Firebreak

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.