Page 2

The moment I wake up, I recognize the sharp, metallic smell for what it is. Lightning-hot flames lick up the side of the door frame to my room, threatening to engulf the entrance.

For months, I’ve been having nightmares about this exact scenario. Since the new alpha supreme dismantled the warning system, I’ve tossed and turned with anxiety about the fact that the daemonic fire could start at any time, and none of us would have a warning until it was far too late.

Now, it takes a second for my mind to acknowledge that, yes, this is real and not just another bad dream. Despite the magical barriers I’ve put up around this property, and despite the numerous bouts of fire we’ve survived up to this point, it’s finally happening.

“Nora!”

Sitting up, I throw the covers off my body, my bare feet slapping against the floor as I race toward her bedroom.

A moment before I burst through the door, it flies open to reveal my daughter standing there in an old t-shirt and a pair of basketball shorts, her blond hair dark with sweat and in her face.

I’m already breathing in the smoke. We both are—I can see it from the shaking way she coughs, the tears in her eyes, the ruddy red of her cheeks. The smoke is thick and black, inky as nighttime.

“Mom,” Nora gasps, “I think it’s daemon fire—”

I’m nodding, hand on her elbow, ushering her away from the door and toward the front of the house. Something in the back of my mind screams at me to turn around, to try to save the house. To do something other than run away.

For the past ten years, every fire has been a daemon fire. At first, they tried to figure it out, tried to put a stop to it. To determine what was causing them in the first place. Then, Declan took over and seemed content to let Silverville burn.

In the hallway, we hurry past every picture,e craft from Nora’s first years of school hanging on the walls. Family heirlooms and all my books. Everything is going to disappear like flash paper in a fire like this.

None of it is as precious to me as the girl stumbling behind me, her fist tight in my shirt. Around us, the supports of the building are already starting to groan, and adrenaline clogs my throat, sour and thick.

Nora coughs again, tripping over a fallen chair and pushing into me, nearly pitching both of us into a crowd of flames in the corner of the room. The daemonic fire burns randomly, moves quickly, eats at the floor, and leaves nothing but silky, fine ash in its wake.

Nora’s coughs fill the air, and I reach back for her, keeping a tight hold on her shirt and looking around desperately, trying to find the best way out of the house.

I have to get us out of here.

Something shudders, alarmingly similar to the sound of the dark laughter. It’s an echoing call you can hear sometimes, swishing through the trees in the endless mountain forests around Silverville. But this time, it’s the sound of the house disintegrating around us, coming down in quick pieces.

“Mom!” Nora screams, pulling me back just in time to keep me from walking under a falling beam. The fire roars around us, and it hits me—my daughter and I are going to die in this house.

I won’t let it happen.

Normally, I would try everything else first. But right now, I have no other choice, and it’s like my body reacts of its own volition, taking action before I can really think about what I’m doing.

Magic flows from the core of me to my fingertips like a dry, sparking sweat, my body producing it at the sign of danger. I summon my mental energy, taking advantage of its presence there, using it to change the world around me.

It starts with the air around Nora and me becoming clearer, the smoke flowing away from us like a powerful fan has blown it off like a fog floating out over the mountains.

Nora looks up at me, her blue eyes tinged with red and going wide at the realization of what I’m doing. She knows about my magic, but I’ve made it clear that nobody else is to know about it. And after starting school, Nora knows why.

She knows that she’s the girl with the freak mom. The girl whose mom played a role in the fires all those years ago.

I swallow all that down, definitely not about to think about it right now, and force myself to focus, controlling the magic until it becomes hard and rigid, forming a bubble around Nora and me.

We force our way through the burning house like hamsters in a ball, and when it gets too hot in the ball, I use what little energy I have to cool the air in our little bubble to a bearable level.

Finally, after what feels like a marathon through hell, Nora and I burst out onto the lawn, gasping for air. She coughs next to me on all fours, heaving until I’m sure her lungs are going to slide right out of her mouth.

I rub her back, trying to use a trickle of magic to help her, get the smoke out of her body.

Then, raising her head, she says, “Mom, look!”

Our street is burning all around us, the other houses in various degrees of consumption like dying stars.

One at the end of the street looks like the fire has only just begun to touch it, while just beside it is a pile of that silky ash, the finest soot, shifting in the dry wind from the blaze next door.

The results of a daemon fire, burning ten times hotter than the typical wildfire, sending the humans around here into a frenzy, trying to put it out. For weeks, they brought planes full of water, dumping it down and becoming astounded and frustrated when it just kept on burning.

But that’s the thing about daemon fire—it doesn’t give a shit about water. The only way to put it out is to stifle it—much like a regular fire—but in a more serious way. To stifle daemon fire, you have to take the energy from it.

My thoughts scatter and reform when, across the street, I see a little boy leaning out the top window of his house.

He opens his mouth and screams for someone to come help him. My heart drops into my stomach, pounding hard enough that I swear I can taste it.

“Stay right here,” I say to Nora, planting her on the sidewalk and maintaining that invisible bubble around her just in case. It’s drawing energy from me quickly, like a little hole has been opened just on my side and I’m leaking out.

I should retain that energy to help Nora. To keep myself safe.

But the boy screams again, and I know what I’m going to do. Running, bare feet screaming at the hot pavement pushing up against them, I sprint into the neighbor’s yard.

Even the grass is hot, sticky, and wet, almost like it belongs to a play set that’s been melting, left out on the sidewalk by a kid on a hot day. I race through it, hiking my nightgown up around my calves to run faster. I glance around quickly, blind panic filling every corner of my mind.

Somewhere in the back of my head, I acknowledge the fact that this is the first time I’ve been in this neighbor’s yard.

Despite summer after summer of living here, and barbecue after barbecue, Nora and I have never been invited.

We’ve never joined the parties. Nora has never joined the kids in playing on blow-up water slides.

I’ve never clinked a beer with the other adults, grousing about rising insurance prices.

“Help!” the boy screams, sounding strangled with fear, his voice twisting and rising to that high, grating pitch only little boys can manage. He’s not looking at me until I come to a stop under his window and throw up my hands toward him.

“Jump!” I command, my own voice coming out haggard and raw. It’s too much for me—I know that. The strain of keeping the protection around Nora, and trying to help this boy.

But I can’t just let him burn. No matter how cruel his parents have been to me. No matter how poor the reception was when Nora and I showed up, moving into my late grandmother’s home. No matter the fact that I remember this same boy refusing to deliver a newspaper to our front door.

He shakes his head, eyes going wide at what I’m suggesting. It’s a long way, a drop that would surely break his bones without something to lighten his fall.

Doing something I almost never do, I use my magic to compel with my voice, telling him with the might of a pissed-off school principal, “ Jump !”

Looking like it’s the last thing in the world he wants to, he brings his body up into the frame of the window, the bright orange and blue of the daemon fire behind him illuminating his skinny arms and legs.

Then, standing with his arms outstretched, one hand on each side of the frame, he swallows and pushes off with his feet, gravity immediately taking over and bringing him toward the ground, toward me, toward my outstretched hands.

Using what little magic I have remaining, I fight against that gravity, mentally pushing him up, up. His body slows, his face shifting from terror to wonder when he realizes he’s not plummeting at a normal speed, but floating down with the grace of a feather.

My arms shake, and my body heaves with the effort. I feel like I’m being pinned at the bottom of a pool, lungs desperate for air, but my body is unable to break the surface.

Then, with only an inch left to go, my magic gives out, and he hurtles down onto my body with an “oomph. ”

For a long moment, I just lay in the grass, my skin numb and tingling, my breath coming hard and fast, the weight of the little boy making it harder to breathe. But I have no strength left inside me to move him to the side.

“Mom,” Nora gasps, falling to her knees in the grass beside me. I open my eyes and see her face upside down, sweaty, sooty blond hair falling over her forehead and trembling in the breeze around us. “Are you okay?”

I blink, still coming back into myself, trying to come up with something to say to my daughter, when another noise infiltrates the little moment.

“Brandon!”

The voice is shrill, and a moment later, the boy’s sweaty skin is unpeeling from mine, the weight of him rising up and off of me. I look up blearily through the smoke to see his mother looking like she might suffocate him herself, his face pressed thoroughly into her bosom.

“Oh, my baby!” she cries.

With Nora’s help, I’m able to raise up onto my elbows so I can see the mother clearer. She’s one of the meanest on the block—something of the queen bee. Leading the charge in ensuring we’re never invited to community barbecues or included in weekend parties.

I’m not expecting her to get on her knees and thank me, though that’s what I would do if someone had just saved Nora’s life.

I’m not even expecting verbal gratitude, or an apology for everything she’s done to us over the time we’ve lived on this block.

If anything, all I want is some sort of acknowledgment—a look in her eye, or a little nod to tell me that I’m not as bad as she thought.

That I’ve proven to her that I’m a person, and even a good one, at that.

But I don’t get any of that.

I should have known better than to ever expect it in the first place.

Instead of any of that, she just curls her lip back in the way that I’ve come to recognize from her, a look of total disdain and disregard that makes my blood go cold.

“Don’t you ever ,” she spits, taking a step toward me, close enough that she only narrowly misses stepping on my bare foot, turned black from the soot and asphalt, “touch my son—or anyone in my family again !”

“Come on, Mom,” Nora whispers, her arms snaking under my armpits to pull me to standing. I wish I could snap something back at this woman, say something to make her hurt for once. “Let’s go.”

I just saved her son, and she still can’t get past her hatred of me.

“Ugh,” she coughs as we walk away. “It reeks of magic out here.”

It doesn’t—the only thing you can smell is the suffocating, blanketing scent of sulfur, slightly sweet and rotten. The smell of a daemonic fire burning strong.

When Nora and I make it across the street, me limping and leaning on her far too much, I manage to get a good look at our house.

The house that belonged to my grandmother before me.

The one that kept Nora and I off the streets for years, safe and with a roof over our heads, even if we weren’t psychologically safe from the neighbors.

And now, all that’s left of it is a considerable pile of shifting, fine, almost silken ash.

Unable to stop myself, I reach down and pinch some of it between two fingers, shivering at the slide of it, how tempting it is to bring it to my lips. Like the urge to chew on electrical wire, or eat one of those laundry pods.

“Mom?” Nora questions again, putting her hand on my back and helping me to sit in the somehow wet dew of the lawn.

I wrap my hands around my knees, feel my body hurtling toward collapse. “Yes, dear?”

All around us, the daemonic fire continues to burn, this time writhing and biting its way into the trees, dancing along the canopy with a bright blue hue that dazzles through the sky. Distantly, screams echo in the dawn.

Nora shifts from foot to foot, and in looking at her, I realize that she had the presence to grab her go-bag, while I absolutely did not grab mine. Finally, she clears her throat and finds my eyes with hers. “Where are we going to go?”

I let the truth of our homelessness settle over me. In all this time of us being alone, I have never lied to her. And I’m not about to start now.

So, I do like I always do, and tell her the truth. “I have no idea.”