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Saturday morning, I wake up in Xeran’s arms, having snuck into his room through the adjoining door the night before. He’d turned over and pulled me in as his little spoon.

Then, as our bodies started to move together, he held his hand over my mouth to keep me quiet, pulling aside my pajama bottoms and pressing our hips together until we were both breathing hard. I fell asleep content, with his knot still emptying inside me.

After getting out of bed, taking another quick shower, and waking Nora from a deep sleep, we head out into the city.

Xeran takes us to the zoo in the morning, then to the aquarium when it gets too warm to walk around outside.

After Xeran buys her a stuffed shark and promises to bring her back for the all-out shark exhibit later this year, we leave the aquarium and head a little outside of downtown to a candy shop.

There, we attend a dessert workshop where they use liquid nitrogen on ice cream.

Nora is fascinated the entire time, asking questions and trying samples of the products.

When we’re done, we walk around downtown until we find the big blue bear from the pictures.

“I think I love Denver,” Nora says when she’s working on her second ice cream of the day. We’re leaving an ice cream shop shaped like a giant milk jug.

I wrap my arm around her, pulling her to my side. “Well, I think you just really like sugar, huh?”

She grins, and I think about how Xeran offered his flash-frozen ice cream to her, apparently not concerned with her getting a crazy sugar high.

He’s still not concerned with it, judging from the amount of candy clinking around inside the bag at his elbow. Anything she wanted from the candy shop, she got to have.

Also at the candy shop, Xeran stopped to chat with a shifter from the local pack, smiling and shaking his hand before we left. I found myself thinking, Of course he’s stopping to talk to another shifter, an ally. That’s what the alpha supreme does.

Then I remembered that Xeran is not the alpha supreme of Silverville. And he doesn’t want to be. As far as I know, he’s still planning on going back to Illinois.

Even though he wants to see where this goes with me.

What does that mean? Other than us finding a way to be together most nights? Other than the fact that I told him about what happened back in high school, and he apologized for the way he treated me back then?

We’re not mates. He made that much clear, and even if that wasn’t the truth—which I can’t even let myself think about—it would be far too late for him to go back on it now.

Lying about a mating bond would be ruinous socially, and if Xeran had any inclinations toward the alpha supreme position, that wouldn’t help his favorability among pack members.

Not to mention the fact that Nora and I have been living with him. If people weren’t talking about it before that incident with my mother in the grocery store, they are certainly talking about it now.

He drops us off at the hotel for a while to pack up and get ready to go, then returns with his truck bed full of canisters.

“What are those?” Nora asks while he’s throwing our bags in the back.

“Those are extinguishing canisters,” he says, closing the top and walking her around to the side of the truck. “Equal parts holy water and ash from daemonic fires.”

“Does holy water really work?” Nora asks, her eyes wide as he circles the other side of the truck and hops into the driver’s seat.

Xeran pauses with his hand on the key, then glances at her thoughtfully. “I’m not sure. It could be just the ash, stifling the fire. But we’ve never really wanted to try the mixture with regular water. It would be an experiment with much too high a cost.”

Nora nods and leans against me, our activities from the day—and the sugar—apparently hitting her hard.

Xeran and I ride in silence for most of the ride, listening to pop hits on the radio. Maybe we’re both in our own heads. Maybe there’s not a whole lot that we can talk about with Nora sitting between us, clutching her stuffed shark to her chest.

Then, a few miles out of town, the handheld radio Xeran has hanging from the rearview mirror crackles to life.

“This is an emergency broadcast.”

The voice is rough, staticky and hard to make out. Xeran sits at attention, reaching out to turn the music down and the handheld radio up so we can catch the last part of what the broadcast is saying.

“—massive fire burning due north of Fort Collins, currently heading toward Glacier Park and Silverville. All residents are advised to evacuate immediately. These fires are burning at record temperatures and inflicting maximum damage. The Colorado Fire Agency is requesting all available—”

I can barely breathe.

Xeran’s knuckles go white on the steering wheel, and that’s when we see it.

In the distance, up over the ridge that Silverville is famous for, an orange glow paints the horizon like a false sunrise.

An orange glow, just faintly tipped with blue.

Something the human eye might miss, even as they address the record-high burning temps.

Even as they try to examine the sporadic nature of the fire, point to something scientific that makes sense.

“No,” I whisper, my hands tightening around Nora, my mind going back to that terrifying night I woke up to find that blue fire in our house, eating it to the ground.

Xeran says nothing but presses harder on the accelerator.

The glow burns brighter on the horizon as we fly down the mountain highway.

What started as a smudge of color quickly turns into a wall of light that makes my eyes water, and when I tip my nose into the air, I easily catch the rotten, sulfuric scent of daemon fire.

This is nothing like the little fires Xeran and his friends have been fighting on the outskirts of town. It’s too big, too much, and already kissing the Silverville Creek.

I’m not a firefighter, and I don’t know much about the mechanics. But everything I’ve learned about daemon fire tells me that water isn’t going to be enough to stop this fire from forging ahead.

“What’s the situation?” Xeran asks when his phone rings.

I can tell it’s Kalen on the other side. He’s talking fast, breaking up, and it’s clear that Xeran is struggling to hear him, too.

“Any casualties?” Xeran asks, and my heart stops.

Kalen goes on, talking about the destruction, and I try to focus on my breathing, try to keep myself from panicking as we grow closer to town. I can feel the air around us heating.

When Xeran gets off the phone, he drives even faster, the speedometer climbing up past eighty. Trees blur past us in dark smears, the glow ahead only getting brighter.

What has happened once is happening again.

Silverville is beginning to burn.