by Amy Star
They suspected arson, but given the ground the blazes had been covering, finding a starting point wasn’t exactly easy, which meant finding any possible tools left behind was next to impossible.
It was weird. There were more professional ways to describe it, of course, but that didn’t make it any less true. Looking back over all of his thirty years, he was pretty sure that “spontaneous combustion of the local ecosystem” was a new one.
Mitch had his own suspicions about what was causing it, but it wasn’t exactly one he could go public with. No one would believe him, and there was a high probability of someone wanting to kill him if he brought it up.
He wanted to bash his head against a wall, since it sort of felt like that’s what his department’s efforts were boiling down to already. That was not what he did, though. Instead, he…well, he suited up and piled into the truck, and it careened down the street, its lights flashing and its siren wailing.
By the time they got there, the air was thick with smoke. There were three other trucks, and someone was already on the radio with a helicopter pilot to douse the area.
The campground had been cleared by the rangers as soon as the smoke became noticeable. The rangers weren’t stupid; they had noticed the rash of unexpected, unexplained fires just as well as everyone else had.
Mitch was sort of hoping that would be all there was to worry about, at least as far as human
casualties were concerned. But alas, nothing was ever that easy.
A ranger reported that a conservationist affiliated with one of the local zoos had breezed through that afternoon, and she hadn’t breezed back out.
As soon as they got that news, it seemed like all eyes were on Mitch. All eyes from his own
department, at least.
He sighed out a slow breath and disappeared behind a truck to shuck his gear, a few of the people he worked with making sure everyone else stayed very well distracted from what he was doing.
Once he was nude, he transformed. It was like a ripple down his spine, a bit like
licking a battery with a penny in his mouth. A jolt and a shudder, and two legs became four. He gave himself a shake and shoved his gear under the truck, where it wouldn’t be noticed while everyone else was so distracted.
And then, he turned and set off across the grass at a ground-eating lope, disappearing into the woods.
He had thought the smell—harsh and burning and acrid—had been bad enough before, but as soon as he was in the comparatively tight, enclosed confines of the woods, it seemed to get about eight times worse.
He had wondered, in the past, what it might be like to be a different animal. But just then, even the idea of being a wolf—of having a canine sense of smell—was almost enough to make him gag. He shoved the thought aside, though. He had more important things to focus on. Someone’s life was on the line, and he was her best chance at being found.
*
It was luck when he found her trail. He could hardly even smell it through the smoke, but it was still there, faint and drifting. He followed it at a steady pace, massive paws squashing leaves and underbrush flat as he loped.
In an ironic turn of fate, she actually found him, as he followed her confused path in aimless, wandering circles. She’d started out in the right direction before she lost any ability to
recognize landmarks and instead resorted to simply moving in any viable direction.
She nearly walked straight into him. She took it rather well, all things considered. Mitch was pretty sure that almost literally walking into a bear was not something people did on a day-to-day basis, and she hardly even blinked when he turned to look at her.
Granted, behind her glasses, she had the slightly glassy, shell-shocked look of someone who had stopped fully thinking and was just moving because it was the only thing left to do. She was tiny—Mitch was 6’6” and he was pretty sure she would only come up to his chest if he had been in his human form—and she was pale and absolutely filthy.
If anything of her actual clothing still existed beneath the drying and flaking mud and the dingy smoke damage, then Mitch would be honestly impressed, and how she could even still see anything through her glasses was a mystery. She was clutching a pair of small, plastic tanks to her chest with a grip like a steel vise, all of the color gone from her knuckles. In each tank was a single befuddled toad, trying to climb the sides of the tanks to no avail.
He wasn’t sure why she was still carrying them, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. If he made an actual move towards her, it was entirely possible that she would simply bolt in terror, and neither of them had any time for that.
So, if she wanted to keep a hold on her toads, then that was none of his business. His business was to start moving back in the right direction, towards safety.
To the woman’s credit, she caught on pretty quickly and started following him immediately,
presumably under the assumption that a wild animal would know the way out of danger a hell of a lot better than she would. He kept up a steady pace, occasionally glancing back at her to make sure she was still following him or to make sure she wasn’t falling behind whenever she coughed. The smoke was thick and cloying, and every so often, he sneezed out what felt like soggy sand.
Being a were-dragon might have been nice, he supposed. Sure, they could be a bit belligerent sometimes, but they were fireproof, and they could fly. Granted, flying wasn’t great for subtlety, but they could also sprint a whole hell of a lot faster than a bear, so Mitch was pretty sure that would be a decent compromise.
Not that it really meant much. He was a bear, and there wasn’t exactly anything he could do to change that just because being something other than a bear would be more convenient at times.
When at last the trees began to thin, Mitch glanced over his shoulder long enough to make sure she was still following him, and then he put on an extra burst of speed.
By the time he burst out of the trees, she was no longer his concern. Even if she collapsed face first into the grass, he hadn’t been gone for that long, which meant the others from his department would know he had found her or else he would still be looking, and they would have her propped up in an ambulance before he could even finish putting his gear back on.
He slowed to a lumbering walk, glancing around at the reasonably organized chaos. There were people in every direction, and he could hear the helicopter circling above them. It had probably already made a water drop and was doubling back after refilling at the nearest lake.
He could hear some vague mumbling about back-burning, given their proximity to town, but he hoped it wouldn’t come to that. The odds of accidentally making things worse were too high for him to ever be comfortable with it, as necessary as it sometimes was.
If only the area was a bit drier and a bit less woody, they could just do some fuel reduction to try to make things a little less hellacious. But evidently, whatever was setting the fires was determined to make everything as inconvenient as possible. (Granted, a forest fire was probably pretty high up on the list of inconveniences, so he supposed he wasn’t surprised.)
He rounded the same truck he had stripped behind earlier and began pulling his gear back on. He had it down to something of a science, so he was dressed in all sixty pounds of gear in a matter of moments.
By the time he emerged from behind the truck again, the woman had been escorted to an ambulance and was well out of harm’s way, or as much as anyone could be out of harm’s way while a fire was still raging.
Mitch still had a lot of work to do.
*
It was late, and the sun had set by the time Mitch made it home again. He was filthy, and all he was looking forward to doing was taking a shower and falling into bed. The fire had been…more or less brought under control. It hadn’t gotten too close to town, and there hadn’t quite been a need to resort to back-burning in order to get it under control, which was always good, but that still left the matter of trying to figure out how i
t had started.
Fires didn’t just spring up out of nowhere; they didn’t just materialize out of clear skies and moderate weather. If nothing else, the weather did mean it was easier to get the strange rash of fires under control before they spread too far, but that was only minimally comforting if they just kept happening.
Mitch heaved a blustering, exasperated sigh as he shucked his clothing on the way to the bathroom, dragging a hand down his face as he went. In most cases, someone saying they had too much work to do was just an inconvenience; as a firefighter, having too much work to do could lead to disaster.
He tried to push it out of his thoughts for the time being as he started the shower, but he wasn’t having much luck. Maybe he was fixated. Maybe he was just very concerned with doing his job well. Maybe he was concerned about the people living in the area. Or maybe it was some combination of all of those possibilities. All of them led to the same outcome; he couldn’t stop thinking about it, gnawing the information over in his head.
Maybe it was vampires. They didn’t get along well with fire—few creatures burned more spectacularly than a vampire—but they always seemed to have a weird fascination with it all the same. (Mitch couldn’t deny, though, that if he suddenly became immortal, he would probably turn into a passive death seeker after a few centuries too.) Generally, in more controlled amounts, but a coterie of vampires setting fire to things en masse wasn’t unheard of. And given a vampire’s speed, strength, and other abilities, it would make sense for them to be able to do it without anyone noticing them and without leaving much, if any, evidence behind.
Granted, in order for no one to have noticed them, it would make more sense for there to be only one. True, it wouldn’t be impossible for a whole coterie to go unnoticed, but it did seem a little farfetched, and just one vampire would probably find it a touch difficult to set such large fires without any assistance.
Maybe vampires weren’t that likely. Not as likely as they could be, at any rate. Even considering all of that, assuming the fires weren’t being started by mortal means, then Mitch was still hoping for vampires over the other idea that had been nagging at him.
It wasn’t impossible for it to be a dragon. A were-dragon, at least. As far as Mitch was aware,
actual dragons were extinct. But while were-dragons were rare, they did still exist, and a were-dragon could breathe fire just as easily as regular dragons had once been able to. So, it was
entirely possible for it to be a were-dragon.
Mitch just didn’t really want that to be the case. Few things in the world could hope to stand up to a were-dragon if it was big enough. Oh, sure, most were-dragons tended to be on the smaller end of the scale when compared to actual dragons, but some were just as enormous as actual dragons had once been. If one of those was behind the fires, well, there wasn’t much anyone would be able to do.
Mitch only had so many friends that were anything other than human, and none of them could square up against a small dragon. A huge dragon would be out of the question. For the moment, Mitch was just going to be optimistic. Forcibly, if he had to be. Vampires, or steadily more and more unlikely mortal means.
He put on a pair of sweatpants once he was out of the shower, steam drifting out of the bathroom after him as he left the room. He stood in the hallway for a moment, debating between heading to the kitchen to have something for dinner, or just heading straight to bed and face-planting onto the mattress.
He pondered it for only a moment before he headed for his bedroom. He walked until his knees hit the edge of the bed, and from there, he simply let himself topple forwards onto the mattress. For a moment, he stayed right where he was, sprawled across the short end of the bed. Eventually, though, he squirmed around until he was oriented in the proper direction and his head was on his pillow. He pulled his blanket over himself and only just remembered to reach a hand out to turn his alarm on.
He fell asleep quickly that night, which wasn’t entirely unexpected, given the day’s events. And when he woke up the next morning, everything seemed to go normally enough. Nothing was on fire that shouldn’t be, at any rate, and on the whole, it seemed like a fairly average day. Maybe he could just put more thought into the most recent mystery later. When it seemed more pressing. For the time being, he was content to bury his head in the sand.
CHAPTER TWO
It was not the best night that Melissa had ever had. Her boss had collected the toads at some point, so at least she didn’t need to worry about them (assuming they didn’t succumb to smoke inhalation in the night, but she wasn’t going to think about that), but the fact remained that she was stuck in the hospital all night and well into the morning, all so the doctor could tell her she would be fine, though her throat and her chest would probably hurt for a while.
Gee, it was almost like she could have figured that out on her own. It seemed like a pretty intuitive leap from ‘smoke inhalation.’
And she didn’t even have her truck or enough money on her to call a taxi, so she was stuck just sitting around in the hospital parking lot until one of her coworkers had the time to pick her up. Harry was the lucky volunteer, early in the afternoon.
“You almost got toasted,” Harry informed her after a few moments of driving in silence, other than the slightly ominous clunking noise that his aged and battered pick-up truck made periodically.
Harry was a tall, gangling young man, made almost entirely of limbs too long for him to know what to do with, and hardly any meat on any of him. Not because he didn’t eat—if he wasn’t doing something that took both hands, he was generally eating constantly—but because he had a metabolism that would put a hummingbird’s to shame. He had red hair, pale skin, and enough freckles that it hardly seemed possibly, along with narrow blue eyes and long, spidery fingers.
He was an odd-looking duck.
“Yup,” Melissa confirmed, sinking lower in her seat. “Pretty sure I’m aware of that. I mean, I was there.”
Harry rolled his eyes, but otherwise kept his gaze focused out of the truck’s windshield. “But you weren’t toasted,” he carried on, as if she hadn’t even said anything. “So why are you pouting like a whiny little bitch?”
Melissa swung a hand sideways, swatting Harry square in the gut with a not-inconsiderable amount of force, with a tiny, satisfied smile to herself when he grunted.
“Oh, I dunno,” she sighed, folding an arm across her chest to cup her other elbow, so she could prop her chin up in one hand as her eyes drifted up and to the side in a parody of thoughtfulness. “I mean, it’s not like I inhaled a ridiculous amount of smoke and spent the night in a hospital room. It’s not like I came reasonably close to dying and had to wear an oxygen mask for most of the evening.
And it definitely doesn’t have anything to do with me feeling like unprocessed shit—you know, like the yellow diarrhea you find in baby diapers—because it feels like I’m breathing sandpaper.” She turned her head just enough to look at him, her eyes large and innocent as she blinked at him slowly. “No, no, you’re right, I definitely don’t have any reason to be in a bad mood.”
Harry was conspicuously silent after that, which wasn’t really any sort of surprise. Melissa had known him since high school; she knew him well enough to know that he just spat things out without putting much thought into them, and then he would just deal with the embarrassing fallout afterwards. So, she couldn’t say she was really mad at him. He was just a bit tactless now and then.
Quiet reigned for a brief while, until Melissa asked, “So, how are my toads?”
Harry snorted. “They were sluggish for most of the night, but they perked up by morning. Their carriers managed to keep them safe from the worst of the smoke.”
She nodded slowly in response, a knot of tension in her chest that she hadn’t even noticed relaxing as relief hit her. She had worked hard for those toads, after all. They deserved to recover just as much as she did.
She didn’t have much else to say after that, though, consi
dering she still felt like she had gargled with broken marbles and been kicked in the chest by a Clydesdale. Talking was not her favorite activity at that point.
They sat in silence until they pulled into the parking lot of the campground. Deserted, obviously, save for one truck sitting in the lot and coated in enough ash and soot to build a new mountain out of it. It was so covered that it was nearly impossible to even tell what color it was supposed to be.
Melissa was ready to groan like she was being tortured, until Harry held up a finger in a “wait one moment” gesture and hopped out of his truck. He pulled a broom -- a full-sized broom -- out of the bed of the truck and, after giving it a twirling flourish, he set out sweeping the hefty layer of ash off of Melissa’s truck.
Afterwards, as Melissa hopped out of the passenger seat and crept closer to investigate her truck, Harry remarked, “Still needs one hell of a carwash, but you should be able to drive home without getting a ticket,” as he planted the end of the broom handle on the ground and leaned against it.