Firebreak

Firefighter Paul Wintershins had run into a fire to rescue someone—and died. Or so people thought ….

Transformed into a fire elemental, Paul is torn between setting things ablaze and stopping dangerous fires. Lately, the temptation to burn is getting harder to resist. But when Paul is called to a malevolent inferno, a new desire takes hold of him: to rescue the beautiful woman who is a target for another’s flames.

With the fire raging, their passion could be the key to Jackie’s survival … and Paul’s salvation.

Firebreak

Anna Leonard

www.millsandboon.co.uk

He could hear the shouts, even over the crackling of the fire and the heavy sound of his own breathing through his smoke mask. They were pulling everyone out, abandoning the structure to its fate. The old house that had withstood a hundred or more years of Louisiana weather had finally met her match in a fire they could not douse.

Sweat dripped into his eyes, under his helmet, and he glared at the roaring sheet of flame in front of him as though his own frustration could match and quench it. There was no reason for this fire to have broken out, and that, in his experience, meant probable arson.

Arson pissed him the hell off. Arson in someone’s home, in a building as fierce and lovely as this? The idea of letting the arsonist win pissed him the hell off even more.

“Wintershins!”

“I’m on my way” he said into his comm, casting a final glance around and heading for the exit. He hated to lose, they all did. But you respected your opponent, and you acknowledged when you were beat. Otherwise, you got dead. And he might not have much in his life worth keeping, outside the job, but he wasn’t going to give up and die.

There was a buzzing in his ears, as though the fire was laughing at him. Paul grimaced, hefting his gear and increasing his pace. But just as he reached the doorway, a line of flame raced from behind him, crossing the doorway like a red dragon. It should have been easy enough to move over it, his gear protecting him from the worst of the heat, but even as he thought that, the low barrier rose into a full wall, filling the doorway with an impenetrable sheet of fire. Paul swore and was lifting his comm to announce his situation when the red-gold flames shifted, bulged outward, as though they were about to explode.

Instead, a face formed in the flames, fine-boned and malicious, a long tongue like a snake’s flickering out from the grinning mouth, eyes black as hell staring at him like the Dark Man himself come to take his soul.

“This house is mine,” the face said, the voice crackling and spitting like the flames it was made of, and Paul’s pores opened with a flood of cold sweat, even as he refused to acknowledge what he was seeing. It was a hallucination, an auditory and visual phantasm caused by something in the flames. Some toxin or drug, and he needed to get out of there, needed to get fresh oxygen right now.

The doorway was clear, the way out was right in front of him. He could hear the voice of his crew through the comm, calling his name, telling him to get the hell out.

“And you’re mine now, too,” the face said, leering at him.

Summoning up his courage, Paul lurched through the door, his gaze intent on the safety just beyond it. As he stepped forward, the flame exploded outward, catching him in a hot, cruel embrace, and there was nothing but fire, agony … and hell.

“Spark.”

He stirred, unwilling to move from the warmth of his nest.

The whisper came again, more insistent. “Spark. You are needed.”

The Spark stretched, its limbs, wreathed in flames, fading from red-gold to a darker red as he woke and reformed himself. Habit, even now, to take a defined shape. Legs, torso, arms, head, and then finally skin sheathing the core of flame, until what stood on the cooling embers of its nest could have passed for a muscular human male—until you noticed the skin flickering with veins of flame, and looked into its eyes and saw how they burned.

The creature that had once been Paul Wintershins did not know the source of the voice that woke him, but he knew what it meant. Somewhere, there was a fire burning. And in that fire … there were people.

And those people needed him.

Whatever hell-magic had destroyed and then rebuilt him into this form had given him the urge to burn, the ability to set the world to blaze … but it hadn’t been able to totally eradicate the man within. When the fire called … the firefighter responded, as well as the Spark.

The Spark felt his body surge toward the call of the crackling flames, though the rising desire was not to douse but to inflame, to pour his essence into the natural flames and cause them to soar ever higher until all that was left was ash and soot

Burn, the desire sang to him. Burn.

“No.” His voice was the crackle and hiss of flame, an inhuman sound.

Yes, it whispered, twining strands of flame over his neck and shoulders, trying to woo him to its purpose.

“No.” His expression showed annoyance, his skin flaring a deeper red, and the whisper faded away—defeated but not gone.

How long had he had been waking this way? No way to tell—a year, a decade or more, and each time the urge to burn battled the urge to save. Each time a small bit of Paul Wintershins faded a little in the conflagration, until he wondered, even as he responded, if the next time would be when the Spark woke, and there was no Paul left at all….

And if that would be such a terrible thing.

Jackie turned in the bed, punching the pillow with her fist, trying to make the lumpy mass into her lovely, comfortable down pillow. But that was back home, and she was here, in this drafty if lovely cabin, with its rustic and damned uncomfortable bed, with a lumpy, too-hard pillow.

But the pillow, and the drafts, and the sound of the frogs and owls outside weren’t why she couldn’t do more than doze off for short periods of time. If only it were that easy. She had fled Manhattan the past Friday, heading for this rental cabin in the woods of North Jersey where nobody would ever think to look for her, hoping, even as she drove up to the little A-frame cottage, that the change of scenery would give her time to breathe, to sort through the chaos her life had become.

Instead, that chaos followed her, dodging her heels when she was awake, and roaming through her dreams when she slept, giving her no rest at all. It had gotten to the point where she was tempted to resort to the bottle of whiskey she had found, dusty and forgotten, in the kitchen cabinet. She wasn’t a drinker, though, and worried that it would make things worse, not better.

She needed clarity, not forgetfulness. Avoiding the issue wasn’t going to do the job, and clearly it wasn’t going to let her sleep.

Giving up on the pillow as a lost cause, Jackie pulled it out from under her head and tossed it on the floor, only to pause mid-motion, her mind waking up enough to notice something odd.

She couldn’t hear the frogs. The endless and almost but not quite inaudible peep-peep-peep that kept her company every damn night since she got here.was silent.

No, she realized a second later. Not silent. Hidden behind a crackling noise, like static from a radio between channels, or a television station that had lost signal. But there was neither radio nor television here. Not even a computer. Not even a land-line. That had been the appeal of it. As far away from everything as she could get, down a mile-long private road, hidden among trees, the cottage was as isolated as she could manage on short notice.

So what was that noise?

The moment the smell reached her nose, she knew. Fire.

Jackie sat up in the bed, the pillow forgotten as she blinked into the pitch-dark room, trying to identify where the smell was coming from. The sound of crackling was everywhere and nowhere, surrounding her in the darkness and making it impossible to get her bearings in the unfamiliar room.

“Oh God,” she whispered, trying not to panic, trying to remember what she had ever learned about fires. In all the hotels she had stayed over the years, directions had been pasted on the door and she couldn’t remember a word of them. Windows? Pointless. The bedroom only had a single window, and it was a straight drop of two stories and more. Call for help, then. She reached out for the nightstand where her cell phone should be, only to remember that she had left it in her car—so if someone from work tried to reach her, even if her phone got a signal out here she could honestly say she hadn’t heard it ring.

No way to call for help. She was on her own.

All right. Fine. She took a breath and regretted it, the stink in the air more noticeable now that she was awake, her lungs itching with the irritation. Stay down, she remembered that. Heat rises, so stay low to the ground.

Rolling off the bed, Jackie went to her hands and knees on the floor, the braided rug scratchy under her palms. She thought about pulling the blanket with her, in case … she had no idea what she’d use it for, and left it on the bed. Keeping her face down, she crawled forward on her hands and knees, toward the door.

She should have been chilled, in the spring night air, wearing only a camisole and cotton sleep pants, but instead her skin felt warm, sweat forming at the bend of her knees and under her hairline. It was just four or five feet from bed to door, but the closer she got, the more a deep-seated almost animalistic instinct told her to back off, to stay away from the door, no matter that it was the only escape, the only way out.

Death, something deep in her psyche whispered. If she went out there, she would meet Death.

A frightened noise caught in her throat, and she scrabbled backward, even as the door blew open, the roar of the flames louder than anything she had ever heard, like a jet engine next to her ear or Niagara Falls thundering overhead. Thick smoke rushed into the room, long red licks of flame curling after them, reaching for her, hungry to consume everything inside. She coughed, her eyes watering, one arm raised to shield herself, impossibly, from the heat.

In the thick black smoke, something moved in the doorway.

Jackie’s breath caught in her chest, hoping against hope that someone, a hunter, a Good Samaritan, had seen the flames and come to help. Wiping the tears from her eyes, she dared to look again.

A figure stood there, a dark shadow outlined in flames.

No, it was made of flames.

She opened her mouth to scream, and the figure reached a hand out to her. The arm was corded with flame, the fingers and palm racing swirls of fire, like a tiny galaxy, deadly and beautiful. She stared at it, unable to move, and it reached again, grasping her arm.

She did scream then, expecting to feel it burn her down to the bone. But while the sensation was warm, it did not burn, and the fingers of flame wrapping around her bare arm felt like human flesh against her own.

“What?” Her voice caught, already rough from the smoke, and she coughed. The figure loomed over her and swooped down, covering her with its body even as the flames roared into the room, sweeping over everything, setting the furniture, the bed she had just been lying in, afire. She was trapped in a conflagration the likes of which she’d only ever seen in movies, and yet, somehow, she was not burned.

“Hold tight to me,” she heard the fire crackle in her ear, the heat of it making her hair move as though touched by a dry wind. “Hold tight, and don’t let go.”

Even as the voice gave her instructions, it straightened up, reaching its full height, maybe six or seven feet tall, so that she was caught up against its chest, her face turned into what should have been a wall of flame. She flinched; impossible not to flinch, fire that close to her face, but again it did not burn. There was warmth, a dry crackling heat, but no pain. If she didn’t think about the source, she could almost believe she was somewhere out in the desert, the sun turning her skin a golden caramel shade.

“The sun can kill you too,” she said, her voice not muffled at all despite being pressed up against the hard wall of fire, and she started to laugh. “This is either the worst stress nightmare I’ve ever had, or I’ve gone insane.”

“Imagine it’s a dream,” the fire told her. “If that helps.” The crackling, static-laced voice sounded more distant now, as though its attention were elsewhere, and Jackie started to lift her head, to see what it was doing.

“No,” it rebuked her. “Stay there.”

Cowed, she kept her head tucked, and her hands and legs drawn in against its body. If this was a nightmare, it was an awfully bossy one.

The fire raged around them, and it was all he could do to keep it from destroying the cottage entirely, sweeping over them in its need to touch and own and consume everything. The fire had started in the kitchen of the modest, four-room cabin; perhaps she had left the oven on, or there had been a rupture in the lines, causing a small explosion. Perfectly natural. Even the way it had spread, racing up the stairs rather than spreading along the rest of the first floor, could be explained by half a dozen natural causes, up to and including human folly or carelessness. But the way the fire resisted him, fighting against his attempts to block it, suggested that all was not as it seemed, here.

He had known something was wrong the moment he arrived, but it had taken him until now to recognize it.

Sparkfire trumped any natural blaze. When he raised a hand, a campfire purred like a housecat. When he slapped a backdraft, it cowered at his feet. When he had arrived the fire had already engaged more than half the house, but it should have taken him only moments to gain control over where the fire went, giving the owner a chance to escape and call for help. He hadn’t known why the sense had brought him here at all, at first glance; a single engine could have dealt with this.

But there had been no engine on the scene, and he had not heard the familiar rising call of an engine crew on its way. A glance around had shown him why: the cabin was isolated, on the edge what looked to be a state park of some kind. There might be no help coming.

Still, it should have been a simple matter to beat the flames back, find the owner of the sole heartbeat he could feel, a single note against the orchestration of the flames, and get them to safety. Should have been, but wasn’t. The flame clung to his feet when he walked, tugged at his arms and hips, slithered up his legs and tried to sway him to its embrace, to join with it and burn all the hotter, all the more unstoppable. He felt the seduction, the lure, and it was sweeter now than when he had woken. He was a Spark. He burned: that was what he did, what he was. The distant voice of the man he’d once been had faded, worn down and worn-out, and it didn’t have the strength to resist the ever-present desire to burn endlessly, to revel in what he was, what he had been created to do. The insistent reminder of how glorious the flame was licked at him, mocked him when he refused.

But the cool weight pressed against him kept him there, intact. Relative cool. It had a heat of its own, almost forgotten, the heat of flesh. Human flesh, so tender against the ravages of flame, unprotected and delicate. Skin would blacken, the moisture drawn out, the lungs seared, if he did not protect it.

The sound of ragged, frightened, smoke-clogged breathing reached him, and the faint remnant of what he had once been reasserted itself. He was the firebreak, set to stop this inferno in its tracks.

Except that no matter what he did to this fire, no matter what command he gave, it refused to stop, would not cease, would not douse. It was the worst fire he could remember seeing in all the endless time he’d been trapped as a Spark, a stubborn and willful fire, refusing to be put down. He knew instinctively, feeling its heat against his own, that there was only one sort of flame that could match the will of a Spark.

Another Spark’s work.

He glared at the nearest, thickest section of flame. “Who sent you?”

The fire crackled and laughed around him, trying to pry itself into his form, to reach the mortal sheltered within his arms. “Who sent you?” he demanded again. “Who set you?” A pointless question. Sparks merely were, with but one instinct—to claim, to possess and to burn. It would be lingering, somewhere, to watch the destruction, but it would not listen to reason or plea to stop.

No mortal means could extinguish Sparkfire; the man he had been knew that all too well. Even if firefighters had arrived, they could have done nothing but watch while the structure burned down, and prayed that it would not spread to the surrounding trees.

This was why he had been called. Only another Spark could stop a Spark-driven blaze.

In theory.

“What’s going on? What’s happening?”

The mortal—a woman, her short brown hair in sleep-tousled curls around her head, lifted her face to look up, as though seeking reassurance. He risked taking his attention away from the flames for just an instant, an ancient and impossible response, and he was trapped by two large, almond-shaped eyes, tear-and smoke-reddened but still impossibly blue, like the depths of a tranquil lake. Those eyes widened at what she saw, looking at him, and her pale pink lips trembled, but she didn’t look away. “What are you? What’s happening?”

She was speaking to him.

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