Wildfire Griffin (Fire & Rescue Shifters: Wildfire Crew #1)(9)

“Yours.” He shook himself, seeming to come back to his senses a little. “I mean, Rory. I’m Rory MacCormick.”

Edith was beginning to suspect that this was not, in fact, a perfectly normal conversation. She was also starting to wonder just how hard he’d hit his head.

“Nice to meet you, Rory.” She glanced around for help. “Where’s the rest of your team?”

He made a vague gesture in the direction of the dog…if it was a dog. Now that Edith had a chance to examine it properly, she wasn’t entirely sure. It looked more like an unholy cross between a grizzly bear and a wolf. It had shaggy, jet-black fur, upright pointed ears, and startlingly bright eyes—copper-orange with crimson flecks.

It wore a reflective yellow harness with THUNDER MOUNTAIN HOTSHOTS emblazoned on the side, along with a logo of a mountain peak crowned with two lightning bolts. Edith had never heard of a dog trained to support wildland firefighters before, but she couldn’t imagine a crew taking a mascot to an actual fire. It had to be some kind of service animal. From the size of those powerful jaws, she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that it fetched and carried whole trees.

The dog’s heavy head cocked to one side. Its muzzle moved back and forth between Edith and Rory, rather like a spectator at a tennis match. Catching her eye, it held her gaze for a moment, then turned to pointedly look in the direction of the smoldering ground fire. One ear tilted back at her.

Don’t know what’s going on here, she could almost hear it saying. But isn’t that more important?

“Right,” Edith said, turning back to Rory. He was still grinning at her. “We need to get out of here, and get you proper medical treatment. Where’s, um, the rest of your team? And your transport? You can’t have just dropped from the sky.”

He opened his mouth, paused, and shut it again. He rubbed at the back of his neck, his gaze sliding away from her at last. “Ah. Well. Actually.”

Whatever he’d been about to say was interrupted by the appearance of a truck, kicking up clouds of dust as it screamed up the dirt track that led to her lookout tower. The chunky, ungainly vehicle looked rather like the love-child of a tank and a school bus. It was bright yellow, just like the dog’s harness, and had the same logo painted on the side: THUNDER MOUNTAIN HOTSHOTS.

The truck pulled up at the base of the tower. Four figures piled out, running up in a confusion of overlapping voices. Edith flinched, caught in a storm of yellow uniforms and unfamiliar faces, unable to process the sudden arrivals.

“Hey. Hey!” Rory held up his hands, quieting the babble. “I’m fine. Start unloading the gear. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

“Not until I’ve checked you out,” one of the men said firmly. His short, white-blond hair momentarily confused Edith into thinking he had to be old, but his handsome face was young and unlined. “What happened?”

“Yes, tell us,” said a towering black man, grinning. “In great and excruciating detail, so that we recount the glorious tale again and again. A rabbit, I believe you said?”

Rory shot him a glare before turning to one of the remaining firefighters. “Blaise, take this comedian and put him to work, okay? We need to get this fire safely ringed.”

The short, curvy woman nodded. She had burnished hazelnut skin and tight-curled hair, cropped close to her elegant head. Edith envied her air of calm confidence. “On it, boss. Cal, Joe, with me. Wystan, don’t let Rory do anything stupid. Again.”

“Not sure how I’m supposed to do that, short of knocking him out and sitting on him,” the white-haired man remarked wryly as the other firefighters headed back to the truck. He glanced over at Edith, his graceful hands busy taking Rory’s pulse. “Hello, by the way.”

Edith knew that she was supposed to reply, but she was still reeling from the sudden onslaught of strangers. Words lay like stones on her tongue.

She struggled to spit one out. “H-hi.”

“Edith, this is Wystan,” Rory said. “And this is Fenrir.”

Edith spent a second looking around for another firefighter before realizing that Rory meant the dog. It caught her eye, and its thick, plumed tail thumped against the ground in a lazy wag.

“Wys, Fen, this is Edith Stone,” Rory continued, as if it wasn’t at all odd to be formally introducing someone to a dog. “She’s—”

He cut himself off, for no reason that Edith could discern. His mouth stretched in that broad, slightly silly grin again. “That is, she’s the fire watcher here.”

Wystan flung her a distracted smile, still busy checking Rory’s injuries. From his swift, sure movements, he was obviously a trained paramedic. “Nice to meet you, Edith. Who else is here?”

“No one,” Edith said, uncertain why he was asking. “Just me.”

Wystan’s eyebrows rose. “You cut the fireline at the base of the hill all by yourself?”

Edith nodded, making herself meet his eyes for a moment. “Is it okay? I didn’t have any proper tools, or much time.”

“I’m only a trainee, so I’m not a real judge of these things.” Despite Wystan’s soft, polite tone, his voice reminded Edith somewhat of a movie villain. That gave her the clue to place his accent—British, from England. “But it looked good to me.”