She repeated the address.
It was Brynn’s house.
He pulled out his phone and started running.
“Scruffy’s Pet Spa,” he snapped, and the computer handling information repeated the name and then connected him to a phone that rang and rang, six long rings, before the voicemail picked up and informed him that Brynn had gone home for the night.
She’d never reset her message today.
She wasn’t answering the phone.
She might be in that house.
He ran faster.
* * *
Sean arrived before the truck and crew, and he was still too late. Brynn’s tiny house was an inferno, and there was no way anyone could possibly be alive inside. He threw back his head and roared out his anguish and rage, and the heritage he’d spent so long denying rushed to answer his call.
Every inch of the surface of Sean’s body blazed into flame. The fire was so intense and the temperature so high that his clothes and the gear he’d managed to don instantly disintegrated into ash. Unexpectedly, the fire didn’t hurt him at all; not that he would even have felt the physical pain. The neighbors and other mindless looky-loos who always gathered at fires started screaming and running, probably to get away from the terrifying fire demon, but Sean didn’t give a damn about any of it.
Not that he’d outed himself, not that he was scaring the populace, not that he didn’t know if he’d survive what he was about to do. He hit the front of her house running and used his body as a battering ram to hurl himself through the front windows, not bothering with the door. He expected the lash of back draft that hit him, hard, but it didn’t matter. None of it mattered.
No fire could compete with the blazing heat of a fire demon.
He shouted her name, over and over, but heard nothing in response except the roar of the fire. The magically created fire.
The arsonist had struck again, and this time he’d made it personal.
Sean crashed through crumbling, fire-engulfed walls until he reached the black and ruined hull of the kitchen that he’d sat in only hours before, promising Brynn that they’d find a way to be together.
Now she was gone, and the fiery monster who was all that was left of Sean could feel nothing but agony.
Could want nothing but revenge.
He finally stumbled out of the inferno. She wasn’t here. There hadn’t been any evidence of a . . . body.
Brynn hadn’t been in the house.
Castilho was on the lawn, using his magic to combat the blaze. He saw Sean burst out of the house in full fire-demon mode and flinched, but to his credit he didn’t back away.
“Sean. Is that you? What the hell? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Sean slowly approached, unsure of his new abilities—he had no idea how close he could get to a human being without setting the person on fire.
“Didn’t want you to fear me,” he told the witch, whose eyes widened when he heard Sean’s voice coming from the demon’s mouth.
“Well, hell, if you’re a fire demon, then they can’t be all bad, can they?” Castilho grinned at him, and then turned his full attention back to the complicated magic he was working to help contain and extinguish the fire.
Sean didn’t know how to react to the man’s easy acceptance and, what’s more, he didn’t really care. He had to find Brynn.
Sue came running across the lawn, waving her phone at him. “Sean, it’s Zach. He says he needs to talk to you.”
He snarled at her. “No time. Have to find Brynn.”
Sue was paler than he’d ever seen her, and he’d been shoulder to shoulder with the veteran firefighter when she’d battled the worst of the worst blazes.
“You don’t understand, Sean. Zach says he has Brynn Carroll, and if you don’t show up within ten minutes, he’s going to set her on fire.”