“Yeah. Magical accelerant. Worse than anything I’ve ever encountered before, too. It fought me like a living thing.”
The exhausted night-shift men and women around the room nodded and made sounds of agreement.
“The fire just didn’t act right. The air currents didn’t affect it in a normal way,” Sean improvised, when it became clear that Castilho had nothing else to say. “The smell was wrong, too. Whatever or whoever set this fire didn’t even try to hide the fact that he used magic.”
“The burn patterns were wrong, too,” Ledbetter interjected grudgingly, as if he hated to agree with anything Sean said. “The electronic accelerant detector came up with nothing. Even the dogs—nothing. Nada. Zip.”
That didn’t make sense.
“You used the hellfire hounds?”
The chief shook his head. “No, O’Malley, we couldn’t use them. They were on loan from Demon Rift, and they went back yesterday. I’m trying to borrow them again, but considering they’re the only mated pair of hellfire hounds known to exist, the demons are understandably reluctant to let them out of their sight until the hounds throw their first litter.”
Sean nodded. He understood but hated to hear it. Hellfire hounds were the best in the world at detecting fire starters and tracking them down, but even they had been thrown off at the first three sites. There’d been something fascinating about watching the powerful dogs race around and around the sites, but fascination had turned to empathy as the hounds grew more and more frustrated until they finally surrendered and sat down next to the truck, whimpering.
“The arson investigators are out there now, interviewing everybody and doing their best to discover motive, means, or opportunity,” Ledbetter continued. “But we all know that motive is usually just sheer crazy in cases like this.”
“We need to find him,” Sean said, seeing that baby in his mind. “What if we don’t get to the next fire in time?”
The chief’s face hardened and, for a moment, Sean saw the shadow of the firefighter the man had been before his internal politician took over. “All available resources are focused on this case, as of right now. Anything else is cancelled. All nonemergency leave is revoked.”
There were a couple of halfhearted groans, but nobody made any real protest. They were all focused on the same goal; it’s why they’d become firefighters in the first place.
“Pyromania plus pretty strong magical ability,” Sean said. “A match made in hell.”
After that, the meeting broke up, and everybody who’d worked the night shift headed out to get some sleep. Castilho stopped Sean with a look, and the witch nodded toward an empty corner of the room.
Sean ambled over to meet him, but before he could say a word, Castilho turned around and pretended to study a poster on protective eyewear.
“Look, I don’t have any evidence of this, so I didn’t want to put it out there,” Castilho said quietly. “But since you mentioned the magic, I’m going to tell you what I suspect. I know it’s going to sound crazy, because we haven’t seen one around Bordertown in years, but I’m worried that there might be a fire demon behind this. They’re all insane, and they have the ability to set fires magically.”
Sean’s gut clenched, and he schooled his face to impassivity. “I don’t—”
Castilho glanced around, as if to make sure nobody was near enough to overhear. “Hey, I know it sounds nuts. I know it’s all just rumors, but that’s my hunch, and I wanted to tell somebody.”
Before Sean could say a word, Castilho laughed a little too loudly and then clapped Sean on the shoulder.
“You’re a riot, man. Smokey Bear walked into a bar. Too much,” the witch said, grinning at the two guys standing across the room at the coffeepot as if he and Sean had just shared a great joke.
“Yeah, I’m a riot,” Sean muttered, watching Castilho.
The witch suspected a fire demon. Of course he did. After all, everybody knew that fire demons were evil—devils incarnate, right? It was why the O’Malleys had kept their secret all these years. Sean was half fire demon, and his secret identity might even make him the prime suspect, if anybody found out about it.
Now he just had to make sure that nobody did.
* * *
When Sean arrived at his mom’s house, Liam was walking down the steps from the front porch, frowning so hard that Sean could almost hear his brother’s teeth grinding. The thunderous expression on Liam’s face was the same one that often reduced even the most belligerent drunks at O’Malley’s into submission.
“Didn’t you buy a new car yet?” Liam said, all but growling as he studied Sean’s latest piece-of-crap ride.
“No point, since they all wind up smelling like smoke, but I’ve told you that before, so why don’t you let me in on what’s really pissing you off?” Sean shoved his hands in his pockets to avoid the temptation to smack his brother in the head. Funny how the childhood roles always came back so easily at this house.
He rocked back on his heels and stared up at the pleasant front of the old Colonial. They’d grown up here, the house always full of the sounds and smells of boys. Shouts and laughter, grass-stained and mud-spattered sports uniforms. The O’Malley boys had been a formidable force on the neighborhood baseball and football teams, always ready for a pickup game, not so great about doing homework on time, except for Yeats, who’d been the studious one.
Through their childhoods and the turbulent teen years, his mother had been the center of the home, dispensing hugs, chocolate-chip cookies, and wisdom as needed. Even after their dad died, when Sean, the baby, had been only eight and Liam, the oldest, had been fourteen, she’d never faltered—or at least never where the boys could see it. She’d been strong enough for all of them, even managing to tame Blake’s wild rebellion because she’d been able to see the pain where nobody else could see anything but the anger.
She was the strongest woman Sean had ever known, and now her boys needed to be strong enough for her.