Page 8 of Sold Rejected Mate
“Engine One?”
“We can hear you,” Xeran says, grabbing the handset. “What’s up?”
“Looks like a structure fire at the Silverville Motel on Route 34. Possible entrapment.”
My heart stops—possible entrapment? Someone—or potentially many people—stuck inside?
“Xer,” I say, leaning forward, but he can’t hear me over the roar of the engine. I’ll have to tell him later about the scent I caught while we were there. Slightly minty, with the unmistakable scent of a Sorel. He will want to know about his brothers being there before a fire like this.
“Copy, dispatch!” Xeran shouts into the radio. “Engine One responding.”
Right now, we’re Silverville’sonlyengine. And it helps that we’re already on the way to the motel, already barreling down the road toward the fire.
My muscles protest at the idea of fighting another fire, exhaustion weighing on me. My limbs feel like lead as we swing into the lot from the four hours we just spent fighting the wild daemon fire.
Felix nearly lost one of his eyebrows from that tree exploding, and Kalen came back with some sort of gnarly cut on his arm, already bandaged up.
But it doesn’t matter. Someone is trapped—someone could be dying.
We force ourselves out of the truck when we get to the parking lot. The motel has always been a fixture on the edge of town. A landmark, and nothing more than that. The kind of place that rents rooms by the hour and doesn’t ask questions about it.
The kind of place I’ve never had any reason to patronize. I have a fine enough time bringing women back to my own bed—king-sized, with good heating and cooling and a thousand-count sheets.
As we near the building, I realize the entire east wing is engulfed in flames, shooting up into the night sky and licking at the second-story windows with a hungry intensity.
I’m already pulling on my mask, checking my air pressure. The heat hits us, a wall of superheated air that makes my turnout gear feel like tissue paper. It’s a good thing we have the engine equipped with both an extinguisherandwater, because this one is going to need the water.
Even from here, I can make out the sound of people crying out, needing help.
“Gods,” Soren says, breathing hard beside me, sounding like he needs a shot from his inhaler. “That’s moving fast.”
Reallyfucking fast. I may mostly fight daemon fire, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know what normal flames look like. Even though this one isn’t tipped with blue, there’s still something unnerving about it. Unnatural.
As we cross, one of the windows blows out, and I pounce, taking Soren down so he’s not rained on with the glass.
“Thanks,” he practically wheezes. “Now get the fuck off me, man.”
I get to my feet, pull him, and follow Xeran into the flames. Kalen and Felix hang back, working on getting the hose out so they can spray the fire while we run in to save people. Xeran calls for us to turn right, to start killing the fire from the other side, but something calls me a different way.
That same tug I felt in my gut earlier. The urge to move. Something is drawing me in.
“Cambias!” Xeran shouts through the comms, his voice muffled through the mask. “Primary search on the first floor!”
I should listen to him—in fact, I’m biologically programmed to, with him as my alpha supreme. But there’s something stronger than that pulling me to the end of the walkway, to the very last door bordering an aspen—which, for some reason, has yet to catch fire.
“Cambias!” Xeran calls as Soren says through our comms, “Temperature is spiking! Reading eight hundred degrees at ceiling level!”
Room 214 is locked, but that doesn’t stop me. There’s heat distortion around the frame, but an itching, clawing, ripping sensation inside me demands that I get through the door. I should use my halligan to get through, should follow the proper procedure, but I don’t.
Instead, I drop my shoulder the old-fashioned way, the wood exploding into splinters as I drive in.
Smoke billows out and toward me when I make it through, and I drop to my knees, crawling forward. Human firefighters might use a thermal camera for something like this, but luckily, my senses are heightened, and I’m able to see much further through the smoke.
“Got someone!” I shout, seeing something in the corner of the room. A woman, sitting in a chair, her head slumped forward. “Victim down!”
I’m army-crawling across the carpet, which has started to get sticky, the plastic in the fabric heating and melting rather than burning the way cotton might. My knees grind against debris and glass as I breathe hard and make my way to her, that thing in my gut propelling me forward.
I’ve only felt something like this before around one other person, and my heart thumps with anticipation.
