Baptism of Fire (Playing With Hellfire Book 1)

by Jessie Thomas

  “He’s not,” I agreed. “But Moretti was.”

  Jodi shuffled through the piles of folders and papers assembled under blocky clips. Expertly avoiding my response. She leaned over the desk and shoved one of the stacks toward me.

  I quirked an eyebrow. “What’s this? Find something worthwhile on Kowalski?”

  “Nothing concrete. Not enough to go after him,” she answered. “I found a file that might be of some interest. There was another fire like yours months before. Kowalski wasn’t the one who closed that case, but whoever did kept it quiet. This isn’t about him, though. At least not directly. This is about your future in the department.”

  I slid to the edge of the chair to grab the paperwork. “I haven’t—”

  “You’ve been avoiding it, I know. If you haven’t made the effort to return to the job by now, Victoria, then that should tell you something. It’s all right to step away from it after what you’ve been through. That doesn’t take anything from the work you’ve put in. That doesn’t make you less of a firefighter.”

  Skimming the photocopies in my lap, my mouth dropped open a little. “Jodi, I appreciate this, I do. But I can’t.”

  “I’ve been right where you are,” she answered, turning her back to cram a folder into one of the file cabinets. A familiar avoidance tactic. “I’ve felt the things you’ve felt. The anger and the grief and the hopelessness. I knew when I made it out alive—when so many others didn’t—that I couldn’t bring myself to go back. It wasn’t the end, even though it felt like it at the time. And it doesn’t have to be for you, either.”

  My thumb skipped over the corners of the photocopies. “I don’t know anything about any of this. I don’t have the experience, let alone the rank…”

  “You’ll get training.” She closed one cabinet and opened another. “I can pull some strings, fast-track you through courses. Things get lost in the shuffle so often, none of that will matter. You’ll do as much good in fire investigation as you did responding to calls. Maybe even more. There’s a shortage of honest firefighters here, Victoria. I need people willing to help clean this place up. People who can’t be bought.”

  I heaved a sigh. She had a point, though I was loathe to admit it. The only way we were ever going to get any justice in this organization was to operate from the inside.

  Was this really my life now? A cushy desk job?

  I’d never pictured myself as anything else; just someone who was willing to run into burning buildings, which wasn’t exactly an anomaly in Perdition Falls. I hadn’t lost that, not entirely. How could I ever go back to the job knowing there was another battle to fight?

  I rose from the chair, the paperwork still clutched in my hand. “I’m not a desk person.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that. You and Javier will have plenty of field work to keep you busy as long as this city keeps burning.”

  My eyebrows knit together. “Santos?”

  Jodi offered me one of her rare smiles. “If I didn’t convince you to take the job, then I would’ve asked him to talk you into it. Between the three of us, maybe we’ll make Kowalski nervous.”

  “Oh, he’s going to hate us.”

  Jodi’s smile widened. “Exactly.”

  23

  The oscillating fan sputtered lukewarm air around the room as I sat on the edge of my bed. Still wrapped in a damp towel from my shower, water dripped down my back and into the tangled sheets. A droplet trickled off the edge of my nose and onto the postcard-sized invitation clutched in my hands. The steam from the shower had long since dissipated, and I’d parked my ass on the bed at least a half hour ago, but I couldn’t get myself to move. I told my body it was time to get dressed. It didn’t feel like following the command, like rising from the edge of the bed was asking it to scale a mountain in full turnout gear.

  Tossing the invitation away, I watched the card helicopter awkwardly until it landed on a pile of clean laundry I’d had no energy to fold and tuck away in my dresser drawers.

  Now was not the time to be having second thoughts about this plan, and yet they’d shown up anyway at the last second. I wanted Marcus gone—I would’ve done it the night he’d set that fire if I’d known what sort of power I had—but this wasn’t the arena I’d wanted for our fight. Not among friends, colleagues, family. Not when so many things could go wrong.

  What if Ally was there?

  It made my skin crawl to imagine him in the same room as her. To put her in harm’s way when she’d already lost enough.

  It was me he wanted to kill. It’d always been me right from the start.

  If I was still his intended target, no one else had to get caught in the crossfire.

  Somewhere in the knotted nest of bedsheets, my phone chirped with a new text message. After I finally unearthed it, I found a long-winded confirmation from Gemma that Ozias was on board with the incendiary’s plan. It didn’t surprise me in the least that it had taken a lot of convincing and pleading and emphasis that there were going to be hundreds of innocent bystanders hanging around sipping drinks. We were working out the finer details like wards and security as the situation changed. We’d get Gemma, Ozias, and Cassia into the gala as our guests, something that I knew Cassia would milk for everything it was worth for the rest of the night.

  Another text message. Jodi. Zahira will be on extra security detail. She’ll be keeping a distance. Same goes for me.

  It would be so much easier to burrow into the sheets and sleep through this whole thing.

  Maybe I should’ve just gone to Iceland.

  My phone went off yet again. Be there in thirty minutes.

  I stood up from the bed, my hair still dripping onto the hardwood floor as I typed out my reply to Javier. I’ll meet you at the front door.

  When the grating tone of the buzzer cut through the whirring of the fans in my apartment, I was as put together as I was going to get. I discovered a formal suit in the back of my closet that hadn’t seen the light of day since I wore it to a wedding last year and consequently forgot I owned. With so many weddings of friends in the department, I’d amassed a collection that would probably get more use now that attending incendiary-infiltrated events seemed to be a significant part of my future career.

  I paired the burgundy jacket and pants with a black camisole and some strappy heels I also forgot had been hiding in the corner of my closet. The formal suit was light, the pants cut just above my ankles. I added some long, layered necklaces, then thought twice about it with the threat of extinguishing Hellfire. I did my best with a dark shade of lipstick, and made sure that my loose curls didn’t look like a bird’s nest with the humidity. I was there to kill a demon, not turn heads, but putting on some dress clothes made me feel like I had my shit together.

  Just a little bit. Maybe.

  I folded the invitation and shoved into my pocket while heading down to the front door. Javier waited on the sidewalk, hands buried in the pants pockets of his three-piece suit. It was difficult to tell in the receding daylight whether it was black or a dark blue, but he wore a burgundy tie to complement the color. His hair, usually mussed and falling across his forehead, had been slicked back.

  “Hey.” He turned, offering a grin. “Parked a long way from here.”

  “That’s pretty much a given,” I said. “I don’t mind the walk.”

  We stepped off the sidewalk, Javier inching slightly ahead to lead the way, but never leaving me far behind. “I get that they’re preserving historical integrity or some bullshit like that, but it’s gotta be a pain in the ass that the streets here are off-limits.”

  “You get used to it,” I answered. “It really is inconvenient, though.”

  He nodded. “Not much different than anything else in this place.”

  “Never thought I’d get used to pyrokinesis and demons.” We skirted past a cluster of tourists spilling out of a restaurant, all boisterous and sunburnt and laden with shopping bags. “But this is my life now. A desk job and a career fighting
Hellfire.”

  Javier shot me a knowing look laced with mischievous delight. “Ah. So she talked you into it.”

  “Against my better judgement.”

  “Wasn’t my first choice, either,” he replied, hanging back a half step. “Hell, I doubt that place is anyone’s priority. Might be why things’ve gotten so bad.”

  “I didn’t think I’d quit the job this early. I thought I’d be one of those seasoned types who don’t know when to stop.”

  “You and me both, Nix,” he answered quietly. “You don’t plan for this kinda thing. Demons. Apathy. I get why you can’t go back to those shifts—if the exhaustion doesn’t kill you, something else will. I got out because I realized the department didn’t give a shit about anyone. Who the fuck wants to work themselves to death for an organization like that?”

  I swept a stray curl behind my ear. “I’m not having any positive feelings about the department these days, either, but the job with fire investigation doesn’t exactly put us at a distance. Why take it?”

  Javier shrugged as we dodged a rut in the sidewalk. “Same as you. Might as well take down everything, right?” he said. “The company’s not so bad, either.”

  He stopped at a polished, muscular, black car. I knew fuck all about cars, but the chrome signature said Camaro. It seemed like it’d been around a while.

  I pushed past the lump in my throat. “So this is what you had hiding under the tarp in your driveway.” I gave a low whistle. “Nice wheels, Santos.”

  “Kept it running so far. Didn’t think my mom would part with it, ‘til she realized it was just collecting dust in her garage. My uncles always fought over it, but, ah…they haven’t been around for a long time now.” He slid into the driver’s seat, and a few seconds later, the engine growled to life. “You don’t remember the Camaro?”

  Climbing into the passenger side, I slammed the door shut behind me. “I should…this is my cue to remember something, isn’t it? I can feel your disappointment.”

  “It’s not the first time you’ve been in this car,” he replied, carefully moving away from the curb and into the flow of cars going toward downtown. The radio pumped out an alt rock song I couldn’t identify, turned down so low that the hum of evening traffic overpowered most of it.

  I inhaled the scent of the broken-in leather seats and Javier’s cologne and tried to let it conjure forth some buried memories. All the things I’d rather forget were the memories that played on a loop in high definition, but I knew the good stuff was buried somewhere underneath it.

  I laughed and hazarded a guess. “It…belonged to your dad?”

  “You asking me, or telling me?”

  “I don’t remember,” I admitted. “I’m jealous that you have this amazing recollection of our friendship locked away in your head when all I’ve got is shit.”

  “So you need help.” When I pinned him with a narrowed look, he lifted one of his hands from the steering wheel. “Nah, not like—okay, I’ve got one. My dad, he took us to the hiking trails near the Falls, right? We get caught in this downpour. And you know those wicked storms that blow through PF…”

  “Drenching,” I said.

  “Doesn’t stop,” Javier said. “Dad’s soaked, and he’s trying to get the two of us under a tree ‘til it passes. But we find this swampy ass mud instead—”

  “Oh, shit,” I laughed. “Of course we did. That was clearly the better option. What was the damage?” I cringed, fearing for the state of the Santos’ Camaro.

  “There was damage, all right.” Javier laughed.

  “Everywhere?”

  “Takes him two weeks to get the damn thing spotless again,” he said. “Even after he thinks he’s got it all, he’s still finding mud where it’s not supposed to be.”

  “Was he mad?”

  “I never remembered him yelling, not once,” Javier said. “He could’ve kept all the swearing internal.”

  I groaned. “What we must’ve looked like…and smelled like. Never mind the mud, that car must’ve reeked for days.”

  “We were—it was disgusting. We were gross.”

  I glanced over at Javier, bathed in the green glow of the traffic light, slightly hunched forward across the steering wheel with his arms resting casually on top of it. He drummed a beat that didn’t match the tempo of the song turned down low. Pushing past the scrap heap of pure junk in my head, I thought there was a glimmer of something else. Somewhat tarnished and blurred around the edges.

  A boy with front teeth missing and permanently mussed black hair getting a face full of freezing water. Chasing the boy with the gap toothed smile, skidding on patches of wet grass in bare feet, our childish giggles filling up someone’s yard…

  “I sprayed you in the face with a garden hose.”

  Javier grinned. “Now you’re telling me.”

  “That’s it. That’s all I’ve got.”

  Javier’s attention turned away from the road for just a moment to look at me. “It’s enough.”

  And maybe it was.

  “I can only imagine what kind of trouble we’d get into if we had experienced our teenage years together. I must attract troublemakers. Moretti was one, too.”

  He shook his head. “From what I’ve heard, you caused a lot on your own. Now, me? My disciplinary record’s clean. Wasn’t starting bar fights with other candidates.”

  “Okay,” I mocked. “That was a grand total of one time. And somehow, the entire department spread the story like—if you’ll excuse the horrible play on words—wildfire. It wasn’t like I spent my time picking fights just for fun. I don’t know what you’ve heard, but in the rare event that I do use my fists, there’s a good reason for it.”

  “Uh huh.” Javier smirked. “Then why’d you knock my front teeth out when we were kids?”

  My eyes widened. “Wait, what?”

  His straight face dissolved into a fit of laughter. “Nah, I’m only kidding you. Am I gonna get the real story behind that bar fight, or what?”

  “Well, you aren’t now.” I shared his smirk, my elbow propped up against the doorframe. He seemed a little disappointed not to get the scoop on a relatively inane event that had somehow developed its own ecosystem of department gossip. I liked to maintain the mystique for the fun of it, but the incident in question wasn’t anything too scandalous by PF standards.

  We settled into comfortable silence as a few streets passed by and the engine hummed, the Camaro edging closer to the banquet hall hosting tonight’s gala. Blue and red lights flashed across the road ahead and streaked the passing cars. We maneuvered past police squad vehicles directing traffic into the parking lot. Noticeably absent were the on-duty firefighters that the city probably couldn’t spare for the night. I didn’t know if it was a logistics issue or something more sinister tied up in the department’s connections to the incendiaries. Maybe they had them on standby, maybe they were showing too much bravado in light of recent events.

  It felt so wrong for all of us to be here either way.

  The flash of red light that fell over the hood of the car twisted my stomach. A familiar feeling nowadays rather than an annoyance, like we were now acquaintances. Even that wasn’t the right word for it, exactly—it was more like an overbearing, parasitic roommate I couldn’t evict. Tethered to me.

  Javier parked the Camaro under the blinding overhead lights in the lot a safe distance from other cars. A bead of sweat already tricked down the back of my neck. I couldn’t tell if it was from the energy-draining humidity or the dread that found its way in again. I hopped out of the car and trailed a couple of paces behind him, fighting the urge to run.

  The street was electric, simmering with a tension that charged the air like static. There had never been this much security at the gala. The influx of uniformed cops prowling the grounds made it a lot less appealing. They had no clue that their carefully constructed perimeter wasn’t going to do a damn thing to stop a demon who could appear anywhere he pleased at will, who probably had eno
ugh power in his veins to wipe out a whole city block.

  And I didn’t think that bullets would do the trick, either.

  It would be so hard to stay sober for this.

  The four-story warehouse sat on the corner of the block, demanding all of the attention from the buildings around it, bricks doused in red neon from the signage. Wrap around wrought-iron patios took up multiple levels of the restaurant’s exterior, the railings adorned with lush hanging baskets. I could smell the manicured petunias and willowy ferns from where we were standing. It felt like we’d accidentally stumbled into the French Quarter in New Orleans.

  As Javier and I neared the doors, my insides threatened to revolt. We passed a group of cops standing around in reflective vests with their thumbs hooked into their utility belts. It wasn’t guilt that attacked me then—the stupid kind of guilt that made me think I’d committed every felony in the book and they’d know it from a single glance.

  It was fear. And not the kind I expected. It brought me to a halt before I even reached the doors, panic holding my lungs for ransom as I scrutinized the balconies already crammed with people.

  I felt exposed, like there was a gigantic spotlight trained on me. It was so much more than the relentless, sticky heat making it hard to suck in a full breath.

  So, of course I started walking away.

  For a moment, I thought I’d actually do it. I’d run off before I could get buried in my own head again and disappear. But I knew this whole thing was bigger than me and whatever I felt. I couldn’t skip out and leave everyone else vulnerable. Not when most of them were in this because of me.

  But I wanted to. So fucking badly.

  I stopped in the middle of the parking lot, trying to calm myself down before I finally lost it. Not here, I pleaded. Not in front of everyone. Please. Get your shit together. The same tired old mantra held me together with a frayed thread.

  “Nix.” Javier jogged to catch up with me. He kept his distance without being asked, which I was grateful for. “What is it? What do you need?”