Zach, the closest thing to a friend Sean had on the crew, planted himself in front of Sean, blocking his path to the door.
“Not this time,” Zach shouted.
They had to be loud to be heard over the roar of the flames that were greedily consuming the old building. Too much rotten wood, too little upkeep—it would be easy to blame that, if this hadn’t been the fourth building in as many nights hit in exactly the same way. They had a serial arsonist on their hands.
“I heard a baby. Get out of my way, or I’ll go through you,” Sean said, deadly calm and deadly serious.
He didn’t have time to delay. There was no way he was taking a chance on giving up on a baby who needed him. Not now and not ever—not ever, but especially not today, after his mom’s bombshell.
Zach was a couple of inches over six feet tall, but Sean was bigger by a few inches and probably by forty pounds of muscle, not to mention his extra abilities. Zach didn’t hesitate; he moved out of Sean’s way, fast, as soon as he heard the word baby. None of them understood how Sean could hear things that nobody else could, but they knew it was true. Enhanced hearing was one of his super powers, they liked to joke.
They also all knew that he could withstand temperatures that would have fried most of them alive. They didn’t joke about that one. He’d caught more than one of his colleagues watching him warily after they’d fought fires, their expressions similar to how he imagined he’d watch a feral wolf. They weren’t all that far off.
They knew he was different, but they didn’t know how different. Sean didn’t tell anybody he was half fire demon. Life was easier that way. Even in Bordertown, where demons were as common as low-caste Fae or shady humans, fire demons were considered to be the worst of the worst: crazed berserkers and the most terrifying of predators. His abilities already isolated him enough from the rest of the tightly knit crew. He didn’t need to add to it.
All of this ran through his mind in the few seconds it took for him to hit the building doorway running. He burst into the conflagration, head down and racing for the spot where the sound had originated. Second floor, to the left. He barely paused at the staircase, but the view was enough to make a sane man flinch. A roaring wall of orange-red flame screamed toward him, and the heat knocked him back a couple of steps. His skin felt the heat, even under his suit, and when the fabric started to melt off his body, he discovered that his protective gear wasn’t rated anywhere near high enough.
Whatever accelerant the arsonist had used wasn’t purely chemical; no way would a normal fire be burning that hot. Magic was involved here. In fact, it would take black magic to push a fire to these levels. Sean could feel his eyes flaring as his pupils contracted, and he knew that anybody watching him would see the irises turn deep blood orange in color and start to glow.
Sean analyzed the situation for options, but the stairs were the only way up; no matter that the stairwell was a tunnel of flame and probably going to explode any minute. He took them four at a time, barely clearing the last one before the explosion hit and the stairs collapsed into a burning mass of tinder. He glanced back at the fiery pit at the bottom of the stairwell and grimaced, and a falling chunk of ceiling smashed down on his helmet, nearly knocking him on his ass.
He stood there, head ringing and skull vibrating, and realized that one of these days he was going to kill himself trying to act like a big damn hero.
But not today.
The sound came again, and he still wasn’t sure. Wounded animals sometimes sounded a lot like babies. It could go either way. But he’d come this far, and he’d be damned if he’d leave anybody behind. He took the first door across the hall to the left, unerringly finding the source of the sound. The front room of the apartment, cheaply furnished but neat and tidy, was only beginning to burn, and he had a moment to hope that the bedrooms were in good shape before he hit the closed inner door running. Two seconds later, about a hundred pounds of shaggy black fur smashed into his chest.
Sean barely stayed on his feet. There had been a lot of power behind that furry projectile. The beast hit the floor and immediately clamped its powerful jaws around Sean’s ankle and pulled, hard. The pink collar on her neck proclaimed that the creature was named Petunia.
“Okay, Petunia, hang on,” Sean said, using his most soothing voice, but the dog’s whining increased in both pitch and volume, and she pulled even harder, trying to move Sean over to the corner of the room.
There was a crib, or bassinette, or whatever the hell people called the small, lace-draped wooden cradle tucked against the corner of the room. He heard the crying again, and it was definitely coming from the crib.
“I got him, girl,” Sean told Petunia.
She seemed to understand, since she let go of Sean’s ankle immediately and stood there, panting and making deep coughing noises. Smoke inhalation could damage dogs’ lungs, too, and Sean made a mental note to have the dog looked at when they got out of there. A crash sounded in the apartment’s front room, and he amended the thought.
If they got out of there.
The baby turned her startled, reddened eyes up to Sean in the instant before he swept her into his arms, and then she waved one pink-pajama’d arm at him and gurgled.
“We’re out of here, princess,” he told her, and then he picked up the room’s only chair, a wooden rocking chair, and hurled it at the window while shielding the infant.
The glass shattered outward, as planned, and Sean crossed the room and looked out. A jump from the second story was an easy one for him to make with fire-demon strength, especially only carrying a tiny baby instead of a large, screaming adult—which he’d had to do before—so he had this one in the bag.
No sweat.
And then the dog barked, reminding Sean that Petunia was not going to make it out alive on her own. He shook his head, impatient with his stupidity. His mother’s news had been blanking out everything else on his mind, and he knew better than most that distraction could be fatal at a time like this.
Sean looked down at the dog’s hopeful face, hesitantly wagging tail, and big, brown eyes. Petunia had stayed in that room to protect her precious charge, and she’d even pulled a Lassie on Sean’s leg to get him to find the baby.
Screw the rules. There was no way in hell he was going to leave that dog to burn to death.
“You’re going to have to trust me, girl,” he said, crouching down in front of the dog, but keeping an ear out for the shift in sound that would tell him that the entire apartment was about to collapse. He could somehow feel in his bones that the fire was about to take the whole thing down.
The dog’s big eyes looked worried, but she lifted one paw as if to shake, and Sean took that for a yes. He lifted her into the arm that wasn’t full of baby, took a running leap for the window, and leapt out into the comparatively cool darkness of the autumn night.
Within the next five minutes, he’d reunited the baby with her mother, who’d been missing because she’d run down to the building’s laundry room while her child was napping. The exploding water heater had shaken debris loose from the basement’s walls and ceiling, and a big chunk of something had hit the woman and knocked her out. Zach had knocked the debris off her and scooped her up, and by the time they roused her to consciousness, the EMTs were administering oxygen to her baby right next to her, so she’d never had to suffer even a moment’s fear that her child was dead. Petunia, also wearing an oxygen mask and getting checked out, was frantically trying to wrap her furry body around her entire small family all at once.