her rooming house. It was the three floors in the middle. It was on the side that Therese’s flat was located on.
And she was in there. Goddamn it… he could sense her.
For a split second, his mind spun out of control, his senses over-heightened by urgency and panic, his body braced to pounce, his blood racing. There was just too much to assess: the ten fire trucks that were parked around the inferno, the arcs of water being trained by human firemen onto the blaze, the ambulances arriving, the crowd gathering in the cold and husbanded by cops.
But he couldn’t afford to be scattered.
Scanning the front of the rooming house, he saw people streaming out of an exit at street level on the far side of the building. She was not among them, and he knew this without being able to see faces or bodies clearly.
No, he knew where she was. And her location terrified him.
Closing his eyes, he forced himself to calm down and then ghosted forward, entering the building through the last set of blown-out windows on the left-hand corner on the third floor. It was an incredibly stupid and dangerous thing to do, given that he could have killed himself if he’d re-formed in the middle of a bed or a sofa. But he lucked out. He was dead center in a shallow living room with an open door, the tenant having clearly escaped the apartment.
Not that he could see much of anything.
The smoke was so thick he had to bend down, and as he headed for the open doorway, he grabbed what turned out to be a baseball shirt to cover his nose and mouth. Its smell of marijuana, embedded in the synthetic fibers, was quickly eclipsed by the stench of melted plastic and steaming metal, and goddamn it was hot. He was sweating already, and all he had on was his silk shirt.
Out in the hall, he looked both ways and saw fuck all. The smoke was down to the floor and coming in waves, the heat wafting it to and fro.
She was close by. He could sense her. But he couldn’t see a fucking thing.
“Therese,” he called out.
If he could sense her, she had to be alive. She just… had to be.
The water from the hoses of the firemen was pounding on the outsides of the building, creating a din that was impossible to hear through, and that was before you added in the alarms that were going off throughout this floor as well as the ones above and below. And the fire itself was loud, the crackling and hissing, the hot breath of the flames forming a background noise level that was going to drown out his voice.
“Therese!” he yelled anyway. “Therese!”
In the back of his mind, he knew no one could survive in this hallway, not without protective gear and a breathing apparatus—and even with that kind of equipment, it was going to be dangerous.
“Therese!”
The heat was all around, even though the fire was still ahead of him, his body flushing, sweat breaking out across his chest, under his arms, down his back. As the skin on his face tightened, he thought of the funeral pyre. Of the dream that had woken him up.
This was the sensation he had. Exactly the sensation he’d had.
As he forced his way forward, his mind played tricks on him. Sometimes what was ahead was the fire in the rooming house. Sometimes it was the fire Selena was calling him from.
Either way, he had the bizarre sense that he was trying to save both of his females.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Therese had known heat before: Steamy August nights when there hadn’t been any air-conditioning or breeze in her parents’ house. Fevers from the occasional virus to which vampires were susceptible. Hearths that were over-enthusiastic, and also the hot flashes associated with her needing.
Nothing came close to this.
As she lay facedown on the hallway’s worn runner, her hands cupped around her mouth and nose, her head tucked in against her collarbones, her breathing labored and wheezy in between coughing spells, she felt like she was in an oven. There was no sweating, even. That had stopped a while ago. She was crisping on the outside, her skin crackling up… her muscles cooking on the inside.
This is how I die? she kept thinking. This is it?
In Caldwell, in a shitty rooming house, on a cold night in December, in a fire?
Determined not to have that fate be what separated her from her