Page 19 of At First Spark
“There’s brush catching behind it!” she yells back over the crackle. “If it jumps, it’ll hit the house!”
“I know.”
I close the distance fast, grab the hose lower down, and pull it toward the ground.
“You need to back off.”
“I am backing off water—”
“Now.”
Her resistance lasts less than a second, but I feel it. Solid. Immediate. Then she shifts back. A dog barrels out of the dark near the side porch and plants himself at her feet, barking like he means to personally fight fire if all the rest of us fail.
“Rook!” she snaps.
Ray opens the attack line behind me. Water slams into the hottest side of the carriage house, and steam erupts in a thick white burst. Beckett peels right. Mac comes in behind all of us, issuing orders with the kind of clarity that makes thought unnecessary.
“Protect the main structure. Keep it off the grass line. Shaw, right side. Wright, get her clear.”
I get a hand on her elbow and steer her backward until the heat drops enough that I can breathe without tasting ash. She tries to look around me the whole way, tracking the movement of the fire, the way the water is hitting, the direction of the wind.
She knows enough to understand the danger.
She also knows enough to make herself harder to manage.
I stop her near the sidesteps and put my body between her and the worst of it before I think better of it.
“Stay here.”
Her chin lifts. “I was helping.”
“You were too close.”
“It’s my property.”
So she’s the owner. The woman from dispatch. The one trying to save the inn with a garden hose and pure refusal to step back.
No one says anything for a few seconds because the fire is too active. Water hammers the rear wall. Flame tries to crawl sideways into the stacked brush and gets beaten back. The half-collapsed roofline gives once, then settles inward in a shower of sparks.
The dog barks again. The woman reaches down without taking her eyes off the scene and grips the top of his neck gently,steadying him and maybe herself at the same time. I glance over and get my first real look at her in the wash of emergency lights.
Younger than I expect. Not fragile. Not soft in the obvious ways. There’s something hard-set about her face even under the smoke and dirt. Strong mouth. Sharp eyes. A kind of exhausted composure that looks practiced rather than natural.
She catches me looking.
“What?”
“Anybody else inside?”
“No.”
“Anyone else on the property?”
“No.”
“Fuel, chemicals, mower can, anything in that building we need to know about?”
Her gaze flicks back toward the carriage house. “Old lumber. Cleaning supplies in a cabinet. Maybe a gas can in the lean-to, but I didn’t get close enough to check.”
