“Good job, girl,” Sean murmured, tipping a salute to the canine heroine before he moved on.
As always, he wanted to be sure to disappear before the thank-yous started and the media showed up. Bordertown’s lead crime reporter, Jax Archer, was a disgraced Fae lordling who just happened to be a living, breathing lie detector, so Sean preferred to stay out of his way. Sean’s old fire chief had gone along with his disappearing acts, mostly because Sean worked more hours than anybody else in the department.
The new chief wasn’t clued in yet.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” the chief shouted at him, crossing behind the hoses toward Sean while everyone else, exhausted but on the alert, watched the powerful streams of water battle the raging, magically created fire.
Sean noted that the department’s witch had arrived at some point, and he was now adding his efforts to the mix. Good thing, too, because water alone wasn’t going to stop that beast.
“Avoiding reporters,” Sean said bluntly, too tired and worried to care about playing nice with the new boss, who was turning out to be quite an ass**le.
One of the reporters Sean could actually tolerate picked that moment to round the corner behind the truck and, spotting Sean, she headed straight for him, her cameraman racing to keep up with her.
“Pierce Holland, Bordertown Gazette,” she said unnecessarily, thrusting her microphone in Sean’s face.
“I know who you are, Pierce,” Sean said, but the reporter kept her game face on.
“You know the drill, O’Malley. Intro for the viewers, all hail the courageous firefighter, et cetera, et cetera,” she said, lowering her microphone and grinning while the cameraman checked something on his lens.
“I’m good,” the man said.
Instantly, the reporter’s smile vanished and she assumed the somber air of Reporter with Serious News, as Sean thought of it. The still-burning flames cast dancing shadows across their little tableau that patterned Holland’s face in a harlequin’s motley of black and orange, and for a moment Sean’s grandmother’s voice rang in his head, talking about a goose walking over his grave.
“Do we know what caused tonight’s fire? Also, I heard you brought out a baby and a dog after everybody else evacuated, O’Malley. Care to comment?”
The chief, winded and red-faced, rushed up then. A less charitable man might have thought he timed his arrival with the moment the camera turned on. Sean decided he wasn’t all that charitable.
“I don’t think you’ve met the new chief, have you, Pierce? He was the one who convinced me to go back in for that baby,” Sean said, lying through his teeth. He pounded his boss on the back, only a little too hard. “Excellent instincts, this guy. Going to make a great chief.”
The chief’s eyes widened, but before either he or Pierce could say another word, Sean smiled at them and ducked behind the truck. By the time his overactive hearing picked up the beginning of the chief’s response to the reporter, Sean was a block away and moving fast, stripping off his gear as he walked.
Another couple of blocks, and he made it to Black Swan Fountain Square, his favorite place for relaxation and quiet contemplation in the middle of the night. There wasn’t much room in the rest of his life for peace or quiet. The family business, O’Malley’s Pub, was always full of loud talk, laughter, music, and merriment.
It was enough to piss a man off.
Especially when he was sick with worry about his mother’s unexplained “little tests,” which had left her drained, weak, and nauseous for more than three weeks now. They knew about her cancer, but when he’d dropped by that afternoon, she’d refused to give him any specifics about the latest issue. So Sean had been having a bad damn day even before his fire station had gotten the call that the arsonist had struck again.
He stared blindly at the black marble sculpture of the beautiful young woman and the swan in the center of the fountain, so tired that he didn’t pay much attention to the actual live swan floating serenely in the water until the second time it came around. When he did notice it, he blinked, and then a flurry of movement in the water boiled up into a cloud of sparkling mist that he hadn’t been expecting, Bordertown or no. So he figured he could be excused for rubbing his smoke-wearied eyes when the iridescent shimmer dissipated, and the bird flapping its wings in the swan fountain turned into a beautiful woman.
A beautiful naked woman.
Maybe that hit he’d taken to the head had been harder than he’d thought, and now he was hallucinating. Except he didn’t have the luxury of that belief for more than a few seconds, because the hallucination started talking to him.
“Really? Are you just going to sit there and stare at me?”
“Well, I was here first, before you turned naked, ah, turned human. I mean, you didn’t—”
“Right. Chivalry. Dead. Insert appropriate cliché.” She pushed her long masses of dark curls out of her face and stalked over to him, not the least bit embarrassed that she was incredibly and gloriously naked. When she crouched down next to him, his breath got stuck in his lungs in a way that had nothing to do with fire but everything to do with heat.
She glanced up at him while reaching under the bench with one hand, and some of what he was feeling must have shown on his face, because she grinned.
“Relax, hot stuff. I’m just getting my clothes.”
TWO
Brynn raised her backpack to show him she had a purpose under that bench and wasn’t trying to pounce on him, and then she walked a few feet away, ducked behind a large flowering bush, and yanked on her clothes. After that, she stopped to hyperventilate a little bit, because he’d seen her transform. Catching her naked wasn’t nearly as worrying as catching her turning human, because this was Bordertown, and sometimes people who were different enough found themselves sold on the black market to collectors.
This guy, though, he’d seen her, and now she had to wonder why it was that she hadn’t noticed him sitting there, when she was usually so very careful, why the moon magic hadn’t shielded her from his view, and what the consequences might be. The only clue offering her even a little rational thought was the BTFD fire helmet sitting on top of a pile of what looked like firefighter gear next to him. Even she, self-proclaimed hermit that she was, knew the insignia of the Bordertown Fire Department. Maybe he was one of the good guys.