Page 4

All night, she sold fear, dropping her voice low for the scary parts. This is not that. Her face has gone open and slack, no show left in it. I’ve watched a lot of people meet real fire for the first time, and it shows in the hands before it ever reaches the face. Hers gave her away a minute ago.

I’ve read her wrong all night, then. Or she’s read herself wrong. The girl who sells fright by the pound just met the kind she can’t ring up and shelve, and it has her by the wrists.

I should be at the lot. Kirk has the truck running. There’s a fire on a mountain, and it’s literally my job to go stand at the edge of it.

I cross the sidewalk to her instead.

“Hey.” I get down into her eyeline, blocking the ridge with my body so the only thing in front of her is me. “Look here. Not up there. Here.”

Her eyes meet mine. Her breathing’s still going too fast.

“It’s not coming for the town,” I tell her, using the voice I use on rookies in the black. “I would not be standing here talking to you if it were. You understand? If this were the kind of night you need to be scared of, I’d have you in my truck already, dropping you off somewhere safe.”

She gets a breath in. “You’re leaving. You have to go up there?”

“I have to go up there.”

“Into that?”

“Into that.” I don’t dress it up for her. She’d know. “It’s what I’m for.”

And there it is, flaring up at the worst possible second. The want I swore off, lit and climbing. Four years back, there was a woman named Daisy and a lease with both our names on it, along with a coffee maker she programmed the night before so coffee was ready when we woke. A season ran long—September clear into November—and I was gone for the worst of it, and she was done finding out each dawn whether I walked back down or didn’t. I don’t blame her. Waiting is its own fire, and nobody ever handed her a shelter for it.

What it left me with is simpler than heartbreak. The coffee-maker life never sat right with me. I kept finding reasons to be up on the scar, feeling more like myself the higher I climbed. Called it the job.

It was never the job. I can stand in a burnover and slow my own breathing by hand. I couldn’t sit at that kitchen table one morning without my legs wanting the door. When Daisy left, what came up under the apology wasn’t grief. It was relief, and I hated the taste of it. So I stopped wishing for that life. Told myself I wasn’t built to want it.

And now I’m standing in front of a woman I met tonight, and every part of me that swore off this exact feeling is lit up and pulling toward her. And I have to turn my back on her and walk uphill into a fire. The timing is a special kind of cruel.

“Go inside,” I tell her. “Lock up. Try to sleep. I’ll come back and tell you it’s out.”

“You don’t know that you’ll come back.”

“No.” I won’t lie to her. “But I know I want to. That’s new for me, so don’t waste it.”

She blinks. Whatever that cracks open in her, I don’t have time to watch it land.

Kirk lays on the horn from the lot—two short blasts, the sound that means now.

I go. And the entire way to the truck, up a street that smells of the exact thing I’m built to run at, the only fire I can feel is the one I just walked away from in a doorway.

3

AUDRIANA

Ilock the door behind him and stand with my palm flat on the wood, listening to the truck pull away up the hill.

He told me to go home. Sleep if I can. But I get three steps toward the back and my feet quit on me.

Home is a dark apartment four blocks off Prospect with a window that faces the wrong way—away from the mountain. I’d lie there seeing nothing and knowing less.

So I turn around. I flip the string lights back on over the horror shelf, orange filling the front of the shop, and I drag the good chair out from behind the counter to the front window, where I can see the street and the black shoulder of the mountain above the rooflines.

Then I pull the book. The black spine. The one he tipped out earlier tonight and asked whether it was the kind where nothing’s really wrong or the kind where something is.

I open it to the first page and read the same sentence four times.

This is the deal I made a long time ago, and it has never once failed me. You want to be scared, you pick up the right book and let it do the work. It takes you somewhere with teeth and it brings you back, and when you close the cover the fear stays inside it. Clean. Contained. Mine to start, mine to stop.