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“X, you up there?”

Soren’s voice floats back to me through the trees and the smoke, and it brings back a million times that the two of us have been in this situation before. Fighting fires together as teenagers, making our fathers proud.

We got the call about the fire this morning, and though we’ve only had a week to train, I called the guys together. I needed something to do so I could stop thinking about Seraphina.

About the look on her face when she talked about me leaving.

Like she was talking about me leaving more than the town—like it was more personal for her. It was personal back then—I hurt her. In front of everyone. Coming from a family like hers, she’d never had an easy time, but my rejection surely only made it worse.

So wouldn’t she be happy that I’d gone? Would it have been better for her that I left?

That’s what I’d always assumed.

“Xeran?” Soren calls again, and I realize I’ve been too caught up in my own head to answer him. Clearing my throat of the smoke and heat, I call out to answer him, “I’m on your six!”

I grit my teeth as I move forward, trying to see him through the thick black cloud of smoke around us.

That’s one way we can tell it’s daemon fire—the smoke is inky black, swirling, making even the brightest day feel like night.

Normal fires burn with a lighter gray smoke, and sometimes you can occasionally even see right through them—but not with the daemon fire.

Humans often get disoriented, trip over themselves, and end up hurting their squad mates in the din.

We’ve even heard stories of them having panic attacks or mental breaks because the darkness in the smoke was so deep.

But it’s easier for us to make our way through the woods now—I can feel the heat of my squad mates, sense them, hear the crunch of their feet. All things humans can’t do, which leads them to lose one another and walk right into the clutches of the fire.

“Fuck, man,” Soren groans, stumbling into me. I get an arm around him, helping him to step out of the shit on the ground.

Each of us carries a canister on our backs, but it’s not filled with water.

Instead, it’s filled with a thick, pulsing goo, similar to the stuff that comes out of a fire extinguisher.

While fighting the first round of daemon fires in high school, we realized that the leftover ash from the fires—a substance devoid of energy or life—could be used to smother the flames.

Mix it with some holy water, and you create a silvery, tar-like substance that sticks to surfaces and kills the flames.

“Over here!” Lachlan calls, swinging around wildly and plastering the trees near him with the stuff. Soren and I move toward him, watching as the bright, electric blue of the fires blinks out of existence.

Through the trees, I can only barely make out the stuff he’s sprayed sliding down the trunks of the trees, coating the bark in its slimy, greasy residue.

“Sor, watch out for that crest up there.” Maybe I don’t need to remind him—he knows these woods just as well as I do. His family has a cabin somewhere up in the mountains, and they’d disappear up there for long bouts of shifting and hunting together.

“Thanks, X,” Soren calls back, and I can hear in the labor of his breathing how long it’s been since he’s done this.

Since any of them have done this.

When I left, Declan made it perfectly clear that firefighting was no longer one of the priorities for the pack, dissolving my old squad and disabling the old warning system. Now I’m the only one of us who’s been keeping in firefighting shape.

We’ve been out here for hours and have only just started to get this fire under control. It came to life in the hills northeast of the town just before dawn. My goal was to stifle it before it could make its way to the town, and it seems like we might actually manage it.

“Oi!” Felix’s voice rings out to our left, sounding strange and echoing. “Guys, come check this out!”

There’s a bit of laughter to his tone, like there always is, and together, Lachlan, Soren, and I push toward him, lifting our knees high to get through the muck.

With any luck, there will be a good, heavy rain to wash this all away—the ash off the trees and the extinguisher off the ground.

If these remnants stay for too long, they can start to trap animals and insects, swallowing up the local wildlife.

To my right, Lachlan moves faster toward his friend, already shaking his head.

Felix is always on the verge of laughter, even when he’s in serious trouble.

Once, when we were kids, we responded to a call like this, only to find him facing up against a wild boar, his hands raised, a wicked smile on his face.

“Think I can take him?” he’d asked, glancing at us. The moment he took his eyes off the thing, it charged.

Now, in the trek to find him, we stumble forward through something of a wall—the smoke disappearing like we’ve walked through a door into another room.

“What the fuck?” Lachlan asks, blinking and reaching up to take his helmet off. His face is smudged with soot and ash, silver streaks running along his temples where it’s mixed with his sweat and dripped in a solid, shining line.

We stumble and stop, glancing at one another, confused. Usually, the smoke will linger for days, stay thick and heavy in the forest. But right now, we’ve emerged into a patch of grass with crystal-clear air, right in the center of the burn. Like we’re in some sort of eye of the storm.

And in the center of the clearing stands Felix, his arms held up in question toward us.

“Be honest with me,” he calls across the field, “am I dead?”

“If you’re dead,” Lachlan returns, “that means we’re all dead.”

Soren starts to cough—the result of sudden clean air after two hours of nothing but that thick, choking black smoke. Lachlan shifts to the side, patting him on the back, but I’m focused on the scene.

Felix with his helmet under his arm, his gear sooty and covered in muck, his boots thick with the extinguishing goop. Blades of bright green grass stick to that goop.

The sun is shining right here. It feels like a completely different world.

When Soren straightens up from his coughing fit, he pulls his bottle of water from his side and chugs it, then turns in a circle, shaking his head.

“What the fuck is this, X?”

They’re all looking at me. Maybe because I’m the one who spent the past decade working as a firefighter. Or maybe because my dad had always made it a point to look for answers, and that’s what they expect of me now.

Or maybe because, no matter how hard I try to ignore it, to fight it, I still end up commanding a leadership position. The wolf inside me yearns to take charge, to lead the group, to be the one giving them the information they’re looking for.

That’s part of what it means to be a leader.

Something I saw my dad embody in his work every single day.

Not just living in the glory of being the supreme, but identifying the needs of your people and meeting them.

Whether that was information, food, water, shelter, or safety, my dad was always looking for a way to make sure the shifters in our pack had the things they needed.

“No idea,” I finally answer, hearing how gravelly my voice comes out. I reach for my water bottle to assuage the burn there. When I squirt the water into my mouth, it’s warm from the fire, but it still feels like a blessing on my scorched throat.

It’s the truth. I have no idea what the hell is going on in this little piece of the woods, completely untouched. But as we stand there, catching our breaths, I look around, noticing the lines in the dirt around the perimeter and the faint etchings on the outskirts of the clearing.

Just as the guys and I turn to go, I notice something else. Something barely perceptible, floating on the breeze. Something that smells like mint and gasoline.

***

“Xeran?”

“Oh, fuck!”

I jump and turn as I walk into the house, heart thudding when I see Nora standing there in the living room, shadows nearly shrouding her, even from where she stands by the window, her hand resting lightly on the windowsill.

In what world do I allow a little girl to sneak up on me? How the fuck is she so quiet? And how is her scent so weak? Surely her father must have had feeble genes. I don’t know if that makes me feel better or worse about this whole thing.

Her blond hair is braided to the side, a hairstyle I recognize with a start from Seraphina. From high school. The thought of her braiding her daughter’s hair in the same way does something strange to my chest.

Nora stares at me with those wide blue eyes—the ones that look so much like mine—but says nothing, almost like she’s waiting for me to make the first move in this interaction.

There’s something about her that’s not quite like any other kid I’ve met before.

The sense that she has an old soul, already understands the world in a way that most kids her age wouldn’t.

She reminds me of myself.

“What are you doing out here?” I can smell Seraphina, hear her steady heartbeat upstairs—she’s asleep.

It’s nearing nightfall now, and the guys and I have just finished cleaning up our gear after checking the surrounding area for any other potential fires.

Daemonic fires are usually spontaneous, but sometimes you can sense the energy in an area where one is about to start.

“I wanted to ask you some questions,” Nora says, turning fully away from the window and clasping her hands in front of herself. She’s wearing a pair of linen shorts and a t-shirt, and I recognize the outfit as one that I picked up from the department store.

For some reason, that gives me the same feeling as thinking about her hairstyle. Something soft and unbidden, a pride that she actually wore what I picked out for her.

After Seraphina got better, I’d thought about the problem of them not having much, of her washing the same clothes in the sink day after day.

But the idea of taking them out to a store seemed like too much of a risk.

Especially after my brothers were bold enough to go after them like that, and so close to our father’s house.

So close to territory that is technically, legally, and naturally mine.

“Your mom doesn’t want you down here,” I say to her, pushing past, realizing I’m avoiding her not just for her sake but mine.

My wolf is telling me that there might be something dangerous about this girl. Like I might end up caring about her more than I should. And the last thing I need right now is another tie to Silverville, another thing making me feel like I should stay here for longer than I planned.

“You were fighting a daemonic fire,” she says, which is not a question but a lead-in that gets me to stop, turn back, and meet her eye.

“We stopped it in the foothills,” I say.

“How do you stop it?”

“Extinguishers.”

“What’s that?”

“Made from the ash.”

“Ash from daemonic fires?” she asks, a lilt to her voice telling me that she already sees how it might work. The cyclical nature of the thing, its aftermath being the thing to stop it.

“Yes.”

“How old were you when you started?”

“Fighting fires?”

“Fighting daemon fire.”

“Sixteen,” I say, then, almost in defense of my father, “I was a mature teenager.”

“I’m mature,” she returns, tilting her head at me. “Maybe I could come with you next time.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Why?”

“Well, first, because it’s dangerous. And second, because your mother—”

“ Nora .”

Nora and I both jump at the sound of Seraphina’s voice from the stairwell, and I realize I was so invested in talking to Nora that I didn’t notice her getting out of bed and coming down the stairs.

She’s healing well, moving better than she did after that night. I’m still angry with her about that night. About the magic. And yet, when I turn and see her there, anger isn’t the first feeling that rises to the top of my chest.

Not meeting my eye, Seraphina repeats herself, mouth tight, “Nora, it’s bedtime .”

“Right, sorry,” Nora says. With a quick glance between her mother and me, she says, almost cheekily, “Good night, Xeran.”

Seraphina bristles almost visibly, and I can’t help it—I let out a little chuckle as I say, “Good night, Nora.”