Damon smiled and picked up his pace a little. They weren’t running, but they were no longer strolling along without a care either. Reg wanted her fudgy caramel swirl ice cream.

  They were almost back to the street the food trucks were parked on when there was a loud boom, like a truck had lost its load or gone over train tracks. She looked in the direction she thought the noise had come from and saw a black billow of smoke. She blinked, thinking at first that she was just imagining things. Then she clutched Damon’s arm. “Do you see that? Was that…?”

  He had been looking the other direction, watching a dog that was tearing around the park loose, with no leash on and no obvious owner nearby to keep him under control. He turned around with a smile, opening his mouth to say something to Reg. He followed her gaze and the blood left his face.

  “That’s the conference center. I need to… I need to go!” He seemed to be trapped between running over to see what had happened and saying a proper goodbye to Reg.

  She pushed him away. “Go!”

  He looked grateful and took off at a run.

  People were already starting to gather, staring at the smoke coming out of the building, the first of the observers beginning to pull out their phones to video the scene. Reg swallowed, watching it. What had happened? She hoped that it was just a blown A/C unit or something that could be easily replaced and hadn’t actually done any damage to the building.

  But she knew it wasn’t the case.

  The black smoke billowing out a couple of the windows of the building was too much to be something that was small and unimportant.

  Sirens started in the distance. Reg wondered how large the Black Sands fire department was. It was a small town. Probably a volunteer fire department. A few trucks. Would it be enough to put out the fire?

  Forgetting about the ice cream, Reg walked toward the building. Unlike Damon, she didn’t belong there. The building and the occupants were not her responsibility. Even though Damon was off the clock, it was part of his job to make sure that people at the conference center stayed safe some of the time. He knew the building and the staff and probably knew all of the emergency evacuation procedures.

  But Reg hadn’t even been inside. The tribunal she had gone to had been in one of the hotels, not the conference center. She had no idea of the layout and didn’t know anything about what to do in case of fire. Other than what she had learned about in school. Stop, drop, and roll. Stay low. Break a window. She had lived in a couple of foster homes with firebugs, and they had done fire drills and repeated the safety instructions repeatedly. But getting herself out of a burning house and helping when something like the conference center was on fire were two very different things.

  She couldn’t help being drawn toward the building. It wasn’t until she was close, and the fire engines drawing up behind her, that she stopped to think about her firecasting gift. She had a gift for starting fires and feeding the flames. Not so much for putting them out. If she got too close, it was possible that she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from feeding the flames. Playing with fire, Davyn her mentor would call it with a fond smile. But he wouldn’t be smiling if she sent a public building up in an inferno. She stopped in her tracks and swore.

  What was she to do? She didn’t want to be one of the observers. One of the people standing around tweeting and live casting the fire. She wanted to help.

  People were coming out of the building in a steady stream. It had only been a couple of minutes since the explosion. The building was being evacuated. Reg knew she couldn’t go inside. Not only because she might make the fire worse, but because everyone would know you weren’t supposed to walk back into a burning building, and would stop her. The firefighters behind her would be cordoning off the area and keeping anybody from going inside. It was their job to go in with their equipment and to search for any stragglers, anyone trapped inside.

  “Reg?”

  Reg looked around at the sound of her name. It was a female voice, not Damon’s. Damon was nowhere in sight. Had he gone into the building? She hated to think that he could get trapped inside there. Even just the smoke could kill him, to say nothing of the flames or any collapsing structure. She should have stopped him, but instead, she had told him to go.

  Her eyes caught on a woman, but in the confusion, it was a few seconds before the woman’s face and identity registered with Reg. She was too worried about Damon, the fire, and what was going to happen to the people left inside.

  “Vivian?”

  Vivian walked toward her, away from the building. A man caught her by the arm, jerking her to a stop. “Hey! You need to stay with your group. We have to account for everyone who was in the building. You need to wait here so we can be sure that everyone gets out.”

  Vivian pulled her arm away from him. “I’m not going anywhere,” she snapped. But despite her words, she took a couple of steps toward Reg. “Reg, what are you doing here?”

  “I was just… lunch…” Reg couldn’t form a full thought. “What are you…?”

  “I was just signing up for a course. They have one on dealing with insurance claims, and I thought that it would be good…” She trailed off.

  Reg was surprised that with Vivian’s history of accidents that she would need any help navigating an insurance claim. But hadn’t she said she couldn’t get insurance?

  “You were in there?” she asked. “What happened? Do you know?”

  Vivian shook her head. Her eyes were dark and hooded. Damon would know whether she was telling the truth, but Reg strongly suspected that she was not. “I don’t know… there was just a noise, and then all of the smoke. Someone pulled the fire alarm, or maybe it went off automatically because of the smoke, and then everybody was trying to get out…” She looked back at the people still coming out of the building. “Everyone was pushing and shouting, and we couldn’t use the elevators. The emergency lights didn’t come on in the stairways, so everyone was using their phone lights to see and find their way out.” She shook her head. “The smoke was getting so thick, so fast…” She coughed.

  “Was everyone okay? Did everyone get out?” Reg knew that Vivian wasn’t in charge of the evacuation and that people were still coming out behind her, but the words just came out. She needed reassurance.

  “I guess. I didn’t see anyone trapped. People were pushing, but they weren’t getting trampled.”

  Reg shuddered. She wished that Vivian hadn’t gone into that building. If she had just stayed away, it would have been fine. Why was fate so determined to exterminate her?

  “You’re okay?” Reg asked, more calmly. Vivian had left their last meeting abruptly and, if Reg were going to find out anything more about her strange curse, she needed to approach the matter delicately, not to trigger whatever it was that had upset Vivian before.

  “I’m fine.” Vivian looked back at the building. “I’m just fine,” she repeated.

  “Do you think…” Reg didn’t know quite how to put her question into words in a tactful way. “You don’t think that this was because of…”

  Vivian shook her head adamantly and looked around, not wanting anyone to hear Reg making any accusations. She took another step toward Reg, but the man who clearly took his position as a fire marshal very seriously again grabbed her by the arm, and he pulled her violently back.

  “I told you, you need to stay here with everyone else. No one is to leave the muster points.”

  The firefighters were pulling hoses off of the trucks and barking at people to move out of the way. There were a few policemen and security guards around, but the fire department appeared to have beaten most of the police department there. Reg moved to the side and tried to stay out of their way. She tried to keep Vivian in sight. She didn’t want something to happen to her client before they had a chance to talk again.

  Reg looked toward the building, hoping to see Damon. She could hear creaking and crackling noises coming from inside the building, and there was a pressure building inside her chest. The fire was growing, consuming everything it could, growing exponentially like a monster that would soon devour the entire building and anything else left within it.

  Even the firemen started to shield their faces and stood back, watching and waiting. The stream of people exiting the building had slowed to a trickle and then stopped. Reg still didn’t see Damon anywhere. She scanned the crowds. There were too many people for her to be sure. He wasn’t wearing his black warlock robes, but navy pants and a white shirt, blending in with the many other businessmen who had exited the building. She was sure he was there; she just couldn’t see him yet.

  Reg could no longer hear the shouts of the firemen around her. She knew they were conversing back and forth, both over their radios and by shouting to each other, but they seemed like they were far away from her. Like there was a barrier between them.

  She tried to suppress the fire. When the fire inside her flared out of control, Davyn had her calm it and squeeze it smaller.

  There was so much of it, spread over several floors, still looking for more fuel. Most of the oxygen had been sucked out of the building. Windows shattered as the heat intensified. Reg closed her eyes and tried harder. She had power. She had plenty of power if she concentrated and stayed focused.

  She drew more energy from the people around her. They weren’t aware of what she was doing, yet they grew quieter, perhaps sensing that something had changed. Maybe feeling some of the power draining out of them. Instead of the adrenaline rush they had been experiencing, they were losing momentum. They stopped talking and yelling so much, made space for the firefighters, and turned their eyes away from their phones and to each other. Reg tried to smother the fires. She sensed that there were multiple fires; it wasn’t just one inferno anymore. She squashed the smaller ones and tried to make a wall around the big ones, to contain them until the firefighters could do something.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Then suddenly, Reg was inside the building. The smoke was so thick she couldn’t see and couldn’t breathe. Her lungs burned. The heat inside the building, even where there were no flames, was enough to cook her flesh. She tried to make peace with the fire, to use her affinity to stop it from burning her, but it didn’t work.

  “Ma’am, you need to move back!”

  Someone shoved Reg back, and she was pulled out of the vision. She breathed clean, oxygenated air and looked around. If it was a vision, had she seen it because she was trying to dampen the fire, or was there another reason?

  Damon.

  Reg looked for him again in the crowds outside the building. There was no sign of him. Reg grabbed one of the firemen. “My friend is in there.”

  “The building has been evacuated, ma’am. She’ll be around here somewhere.”

  “No, he went in to help. He’s a security guard. He went in, and he hasn’t come back out.”

  “He could be on the other side of the building. You don’t know.”

  Reg tried to see the vision again, to get some detail of where Damon was. She was able to connect to him again quickly. She felt dizzy and faint. The fumes of burning synthetics choked her. “He’s there… with other people. He was helping to clear bathrooms. There was a woman with children…”

  The firefighter stared at her through the face shield. “What are you talking about?”

  “I can see him. I see where he is. It’s the main floor. There are accessible toilets. They aren’t in the same place as the main women’s and men’s bathrooms. You need to go there and get them out.”

  “You don’t know that. I have a job to do. Let me do it.”

  “I do know.” Reg held on to him as tightly as she could, knowing that he was going to pull away and shake her off. “I can see them!”

  “Ma’am.”

  “Please!” She tried to project the image to him. Somehow, she needed to make him understand. He was a resident of Black Sands. He had to have seen some pretty weird stuff in the past. Even if he didn’t really believe in magic, he had to know from living there that some things couldn’t be explained. “You have to get him and that family out.”

  He hesitated for a minute. Then he pulled away. “Main floor accessible toilet.”

  “Yes. Please.”

  He nodded. He hurried away from her, toward the burning building, talking into his radio. Telling them to help him to get to the restroom? Or to keep the crazies back out of the way so he could get his job done?

  That was all Reg could do. She couldn’t go in there herself. She didn’t have any equipment or training. All she could do was wait outside.

  And do what she could to calm the fire.

  She leaned against a tree, her knees shaking like jelly, and again began to pull strength from the crowd surrounding the building. She pictured the area where Damon and the others were trapped and concentrated her efforts there. Putting out the smaller fires and trapping the bigger ones behind walls. Trying to create an invisible barrier between the little family and Damon, and the flames. Damon crawled over to the sink and began running the water. He soaked handfuls of paper towels and he and the woman tried to hold them over their own faces and the children’s.

  Reg sank to the ground. How long would it take the firefighters to get to them? Had the man believed her? Were they trying to get in and clear a safe path to retrieve them?

  The seconds ticking away seemed like hours and days. Reg pressed her palms to her eyes, trying to keep her focus.

  Finally, she heard the shouting and the rushing of the water hoses. The crashing as they pushed in through the door and looked for the survivors. Reg’s throat swelled so that she could hardly breathe or swallow the lump, impossibly grateful that the firemen had reached Damon and the family.

  Between them, the firefighters managed to help the children and mother out the door, shielding them from the flames. Damon stuck close to them, struggling for breath but managing to get out under his own power. Reg waited until they were all out of the building before letting go.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Reg? Reg, are you okay?”

  Reg didn’t want anyone to touch her. She kept her eyes closed, batting away at the hands that interfered with her sleep. She needed to rest. For just a few more minutes. She didn’t want to go to school yet.

  “Reg. Wake up. Reg!”

  The insistent voice wouldn’t go away. Reg tried to pry her eyes open. She blinked blearily, looking around, not sure what was going on. There were a lot of people around. She was napping underneath a tree. There seemed to be a lot of excitement. Davyn was crouched down next to her.

  “Hey. Hi, Davyn.”

  “Are you alright? What happened?” Davyn looked over his shoulder toward the conference center, but it was blocked by the crowds watching it. There was smoke coiling into the sky. “Reg, tell me that you didn’t…”

  “What?” Reg sat up, blinking her eyes and trying to sort out her fuzzy brain. “What’s going on?”

  “There’s a fire. Did you have something to do with this?”

  A fire. Reg tried to remember all that had happened. She felt weak. Like she had just run a marathon. Not that she had ever run a marathon.

  “No. Why would you think that?”

  “I don’t want to think that you could have. I told you not to experiment, not to practice any firecasting without me.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “How did this start, then?”

  “It wasn’t anything to do with me.” Reg rubbed her eyes. They stung from the smoke. Her head was thick and it was difficult to breathe through her stuffed-up nose. “I don’t know what happened. Maybe a bomb. I was walking in the park.” She looked in the direction of the food trucks. “And there was a boom and then smoke started to pour out.”

  It started to come back to her. More details of why she had been there and what had happened.

  “Where’s Damon? Is he okay?”

  “I’m sure he’s fine. Tell me what happened next. Why are you so tired?”

  “Damon was in the building. You have to make sure he’s okay.”

  “He was in the building when the fire started?”

  “No. He went in to help. And he got trapped. There were people in there, he was helping to get them out, and he got trapped in the bathroom. I told the firefighters.” Reg rubbed her head. She had a headache. A really bad one. Like when she was a kid and got badly dehydrated at school track and field day and threw up. “I told them, and I tried to quiet the fire. Tried to keep Damon and the others from getting hurt until they could get them out.”

  Davyn raised his brows, eyes widening. “You did that?” He looked toward the conference center. “From out here? That would take a huge amount of energy. It looks like it was a massive fire.”

  Reg nodded. “It was. Really big. I took energy from the other people.”

  “The other people?”

  Reg motioned to the crowd. “The bystanders. Everyone was standing around, all excited, so I… borrowed some of their energy.”

  “Borrowed?” Davyn repeated, his lip curling.

  “Well… I guess technically, I’m not going to be giving it back, so maybe it wasn’t exactly borrowing, but they would have given it to me if they had known. They wanted to help.”

  “Oh, I see. And you could tell that they wouldn’t be upset if you skimmed their energy to help fight the fire.”

  “Well, they wouldn’t, would they? Who would be upset about that? You’d help, if you could, wouldn’t you? You’d want me to save Damon and the kids who were stuck in there.”

  Davyn rolled his eyes. “Yes, you know that I would, but that’s not the same as asking permission. You’re just taking. That’s really frowned upon in magical society.”

  “I needed it to save Damon. You think I should just have let him die? Or should I have gone in there myself and gotten burned up too?”

  “I didn’t say that, Reg. But you have to think about what’s ethical. You can’t just take energy from people. How is that any different than Corvin taking your gifts away without you understanding what you were consenting to?”

 

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