Page 8 of Watch Me Burn (Sanctuary #1)

CHAPTER 7

ALASKA

A laska.

I’m moving to Alaska .

Glancing at the travel itinerary on my phone while we wait for the first leg of the trip to begin, I already get a strange pit in my gut when I look at the last stop.

“Dyea?” I pronounce it like ‘die-ee-uh’.

“Dyea,” corrects Elise.

She says it like ‘die-ee’. I guess the ‘a’ is silent, but when she emphasizes the ‘die’ part, the second syllable doesn’t really seem to matter much.

Die. I’m going to a hidden town in Alaska full of vampires, shifters, and who knows what else, and it’s called Die . If that’s not an omen for how this is going to go, I don’t know what is.

I don’t have a choice. Fire witches are rare. Either their magic is too tamped down for them to even know they have any—like me—or they’re hiding out, but Celeste admitted she didn’t know of any currently practicing in the US right now. I get why they would hide out, too. When everyone looks at like you as though you’re going to point at them and they’ll blow up on the spot, it gets old.

Well, not everyone. Elise doesn’t seem to care. Thorn wasn’t worried. And Jasper… I don’t think anything fazes that vampire.

Celeste was nervous, though. I think her tip to find the fire opal was to get rid of the threat that I pose by being an untrained witch with a devastating power. Same thing with shipping me off to Alaska. It’s as far from her East Coast coven as I can get. And, sure, I know she suggested this hidden sanctuary because the cold temperatures would also help me conceal my fiery side until I mined some of the fire opal. Doesn’t change the fact that, as soon as I gave in and agreed to go with Elise, she jumped headfirst into making the arrangements.

Thorn threw all of Clarity’s resources behind us, too. He tried to make it seem like he was rewarding Elise for all of her decades in service to the Cadre, but while she beamed over at him, I know better. Like Celeste, he wanted me as far away from his people as possible.

He would’ve sacrificed Elise to get me to trigger my magic. In a way, he’s doing the same thing. Throwing one of his most loyal vampires at Alaska to get rid of me.

Oh, well. Good riddance to him.

I’m glad she’s coming with me. Now that I know that Peter’s been a bigger headache than I thought, no way could I leave her behind. She’s coming with me where I can keep an eye on her, and barely twenty-four hours after that witch hunter tried to jump me, we have all of our essentials packed up, our luggage checked, as we wait for our flight to Seattle to take off.

That’s the first leg of our journey. From Seattle, we have to take a second flight to Skagway, Alaska. It’s the nearest airport to where the sanctuary is hidden in the old ghost town known as Dyea, and though it had its heyday during the gold rush in the 1890s, it’s vacant enough now to conceal a small village made up of about fifty relocated supernaturals.

After we land in Skagway, we need to find the Dyea Express to take us the rest of the way to our new home.

The Dyea Express is a small shuttle that is owned by the local witch coven. All sanctuary cities have a connection to the covens since their magic keeps it hidden, and their members act as mediaries between the villages and the rest of the outside world of humans.

Sanctuaries are supe-run towns. I’m going as a human but only because I’m considered part of Elise’s luggage. Seriously. As a vampire searching for a place to hide out from a rejected mate, she was granted sanctuary and given permission to bring her own personal human to snack on since there aren’t many others who could feed her. Shifters would refuse on principle, and vampires don’t really share. Not their own blood or their food sources.

In the whirlwind of packing up and getting ready to go before the second witch hunter could find me, I did stop to ask Elise what she was going to do about drinking. With an impish shrug, she told me it would work out. Between packing a cooler full of blood bags that Thorn would find a courier to bring to Alaska and heading out into the local towns, she swears she’ll be fine.

And if she’s not? I offered her to drink my blood, and the fact that she didn’t politely refuse right away tells me that she’s secretly as worried about her diet as I am.

For the moment, though, she’s sipping on the to-go cup full of A positive she brought with her to the airport. Normally, the TSA would’ve gone through it and flagged her for drinking freaking blood, but not Elise. She batted her eyes, flashes her pale green eyes, and the guy manning the X-ray machine winked and told her to go on through with the cup.

Our trip is mostly uneventful.

That’s a good thing. When everyone staring at us makes me think that we’ve been spotted, and that they’re a witch hunter in disguise, I realize that it’s a good thing I left Clarity after all. I’m jumpy as fuck, and I can’t wait to be hidden away even if I was against this whole thing in the first place.

But I’m traveling with Elise van Duren. No matter where we go, she’s the center of attention even though she doesn’t want to be, and it really tests my resolve not to lose my temper when the fifth guy stops on his way to the bathroom to proposition her to join him and become the latest members of the mile-high club.

Poor Elise. She might be seventy-two years old, but I think there’s some truth to how she said that, as a vampire, she’s considered barely legal. Either that or she’s been sheltered all of those years because she honestly didn’t know what the first guy was implying until I barked at him to leave her alone and made an unpleasant comment about Elise and I being a couple.

If there was ever a moment I wished I could control my fire, it was as the smarmy, cocky businessman stormed away from us. A flame directed right at his ass might not make him less of a homophobe or bigot, but I’d feel better that he would yelp in pain any time he had to take a shit.

The other guys weren’t as big of jerks, but it got old. I finally told Elise to rest her head on my shoulder and go to sleep, and at least then she didn’t have to hear what some of those pigs had to say about her.

That was the first leg. The eight hours dragged—and I ended up napping with Elise for half of our redeye flight—but luckily there was only an hour gap between one flight and the next. I got breakfast, Elise choked down a half of a donut, and off we went to Alaska.

The Dyea Express only runs when the sanctuary knows it’s getting a new arrival to the hidden village. I’m not really an anxious person, but I spent most of the two-and-a-half hour flight hoping that we wouldn’t be stranded in Alaska when he landed. Especially since there was snow in the forecast, and as much as I love the white stuff, I’d rather not have to trudge out into the Alaskan woods that make up most of Dyea if I can.

Thankfully, after the forty-minute wait to claim all of our luggage, we go out to wear all of the shuttles come and go to pick up passengers and discover that there’s only one waiting there: the Dyea Express.

I should’ve expected as much. The Skagway airport is a regional airport that’s mainly used to ferry cruise ship passengers up to Alaska before they head out to port. It only had two runways, and I nearly swallowed my tongue a little on the less than smooth landing.

There’s a bite to the air. It’s about the same temperature as it was back in Clarity—around thirty degrees Fahrenheit—so it’s cold to regular humans, but not that I know I’m a fire witch, I finally understand how I can wear a basic sweatshirt and jeans in below freezing weather and be perfectly comfortable.

Elise, as usual, is wearing one of her form-fitting dresses and a pair of high heels that make her closer to my height. Then, because she might be small, but her vampire strength isn’t , she’s carrying four pieces of luggage to my two without any trouble at all.

A friendly-faced woman with light brown hair curling around her face before tumbling past her shoulders is wearing a thick coat, a pair of gloves, and an expectant expression as we approach her.

“Hi. Ride out to Dyea? I’m here to pick up two passengers.”

“That’s us,” I tell her.

“Great. Name’s Linda. Linda Greene. Here. Let me help you put your luggage into the back of the shuttle. Ride out to Dyea isn’t bad, barely a half an hour, but it can be bumpy at times. Better you have all your belongings secured.”

It’s not even ten o’clock in the morning yet. We’ve been up since we got to the airport last night, except for a couple of hours down while we were flying. Add in the four hour time zone adjustment and jet lag is kicking my newly witchy ass right about now.

And what kind of witch did the coven send to transport us from the airport to the village?

A morning person .

Luckily, I have Elise. Who might be a vampire, but if there’s one thing I learned, it’s that pop culture got a lot of things way wrong. She doesn’t stay up all night and sleep all day, she definitely doesn’t sleep in a coffin, and though she doesn’t eat much, I know she can have garlic without any issues.

So, yeah. She’s a morning person who actually doesn’t need all that much sleep, and she chatters with Linda, asking her about what it’s like to live in Alaska, while I lean my head up against the shuttle window and doze the entire ride away from the airport.

Before I know it, the voices quiet and the shuttle comes to a slowing stop. Elise reaches over to nudge my shoulder, and I wake up in time to see that we’ve stopped in the middle of freaking nowhere.

Seriously.

All I see are trees. The road is empty, and I’m not even sure I want to call it a road. It’s, like, a stretch of gravel trying to find its way through the thicket of overgrown bushes, rocks, and trees surrounding us.

Linda whips her head around, curls bouncing happily as she says, “Here we go, ladies. Welcome to Dyea.”

I peer through the frosted window; it’s easy since the heat from my cheek kept that part of the glass from fogging up. “We’re here?”

“Sure are. Come on. I’ll help you get your luggage out of the back.”

Elise goes first. It takes me a second to come completely back to the land of the fully conscious.

However, before I can get off of the shuttle, Linda stops me.

She points at my chest. “You’re Bridget, right?”

I’m not surprised she can guess which of us is the ‘human’ and which one of us is the vampire. Elise gracefully disembarked the bus to retrieve our luggage while I just bumped into the front seat, lost my footing, and nearly fell down the steps leading outside.

Plus, you know, there’s how I look like a normal person while Elise should be on a movie set somewhere instead of being dropped off outside of a former ghost town.

“Yeah.” I fluff my hair. It’s a smushed mess from my quick cat nap against the window pane. “That’s me.”

“Great. Hang tight a second, will ya? I’ve got something for you.”

She does? “Me?”

“Yup. I almost forgot. Madame Montvale told me to give this to you.” Linda grabs something from the dashboard. She passes over an envelope. “It’s a map to the underground cave system. If you’re not familiar with the area, you’d get lost without it. She said you’ll need it to find what you’re looking for.”

Everyone else seems to refer to Celeste as Madame Montvale except for Thorn and me. Probably because, as the leader of the Cadre, they’re on the same level. As for me, I’m just learning about where certain supes rank in their various hierarchies. She’s the head of the largest coven of the East Coast. For all I know, she’s like the witches’ governor and deserves the title.

But she was introduced to me as Celeste, and I have a hard time thinking about her as anything else. Still, I know who Linda means—and I know exactly what she’s talking about when she says that it might help me find what I’m looking for.

Fire opal grows in the caves. If I want to get rid of my powers, I need fire opal.

And now I have a map.

Well, to the caves, at least.

But how do we find the sanctuary?