“Oh dear,” Cass murmured. “Is it the solstice already?”

Walker turned on his radio and hit the gas. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he demanded as he took the curves at breakneck speed, siren screaming.

“Nulls once burned bonfires to ward off evil—like witches—on summer’s eve. The cards warned hostilities would commence on the solstice.” Cass peered out the window.

“I think that’s tomorrow,” Walker said after reporting the fire to the office. “And any fool burning in this drought needs to be horsewhipped.”

Meeting a line of cars exiting Hillvale, Walker flashed his lights and used the siren. They eased to one side so he could reach the parking lot. A line of traffic still streamed down from the lodge. On a weekend, the lodge was packed—it was like watching money flow down the drain.

The chatter on the radio indicated the fire had been reported and emergency services were heading up, but Hillvale was a long way from anywhere.

“You ladies need to get out here,” Walker ordered, eyeing the lick of flame through the pines on the ridge.

“Does the lodge have any earth movers?” Sam asked, not unbuckling.

“Monty does. He parks them in the town lot.” Cass did unbuckle, but only so she could open the door and hail Mariah. “Tell Monty to move the mountain,” she called.

Mariah signaled understanding and trotted off.

“Get out, Cass,” Walker said between clenched teeth. “I don’t have time to fight you.”

The old witch leaned over and patted him on the shoulder. “You’re not a fireman, dear. Direct traffic, keep Sam safe, and we’ll do the rest. We’re prepared for this.”

He only bit his tongue because she climbed out to join the rest of her coven gathering in the lot, carrying shovels and hoes. His blood pressure probably soared thirty points.

“Sam—” he said warningly.

“They’re going to cut a line between town and the fire. That fire is aimed for Hillvale, not the lodge,” she said acerbically. “Someone is literally and metaphorically trying to burn them out.”

That was craziness. And she believed it? He cursed again, turned the sirens back on, and began forcing traffic to the side of the road so he could reach the lodge. After years of sitting behind a desk, he indulged in the visceral satisfaction of active command again.

Except he couldn’t force the insane woman beside him to follow his orders.

While he maneuvered past hulking SUVs driven by terrified tourists, she leaned over to gaze up the mountain. “Looks as if it started on Menendez land. I don’t remember any tall trees there. I thought it looked as if it had been logged.”

“Pines all around it.” Pines that would shoot sparks all over the mountain if the wind picked up.

“Water hoses won’t reach that far. How do they fight fire up there?”

He shut the sirens as he hit the parking lot where lodge guests still spilled from the building, carrying suitcases and children.

Children. They had effing damned children in the path of that fire. He watched a curly-haired toddler no older than Davy had been and his lungs ran out of air.

Focus, Walker. Resist the urge to grab the children and run. “Water trucks,” he said curtly. “Planes. They’re on the way. Clearing brush is the best thing we can do.”

He slammed out of the car, fighting his protective instincts. He couldn’t take care of Sam, and he sure as hell couldn’t take care of a hotel filled with people. But he had a job to do.

Walker watched warily as Sam let herself out the other side. Her elegantly boned face was so much like Cass’s it was eerie, now that he’d seen them together. Both women were poised in the face of danger. Sam’s stillness was almost terrifying, akin to a cougar that smells danger and freezes before leaping.

“It’s fueled on evil,” she murmured. “I can feel it flowing through the ground. Cass is right. Someone deliberately set that fire.”

Shit, back to crazy again. “Stay here. Don’t move or I put you in handcuffs.”

Lazy, lanky Harvey, the long-haired musician and wood-carver, hurried across the lot to add to Walker’s escalating fury and anxiety.

Sam was aware that she’d ticked Walker off, but the primal elements flowing through her were stronger than his anger. She felt as connected to the land as she did to Cass. She could feel the stress. It was an odd feeling, stronger than the ones she’d used for planting.

Walker’s stress was of a different sort. He’d donned his sunglasses, and his expression was one of control so rigid that a muscle ticked in his jaw. He was watching the people pouring from the lodge with their belongings as if he wanted to make them all disappear.

A baby cried, a child shouted. He flinched and shoved on his mirrored sunglasses. His fists curled as he watched Harvey approach.

The musician provided welcome distraction. Harvey’s height gave him a lean look, but his black t-shirt revealed sinew and muscle. For a musician, he took athletics seriously, it appeared.

He held out one of his carved staffs to Sam. This one was a blond wood, slender, the tree branch’s original knobs and curves adding an almost feminine quality to it. The handle had been carved to resemble an antique sailing ship prow—a woman’s face with crystal blue eyes and hair streaming in the wind. Sam instinctively reached for it before he spoke.

“Protect the earth,” Harvey commanded.

Beside her, Walker nearly growled. Harvey loped off to help Carmel’s brother haul his paintings to a battered Land Rover. Helping empty the studio, the stout real estate mogul Grumpy Gump was collecting the smaller canvases, leaving the big ones to skinny Lance. For the first time, Sam noted gray shooting through the mogul’s thick blond hair.

Kurt and Carmel Kennedy were there, assisting their guests in their departures.

Sam’s staff twitched. She had no idea what that meant, but after being trapped and helpless these last days, she needed her self back. She’d always craved an accepting community, but she’d learned early to defy bullies who kept her out.

She glared at Walker. “Handcuff me, and you can arrest me for assaulting a police officer.”

“That would be a reverse policy. I mean it, Sam. Don’t be part of the problem,” he ordered.

“I think we’re all part of the problem, but that fire up there is manmade. I can feel the malice burning.” Torn between intellectual obedience and the innate sensation of knowing how the earth felt, Sam’s defiance escalated.

Even as she spoke, one of the lodge’s uniformed security guards raced down the hillside, shouting, “It’s a cross! The crazies are burning a cross!”

“No, they’re not.” At that deliberate slur, she chose sides and started toward the path into the woods. “The Lucys are in town, blocking evil with bulldozers.”

She said it for Walker’s benefit, not the guard, who was too far away. Walker grabbed her elbow and swung her around.

“That part, I almost understand,” he said. “But you can’t put out the fire. Stay here and keep the Kennedys in line or they’ll be rounding up your friends and shooting them.”

Startled, she studied his expression, but wearing his mirrored sunglasses, he played his inscrutable card. Last night, in his arms, she’d thought she understood him. Today, not so much.

Remembering Carmel at the graveyard at midnight, she had to consider his conclusion, but she shook her head in disagreement.

“The Kennedys are not the wrongness seeping through this soil. I guess you’re right, though, I’m new to this. I’ll hold them off with my new stick.” She gave him a blindingly insipid grin that she figured he didn’t buy for an instant, but he released her.

Last night had been a moment out of time, one she’d never have again, she feared. He was the Null voice of sanity and authority, and she was just a crazy Lucy, apparently. She stalked off toward the lodge.

She discovered the walking stick had a belt that she could strap around her arm or waist or anywhere that suited her. She fit it to her waist and hefted a toddler wandering after his father, who was bogged down in bags of toys and coolers.

“People are more important than things,” she warned the mother racing up to fling diaper bags in the back of their van. Sam handed her the kid. “Get out now, before the fire spreads.”

Both parents glanced in alarm at the flames licking down the hillside. Thank all the stars, the wind wasn’t blowing hard, but it would take only one gust. . . Following Sam’s advice, they fastened the kid in his seat and climbed in without going back for suitcases.

Turning around, Sam came face to face with Carmel. The older woman looked as if she’d like to spit in her face. “Out,” the older woman said in a threatening tone. “Get out of town now.”

“And hello to you, too, step-grandma,” Sam said. “I’ll invite you to tea sometime, but right now, you have a bigger problem we should address first.”

That wasn’t like the old her to talk like that. She now knew she was normally cautious and determined, hunting for niches where she might fit in. She wasn’t comfortable with this new aggressiveness, but maybe she should learn.

Carmel looked so stunned, Sam couldn’t regret the wild freedom surging through her. Turning her back on the lodge, she threw caution to the winds and jogged over to where Harvey strode up the path toward the exorcism clearing.

Behind her, the Nulls were being sensible. Walker was directing traffic. Her Uncle Kurt was helping the last few straggling guests. She could hear fire engines screaming up the road, and a plane flying over the mountain.

She refused to watch helplessly if there was any small part she could play in saving a town that had taken her in. But she didn’t have bulldozers or even a hoe. All she had was a pulsating stick and the Lucys’ foolish superstition. If she wished to be an objective, open-minded scientist, shouldn’t she at least experiment?

She unclipped the carved staff and held it in her hand, not like a dowsing rod this time, but as a walking stick. It seemed to amplify the vibrations she’d sensed when she’d climbed out of the car.

“What the hell am I supposed to be doing?” Sam asked as she caught up with Harvey.

“Find the source of the fuel?” He lifted his thick black eyebrows in question as she approached.

“We find a source of malice? That could be the entire damned world,” she said, biting back her fear that they were all crazy. But she’d found the old church grounds earlier. . .

“Is that what this energy is? Malice? Sounds about right. It’s all a learning process,” he said with a shrug, proceeding onward now that she’d caught up with him.

“Swell. We won’t learn anything if we burn to death.” The acrid stench of wood smoke filtered down on the breeze, but the fire was still a few miles away.

“Fitting end for witches, I suppose,” he said fatalistically, hiking on.

She should follow Walker’s sensible advice and get the hell out of here. But she didn’t—because she could feel what Harvey was talking about. Her scientific observational skills required tracing the source of this energy, if only to prove its existence.

“There are no such things as witches,” she protested. “We may have a sensitivity to faults in the earth or uncannily strong senses of smell for pollution, but magic isn’t real.”

“Magic explains the inexplicable,” he said, covering ground in long loping strides. “I suppose one could substitute God, but too many nebulous variables attach to that concept. I try not to offend more people than I already do.”

He was luring her with his voice, she knew. She followed easily, keeping her eye on the distant flames. “I just offended Carmel, again. I apparently offend her by existing. So I’m guessing whatever magic voodoo you think we do isn’t the only reason people find us offensive.”

“I carve wood,” he stated flatly. “I imbue no magic into it. Tell me these vibrations are the magic of my carving.”

She held the rod out and watched it quiver. “I’ve never felt wood vibrate before, but people have been using dowsing rods for centuries. Aren’t they supposed to be forked?”

“I’m hunting energy, not water or gold,” he said irritably.

“Fine then, I’ll experiment and try to keep an open mind.” Energy dowsing sounded better than hunting for malice.

He didn’t bother acknowledging her attempt to understand. Harvey had a bit of a chip on his shoulder, she suspected.

Sam tried to sense a path with the staff, but the energy it amplified was widespread. She swung around in a circle, holding out the rod, but one side wasn’t stronger than the other. She glanced up the hill. The stench of wet charred wood was heavy. The plane had dropped its chemical load between the fire and the lodge, leaving flames to lick downhill in the other direction—toward town and the bulldozers. She didn’t sense danger, yet.

She created a distance between herself and Harvey, spreading their range. The ground was relatively clear of brambles, but she kept an eye out for fleeing critters—like snakes.

“Did you find Cass?” Harvey poked through the dead leaves with his black staff.

So much had happened that she’d forgotten they hadn’t had time to share the news. “We left her down in Hillvale, bossing everyone around.”

“Long story best told over a fire with a bottle of wine?” he suggested.

“A whole barrel of whiskey might be required. Cass has to live here. I’ll leave her to tell the tale, or the part she considers suitable.”

“Yeah, she keeps secrets. You and Walker an item?” He was ahead of her as he asked that, so she couldn’t read his expression.

She didn’t know how she felt about that, or the intriguing man asking her. She wasn’t in a place yet that let her think about relationships. Last night had been necessary for both of them, but they were worlds apart. “Not sure. He helped me and Cass, but he’s here for his own reasons.”

“Aren’t we all?” He glanced toward the fire line creeping closer despite the chemical retardant. “May be time to get out.”

Sam felt a tug on her staff. She halted and tried to sense the energy flow. Was this how she had chosen the best areas to plant back on the farm—without need of a stick? Neighbors had claimed she had a green thumb, but she’d assumed it had more to do with paying attention as to when to plant, water, and fertilize. Choosing the ground for planting had involved sun and the chemical composition of the soil and she’d let instinct guide her.

“I don’t know enough,” she said in frustration, swinging her stick over the area that had drawn her.

“There’s underground water around here somewhere,” Harvey reminded her. “That’s the reason for the well.” He dug his stick into the ground as if hoping it would create a magical fountain.

“Water, oil, evil, who knows what we’re sensing? I had no classes in earth vibrations and what they mean.” But the urge to slam her stick into the ground next to Harvey’s was strong.

Their sticks vibrated hard enough to disturb the ground. To her shock, a few drops of water trickled out, leaving a shiny streak over the rock beneath their joined sticks.

“Does that mean you remember who you are?” Harvey asked, twisting harder, as if he wished to flood the valley.

“I remember facts, but I’m not at all certain I ever knew who I was.” There was part of her dilemma. Was she the Samantha who wanted to escape her stultifying environment? Or the Sam who wanted family? Or some weird Sam she didn’t know but who liked walking sticks and found water?

Instead of fleeing for safety, she excitedly twirled her staff deeper. Jade had taught her feng shui. If one could feel chi, it might feel like this. “This is more than water.”

“It’s flowing from the direction of the Menendez land.” Harvey gazed eagerly toward the heavy smoke above.

From his expression, she judged he was more interested in water than chi. Everyone here had a damned agenda.

Threads of fire caught on dead pine debris on the hill above them. Tiny lava flows of sparks aimed straight for the lodge.

“We should have brought shovels, not sticks.” Ripping her staff from the ground, Sam ran for the parking lot, in a path parallel to the fire line. She knew it could spread any direction. What was she doing here anyway? Had Cass made her stupid?

A snake slithered across a rock ahead, and she froze, trying not to scream. Animals ran from fire. They had more sense than she did.

“Samantha!” The cry came from a distance. Had they walked that far?

A flaming pine crashed on the ridge just above them.