One True Mate: Shifter's Solace (Kindle Worlds Novella)(5)

“I’m right, Chief,” Rory said. “I promise you, we’re going to save a life.” Then he lost his restraint again. “If we fucking move!”

Sirens howled as they barrelled towards the fire – if there was a fire. Sweating inside his turnout jacket, Rory wondered if maybe his team-mates were right and it was all in his head. Despite the Chief’s order, they were casting some pretty hostile glances at him. He couldn’t blame them. If one of the others had done the same thing – especially shifting like that and trying to face down the Chief – he’d assume they were nuts too.

But as they got closer to Serenity, a little town on the way to Chicago, hardly a blip on the map but where most of their call-outs came from, everybody saw it.

There was a glow on the horizon. There was a fire.

But the voice in Rory’s head had gone quiet.





Chapter Four


The sirens died away as the squad bundled out of the engine, a couple of them unspooling the hoses and hooking them up to the fire hydrant. Brady tucked the ambulance in behind them, opening the back doors and hauling out a backboard and a bag of kit in case of casualties.

Flames licked greedily up the front of the building. The paint on the sign – The Antique Boutique – blistered in the heat, and the windows were cracked and opaque with soot. A plume of smoke spilled into the sky, smothering the stars.

Are you there? Rory called frantically in ruhi.

No answer.

Are you alive?

He fumbled with his helmet and respirator, fingers shaking as he checked the connections and eyed up the building, looking for the safest route inside. The whole fa?ade was in flames, which ruled out using the engine’s ladder to get in through one of the upstairs windows.

The Chief raised his voice over the crackling of the flames and the rattle of the hoses. “Looks like the flash point was on the upper floor. Go in through the front door, but Rory – if the stairs aren’t safe, pull back. That’s an order.”

Rory nodded and inhaled through his respirator, checking the flow of air. The sound rasped in his ears, harsh and unnatural. As he pulled on his insulated leather gloves, he heard her in his head again, faintly but definitely there.

Help me. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe…

He broke away from the Chief and headed into the building, not even checking to see who had his six. He trusted every man on the squad with his life. And with hers…

He crashed through the door, a jarring pain shooting through his shoulder as he struck it. The smoke curled thickly in the air even down here, and the flames were starting to spread to the stairs, but they were still intact.

Rory climbed as fast as he could, weighed down by his heavy equipment. She’d stopped screaming now, stopped calling out to him, but he could still feel her there, in the back of his mind, and he headed towards her, striding unerringly through the flames. She was huddled on the floor in a foetal position, tucked in a corner the flames hadn’t yet reached, her arms curled around her head as if she could shield herself from the fire. He couldn’t see what she looked like, just the pale gleam of her slender limbs and the darker fall of her hair.

He didn’t know whether she was still alive or whether she’d succumbed to smoke inhalation, and there was no time to check for a pulse.

He heard Ben’s voice in his head. Bro, the stairs are going up. Pull out!

I’ve got a survivor, he sent back in ruhi. I’ve got her.

Please, let her be a survivor. Not a corpse. Not that. His heart twisted with panic at the thought.

You’re both gonna be toast if you don’t pull out right now. Move!

Rory hauled the woman into his arms. She was utterly limp. A dead weight, something cruel in his subconscious taunted him. But no, he wouldn’t believe it.

As he barged through the doorway at the top of the stairs, he turned his back against the flames, shielding her with his body. Even through the double layer of his turnout jacket, the heat was fierce. He kicked aside a burning joist that had crashed down across the stairs, planting the sole of his boot against the flaming wood and sending it tumbling, then followed it down, stumbling to find the steps in the disorienting blackness of the smoke and the bewildering heat of the flames on all sides.

Ben was at the bottom of the staircase, the reflective silver strips on his jacket a faint glimmer in the acrid black smoke.

As Rory’s foot found the next step, he felt it give beneath his weight.

The charred staircase collapsed like a house of cards, and they fell.

Rory! Ben’s voice was a shout of anguish in his head.

As he fell, he shifted, bursting his clothes at the seams, curling his massive body around the woman’s, praying he could break her fall. Praying his bulk would shield her from the flames until the squad could pull her to safety.





Chapter Five


“Rory, for fuck’s sake, you idiot, we got her. She’s safe.”

Ivy opened her eyes. She was lying on the sidewalk, aching all over, and someone had fixed an oxygen mask over her face. So she wasn’t dead, she thought distantly. That was nice.

She turned her head painfully to the side, and saw an enormous bear. It was rearing and bellowing, trying to get back into the shop, which was little more than a charcoal shell being soaked by arcs of water from firefighters’ hoses.