“Our daughter and our grandchildren?—”
“We’ll get them out,” I promise them. “You need to get out of the way.”
They finally step aside, rushing toward where Joe is waiting for them. I hardly have time to take in what they said, but it strikes me—daughter and grandchildren. That means Angelie is in here…
And she isn’t alone.
“Top floor,” Carlisle barks to me from behind his respirator, pointing toward the staircase. “I’m going to take the ground. Dylan, you check outside, make sure nobody has been stupid enough to wander out and get a look at the fire.”
We move out, following his orders—no point getting uppity about the chain of command when there are more important things for us to worry about right now. I take the stairs two at a time, moving through the corridor at the top and checking behind each door in turn. One, a bedroom, is empty. Another, a bathroom, has had the window left open and is already starting to fill with smoke. And the third…
When I throw open the door at the end of the corridor, I freeze for a second. Because after all this time, there she is. Angelie. Just the way I remember her. Long light-brown hair pulled back from her face, blue eyes catching the late afternoon light as they turn, panicked, toward me.
And the grandchildren her parents mentioned—it’s not two. Not even three.
Four toddlers surround her as she desperately tries to get them into carriers.
“Callum?” she gasps, rising to her feet.
“Stay there,” I bark at her, pushing aside the shock that threatens to grasp me by the throat. If I let something happen toher just because I was too stunned to respond when she needed me most, I knew I would never be able to forgive myself.
I back out of the room, looking down the stairs toward Carlisle, and gesture him up to join me. I don’t think he can hear me over the crack of the branches and the rush of the flames starting to approach outside, but he moves up to join me.
“Four kids,” I tell him, nodding toward the bedroom. “And her, Angelie. You take two, I’ll take two, okay?”
“Got it,” he replies, though I can see a flicker of surprise in his face as he follows my orders. I know that the shock must be rocking through his system just as it is through mine. Children? Angelie wasn’t even intending to stay in town for much longer when we last saw her, so coming back here to have kids, it’s…it’s something, to say the least.
We step across the threshold, and I grab one of the carriers, lifting another toddler into my arms—she has a mess of light blonde hair, and she grips my upper arm for dear life, tears welling in her eyes. Carlisle grabs the other two, taking one in each arm, and brushes aside his respirator for a moment so he can speak to Angelie.
“Downstairs,” he tells her. “We have a van waiting—we need to get you out of here, you understand?”
Her eyes seem a little hazy from the shock, and I’m not sure if it’s more about the fire or the fact that we’ve just appeared in her life out of nowhere. It doesn’t matter; we can contend with those issues when we need to, if we need to. Right now, all I give a damn about is getting her out of here and making sure her children aren’t trapped by the rush of the oncoming flames.
We make our way swiftly down the stairs, and as the girl grips my arm tighter, I steal a glance at her. How old are these kids? They all look to be the same age, though I’ve never much been good at deducing the age of children. Never really been around them much, what with Dylan and I being twins and not having any younger siblings or anything. Could they be quadruplets? The thought seems crazy, even to me, but these things happen, right?
Carlisle kicks the door open and guides Angelie outside. She pauses for a moment to check on the children, her eyes watering, either from the smoke or from the fear that something has happened to them.
“They’re okay,” I tell her, pulling off my respirator. Looking around, I search for the others, and sure enough, Dylan emerges around the side of the house.
“We’re good to go,” he says.
Joe screeches the van to a halt, climbs out, and rushes over to us. “The last bus just left,” he tells me. “Everyone’s out, except…”
His gaze turns to Angelie and the four children, and for a moment, I can see him crunching the numbers in his mind. The very same numbers that I was crunching when I laid eyes on them. They look to be about three years old, or something close to it, and we hooked up with Angelie nearly four years ago now. I’ve kept track of the time, the memory still just as clear as it was back then, the thought of her body against mine, against all of ours, enough to burn itself into my skin like a brand.
Which means…which means that these children could belong to one of us.
“Okay, back of the van, now,” Carlisle says, cutting through the silence as he takes control. “We have the safe house on the other side of the mountain, we can head there for the time being. Angelie, are there any health concerns we should know about? Allergies, illnesses, asthma that they might need help with?”
Angelie shakes her head, looking distant, as though she’s somewhere else entirely. I guess, to some extent, that must be exactly what’s going on. Seeing us again, all four of us together, just like we were on that night, it’s like she’s been whipped back in time to a memory that I know none of us have been able to leave behind.
But we’re going to have to at least put that on hold if we’re going to get her out of here in one piece. Carlisle carefully hands off two of the kids to Joe, who helps them into the back of the van, securing them as best he can in the adult-sized seats.
“Drive carefully,” I mutter to him, as I do the same for the other two. Not like we have much choice in our method of transport here, but I don’t want them bounced around too much in the back. I feel a sudden surge of protectiveness at the sight of them—a protectiveness that I could just put down to them being children in a time of need, but there might be a little more to it than that.
“You next,” I insist, offering Angelie an arm to get herself into the back. She stands there for a moment, frozen. It’s not uncommon, to be so shocked at an incoming fire that you just freeze up, but the air is growing thick and dark with smoke and every second we spend here is another moment that we let the fire draw closer.
“Angelie—”
