The Fireman by Joe Hill Read Free Book Online Page B

made to wait, liked him to be in charge. He had strawberry-scented cream and he rubbed it into her. He was naked beside her, his body dusky and fit in the low light, his chest matted with black fur.
    And when he rolled her over and got inside her, she made a sobbing sound of pleasure, because it was so sudden, and he was so intent about it. He had hardly started when the condom slipped off. He stopped his motion for a moment, frowning, but she reached down and flung it aside, and then took his ass and pushed him down on her again. Her nurse greens were on the floor, stinking of smoke. She would never wear them again. A hundred square miles of French wine country was on fire and more than two million people had burned to death in Calcutta, and all she wanted was to feel him inside her. She wanted to see his face when he finished. She thought there was a good chance they’d be dead by the end of the year anyway, and he had never been inside her this way before.
    On the night of the hospital fire, they made love by candlelight, and, later, a baby began.

 
    UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
    HarperCollins Publishers
    ....................................
    AUGUST • 7
    Harper was in the shower when she saw the stripe on the inside of her left leg.
    She knew what the stripe meant in one look and her insides squirmed with fear, but she wiped cool water from her face and scolded herself. “Don’t start with me, lady. That’s a goddamn bruise.”
    It didn’t look like a bruise, though. It looked like Dragonscale, a dark, almost inky line, dusted with a few oddly mineral flecks of gold. When she bent close, she saw another mark, on the back of her calf—same leg—and she jerked upright. She put a hand over her mouth because she was making little miserable sounds, almost sobs, and she didn’t want Jakob to hear.
    She climbed out, neglecting to turn off the shower. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t like she was wasting the hot water. There wasn’t any. The power had been out for two days. She had gone in the shower to wash the sticky feeling off her. The air in the house was smothering, like being trapped under a pile of blankets all day long.
    The part of her that was five years a nurse—the part that remained calm, almost aloof, even when the floor was sticky with blood and a patient was shrieking in pain—asserted itself. She choked down the little sobs she was making and composed herself. She decided she needed to dry off and have another look at it. It could be a bruise. She had always been someone who bruised easily, who would discover a great black mark on her hip or the back of her arm with no idea how she had injured herself.
    She toweled herself almost dry and put her left foot up on the counter. She looked at the leg and then looked at it in the mirror. She felt the need to cry rising behind her eyes again. She knew what it was. They put down Draco incendia trychophyton on the death certificates, but even the surgeon general called it Dragonscale. Or he had, until he burned to death.
    The band on the back of her leg was a delicate ray of black, blacker than any bruise, silted with grains of brightness. On closer inspection, the line on her thigh looked less like a stripe, more like a question mark or a sickle. Harper saw a shadow she didn’t like, where her neck met her shoulder, and she brushed aside her hair. There was another dark line there, flaked with the mica-specks of Dragonscale.
    She was trying to regulate her breathing, trying to exhale a feeling of wooziness, when Jakob opened the door.
    “Hey, babe, they need me down to the Works. There’s no—” he said, then fell silent, looking at her in the mirror.
    At the sight of his face, she felt her composure going. She put her foot on the floor and turned to him. She wanted him to put his arms around her and squeeze her and she knew he couldn’t touch her and she wasn’t going to let him.
    He staggered back a step and stared at her with blind, bright,