The Cursed (League of the Black Swan) (43 page)

“O’Malley, get your ass back here,” his boss, the new Bordertown fire chief, shouted.

Sean ignored him, just as he’d ignored the previous fire chief. He’d heard something in that building. Maybe it was only a cat. No matter how much it tore him up inside when he found evidence that a helpless animal had lost its life in a fire, he knew the rules: Firefighters didn’t risk their lives for pets. Not that he gave a rat’s ass for rules right then, and he’d certainly bent a few to save pets in the past. They all had.

But it hadn’t sounded like a cat. It had sounded like a baby.

Zach, the closest thing to a friend Sean had on the crew, planted himself in front of Sean, blocking his path to the door.

“Not this time,” Zach shouted.

They had to be loud to be heard over the roar of the flames that were greedily consuming the old building. Too much rotten wood, too little upkeep—it would be easy to blame that, if this hadn’t been the fourth building in as many nights hit in exactly the same way. They had a serial arsonist on their hands.

“I heard a baby. Get out of my way, or I’ll go through you.”

Sean didn’t have time to delay. Zach was just over six feet tall, and he was all lean muscle, but Sean was bigger still, by a couple of inches and probably forty pounds. Not to mention his extra abilities.

Marcus moved out of Sean’s way, fast. None of them understood how Sean could hear things that nobody else could, but they knew it was true. Enhanced hearing was one of his superpowers, they liked to joke. Just as they all knew that he could withstand temperatures that would have fried most of them alive.

They didn’t joke about that one.

They knew he was different, but they didn’t know
how
different. Sean didn’t tell
anybody
he was half fire demon. Life was easier that way.

He burst into the conflagration, head down and running for the spot where the sound had originated. Second floor, to the left. He barely paused at the staircase, but the view was enough to make a sane man flinch. A roaring wall of orange-red flame screamed toward him, and the heat knocked him back a couple of steps. His skin felt the heat even under his suit, and he found out his protective gear wasn’t rated anywhere near high enough when the fabric started to melt off his body.

Whatever accelerant the bastard had used wasn’t purely chemical; no way would a normal fire be burning that hot. Magic was involved here. In fact, it would take black magic to push a fire to these levels. Sean could feel his eyes flaring as his pupils contracted and he knew that anybody watching him would see his irises turn deep blood orange in color and start to glow.

Sean analyzed the situation for options, but the stairs were the only way up; no matter that the stairwell was a tunnel of flame and probably going to explode any minute. He took them four at a time, barely clearing the last one before the explosion hit and the stairs collapsed into a burning mass of tinder. He glanced back at the fiery pit at the bottom and grimaced, and a falling chunk of ceiling smashed down on his helmet, nearly knocking him on his ass.

He stood there, head ringing and skull vibrating, and realized that one of these days he was going to kill himself trying to act like a big damn hero.

But it wasn’t going to be today.

The sound came again, and he still wasn’t sure. Wounded animals could sound a lot like babies. It could go either way. But he’d come this far, and he’d be damned if he’d leave anybody behind. He took the first door across the hall to the left of the stairwell, unerringly finding the source of the sound. The front room of the apartment was only beginning to burn, and he had a moment to hope that the bedrooms were in good shape before he hit the door running. Two seconds later, about a hundred pounds of shaggy black fur smashed into his chest.

Sean barely stayed on his feet. There had been a lot of power behind that furry projectile. The beast hit the floor and immediately clamped its powerful jaws around Sean’s ankle and pulled, hard. The pink collar on the dog’s neck proclaimed that the creature was named Petunia.

“Okay, Petunia, hang on,” Sean said, using his most soothing voice, but the dog’s whining increased in both pitch and volume, and she pulled even harder, trying to move Sean over to the corner of the room.

The corner. There was a crib, or bassinet, or whatever the hell people called the small, lace-draped, wooden cradle tucked against the corner of the room. The crying sound came again, and now he could tell it was coming from the crib.

“I got her, buddy,” Sean told Petunia. She seemed to understand, since she let go of Sean’s ankle immediately and stood there, panting and making deep coughing noises. Smoke inhalation could damage dogs’ lungs, too, and Sean made a mental note to have the animal looked at when they got out of there. A crash sounded in the apartment’s front room, and he amended the thought.

If
they got out of there.

The baby turned startled, reddened eyes up to Sean in the instant before he swept her into his arms, and then she waved one pink-pajamaed arm at him and gurgled.

“We’re out of here, princess,” he told her, and then he picked up the room’s only chair, a wooden rocking chair, and hurled it at the window while shielding the infant.

The glass shattered outward, as planned, and Sean headed for the window. A jump from the second story was an easy one for him to make, especially carrying only a tiny baby instead of a large, screaming adult, which he’d had to do before, so he had this one in the bag.

No sweat.

And then the dog barked, reminding him that Petunia was not going to make it out alive on her own. Sean looked down at the dog’s hopeful face and slowly wagging tail. Petunia had stayed in that room to protect her precious charge, and she’d even pulled a Lassie on Sean’s leg to get him to find the baby.

Screw the rules. There was no way in hell he was going to leave that dog to burn to death.

“You’re going to have to trust me, girl,” he said, crouching down in front of the dog, but keeping an ear out for the shift in sound that would tell him that the entire apartment was about to collapse. It was close.

Too close.

The dog’s big eyes looked worried, but she lifted one paw as if to shake, and Sean took that for a yes. He lifted her into the arm that wasn’t full of baby, took a running leap for the window, and leapt out into the blissfully cool darkness of the autumn night.

Minutes later, he’d reunited the baby with her mother, who’d been missing after she’d run down to the building’s laundry room while her child was napping. The exploding water heater had shaken debris loose from the walls and ceiling of the basement, and a big chunk of something had hit the woman and knocked her out. She was one of the people Zach had rescued, and by the time they roused her to consciousness, the EMTs were administering oxygen to her baby right next to her, so she never had even a moment’s fear that her child was dead. Petunia, also wearing an oxygen mask and getting checked out, tried to wrap her furry body around her entire small family all at once.

Sean, as always, made sure to disappear before the thank-yous started and the media showed up. Bordertown’s lead crime reporter, Jax Archer, was a disgraced Fae lordling who just happened to be a living, breathing lie detector, so Sean preferred to stay out of his way.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” the fire chief shouted at him, crossing behind the hoses toward Sean while everyone else, exhausted but on the alert, watched the powerful streams of water battle the magically created fire.

“Avoiding reporters,” Sean said bluntly, too tired and worried to care about playing nice with the new boss, who was turning out to be quite an asshole.

One of the reporters Sean could actually tolerate picked that moment to round the corner behind the truck. Spotting Sean, she headed straight for them.

“Pierce Holland,
Bordertown Gazette
,” she said unnecessarily, thrusting her microphone in Sean’s face. “Do we know what caused tonight’s fire? Also, I heard you brought out a baby and a dog after everybody else evacuated, O’Malley. Care to comment?”

“I don’t think you’ve met the new chief, have you, Pierce? He was the one who convinced me to go back in for that baby,” Sean said, lying through his teeth. He pounded his boss on the back, only a little too hard. “Excellent instincts, this guy. Going to make a great chief.”

The chief’s eyes widened, but before either of them could say another word, Sean smiled at them and ducked behind the truck. By the time his overactive hearing picked up the beginning of the chief’s response to the reporter, Sean was a block away and moving fast, stripping off his gear as he walked.

Another couple of blocks, and he made it to Black Swan Fountain Square, his favorite place for relaxation and quiet contemplation in the middle of the night. There wasn’t much room in the rest of his life for peace
or
quiet. The family business, O’Malley’s Pub, was always full of loud talk, laughter, music, and merriment.

It was enough to piss a man off.

Especially when he was sick with worry about his mother’s unexplained “little tests,” which had left her drained, weak, and nauseous for more than three weeks now. She’d refused to talk about it that afternoon, so Sean had been having a bad damn day even
before
his fire station had gotten the call that the arsonist had struck again.

He stared blindly at the black marble sculpture of the beautiful young woman and the swan in the center of the fountain, so tired that he didn’t really notice the actual live swan floating serenely in the water until the second time it came around. When he did notice it, he blinked, and then a flurry of movement in the water boiled up into a cloud of sparkling mist that he hadn’t been expecting, Bordertown or no.

So he figured he could be excused for rubbing his smoke-wearied eyes when the iridescent shimmer dissipated and the bird flapping its wings in the swan fountain turned into a naked woman.

A
beautiful
naked woman.

Maybe that hit he’d taken to the head had been harder than he’d thought and he was hallucinating. He didn’t have long to believe that one, since the hallucination started talking to him.

“Really? Are you just going to sit there and stare at me?”

“Well, I was here before you turned naked, ah, turned human, I mean you didn’t—”

“Right. Chivalry. Dead. Insert appropriate cliché.” She pushed her long masses of dark curls out of her face and stalked over to him, not the least bit embarrassed that she was incredibly and gloriously naked. When she crouched down next to him, his breath got stuck in his lungs in a way that had
nothing
to do with fire but
everything
to do with heat.

She glanced up at him while reaching under the bench with one hand, and some of what he was feeling must have shown on his face, because she grinned.

“Relax, hot stuff. I’m just getting my clothes.”