Daddy scooped her up into his arms, and suddenly they were moving. But the flames were everywhere. Following them. “It’s going to be okay.” Her body bounced in his arms as they jogged down the stairs, and she believed him.
Right until the world ripped out from underneath them.
“Aslen, go!” Murray backed away from the wall of flames spreading and bearing down on them both, and Aslen couldn’t help but add a few feet of distance between her and a very painful death.
The flames had stripped the needles off the trees ahead of her. Climbing higher and cutting her off from Murray. She hadn’t been able to save her father that day their house had burned to the ground, not knowing that her mother had already suffocated from the smoke. But she was going to save Murray.
Training pulled her from the past and slapped her into action. She’d dropped her gear back at her house, but the lack wouldn’t stop her from managing this fire as she had every other she’d faced. Scanning the downed trees, dead leaves and boulders around them, she mentally discarded all of it. Whatever accelerant the arsonist had used would ensure the fire burned beyond natural timing and temperatures. She had to create a barrier between Murray and the fire. Something strong enough to withstand those temperatures for just a few seconds. The boulder to her right. It was large enough to add a break in the fire wall closing in on him. It could work.
Aslen darted for a felled branch of dead leaves nearly as wide and tall as she was. The bark had so far been left untouched despite the proximity to the fire, and didn’t smell of accelerant. It would work. It had to work. Dragging the tree carcass toward the ring of fire she laid it perpendicular to the boulder. Theleaves caught immediately. She might not be able to contain the fire, but she could manipulate it into going where she needed it to. “Murray! The boulder!”
His frame shadowed through the flames as he followed her voice. Arms protecting his face, he seemed to read her thoughts. “It won’t work! The fire. It’s blocking me from the rock!”
Acid charged up her throat. The past threatened to consume her as he backed off from wall of flames. No. This wasn’t the end. He couldn’t give up yet. Her eyes burned with tears and smoke. “You have to try! Please!”
She couldn’t lose him. He could ignore her for the rest of her life. He could hate her for leaving. He could never love her the way she’d wanted since she was thirteen years old. He just had to live to do it. He had to fight.
Murray seemed to still behind that wall that gave her mere glimpses of his handsome face, the crack and pop of the fire consuming the debris along the forest floor louder than the buzz in her head. “You have to leave, Aslen.”
“Don’t you dare.” The warped scars of melted skin running up her right bicep and over her shoulder seemed to burn all over again with remembered pain. The muscles in her jaw ached under pressure as tears burned her nose and eyes. “Don’t you dare leave me here alone. You promised to protect me. So fight!”
His outline was lost as the fire surged another foot in her direction. Panic clawed up her throat. She was running out of time, and they’d already lost the one resource they had to get him out. Wait. No. The reservoir. They were close enough—within a quarter mile. Aslen stripped free of her jacket and T-shirt, clenching them both in her fist, leaving her in her sports bra. If she could soak her clothing enough, she might be able to use it as a defense against the smoke and flames over their exposed skin. “You better be alive when I get back.”
“Aslen, no!” Murray’s voice bellowed over the roar of the fire. “You don’t know if he’s still out there.”
She ignored the pained plea in his voice and raced north, toward the reservoir. The chances of coming back with enough water in her clothing to help were slim at best, but it was worth the risk. Her life was worth the risk, no matter how many times he tried to tell her otherwise.
Her lungs ached with effort as she dodged a labyrinth of downed trees, sandpits and sharp rocks working to throw her off. The muscles in the backs of her thighs protested every step, but she wouldn’t stop. Not until she’d done everything she could. Murray had saved her life. Not just physically. Mentally, emotionally. He’d given her a home, a family. A second chance when no one else would. He’d always sacrificed everything to keep his promise to her. This was how she repaid him.
Branches scraped at her exposed skin and drew blood, but Aslen only pushed herself harder. Firefighters were required to run three miles through woods just like this, weighed down with fifty pounds of gear. She could sprint the quarter mile to the reservoir and back without breaking a sweat.
Sunlight brightened ahead, and she glimpsed the shore and the surface of the reservoir. Azure blue and untouched by the fire set this morning. She could see it. Feel the cool breeze coming off the top countering the summer heat for the dozen families enjoying their vacation. She was almost there. She could reach out and touch it. Taste the fresh water from the edge of the tree line.
Pain seared across her scalp. Aslen wrenched backward, her feet coming out from underneath her. Her jacket and shirt fell from her hand as she reached back to ease the tension pulling her hair into a fist. Agony reverberated up through her knees as she landed on a jagged rock trying to escape the floor of red sand. Her scream was cut short by a hand over her mouth.
“Now where do you think you’re going?” A low voice pressed close to her ear. “I wouldn’t want you to miss all the fun.”
Chapter Fourteen
He was going to kill her.
Murray didn’t know how or when, but the second she came back from whatever harebrained scheme to get him out of this mess, he was going to let her have it. He knew Aslen. He knew the guilt she carried from the fire that’d cost her parents’ lives. He knew the truth—that she’d been the one to start it by playing with matches under her bed. And he knew how far she would go to make up for that mistake. Even if it meant putting her precious life in danger. “Aslen!”
Damn it. Sweat cascaded down his face and into his eyes. Murray swiped at it, but it was no use. Salt slicked his skin, the deposits overheating, crusting his hair and face. His body couldn’t stave off this heat forever, but the fire wouldn’t relent. It’d gained another few feet, corralling him into a circle no more than five feet in every direction. And closing fast. She was out there. Fighting for him when it should’ve been the other way around. How could he have let this happen? What the hell had he been thinking in dragging her into this investigation?
He should’ve known better. She’d had no intention of keeping that promise to leave him behind from the start, but if he lost her… That tightness that’d nearly strangled him at her small dining room table after negotiating her deal returned ten times stronger. It curdled the acid in his gut and shoved deep into the recesses of his nerves. Grief hit hard and fast. There was nostopping it. No shutting it down as he had so many times in the past. When he’d lost his mom, his dad. Jackson. He hadn’t let himself feel any of it for Aslen’s sake. He was all she had left, and he’d done whatever it took to be there for her. Only to die at the hands of the very element that’d ripped her life apart.
Murray tried to breathe through the physical ache threatening to crush him from the inside. The tips of his fingers burrowed into calloused palms. She’d disappeared right in front of his eyes, put herself at risk to save him because that was what she did for the people she cared about, and that anxiety he had whenever he lost sight of her surged. Choked him.
It was the not knowing. Of where she’d gone, if she was safe. After everything they’d been through together since middle school, Aslen had become part of him. A vital organ he couldn’t live without. He needed her in his sights, craved her presence as much—if not more—than those pointless facts she used to distract herself.
She’d stripped free of her jacket and T-shirt and run in the direction of the reservoir. While fire management wasn’t his area of expertise, he had to trust she knew exactly what she was doing. That they would get out of this. Because the other option was losing her, and Murray wouldn’t accept that. Ever. Focus on what he could control. That was what Aslen had taught him when news of Jackson’s disappearance had arrived, when she’d crawled beneath his covers that night and held him as if he would break apart into a million pieces if she didn’t. He growled to himself. “Control. What can you control, damn it?”
Had she made it? Was she already on her way back? The thoughts seemed to attack from every direction, but he couldn’t give them any energy right now. Couldn’t waste what little he had left. Survival. That was all he could focus on. Murray spun in a circle, searching for that weak spot in the wall closing in on him with every breath. Pops and crackles sparked dangerously at hisfeet as debris caught fire, closer and closer. The arsonist could still be out there. Could have gone after Aslen. Stopped her from coming back for him.
His blood burning in his veins, Murray ripped off his own jacket to stop himself from cooking to death in his clothing. In his rush to search for the arsonist, he hadn’t brought any water out here with them. Right. So what could he use?
The low hanging branches of the trees circling the clearing wouldn’t do him a damn bit of good. They were already lost to the flames, but the thicker ones, the older ones that had maybe dried out over the years and might not hold his weight, were his best bet. His heart thundered hard in his chest. He put any remaining energy he had into following the uneven rhythm to hone his focus to the here and now. Not into the idea that he was about to become a rotisserie chicken. The now-blackened boulder Aslen had tried to convince him would hold against the encroaching flames provided a break in the deadly wall heading straight for him.
