Page 3 of Spellbound By the Firefighter

That’s the thing I catch first, before anything else has a chance—she doesn’t step back. A foot of dark between us, and she holds it.

My eyes have already adjusted enough to find her. The orange from the window catches the side of her face—one cheekbone, the corner of her mouth, a strand of hair come loose at her temple that she hasn’t fixed since I walked in.

She’s looking up at me, chin tipped, and that high lace collar’s still buttoned tight around her throat. The whole severe black gown seals her up, chin to wrist, the same as it did at the podium. Every inch of her is covered, untouchable by design, and I’ve never in my life wanted so badly to see what’s under someone’s clothing.

I keep my eyes on her face. Her lips are parted around a held breath. I want to be the reason she forgets to let it out.

Twelve days on a mountain and I came down empty, wrung out, running on the last of myself. I walked through that door twenty minutes ago, and one look at the woman behind that podium filled the tank back up. I don’t have a word for what that is except that I’ve never had it—and I’m thirty-five, I’d know. She turned her head and found me across a room full of people, and something in me said, This one.

I could close the foot of darkness between us right now. Her breath says to close it. My hands want her jaw, that loose strand, the give of her waist under them. I lean in half an inch and watch her chin lift the rest of the way to meet me.

Then the air turns.

Smoke. Not the smoke I walked in wearing, cold and set into my collar hours ago. This is fresh. Moving. Woodsmoke with a green edge to it and a wind at its back, coming in under the front door in a thin thread of cold.

My body’s already turned toward it. Somewhere in the turn, I push the black book back into its slot on the shelf, barely aware I’ve done it, hands tidying one small thing while everything else in me goes to the smoke. Twelve days on the burn scar—the ground the fire already tore through—have trained the reflex into me, and it takes the wheel while the rest of me is still standing next to a woman I’ve gone and settled on without asking anybody’s permission, mine included.

“Tanner.” Her voice, near my shoulder. The playful tone is gone.

“Stay here.”

I’m at the window before she answers. Out on Prospect, the dead string lights sway on their wire—a wind that hadn’t stirred all night. The hay bales sit black against the storefronts. And up past the rooflines, where the mountain should be nothing but night stacked on night, is an orange smear low on the ridge that wasn’t there when I came down.

I know that color. I know the exact distance in it.

“What is it?” She’s come up beside me anyway.

“Wind shift.” I’m reading the smear, the lean of it, the way it’s paying out flat instead of climbing. “We’ve had a cold front sitting north of the pass for two days. It just came over. It’s pushing the smoke off the scar down into the valley.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s loud.” I get my phone out, thumb my way to Reid’s contact information, and watch the ridge while it rings. “Looks worse than it is from down here. Smoke lying down like that means the fire’s not making its own weather. It’s the front moving it, not the fire growing.”

What I don’t tell her is that looks-worse-than-it-is has killed people who trusted it, and that I won’t trust it until somebody’s eyes are on the actual edge. Reid picks up on the second ring with bar noise behind him.

“You seeing this?” he asks.

“I’m seeing it. Wind came over the pass. You need me up top?”

“Kirk’s already pulling the truck around. Get to the lot.” The bar noise drops away, a door closing on it. “You good to roll? You’ve been down twenty minutes.”

“I’m good.” I’ve been good on less. Being good on less is the whole job.

I hang up and notice the strip is already reacting to what it can’t read. A couple spills out of the bar and stops dead on the sidewalk, staring up at the glow, the woman’s hand climbing to her mouth. A man in a skeleton costume films it. Two more people come out behind them and catch the fear the first ones are giving off, and now there’s a small cluster of them on Prospect looking up at a ridge and inventing the worst version of it.

That’s what people do with a fire they don’t understand. Panic doesn’t come from the fire. It comes from the gap between the fire and what you know about it.

I go out. The cold hits—the wind with the smoke riding in it—and I put myself between the crowd and the view.

“It’s a wind event.” I don’t raise my voice. Raising your voice tells people to be afraid. “The fire’s up on the scar where it’s been all week. The front just pushed the smoke down on us. Crews are already headed up. Go home and shut your windows. It’ll clear by morning.”

The skeleton lowers his phone. The woman’s hand comes down off her mouth. I watch it work—the fear draining out of the group because one man in a soot-streaked shirt sounded like he’d already seen the ending, and it was fine.

That’s the job. You stand still enough that the scared people around you relax.

The crowd breaks up, drifting off toward cars and doorways. And when it’s gone, I turn back, and Audriana is standing in the open door of the shop with the last of her string lights dark behind her. She is not fine.

Her hands. That’s what I notice first. They’re wrapped around her own elbows, arms crossed tight, and the fingers are pressing white into the sleeves. Her breath’s gone shallow and fast and she’s staring past me at the ridge.