“Ooh, send pics!” Jenny cheers.
Ash ends the call.
“Sorry about the joke,” he says, standing beside me. “Kind of a dick move.”
It could be the dust or the dark, but I think it’s how his voice gets soft apologizing that makes me hyperaware of being here, with him, so far from anyone else. And of how close he’s standing, and how that same joke five minutes ago would’ve pissed me off a lot more… if I didn’t kind of like the way he lights up when I react.
At least he isn’t pushing to hear more about Rocky. Or Mom.
“Jenny’s way too excited about this,” I say.
Ash moves into the clutter, wiping a line through the grime on a bookshelf with his finger.
“She loves haunted stuff.” His voice sounds wrong in the dead interior, and a shiver runs down my spine.
“That makes one of us.”
His light snags on a jagged shadow stretching from the floor to ceiling.
“What the hell is that?” I whisper.
He steps closer, but even as his light throws broken shadows across the room, it’s his silhouette I can’t stop watching.
“Let’s hope it’s not Charlie,” he says.
The house creaks its answer somewhere above us.
CHAPTER 14
ASH
A cast-iron furnacesquats against the far wall, hulking from some other century.
“Get some wood from outside,” Kael orders. “I’ll look for firestarter.”
“You sure you can get it working?”
He tries the firebox, but it’s stuck. He flips open the pocketknife and wedges it under the handle, muscles straining as he yanks. His sweatshirt rides up just enough to show a strip of skin, damp at the waistband. The rough grunt he makes with his whole body when the door finally gives hits me low and hard.
“Somebody’s made it work,” Kael says, ducking his face into his sweatshirt as soot billows out. He runs a hand along the chimney pipe. “Let’s hope whoever it was doesn’t come back.”
“We dowantto be rescued,” I remind him, but he just waves me toward the door, suddenly comfortable alone in the place he’d refused to enter.
Fetching firewood is the least I owe him after scaring the life out of him and mocking his dead mom’s keepsake.
Jenny:okay?
I text back,He’s fine.
The gap where I pried off a board works as a doorway. After the inn’s dimness, moonlight is shockingly bright, illuminating towering pines looming overhead, their long shadows stretching across the clearing. For the first time all day, the wind is just wind. No hint of smoke.
Kael would call it beautiful. And if he did, I’d understand.
“Are you going?” he calls from inside. The impatience in his voice nudges me fully out.
I keep my flashlight off, letting the moon do its work. Gathering an armful of wood from the forest edge is easy. Dry branches are scattered everywhere as perfect kindling.
Eight years in San Francisco have taught me the vocabulary of fire season. Wine country watches the forecast the way other people watch sports scores. It’s neverifthere’s a fire, justwhereandhow many. Two years ago the sky wentBlade Runnerorange when ash fell on the city. It felt too close then. Now I’m standing in the path instead of under the fallout.
