Page 14 of Under The Mountain Man’s Spell

"It's cast iron. It'll keep." I got an arm around his chest and hauled him up, and he fought me for about three seconds before he went limp. I hoisted him over my shoulder and turned for the door.

The barn was making sounds I knew, the long creak before a beam gives, the crack of hot nails. The scar on my forearm ached under my glove. I smelled hay and creosote and hot metal, the same smell as the night I was twenty-five and went back into a burning barn for a tractor, because I was sure I'd started the fire and figured I could at least save something.

Not today. I thought of Molly's face when the pager went off, white and wide-eyed and trusting me to come back, and I locked my jaw and kept moving. The loft let go behind us as we cleared the door. A burning beam end swung down and caught me across the ribs hard enough to drive the air out of me, and I kept walking until the grass was under my boots.

I set Mr. Hollis down on the grass, thought better of it, and hauled him upright against the engine's bumper, where he could breathe. His jacket sleeve was smoldering. I yanked off a glove, stripped the sleeve off his arm bare-handed and flung it clear, and found his pulse. Conscious. Airway open. Hoarse as gravel, with soot rimming his nostrils and his eyebrows singed. "Command to dispatch," I said into the radio at my shoulder. "One patient out, conscious, smoke inhalation. Send the ambulance."

Molly reached us at a dead run, with the first-aid kit from the pen banging against her hip and her braid half undone. She dropped to her knees in front of him before I'd finished the call. Mrs. Hollis was still shrieking.

"Pulse is one-twenty," I told her. "He's breathing on his own, and his face is clear."

"I've got him." She took his wrist anyway and watched her watch, her voice low and steady. "Mr. Hollis. Can you hear me? Look at me."

"The press," Mr. Hollis rasped. "Is it all right?"

"Mr. Hollis, I'm taking your pulse. Stop talking." She glanced up at me. "Go run your fire, Chief."

I went. For the next ten minutes I was all business. The loft line knocked the fire down to something we could live with, the brush truck crew had the corn soaked and safe, and I walked the perimeter twice before I let myself believe it. The barn was gone. It would smolder until morning, and my crew would be pulling it apart for hot spots until after dark, but it wasn't going anywhere, and neither was the maze.

The medical clinic's rig rolled in and parked, and my sister climbed down from the cab with her aid bag and the portable oxygen. "Ambulance is five minutes out. What have you got?"

"Walt Hollis, by the engine. Smoke inhalation, but he's talking. Molly's with him." My throat cracked on Molly's name, and I blamed the smoke.

Summer looked from me to Molly and back and her eyebrows shot up. "Huh."

"Don't."

"I didn't say anything." She went, and I watched her kneel beside Mr. Hollis, get the mask over his face, and check what Molly had checked. When she was done she pulled a water bottle from her bag and pushed it at Molly, and Molly's "I'm fine" carried across the ash to where I stood.

"Drink anyway. You've been breathing smoke."

Molly drank, and leaned her head back against the engine's wheel, and that was when it hit me. Mr. Hollis was safe and the fire was down to smoke and steam, and there was nothing left to command that my crew couldn't handle without me. My hands started to shake and my pulse roared in my ears, and every muscle I owned wanted to cross that patch of ash and haul her into my arms in front of my entire crew. I jammed my fists into my jacket. Then I walked around to the far side of the truck and started hauling water bottles out of the side compartment, because my crew needed water and because it was in the opposite direction from Molly.

* * *

The ambulance came and took Mr. Hollis, with his wife climbing in after him and still talking, and when it was gone Summer cornered me beside the smoldering barn.

"You've been looking at Molly like she's the last slice of apple pie at a church potluck," she said, low. "So what's the problem, big brother? Scared?"

Heat shot up my neck. I checked over my shoulder. Molly was forty feet away with her back to us, packing up the first-aid kit. "Keep your voice down."

"Why? Maybe you both need a little encouragement."

"You've been married three weeks," I said through my teeth. "You have no business giving anyone advice."

"Flint would say I'm right." One corner of her mouth went up. "He says you've been grouchier than a grizzly lately, and the guys are beating you at pool. General consensus is your mind's on other things. Like one cute Veterinary Nurse."

She went off and climbed into the rig laughing, and I let her. It had been a long time since I'd heard her laugh like that.

I turned back to the barn. The roof was gone and the walls stood black and steaming, and the smell of it put me right back at twenty-five. I'd been careless then, young and sure of myself, drinking in a rancher's barn with his hands at the end of a long day, and when it went up in the night I'd been certain it was my doing. I'd gone back in for his tractor because it was the only thing I could think of to save, and I'd come out with the scar on my arm and nothing else. The fire marshal wrote it up as electrical. I'd never believed him for a day.

Silas found me before I could go any further down that road. "The access road," he said. "Nine minutes. That brush has to go."

"Timber's End can do it before spring. Write me up the times and I'll take it to council next week." I looked past him at the barn, still breathing smoke from every gap in the boards, and at the maze beyond it, eight feet of dry corn with half the county due to walk through it after dark. "I want two on hot spots until it's cold. I don't care if that's midnight. And I want the brush truck parked at the north edge of the corn for the finale, not on the green."

"Already done. Both." He waited. "Go, Chief."

"I'm not leaving a working fire."