He stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. “I need to tell you a secret of my own, Brynn, before we go any further.”
She frowned. “If you tell me that you’re married—”
He laughed. “Are you kidding? My mother would have skinned me alive if I had a wife and brought a date to her house.”
“Okay, well, tell me this evening. After work,” she said, a slight frown shadowing her beautiful face.
“Can’t. I have to work tonight, too,” he said.
“Then come by when you get done, even if it’s the middle of the night,” she said. “Whatever it is, it can’t be worse than my curse, right?”
Her attempt at a smile faded when he didn’t return it. She squared her shoulders. “Okay,” she repeated. “We’ll figure this out.”
They finished cleaning up in silence, and then they both headed for the door and their respective days. He’d just stepped out onto the porch when she stopped.
“I forgot my keys,” she said. “You go ahead, and I’ll see you later.”
Sean hesitated, but he did want to check up on his mom before he went to work. He pulled Brynn close and kissed her again, taking his time about it, right there on her porch.
“I’ll see you tonight,” he promised. “Good luck with the oil emergency.”
She smiled. “Thanks. All in a day’s work at Scruffy’s.”
Sean sauntered down the steps and headed for his car. It wasn’t until he’d traveled halfway to his mother’s house that he realized he was whistling. They’d figure it out. She’d be okay with his secret.
He refused to let things turn out any other way.
TWELVE
Brynn rushed to her bedroom to get her keys, but before she could make it back to the front door, it started to swing open, and sheer, effervescent joy bubbled inside her. He hadn’t been able to leave without another kiss, maybe.
“Back so soon,” she teased, but the large man who entered her house wasn’t Sean.
She stumbled back a step, but she wasn’t really worried, not yet, even though he was entering her house uninvited, because he looked familiar to her for some reason.
“Can I help you?”
The man raised a closed fist to just in front of his mouth, opened his hand, and blew. A shower of fine gray dust shot forward into Brynn’s face before she could duck or dodge away.
“What—” she managed, but the rest of the sentence died away as the poison entered her system. The room spun, and her vision funneled down to black, except for sparks of light from the matches her attacker was lighting.
Matches? But why—?
Her last thought before unconsciousness claimed her: Sean.
THIRTEEN
Sean heard the alarm when he was still halfway down the block from the station, and he started sprinting. The arsonist had taken a few days off, but even though Sean and the rest of his crew hoped the scumbag had fallen off a cliff or, more fitting, set himself on fire and was now out of commission, nobody was relaxing. This could be him again, and—worse—he could be escalating. People could die.
Please let it be a normal, boring backyard grill out of control.
“House fire,” Sue told him, when he started gearing up. “We don’t know if it’s him or not.”
“Where is it?”
She rattled off the address and Sean dropped his helmet, whirled around, and grabbed her. “What did you say?”
She blinked and glanced quite deliberately at his hands on her shoulders. He immediately released her.
“I’m sorry, Sue, but I need to hear that address again right now,” he demanded. Terror sliced into him with a scalpel’s edge, and rage wasn’t far behind.
She repeated the address.
It was Brynn’s house.
He pulled out his phone and started running.
“Scruffy’s Pet Spa,” he snapped, and the computer handling information repeated the name and then connected him to a phone that rang and rang, six long rings, before the voicemail picked up and informed him that Brynn had gone home for the night.
She’d never reset her message today.
She wasn’t answering the phone.
She might be in that house.
He ran faster.
Sean arrived before the truck and crew, and he was still too late. Brynn’s tiny house was an inferno, and there was no way anyone could possibly be alive inside. He threw back his head and roared out his anguish and rage, and the heritage he’d spent so long denying rushed to answer his call.
Every inch of the surface of Sean’s body blazed into flame. The fire was so intense and the temperature so high that his clothes and the gear he’d managed to don instantly disintegrated into ash. Unexpectedly, the fire didn’t hurt him at all; not that he would even have felt the physical pain. The neighbors and other mindless looky-loos who always gathered at fires started screaming and running, probably to get away from the terrifying fire demon, but Sean didn’t give a damn about any of it.
Not that he’d outed himself, not that he was scaring the populace, not that he didn’t know if he’d survive what he was about to do. He hit the front of her house running and used his body as a battering ram to hurl himself through the front windows, not bothering with the door. He expected the lash of back draft that hit him, hard, but it didn’t matter. None of it mattered.
No fire could compete with the blazing heat of a fire demon.
He shouted her name, over and over, but heard nothing in response except the roar of the fire. The magically created fire.
The arsonist had struck again, and this time he’d made it personal.
Sean crashed through crumbling, fire-engulfed walls until he reached the black and ruined hull of the kitchen that he’d sat in only hours before, promising Brynn that they’d find a way to be together.
Now she was gone, and the fiery monster who was all that was left of Sean could feel nothing but agony.
Could want nothing but revenge.
He finally stumbled out of the inferno. She wasn’t here. There hadn’t been any evidence of a . . . body.
Brynn hadn’t been in the house.
Castilho was on the lawn, using his magic to combat the blaze. He saw Sean burst out of the house in full fire-demon mode and flinched, but to his credit he didn’t back away.
“Sean. Is that you? What the hell? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Sean slowly approached, unsure of his new abilities—he had no idea how close he could get to a human being without setting the person on fire.
“Didn’t want you to fear me,” he told the witch, whose eyes widened when he heard Sean’s voice coming from the demon’s mouth.
“Well, hell, if you’re a fire demon, then they can’t be all bad, can they?” Castilho grinned at him, and then turned his full attention back to the complicated magic he was working to help contain and extinguish the fire.
Sean didn’t know how to react to the man’s easy acceptance and, what’s more, he didn’t really care. He had to find Brynn.
Sue came running across the lawn, waving her phone at him. “Sean, it’s Zach. He says he needs to talk to you.”
He snarled at her. “No time. Have to find Brynn.”
Sue was paler than he’d ever seen her, and he’d been shoulder to shoulder with the veteran firefighter when she’d battled the worst of the worst blazes.
“You don’t understand, Sean. Zach says he has Brynn Carroll, and if you don’t show up within ten minutes, he’s going to set her on fire.”