“After I soak the whole roof, I’ll leave. But not before.”
Part of Shelley thought the decision was quite rational.
Part of her was terrified.
The wind was blowing directly from the east, and it was blowing hard enough to make her stagger.
Grimly, she climbed to the next level of the roof. The shingles were slippery where water had fallen and crackling dry where the sprinkler couldn’t reach. She dragged the sprinkler to another place. Cool, bright water streamed over the roof.
The wind veered slightly, backing toward the north again.
“Thank God,” she said. “I’ll have time. I probably won’t even have to leave at all.”
For the next twenty minutes the wind blew less fiercely. She went from roof level to roof level, trying to cover as much of the shingles as possible. When a section of roof was barely damp, she dragged the sprinklers over to wet down another part.
She no longer heard the Sierra Deuces as they made their heart-stopping passes over the flames. She no longer noticed the palm-sized ashes floating down, partially cooled by a descent from thousands of feet. She heard and saw only the job before her, a dry roof and three hoses to drag.
Forty minutes later, Shelley stood on the middle roof level, looking southwest. Sky that had been pure and blue was now the color of slate.
With her heart in her throat, she climbed up to the roof that looked out on the street, where the fire was burning down from the north and east. Each time she had climbed from roof to roof, she had promised herself that it would be the last time and then she would go down the hill.
I’m not being foolish. There’s still plenty of time for me to leave.
Even if flames had already jumped the fire line and settled onto the next ridge over from her house, fire burned very slowly going downhill. And if that wasn’t enough, there was a fresh fuel break cut through the canyon bottom.
I can move the sprinklers just once more. There’s enough time to soak the roof and save my home.
Even as she told herself it would be all right, she glanced at her watch. A sick feeling washed over her. The wind had been blowing from the east for the past twenty minutes. The fire was coming straight at her.
Coughing as smoke raked her throat, she climbed to the peak of the roof. When she reached for the sprinkler, she looked over the peak for the first time in thirty minutes.
A feeling like death went through her.
The hellish glow of the fire was everywhere. Flames were twenty feet high, thirty feet, even higher; flames twisting and dancing over the land in terrible beauty.
A vast, eerie crackling sound filled the air, as though the day itself was burning.
Motionless, barely breathing, Shelley listened to the voice of wildfire raging through chaparral toward the necklace of hilltop homes where she stood.
Wind gusted fiercely.
Wildfire answered with an explosion of flame. Fire consumed the air, the sky, the chaparral, everything but the rocky land itself.
Even before the first embers rained down, scorching her, Shelley knew that she had been a fool to stay. The fire hadn’t slowed meekly on the downhill side of the ridge and died along the fuel break. Flames had leaped the whole canyon, wildfire riding the searing wind, chaparral exploding in a firestorm that neither sprinklers nor prayers could turn aside.
Spot fires burned on both sides of the winding road leading down the hill to safety. In some places the small fires met and blended in a preview of the flaming hell to come. Numbly, held in the thrall of the advancing firestorm, she watched tongues of fire lick across the road, cutting her off from escape to the flatlands below.
A high scream rose up from the road, a sound like canvas endlessly ripping. Something flashed darkly, a shadow racing between flames several miles below, a black motorcycle accelerating through tight corners, its rider crouched half off the seat as he leaned into the curves, keeping the bike upright by using his own body as a counterweight.
Abruptly Shelley’s numbness shattered into real terror. Not for herself. For the man racing wildfire to be with her.
“Cain! Go back!”
The cry tore at her throat, but the voice of the fire was much louder.
“No! Go back, Cain! Go back while you still can!”
The wind tore away her cry. Fire leaped the road behind Cain, in front of him, all around him, caging him in flames.
He vanished within the fire.
Time slowed, crawled, stopped. The only thing still moving was the savage leap of advancing fire.
Shelley screamed, a long sound of anguish that was torn from her soul.
Chapter Twenty-One
Shelley stood rigid, as frozen as time itself, her scream lost in the awful voice of wind-driven fire.
Suddenly a black motorcycle burst out of the flames, its engine revving in a single sustained shriek of maximum power. Cain was crouched over the handlebars, holding the motorcycle to the road with skill and brute power.
Adrenaline swept through her, freeing her. She scrambled off the roof and down the ladder. Embers fell all around, burning her. She didn’t feel it.
Down the street a cedar roof blossomed into flame with a terrible soft sigh. Tiny fires burned on her neighbor’s roof. Glowing ashes drifted down in a searing rain that shriveled plants as she watched.
She ran to the driveway, yanked open the car door, and pulled a trembling Nudge out of her cage. The cat tried to climb inside Shelley’s shirt.
“Easy, sweetheart. Easy,” she murmured soothingly. “You’re too big for me to handle if you go ballistic. I know you don’t like water, but we’re going swimming anyway.”
The motorcycle engine’s high-pitched cry came closer, dimming the voice of fire. Abruptly the sound changed, tires rather than engine shrieking.
Cain sent the bike into a long, controlled skid that ended in front of her house. He hit the ground running. Behind him, the bike continued on its side across the pavement in a shower of sparks.
Fifty feet away, a neighbor’s roof sighed and gave itself to the fire.
“The pool!” she shouted.
Cain couldn’t hear her. His helmet was on, black visor down, the plastic pitted and tarnished by fire. He grabbed Nudge’s scruff in one hand and. Shelley’s arm in the other and ran through the front yard.
Suddenly the air was hot, steamy with the sprinklers’ artificial rain. Yet the back of Shelley’s blouse was dry. She heard the wildfire racing up behind her, felt it reaching for her.
Cain kicked the redwood gate wide open. Side by side, they raced down the flagstone steps through air that was a mixture of steam and smoke and ashes too thick and too hot to breathe.
He didn’t wait until the steep path descended to the level of the pool. He literally threw Shelley into the pool from the steps at the head of the waterfall. An instant later, he followed in a long leap, taking the squalling cat with him.
A thunder of water closed around them, absorbing the first, deadly burst of the firestorm as it broke over Shelley’s home. Beneath the water, she opened her eyes on a world gone the color of flames. Instinctively she stayed underwater and headed for the flagstone grotto behind the waterfall. Cain swam alongside, moving powerfully despite his boots, helmet, leather jacket, and a fistful of frantically struggling cat.
Cautiously, remembering the fierce heat that she had felt in the instant before water covered her, Shelley surfaced behind the waterfall. The water was a seething, translucent, sooty orange wall shielding her from the rest of the world. The air was hot, bitter, steamy—but breathable.
The firestorm had passed over.
Cain heaved the dripping cat up onto the stone lip of the pool. Ears and fur plastered to her body, Nudge hunkered down and snarled like the outraged cat she was. She lashed out with unsheathed claws, but he had already snatched back his leather-gloved hand.
Bracing himself on the side of the pool with one arm, he fumbled with his helmet fastening. When the buckle
opened, he swept off the helmet. Then he grabbed Shelley and pulled her close. She clung to him, unable to speak, her arms locked around his neck.
“I don’t know whether to kiss you or strangle you,” he said, his voice raw. “If you ever do something that stupid again, I’ll kill you myself!”
Before she could answer, his mouth closed over her lips. She didn’t fight. It was what she wanted more than anything else on earth.
He was alive, and so was she.
It was more than she had ever hoped for after she saw his motorcycle engulfed in fire.
When he finally lifted his head, she tried to speak. All she could do was cough harshly. Smoke had penetrated even the waterfall’s protective wall.
His hand fastened on her collar, ripping apart her blouse in a single motion. He used the soaking strip he had torn off to cover her mouth and nose.
While she tied the cloth behind her head, he struggled out of his gloves and leather jacket. The jacket showed both the dull scars of fire and the thin, pale scars left by Nudge’s raking claws.
When Cain began coughing, she yanked off another piece of her blouse and tied it over his face. As she finished, a brilliant flare of orange lit the ash-gray water. The roof was collapsing, sending fire raining down.
Suddenly reality crashed around Shelley.
Everything I’ve worked for since I was nineteen is gone.
She had given up everything for her home, including the man she loved. She had lost her home anyway, and had nearly killed Cain and herself in the process. With a low moan she closed her eyes, not wanting to see even the molten reflection of her dying home.
Cain gathered Shelley in his arms and held her while her childhood dream of security burned to ash around her.
Finally the last fiery colors ran down the waterfall into the pool and did not return. He waited a while longer, holding her, feeling the shudders that ran through her body with each breath she took.
When his eyes no longer smarted from smoke, he pulled the soaking cloths away from his face and hers. Gently he kissed her forehead, took her arms from his neck, and put her hands on the lip of the pool.
“Can you hang on?” he asked, his voice rough from smoke.
She nodded.
He took a breath, eased through the waterfall, and looked around.
The waterfall drowned what he said. It was just as well. The words were as ugly as the smoking debris.
Nothing was left of Shelley’s home but random, ruined walls and a scorched cement foundation. The rest was no more than ashes riding on the back of a wild desert wind.
Grimly, Cain dove back beneath the waterfall.
“It’s safe now,” he said as soon as he surfaced. “There’s nothing left to burn.”
She bit her lip and nodded. She had expected nothing else.
Even so, it was a shock to come out from behind the waterfall and find a landscape gone black, nothing left but ashes and wind.
So much beauty engulfed and then burned to soot and memories.
The black vision blurred beneath her helpless tears. He touched her cheek with fingers that trembled.
“I’ll build it for you again,” he said. “Every stone, every flower, every wooden beam and piece of tile. Everything. You’ll have your home again if it’s the last thing I ever do. I promise you. You will have your home again.”
Sobs racking her body, she turned to him. “Hold—me. Just—hold me.”
Cain lay on his side in the penthouse, watching Shelley sleep. She was pale but for the traceries of red where burning debris had touched her. When he had washed the soot from her fair skin, each scarlet mark he discovered had been like a knife scoring his own body, telling him how close he had come to losing the only woman he had ever loved.
His fingers tightened in her silky hair as he bent to brush his lips over her cheek.
I’m sorry, love. I never should have left you. Will you be able to forgive me?
Not wanting to wake her, he didn’t say the words aloud. He knew she was exhausted by adrenaline and grief. She was vulnerable now.
Too vulnerable.
She’ll turn to me because she has nothing left. I don’t want it to happen that way. It’s not good for either of us.
Yet he knew he couldn’t leave her again.
Shelley stirred. Still asleep, she curled more closely to him, snuggling against his warmth.
He drew her closer and he breathed deeply of her sweetness. He didn’t know what would happen when she woke up. He only knew that it would be better than waking up alone.
Her eyelashes trembled, then opened.
The first thing he saw was her joy at seeing him. Then came shadows as memory returned. His hand smoothed gently over her hair, comforting her as he would a child.
“I’ll make another home for you,” he said quietly. “It will be all right, Shelley. You’ll have your home again.”
“Do you still love me?” she whispered, watching him with eyes that were older, darker, even more beautiful than he remembered.
“Not even hell’s own wildfire could destroy my love for you.”
“Then I’m home,” she said simply. “Wherever I am, when I’m with you I’m home.”
His arms tightened. He looked at her as though he wanted to see through to her soul.
“Are you sure?” he asked. “I want to marry you, but not like this. Not because you’ve lost everything else. That would be unfair to both of us.”
Suddenly Cain closed his eyes. If he looked at her, he would take whatever she offered despite the knowledge that they would both regret it later.
“When you have your home again,” he said, “then we’ll talk about us.”
“I’ll never have my home again. Its most important ingredient is gone.”
He opened his eyes and saw her certainty. Defeat tasted like ashes in his mouth.
“The art,” he said roughly. “Why didn’t you try to save it? Some of it would have survived a dunking in the pool.”
She shook her head. Silky tendrils of hair licked across his bare shoulder.
“The art wasn’t what made my house a home. Love made it a home. My love. But when you left, you took my love with you.”
His eyelashes lowered, veiling his eyes. A muscle moved along his jaw. “Then why didn’t you come with me?”
“I didn’t understand then. Now I do.”
“What do you understand now?”
“Us. You gave me one kind of fire and it burned through all the barriers I had built up against trusting someone else with my life. When you left, I thought that our fire had destroyed me.”
Tears came as she remembered her pain and her loneliness.
“Shelley . . .” he whispered. “I never meant to hurt you.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you, either. And I did, didn’t I?”
“Like nothing I’ve ever felt before in my life.”
Her eyelashes trembled as she tried to blink back tears. She couldn’t, so she just let them go.
“It took another kind of wildfire to burn through reality and show me what is enduring and what isn’t,” she said, her voice husky. “Love is like the naked land. It’s real. It’s enduring. The structures we build on it might burn or crumble or disappoint us. But love survives like the land beneath the ashes. We can build again.”
She took his hands and kissed them, loving each callus and scar, each lean and graceful finger.
“I lost a lot of things when my house burned,” she whispered. “Beautiful things, irreplaceable things. But still things. When I saw you coming up the road and the fire burning everywhere—”
Her voice broke and her arms closed around him with a grip that even he would have had trouble breaking.
“When I saw that fire explode over your motorcycle, over you, I would have given everything I’ve ever had or hoped to have just to know that you were alive. Everything. My art. My home. My life.”
With a hoarse sound, Cain buried his face in her hair
and held her as though he wanted to take her into his soul. It was a long time before either one of them could speak.
“That’s how I felt when Dave called and told me there was a fire near your house,” he said finally, his voice thick with emotion.
“How did you find me?”
“I went looking. You weren’t at the evacuation center, you weren’t at The Gilded Lily, and the bastard at the roadblock wouldn’t let me by.”
What Cain had gone through showed in every harsh line on his face and in the gun-metal eyes narrowed against remembered pain.
“I knew you were up there protecting your home, and everywhere I looked there was fire. I . . . went crazy. I had to know you were alive.”
“But how did you get past the police?”
He smoothed his cheek against her hair and let out a ragged breath.
“I took a trail Billy and I had discovered. Then I cut back to the road as soon as I was past the squad car.”
“You shouldn’t have. If you had been killed . . .”
She didn’t finish. She couldn’t. She simply held him until she stopped trembling.
“When I found you had come back for the wedding and hadn’t even called me,” she said, “I didn’t know anything could hurt that much.”
“I didn’t come back for Dave’s wedding. I came back for the woman I loved. I just didn’t know how to go about getting her when she didn’t want me.”
“But she does,” Shelley said, smiling through her tears. “I love you. I’ll go with you wherever you want, whenever you want. Just let me be with you.”
“We don’t have to go anywhere. We’re home.”
“But all those landscapes of the soul calling to you . . . what of them?”
He kissed her forehead, her eyelashes, the hollow beneath her cheekbone, the corner of her mouth, the pulse beating in her throat.
“I tried to lose myself in one of those landscapes. It should have been easy. It always was in the past.”
“You didn’t like the Atacama?”
“It’s a wild, harsh land. Stone and sand and wind, a sky so empty it makes your soul ache just to look up at it. Dry rivers run down to a cold sea. Desert without end, thousands of square miles where nothing grows. I loved the Atacama.”
Where the Heart Is Page 27