Chapter One
Tina Driscoll could barely keep her eyes open as she shuffled to lot D, the parking lot on the farthest end of the hospital where she worked. Her legs were stiff from standing on them for twelve hours straight and felt heavy, like they had lead weights tied to both feet. When she finally found her car, she leaned on the side of it, digging into the pocket of her sweat-stained scrubs for her keys. But a different sensation met her palm. A buzzing. It was her phone vibrating...and the last name she wanted to see at this very moment was flashing on its screen.
“Noooooooo,” she groaned, drawing out the word until it turned into a whine. “Not tonight,” she said, her eyes cast heavenward. As much as she wanted to shirk her responsibility, pretend she never felt her phone in her pocket and head straight home, she knew she couldn’t ignore the call. It was the kind of thing that was simply part of the job.
“Gus, you’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Ah, you’re still here! Fantastic,” Gus exclaimed on the other end. The voice was hoarse and gravelly. Despite being Tina’s boss and head nurse, Gus still hadn’t given up smoking. Or baking decadent desserts for the entire staff. A smoking nurse with an atrocious sugar and fat-laden diet: the ultimate irony. He continued on before she had the chance to protest. “I know, I know, I know. Let me explain.”
“Now you told me I was absolutely, one-hundred-percent off the schedule tonight. You promised me that Kendra had it covered.” Tina tried her best to sound annoyed, but it was hard to be annoyed at goofy, lovable Gus. The one guy who took a chance on a wrong-side-of-the-tracks kid with no family and a degree from a less than reputable community college. But it was because she was good. And he noticed her potential right away.
Gus coughed throatily into the receiver. “I’m so sorry, hon. Kendra called in sick not even a minute ago and something big just came up. Real big. I promise that you will be absolutely, one-hundred-percent off the schedule next Saturday night.”
Tina tried her best tough-guy voice. “She better be really sick, Gus.”
“Incredibly sick,” Gus confirmed.
“Like projectile-vomiting-pea-soup-while-pus-drips-out-of-her-eyes kind of sick?”
“Yes, I swear. Now you know I’d never bother you unless it was an absolute emergency and I need your expertise tonight. You’re the—”
Tina smirked. “I know, Gus. You’re the bee’s knees, the cream-of-the-crop, the best nurse on my staff,” she said, repeating all of Gus’s usual lines. This wasn’t the first time he’d called her back in after giving her the night off. But his words did have some merit to them. Tina had never lost a single patient—even the ones with the grisliest injuries. She had managed to help heal them all—everything from stage-three pancreatic cancer to a drowning victim who’d been pronounced dead for seven full minutes. And Gus knew this.
He barked a short laugh. “Damn right you are. Now get your butt over to 52 Crawford Place in Saunville,” he instructed. “The Mezza Estates.”
Demon territory, Tina realized. She bit her lip. “A residence?” she asked, her voice quavering slightly. “But Gus, you never have me go directly to the scene.”
“I know, but tonight we can’t waste any time. This one’s bad, honey. Real bad. I need you to get there as soon as you can.”
“What happened?”
“Another fire,” Gus replied. Tina heard a flick and the crackling incineration of the end of a fresh cigarette.
“But that’s the like—what? Sixth one this week?” Tina asked incredulously.
“It’s summertime in Los Angeles, doll. The trees and grass are dry and all it takes is one little incident—a flash of lightning, even—and poof. And these estates also happen to border on a national park that caught fire ten times within the last year alone.”
Tina considered for a moment. “Throw in a box of your famous éclairs and you don’t have to start a chain of unwelcomed phone calls tonight.”
“Done,” Gus laughed throatily. “I’ll even raise you a butter tart for your trouble.”
Tina removed her opposite hand from her pocket and opened her fist. She looked at the car keys she had been gripping so tightly that they had left little indentations in her palm—she had been so close to having the night off. She placed the keys on the roof of her car and sighed. Pinching the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger, she said, “I’m heading over there now.”
Chapter Two
When Tina eyed her dashboard and saw the green line on the screen of her GPS get shorter and shorter as the blue dot of her car approached her destination, a tightness started to grow in her chest. She stopped at a red light and glanced at her hands, which were now trembling fiercely as they rested on the steering wheel. What is going on with me, she thought. Nothing about tonight was out of the ordinary, aside from Gus requesting that she go directly to the scene. She’d seen fires—and their resulting burn victims—dozens of times and never lost her cool, calm demeanor. Sure, there were always the nerves that riddled her before pulling back the curtain of an exam room, the buzz of anticipation of what she’d have to do for her next patient. But this time it was as if her body was trying to tell her something. To warn her.
Though she was still a few miles away, Tina could see the black mass come into view through a thick patch of evergreen trees, the smoke pluming upward and outward across the now darkened sky. “Wow” was all she could manage to say. It had to be one hell of a fire to create such an incredible amount of swirling smoke, the black clouds so large they looked like an entity. A living, breathing monster. Unsurprisingly, when she finally arrived on the scene, there were dozens of firefighters. They were still armed with hoses, eliminating what were presumably the remaining hot spots in the ash, while three ambulances sat parked across the street, out of harm’s way. There must have been only a few residents in the house, Tina thought with a sigh of relief. She searched the ambulances for any kind of flurry of activity, but the first two appeared to be empty. The third held a small, vague outline of a patient sitting on its gurney. Tina threw her car into Park and jogged over to it.
The child inside the only occupied ambulance looked to be about five, Tina guessed. The shirt of his cowboy pajamas, its edges charred and sooty, was unbuttoned to accommodate the panels of a heart rate monitor that beeped like a metronome in the corner of the ambulance. His short black hair was mussed and his crystal blue eyes—which peered from above an oxygen mask that slightly concealed the rest of his face—looked bright with wonder. Tina thought of the resilience of kids until she saw that his left hand was pressing down into his right forearm; the gauze under his fingertips was stained deep red with blood.
Tina stole a glance over her shoulder at what was once this boy’s home and shook her head, astonished that he made it out alive, that only his arm was injured.
She recognized the EMT taking the boy’s vitals. “Hey, Nikki.”
Nikki’s short gray curls bounced when she glanced up from the stethoscope pressed to the patient’s back once she had finished listening to his breathing. Her silver-framed glasses sat low on her nose, making her look like Mrs. Claus, which was quite fitting, Tina thought, as Nikki was just as cheerful. “Hey, Tina! Surprised to see you here, girl. But happy none the less.” She smiled.
“Gus said you’d be needing back up,” Tina explained.
“And Gus would’ve been right.” Nikki nodded to the crumbling house. “With these giant mansions, you can never tell if there’s one person inside or fifty. But luckily there were only three people, including my friend here.”