die like something gasping for its last breath. For what feels like hours, Soren and I work our way along the wall of fire, leaving the fast-hardening goop in our wake, careful to leave paths we can walk through.
Then, a massive fir roughly thirty feet from us explodes into flames, pieces of bark and branch battering over us as wecrouch down, protecting our heads. No ember touched that tree, no burning debris fell on it. It just burst into flames, the way daemon fire is known to do.
“Come on, man,” I say, straightening up and reaching a hand out for Soren, who’s stumbled backward over a log. “Let’s keep moving. We have to meet up with the others.”
We advance. Sweat pours down my face inside the mask, and my arms start to ache from the weight of the extinguisher’s hose.
“What’s your position?” Soren asks over the comms when we feel a noticeable difference in the heat. I start to suspect the thing is getting smaller. When Xeran responds with coordinates not more than a mile from us, Soren and I share a look of triumph.
That’s when, over his shoulder, I see something. Someone.
“Shit,” I say, stumbling forward, moving to help her before I can think about it.
But when Soren spins around, trying to see what I see, she shifts away. I blink a few times, trying to look into the light, into the flames, but there’s nothing.
