CHAPTER ONE
When it came to Melissa Mun’s job, it was not always glamorous. But she was alright with it, on the whole. She was only twenty-three. She hadn’t been at it for that long, so of course she still got the grimy grunt work. She understood that, and on most days, she was more than okay with that. Grimy or not, she understood that she was still doing good work, work that would help the world, even if her mark on the world would likely never amount to much. And she was alright with that too. If she had been after glamor or glory, she would have gone into a very different job field.
Even so, sliding around in the mud in the woods, trying to catch a pair of toads was not exactly her idea of a good time. It would be worth it, though. They were endangered, and while the breeding program at the local zoo was doing reasonably well, they needed more breeding options in order to make sure their gene pool didn’t get too shallow. So, if that meant they needed two new toads, then Melissa could do that, and gladly.
Be it something as majestic as a cheetah, as slimy as a toad, or as seemingly insignificant as a beetle, every species deserved a chance to thrive, especially when it was humans putting them in a bind in the first place.
The first toad was scooped up and plopped into a custom-made travel carrier without much issue. The second toad, however, was a wily and elusive little bastard, and Melissa was rapidly getting filthy as she tried to catch it, her pale skin streaked with mud and grime. Though she had done her best to pin her hair up on top of her head and tie a bandana over it, she knew she was most likely going to be combing stray flecks of dried muck out of it for days.
Almond-shaped brown eyes narrowed in concentration as she crept forward, net at the ready, only to grind to a halt with a groan as the toad disappeared into a hollow in the ground. It would have been so much easier if she had been sent to do this just a few weeks earlier, before the
vernal pond had dried into a sucking mud pit. But, she would prevail!
That was about the direction her thoughts were going in when she first smelled smoke. She didn’t think much of it at first, considering the smell wasn’t that strong. There was a camp ground not too far off, and they weren’t in the middle of a drought or anything like that, so the rangers were reasonably lax on policing the campers’ campfires. If a bonfire got a bit bigger than expected, then it wouldn’t be too much of a logical leap to assume that the smoke would drift.
So, she ignored it for the most part. She had more important things to worry about. Like
catching the second godforsaken toad. Melissa had grime up to her knees and elbows and even streaked across her face from when she shoved a loose strand of hair out of her face, and her mood was rapidly traveling south. Even her glasses looked more brown than green just then.
So, it was with a loud, slightly breathless, “Gotcha!” that she caught the second toad, scooping it up with her net. As she looked up from the mud, she realized that everything seemed considerably dimmer, and the smoke around her was thick enough to choke an elk. Melissa waved a hand in front of her face and squinted through the haze. Though the smoke was gradually getting thicker, she could still make out the direction she had originally come from.
Hastily, she dropped the second toad into the second travel carrier. She left most of her
equipment behind, in favor of picking up the two carriers and taking off at a jog, far less encumbered and far timelier than she would have been if she had paused to gather up her equipment before leaving. It was all replaceable. Given that her job that day didn’t consist of anything more advanced that “grab toads, bring toads to zoo” most of the equipment wouldn’t be particularly expensive to replace. And it would all be far more easily replaced than
replacing the toads or Melissa herself.
Of course, that was assuming she made it out of the woods to replace any of it. The smoke was only getting thicker, and for a moment, she berated herself for not setting up a line to guide her way out, before she reminded herself that the weather had been mild, it wasn’t particularly dry and it wouldn’t snow for weeks, so why would it have even crossed her mind to set up a guideline?
But considering all that, how had a fire managed to spread so quickly? How had one of such a size even cropped up? It wasn’t the right weather. If they had been stuck in the middle of a drought or a heat wave, she would have understood, but the weather was as mild as Melissa could recall it ever being.
But she could ponder that later, at a more opportune moment.
She coughed and started moving more quickly, but by that point, it was getting harder and harder to tell if she was still going in the right direction or if she had gotten turned around and started going in circles. She slowed to a halt and squinted through the haze, but all she saw were the
indistinct silhouettes of tree trunks. Stopping wasn’t going to help her. It was just going to mean the fire would sweep her up even if she was going in the right direction.
She set the carriers down, pulled her bandana from the top of her head, and tied it over the lower half of her face. With that done, she scooped the carriers up again and broke into a jog once more. She didn’t know where she was going, but she wasn’t going to just sit down in the dirt and give up.
She hugged the carriers closer to her chest and sped up, slowing every so often only to see if she could tell which direction the smoke was traveling in. It was a lost cause, more often than not, as the smoke only got thicker and thicker, until it seemed more like she was walking into a greyish beige wall than it seemed like it was closing in on her from every direction.
It was when sparks and embers started blowing past her face every so often that she started to think “alright, this is it. I’m a goner.” Even then, she kept moving, her head low as she coughed into her bandana. If she laid down and died, it was damn well going to be
because the fire had engulfed her and not because she gave up.
She tightened her grip on the toads’ travel carriers, almost like one might latch onto a security blanket. She supposed it wasn’t far off just then. They were all she had to ground herself to reality; she had to latch onto them to keep herself calm, and she was going to use every tool in her arsenal if it kept her from curling up into a weeping ball in the dirt.
The smoke was only getting thicker, and it was only sheer stubbornness and determination that kept her going, even when the air was thick enough that she was nearly jogging into trees. She was strangely glad that her hold on the carriers would double as a cushion for when she inevitably did plow right into a tree, to keep the toads from getting jostled too much.
(They were going to die along with her, and she knew she should let them go so they might at least have a chance at getting through the fire alive, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She knew if she stopped and let them go, if she didn’t have their well-being to focus on, if she wasn’t determined to get them out of the woods alive, then she may very well just lie down in the dirt and wait for the ash to cover her, like her own miniature version of Pompeii. Maybe it was selfish, but she needed those two little toads just then.)
Sweat dripped into her eyes, and she blinked it away. She couldn’t free up a hand or she would drop her toads.
Just a little farther, she told herself. If she just kept repeating it in her head, eventually it might even be true. Never mind that she had probably been going in circles the entire time. She half
expected to stumble over the same dried-out vernal pond where she had started.
*
When she almost walked into a bear, she was startled, but she couldn’t say she was surprised. They weren’t exactly a rarity in the area. And then, she realized it was about twice the size of any other black bear she had ever seen. It regarded her with brown eyes that seemed disconcertingly intelligent, and if it was at all nervous about her, it showed no signs of it.
Melissa couldn’t really blame it. Given everything else going on, her 4’11.5” frame (yes, that last half of an inch was incredibly important) most likely didn’t inspire much fear. All in all, the bear probably should have been inspiring some amount of fear, but Melissa was too tired, frazzled, and focused on just breathing to feel more than some fuzzy confusion as it regarded her placidly. It wasn’t acting very much like a bear, and it wasn’t running in a panic like every other animal Melissa had stumbled past since the smoke started to thicken.
Maybe she was hallucinating.
With a very deliberate air, the bear turned and began to trot away at a purposeful speed. It glanced back at her once, peering at her over its shoulder, and while she could admit that it seemed a little odd, that wasn’t at the forefront of her thoughts just then. Instead, it occurred to her that the bear likely knew where it was going a whole hell of a lot better than Melissa did.
She adjusted her hold on her travel carriers, shifting them to a more comfortable grip so they didn’t feel like they were in danger of sliding out of her hands at a moment’s notice, and then she broke into a jog in the bear’s wake. If the bear was headed for clear air, just like Melissa was, then it was probably going to have better luck than she was. And if she was hallucinating, well, at least it was better than just standing numbly and waiting to burn.
She kept up her pace, following in the bear’s almost suspiciously leisurely wake, as if it was making a conscious effort not to leave her behind. She was pretty sure that couldn’t really be the case, though. It was a bear. A freakishly large bear, but a bear nonetheless. She supposed it could have been tired. It could have been bolting from the fire for a while by the time Melissa nearly ran into it.
It made about as much sense as any other explanation, and just then she wasn’t too inclined to think too hard about it.
With each second, her throat felt tighter. Her eyes were watering, her chest hurt, and as she followed the bear through the trees, she silently tried to recall all of the details of smoke inhalation. It wasn’t great for morale just then, as her footsteps faltered as she coughed like she was trying to throw up her own trachea.
Adrenaline was a hell of a thing, though, and it did a mightily impressive job at keeping her upright and moving forward at a steady speed, one foot in front of the next foot. She could hardly see anything save for the bear’s outline, wobbling and hazy in the smoke, but that was all she needed.
She just had to keep moving.
As she followed the bear, she expected it to lead her out of the woods and into the middle of nowhere. It would make sense, after all. Its only priority was getting away from the fire. Or at least, that was what Melissa thought. It was a bear, after all. Larger than any black bear she had ever seen, but it was damp, food was plentiful, and the breeding season had been fruitful, to say the least.
But as the trees steadily thinned, tapering gradually into gently rolling grasslands, she could hear something in the distance that most definitely didn’t sound like the roar of a raging fire, and she could see lights dimly through the smoke that were too regular and too red to be the flames.
When at last she stumbled out of the woods and onto clear, unobstructed grassland, there were people in every direction. The noises were the sounds of firefighters shouting to each other and the rhythmic thrumming of a helicopter’s propellers in the air above them. She heard the static of a radio, and a man nearby was talking into one, though Melissa wasn’t close enough to make out what he said, just that he sounded very decisive. At least not until he leaned away from his radio and shouted at the top of his lungs to everyone present, “Drop!”
Above them, the helicopter unleashed a torrent of water over the trees and continued on its way. Melissa’s ears rang, and her head pounded in time with the sound of its propellers spinning.
There were people in every direction doing too many things to keep track of. She was distracted for a moment by a firefighter gesturing broadly into the grass in the direction that Melissa knew the nearest town was in. She caught the words ‘back burning,’ and it took Melissa a moment to realize that she had lost track of the bear. She turned in a circle, and the world spun around her. Finally, she spotted it lumbering away towards a truck. Slowly, she wobbled after it, squinting as it moved behind the truck like it was supposed to be there.
By the time she was close enough to see around the other side of the truck, there was no bear there, but a man, tall and broad and tan, with muscles toned by hard work and short, wavy
auburn hair made pale with ash. He was streaked with sweat and grime, and entirely naked. The bear was nowhere to be seen. As if it had never been there. As if only the man had ever been there.
Melissa felt a little lightheaded as the implications struck her. She took an unsteady step forward, and then a thickly gloved hand closed around her elbow and began to tow her away, in a different direction. The firefighter was indeterminable behind all of his gear, but he was leading her
towards an ambulance. An EMT met them halfway there and helped her the rest of the way, until she was sitting in the back of the ambulance, its doors open and her legs hanging towards the ground. I am not tall, she reflected to herself, watching the way her shadow moved as her legs dangled over the grass. If I was tall, I would be able to put my feet on the ground.
She had an oxygen mask over her face, and the discontented toads in their carriers were sitting next to her. The EMT was asking her a series of yes or no questions, urging her to answer just by shaking or nodding her head. She appreciated it. Her throat sort of felt like someone had taken a cheese grater to it. She didn’t even need to say anything when he asked a question requiring a non-positive-or-negative answer, as she simply pulled her wallet out of her pocket and let him see her identification.
The world was sort of wobbling in six directions at that point and Melissa was pretty sure there was a very high probability of her throwing up. So as curious as she was about the mystery bear, for the time being, she was content to be loaded into the ambulance with her oxygen mask and her toads.
*
When the alarm sounded, it was time to suit up and pile into the truck because a forest fire had broken out and begun to rage far too quickly for it to be normal. It was beyond the possibility of just peacefully dying down (and only just barely possible if it wasn’t being helped along). Mitchell McConnell sort of wanted to bash his forehead against a wall.
It was the third time in the last few weeks that a fire like this had started up. The weather wasn’t the culprit. The season had been mild and soggy, and while lightning strikes were certainly a possibility, given the current weather, it was more likely that any struck trees would smolder and go out on their own in the rain.
They suspected arson, but given the ground the blazes had been covering, finding a starting point wasn’t exactly easy, which meant finding any possible tools left behind was next to impossible.
It was weird. There were more professional ways to describe it, of course, but that didn’t make it any less true. Looking back over all of his thirty years, he was pretty sure that “spontaneous combustion of the local ecosystem” was a new one.
Mitch had his own suspicions about what was causing it, but it wasn’t exactly one he could go public with. No one would believe him, and there was a high probability of someone wanting to kill him if he brought it up.
He wanted to bash his head against a wall, since it sort of felt like that’s what his department’s efforts were boiling down to already. That was not what he did, though. Instead, he…well, he suited up and piled into the truck, and it careened down the street, its lights flashing and its siren wailing.
By the time they got there, the air was thick with smoke. There were three other trucks, and someone was already on the radio with a helicopter pilot to douse the area.
The campground had been cleared by the rangers as soon as the smoke became noticeable. The rangers weren’t stupid; they had noticed the rash of unexpected, unexplained fires just as well as everyone else had.
Mitch was sort of hoping that would be all there was to worry about, at least as far as human
casualties were concerned. But alas, nothing was ever that easy.
A ranger reported that a conservationist affiliated with one of the local zoos had breezed through that afternoon, and she hadn’t breezed back out.
As soon as they got that news, it seemed like all eyes were on Mitch. All eyes from his own
department, at least.
He sighed out a slow breath and disappeared behind a truck to shuck his gear, a few of the people he worked with making sure everyone else stayed very well distracted from what he was doing.
Once he was nude, he transformed. It was like a ripple down his spine, a bit like
licking a battery with a penny in his mouth. A jolt and a shudder, and two legs became four. He gave himself a shake and shoved his gear under the truck, where it wouldn’t be noticed while everyone else was so distracted.
And then, he turned and set off across the grass at a ground-eating lope, disappearing into the woods.
He had thought the smell—harsh and burning and acrid—had been bad enough before, but as soon as he was in the comparatively tight, enclosed confines of the woods, it seemed to get about eight times worse.
He had wondered, in the past, what it might be like to be a different animal. But just then, even the idea of being a wolf—of having a canine sense of smell—was almost enough to make him gag. He shoved the thought aside, though. He had more important things to focus on. Someone’s life was on the line, and he was her best chance at being found.
*
It was luck when he found her trail. He could hardly even smell it through the smoke, but it was still there, faint and drifting. He followed it at a steady pace, massive paws squashing leaves and underbrush flat as he loped.
In an ironic turn of fate, she actually found him, as he followed her confused path in aimless, wandering circles. She’d started out in the right direction before she lost any ability to
recognize landmarks and instead resorted to simply moving in any viable direction.
She nearly walked straight into him. She took it rather well, all things considered. Mitch was pretty sure that almost literally walking into a bear was not something people did on a day-to-day basis, and she hardly even blinked when he turned to look at her.
Granted, behind her glasses, she had the slightly glassy, shell-shocked look of someone who had stopped fully thinking and was just moving because it was the only thing left to do. She was tiny—Mitch was 6’6” and he was pretty sure she would only come up to his chest if he had been in his human form—and she was pale and absolutely filthy.
If anything of her actual clothing still existed beneath the drying and flaking mud and the dingy smoke damage, then Mitch would be honestly impressed, and how she could even still see anything through her glasses was a mystery. She was clutching a pair of small, plastic tanks to her chest with a grip like a steel vise, all of the color gone from her knuckles. In each tank was a single befuddled toad, trying to climb the sides of the tanks to no avail.
He wasn’t sure why she was still carrying them, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. If he made an actual move towards her, it was entirely possible that she would simply bolt in terror, and neither of them had any time for that.
So, if she wanted to keep a hold on her toads, then that was none of his business. His business was to start moving back in the right direction, towards safety.
To the woman’s credit, she caught on pretty quickly and started following him immediately,
presumably under the assumption that a wild animal would know the way out of danger a hell of a lot better than she would. He kept up a steady pace, occasionally glancing back at her to make sure she was still following him or to make sure she wasn’t falling behind whenever she coughed. The smoke was thick and cloying, and every so often, he sneezed out what felt like soggy sand.
Being a were-dragon might have been nice, he supposed. Sure, they could be a bit belligerent sometimes, but they were fireproof, and they could fly. Granted, flying wasn’t great for subtlety, but they could also sprint a whole hell of a lot faster than a bear, so Mitch was pretty sure that would be a decent compromise.
Not that it really meant much. He was a bear, and there wasn’t exactly anything he could do to change that just because being something other than a bear would be more convenient at times.
When at last the trees began to thin, Mitch glanced over his shoulder long enough to make sure she was still following him, and then he put on an extra burst of speed.
By the time he burst out of the trees, she was no longer his concern. Even if she collapsed face first into the grass, he hadn’t been gone for that long, which meant the others from his department would know he had found her or else he would still be looking, and they would have her propped up in an ambulance before he could even finish putting his gear back on.
He slowed to a lumbering walk, glancing around at the reasonably organized chaos. There were people in every direction, and he could hear the helicopter circling above them. It had probably already made a water drop and was doubling back after refilling at the nearest lake.
He could hear some vague mumbling about back-burning, given their proximity to town, but he hoped it wouldn’t come to that. The odds of accidentally making things worse were too high for him to ever be comfortable with it, as necessary as it sometimes was.
If only the area was a bit drier and a bit less woody, they could just do some fuel reduction to try to make things a little less hellacious. But evidently, whatever was setting the fires was determined to make everything as inconvenient as possible. (Granted, a forest fire was probably pretty high up on the list of inconveniences, so he supposed he wasn’t surprised.)
He rounded the same truck he had stripped behind earlier and began pulling his gear back on. He had it down to something of a science, so he was dressed in all sixty pounds of gear in a matter of moments.
By the time he emerged from behind the truck again, the woman had been escorted to an ambulance and was well out of harm’s way, or as much as anyone could be out of harm’s way while a fire was still raging.
Mitch still had a lot of work to do.
*
It was late, and the sun had set by the time Mitch made it home again. He was filthy, and all he was looking forward to doing was taking a shower and falling into bed. The fire had been…more or less brought under control. It hadn’t gotten too close to town, and there hadn’t quite been a need to resort to back-burning in order to get it under control, which was always good, but that still left the matter of trying to figure out how it had started.
Fires didn’t just spring up out of nowhere; they didn’t just materialize out of clear skies and moderate weather. If nothing else, the weather did mean it was easier to get the strange rash of fires under control before they spread too far, but that was only minimally comforting if they just kept happening.
Mitch heaved a blustering, exasperated sigh as he shucked his clothing on the way to the bathroom, dragging a hand down his face as he went. In most cases, someone saying they had too much work to do was just an inconvenience; as a firefighter, having too much work to do could lead to disaster.
He tried to push it out of his thoughts for the time being as he started the shower, but he wasn’t having much luck. Maybe he was fixated. Maybe he was just very concerned with doing his job well. Maybe he was concerned about the people living in the area. Or maybe it was some combination of all of those possibilities. All of them led to the same outcome; he couldn’t stop thinking about it, gnawing the information over in his head.
Maybe it was vampires. They didn’t get along well with fire—few creatures burned more spectacularly than a vampire—but they always seemed to have a weird fascination with it all the same. (Mitch couldn’t deny, though, that if he suddenly became immortal, he would probably turn into a passive death seeker after a few centuries too.) Generally, in more controlled amounts, but a coterie of vampires setting fire to things en masse wasn’t unheard of. And given a vampire’s speed, strength, and other abilities, it would make sense for them to be able to do it without anyone noticing them and without leaving much, if any, evidence behind.
Granted, in order for no one to have noticed them, it would make more sense for there to be only one. True, it wouldn’t be impossible for a whole coterie to go unnoticed, but it did seem a little farfetched, and just one vampire would probably find it a touch difficult to set such large fires without any assistance.
Maybe vampires weren’t that likely. Not as likely as they could be, at any rate. Even considering all of that, assuming the fires weren’t being started by mortal means, then Mitch was still hoping for vampires over the other idea that had been nagging at him.
It wasn’t impossible for it to be a dragon. A were-dragon, at least. As far as Mitch was aware,
actual dragons were extinct. But while were-dragons were rare, they did still exist, and a were-dragon could breathe fire just as easily as regular dragons had once been able to. So, it was
entirely possible for it to be a were-dragon.
Mitch just didn’t really want that to be the case. Few things in the world could hope to stand up to a were-dragon if it was big enough. Oh, sure, most were-dragons tended to be on the smaller end of the scale when compared to actual dragons, but some were just as enormous as actual dragons had once been. If one of those was behind the fires, well, there wasn’t much anyone would be able to do.
Mitch only had so many friends that were anything other than human, and none of them could square up against a small dragon. A huge dragon would be out of the question. For the moment, Mitch was just going to be optimistic. Forcibly, if he had to be. Vampires, or steadily more and more unlikely mortal means.
He put on a pair of sweatpants once he was out of the shower, steam drifting out of the bathroom after him as he left the room. He stood in the hallway for a moment, debating between heading to the kitchen to have something for dinner, or just heading straight to bed and face-planting onto the mattress.
He pondered it for only a moment before he headed for his bedroom. He walked until his knees hit the edge of the bed, and from there, he simply let himself topple forwards onto the mattress. For a moment, he stayed right where he was, sprawled across the short end of the bed. Eventually, though, he squirmed around until he was oriented in the proper direction and his head was on his pillow. He pulled his blanket over himself and only just remembered to reach a hand out to turn his alarm on.
He fell asleep quickly that night, which wasn’t entirely unexpected, given the day’s events. And when he woke up the next morning, everything seemed to go normally enough. Nothing was on fire that shouldn’t be, at any rate, and on the whole, it seemed like a fairly average day. Maybe he could just put more thought into the most recent mystery later. When it seemed more pressing. For the time being, he was content to bury his head in the sand.