Page 1 of Spellbound By the Firefighter

1

AUDRIANA

The best part of a scary story is that you can close the book.

Mine is open on the podium at the front of The Last Page, Copper Peak’s only bookstore. My thumb holds the page while the last group of listeners leans in for the part where the thing in the walls stops pretending to be the house.

It’s eleven o’clock on Halloween. String lights loop the front window and trail back over the shelves, orange and low, the whole shop strung up for the season. Outside on Prospect Street, the decorations have gone soft in the dark—hay bales slumped, the strip thinned down to the few who never go home.

Inside, it’s warm and close. Mine.

The Last Page sits right where Prospect meets the old Trading Post, one face to the street and one to the cobblestone courtyard behind. Customers can leave toward the strip or toward the quiet, whichever kind of night they’re having. The bookstore has sat on Prospect longer than I’ve been alive. Ellie owns it and signs my checks, but I run the horror section—took it over at nineteen, because nobody had to teach me how to love it—and most nights she trusts me to close the place down alone.

I dressed for it tonight. Floor-length black, a high lace collar buttoned tight to my throat, jet buttons running down the front to the hem. The costume shop tag called it a mourning gown—a sad Victorian widow, more or less. It seals me up chin to wrist, formal and severe, and that’s the point. I run the town’s scary stories. I ought to look it.

The buttons are a lie, every one. They’re sewn flat over a single zip hidden down my left side—forty grim little fastenings for show, one pull and the whole gown gives. You learn that trick fast when a costume has to survive a four-hour shift and a coffee run.

“Read the walls part again,” says a woman in a witch hat.

So I read it again. I drop my voice for the walls. I let the silence sit a beat too long before the knock comes—three of them, slow, in no hurry at all.

Somebody gasps. Somebody laughs at the gasp. This is my favorite part of the job. A good scare that can’t actually hurt them, and a whole room lit up because of it.

Fear I choose. Fear that ends when I shut the cover. There’s a version I don’t do, and it doesn’t come from a book.

The bell over the door chimes, and cold enters the store with it. But under the cold lies something else. Smoke. It’s faint—the kind that lives in fabric. I look up.

He steps in and stops—a foot inside the door, one hand still on the frame. The shop’s warmth wraps around him, but he doesn’t sink into it. His shoulders stay up, braced against a cold that ended the second he crossed the threshold.

He flexes his fingers once, working the stiffness out of them, then turns his face toward the nearest lamp and holds it there. Only then does something in him let go, a half-second behind the rest of him. A man who’s been somewhere the warmth doesn’t reach…and he’s been there long enough to stop expecting it.

The witch-hat woman turns to look at him, and everyone else follows. Days of beard, soot worked into his hairline. He’s still half in his gear—yellow shirt gone brown at the cuffs—and he takes the room in slowly, corner by corner, before he trusts himself to take another step inside.

I know the Copper Peak fire crew by sight. Everyone does now, since the mountain started burning in September. All but one. There’s a man who stays at the edge of the group, out of the newspaper photos. Nobody in town has caught his name. He’s the one standing here wearing a day of fire.

“We’re almost at the scary part,” I tell him. “You want a summary, or do you want to just listen to the ending?”

“Ending’s the same in all of them.” His voice is low, worn down to the grain. “Something you didn’t see coming.”

“That’s the whole appeal.”

“Is it?”

I finish the story for the room. The walls win. They always do, in the good stories. The witch-hat woman buys the book and two others, and the rest filter out into the courtyard in twos, pulling coats tight and calling happy Halloween across the cobblestones. The bell chimes over and over. And then it doesn’t, and it’s the shop and the string lights and him, standing at the horror shelf with his hands in his pockets.

He tips a spine out with one finger, reads the title, then pushes it back. “You actually like this stuff?”

“I love it.” I come around the podium. My boots are loud in the empty store. “Best kind of scared there is.”

“Best kind.”

“You pick it up when you want it. You put it down when you’re done.” I stop a couple of feet away. Up close, the soot’s settled into the creases by his eyes, and he smells of woodsmoke. My skin goes warm. “And when you close it, it stays closed. It can’t follow you home.”

“Sounds real safe.”

“It is. That’s the point.”

He looks at me then, full on, and it drops through my stomach before I register it. Something in his face has gone still and certain, and I don’t have a shelf for it.