“Watch,” she whispered. She had pulled the mask down around her neck, and Harper saw a beauty: chocolate eyes that glittered with hilarity, tomboy freckles, and delicate features that seemed even sharper and clearer because her head was shaved smooth, to better show the hollows of her temples and her fine bones. “Look at his hand.”
And Harper saw that the Fireman’s bare left hand was boiling with gray smoke. The left hand had let go of the halligan bar and dropped to the Fireman’s side. Harper flashed to a memory—the Fireman wrestling with Albert in the hallway off the emergency room, and trying to yank his glove off with his teeth.
Jakob pulled back on the halligan bar, meaning to drive the Fireman into the tree trunk again. But at that moment the Fireman reached over the bar and put his hand on Jakob’s throat, and fire belched from his palm.
That flame was as blue as a blowtorch. The Fireman’s hand wore a glove of radiant fire. The blaze roared like a rising wind and Jakob screamed and let go of the halligan and fell away. He screamed again, grabbing at his blackened throat. His feet got tangled and he went straight down on his ass and then he sprang up once more and ran, heaving himself blindly through the branches and brush.
The Fireman watched him go, his left hand a torch. Then he opened his filthy yellow turnout jacket, put his burning hand under it, and clapped the jacket shut, trapping his hand between the coat and his shirt.
He opened the jacket and shut it and opened it again, beating at his hand calmly—he looked rather like a child trying to use his armpit to make farts—and the third time he opened the jacket, the flame had gone out and the hand was spewing filthy black smoke. He waved the hand in the air, letting the smoke boil off it. In the distance, Harper could hear branches snapping and brush crackling, the sound of Jakob running away. In another moment the woods were quiet except for the alien chirp of night insects.
The Fireman held up his left hand, drew a deep breath, and blew away the last of the smoke. His palm was sketched with Dragonscale. Those fine, delicate black lines were ashed over now, the surface snow white, with a few sparks nested here and there, glowing faintly. The rest of the skin covering his hand was—fine. Clean and healthy and pink and impossibly unburnt.
Allie said, “I love it when he does that, but his best trick is when he makes a phoenix. It’s better than fireworks.”
“True enough!” said the Fireman, turning his head and grinning cheekily up at them. “I put the Fifth of November and the Fourth of July to shame. Who needs Roman candles when you’ve got me?”
BOOK TWO
LET YOUR DIM LIGHT SHINE
1
Allie was first out of the tree, grabbing the branch and swinging to the ground. Harper meant to go down by way of the rudimentary ladder nailed into the trunk, but as soon as she slid off the branch she had been sitting on, she dropped.
The Fireman was there to break her fall. He didn’t exactly catch her. He just happened to be below her when she went down. She flattened him under her and they hit the dirt together. The back of her head smashed him in the nose. Her right heel bounced off the ground. The pain that shot through her ankle was exquisite.
They groaned in each other’s arms, like lovers.
“Fuck,” she said. “Fuck fuck fuck.”
“Is that the best you can do?” the Fireman asked. He was holding his nose and blinking back tears. “Just a lot of ‘fuck fuck fuck’ over and over again? Can’t you expand your range a little? Goddamn bloody arsefoam. Daddy drilling Mommy on the kitchen table. That sort of thing. Americans curse without any imagination at all.”
Harper sat up, her shoulders hitching with her first sobs. Her legs were trembling and her ankle was broken and Jakob had nearly killed her, had wanted to kill her, and people were shooting guns and bursting into flame and she had fallen out of a tree, and the baby, the baby, and she couldn’t help herself. The Fireman sat up next to her and put an arm around her and she rested her head on the slippery shoulder of his jacket.
“There, there,” he said.
And he held her for a bit, while she had a good, unglamorous cry.
When her sobs had subsided to hiccups he said, “Let’s get you up. We should be going. We don’t know what your deranged ex-husband might be up to. I wouldn’t put it past him to call a Quarantine Patrol.”
“He’s not my ex. We’re not divorced.”
“You are now. By the power vested in me.”
“What power vested in you?”
“You know how captains of ships can marry people? Little-known fact, firemen can divorce people as well. Come on, up with you.”
The Fireman encircled her waist with his left arm and hoisted her to her feet. The hand on her hip was still warm, like fresh bread from the oven.
“You set your hand on fire,” she said. “How did you do that?”
On the face of it, she already knew the answer. He had Dragonscale, same as her. His hand was still uncovered and she could see a black-and-gold scrawl tracing the lines of his palm, running in a coil around and around his wrist. A fine gray smoke trickled from the thicker lines.
She had seen at least a hundred people with Dragonscale ignite—ignite and begin to scream, blue fire racing over them, as if they were painted in kerosene, their hair erupting in a flash. It was not something anyone wanted or could do to themselves, and when it happened it was not controlled and it always ended in death.
But the Fireman had consciously lit himself up. And only part of himself, just his hand. Then he had calmly put himself back out again. And somehow he had not been hurt.
“I thought about offering a class once,” the Fireman said. “But I couldn’t figure out what I was teaching. Advanced Pyromancy? Spontaneous Combustion for Dummies? Arson 101? Besides, it’s hard to get people to sign up for a course when failing a test means burning alive.”
“That’s a lie,” Allie said. “He won’t teach you. He won’t teach anyone. Liar, liar, pants on fire.”
“No, not tonight, Allie. This is my favorite pair of dungarees and I can’t afford to burn them up just because you want me to show off.”
“You’ve been spying on me,” Harper said.
The Fireman glanced up into the branches of the oak, where she had been perched only a moment before. “There’s an excellent view of your bedroom from up there. Isn’t it odd, how people with something to hide will pull the curtains at the front of the house, but never think to cover the windows out back.”
“You spend a lot of time wandering around in your underwear, reading What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” Allie said. “Don’t worry. He never peeped through your windows at you while you were getting dressed. Maybe I did once or twice, but not him. ’E’s a proper English gen’lem’n is wot he is.” Allie’s faux English accent was at least as good as Dick Van Dyke’s in Mary Poppins. If Harper had been a sixteen-year-old boy, she would’ve been mad for her. You could just tell she was the best kind of trouble.
“Why?” Harper asked the Fireman. “Why spy on me?”
“Allie,” the Fireman said, as if he had not heard Harper’s question. “Run on ahead to camp. Bring your grandfather and Ben Patchett. Oh, and find Renée. Tell Renée we have acquired her favorite nurse. She’ll be so pleased.”
Then Allie was gone, springing into leaves in a way that made Harper think of Peter Pan’s shadow zinging around Wendy’s bedroom. Harper had a head crammed full of children’s books and could be quite compulsive about assigning people storybook roles.
When the girl was gone, the Fireman said, “Just as well to have you to myself for a moment, Nurse Grayson. I’d trust Allie Storey with my life, but there are some things I’d rather not say in front of her. Do you know the summer camp at the end of Little Harbor Road?”
“Camp Wyndham,” Harper said. “Sure.”