Bear The Blaze (Firebear Brides 3) (8 page)

You need to talk to him,
she told herself, allowing one more second of obsessing about him before she’d put him out of her thoughts until her job was done.
When he gets back.

She refused to consider the possibility of
if
he came back. He had to. They had unfinished business. The werebear had no right to try and get injured during something as apparently routine as a forest fire in Idaho.

Attempting to troubleshoot a truck alone that was finicky mostly during gear changes was not an easy task. After poking around in the engine for a while, Abigail eased herself into the service pit that opened up in the belly of the workshop. Wearing her headlamp and dragging her toolbox down there—a precarious climb as the pit was only accessible via ladder—Abigail took her time to check the underside of the truck.

These modern cars were a real hassle. Most things that needed to be done required half of the damn thing to be dismantled. Thank the Lord she was so adept at it. Abigail was busy loosening some couplings when she heard the telltale sign of heavy footsteps outside.

“You guys back already?” she called, but got no answer.

She couldn’t see a damn thing from the darkness of the pit, despite standing up on a little foot ladder because she wasn’t tall enough to reach everything she needed to. There was no answer, and for a second she thought she’d imagined those steps. But a moment later she heard something sloshing, like liquid in a canister, and the footsteps sounded again, more distant this time.

“Redmond, would you stop dicking around! Is everyone all right? Did Old Bell make it?” she called, frowning to herself.

When that too went without a reply, Abigail hopped off the ladder and went for the one that would take her out of the pit. As she put her hands on the first rung, the heavy metal cover was slammed down on top of the pit, covering the ladder exit and plunging Abigail into darkness. All she saw were a pair of dark brown, muddy work boots with bright yellow tags.

“This isn’t funny!” she hissed, clambering up the rungs and pushing at the cover, unable to move it from her side. “Let me out!”

It was at that moment that her heart sunk. She heard the sound of a match being pulled and then the terrifying whoosh that came with a fire starting, big and angry. She could hear those footsteps faintly walking away again until there was nothing else but the roar of the fire somewhere outside of the workshop, and the panicked beating of her heart to keep her company.
 

CHAPTER TEN

Ragnar

Putting distance between himself and Abigail was like taking a hot prod and trying to gouge his eyes out. In a word, impossible. Every fiber of his being longed to hold her, to be closer to her and cut through that distance he’d so painstakingly constructed. But he knew that doing that would have been for him, not for her.

Got to be strong
, he told himself, snorting dryly at the stupidity of that thought.

He was very aware that he looked like an apparition of his usual self. Eyes sunken into his skull, and his face contorted in a constant scowl that put his usual grouchy demeanor to shame, he looked like the true definition of the outward image he’d been trying to create. There were too many balls in the air and Ragnar was wearing himself thin trying to keep them all moving.

While the pain and futility of keeping away from Abigail nearly consumed him, he threw himself into his work. Determining whether it had been the Hasslebacks starting those fires had become his one goal, driving him to study and revisit each and every fire site and look for a pattern that would lead him back to the werebear twins.

With all of that at the forefront of his mind, Ragnar knew he was getting sloppy. The moment the tall pine tree, fully in flames, came crashing down mere inches from him was sign enough of that.

“Ragnar, you okay?” Royce hollered, holding onto one of the hoses and spraying the arc of water onto the burning brush high and strong.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he replied, shaking his head and securing his hard hat a bit better.

He ran past Royce, having been on his way to check on Redmond. There were two hoses on Old Bell, leaving one of them as a runner between the firebears and the rest of the crew made up of Shifter Grove locals. Ragnar respected those men. Though few of them were even from around here, unlike Battle and Argo and the Hamiltons, each and every one of them seemed to treat Shifter Grove as a permanent home and they were willing to go through hell or high water to protect it. Or high fire, as was the case here.

“The south side is getting under control. The winds are helping with the efforts there and the fire’s becoming localized here,” he yelled over the roar of the flames that he’d come to know so well.

“Good,” Redmond replied, gritting his teeth as he maneuvered the jet of water. “We can’t keep going forever anyway. Need to refill the tank soon.”

Ragnar nodded, going to check the tank levels. Thankfully, they were okay for now. It wasn’t a massive fire in any sense of the word. The one he’d seen at Rake’s place had been far worse. This one seemed almost casual in comparison, like an afterthought. That alone should have tipped Ragnar off sooner.

As he was turning back to walk to Redmond, something struck him, like an arrow to the heart. He was left gasping for a moment, frozen in place. It felt very much like what he imagined losing a limb would feel like. Twisting, wringing pain that seemed to take hold of him for a moment that lasted far too long. When he managed to draw breath again, Ragnar knew what was wrong.

Abigail.

Something was happening to Abigail and he
knew
he needed to find her.

“I need to go,” he roared over his shoulder, scrambling past Old Bell and running toward Deacon who was taking a momentary breather after coming from the other end of the fire site. “I need your truck!” Ragnar said, his entire body speaking of urgency.

Deacon took one look at him and snaked out the keys from his pocket. It didn’t take much for one shifter to understand another’s pain and it wasn’t like Ragnar was hiding anything in this case. With a barely mumbled thank you on his lips, Ragnar scrambled into the truck and kicked it into gear. He floored it as soon as he could, sending dust flying in his wake as he peeled out of the command post on one of the rural roads.

His body was pricked with goose bumps as he made the truck go as fast as it possibly could, taking any and every shortcut he could think of to reach home faster. Hamilton House seemed like it had been moved a million miles farther away, with every second taking ten times as long in Ragnar’s head.

I’m coming, beautiful,
he thought desperately.

He didn’t know what it was that made him so sure that something was wrong with Abigail, but his bear was adamant about it and his physical reaction was chilling. Never had he felt that kind of panic. Gnashing his teeth, he reached the intersection leading to the house and his stomach dropped when he saw the clear, harrowing signs of a fire blazing somewhere close to the house.

The truck wanted to bump off the road a few times as he made it go far faster than the snaking road allowed. As he got closer, he saw that it was the workshop that was on fire, a tight, concentric circle of flame drawn around it with no way in. Ragnar pulled up in front, jumping out of the cab before it had even come to a proper stop.

“Abigail!” he yelled, his hands balled into fists. “Abigail, are you in there?”

But he didn’t get an answer. Even without it, he
knew
she had to be. Through the flames, he could see Redmond’s truck parked in the workshop but Abigail nowhere in sight. His throat closed up for a second when he noticed that the pit was covered up on one side, which was the only way to get out of there. The smoke was snaking low and thick and the fire was beginning to creep up the inside of the shed, consuming everything in its path.

Without thinking, he let the shift take him
over. He’d never changed so fast in his life. His body grew wider and thicker, elongating at every end and becoming rippled with muscle and thick hide. The soft but slick dark brown coat covered him from head to toe and when he fell on his front paws, lashing his nails into the dry earth, he let out a deep, rumbling roar.

There was worry in his brown eyes as he charged forward, but not for his own health or safety. Throwing himself through the flames, that seemed like the least important thing in the world. The fire curled around him, giving him no choice but to ram through it as it singed and bit at him mercilessly. Luckily the area around the truck and the pit was still mostly clear, giving Ragnar a fighting chance.

He felt the pain of his wounds, the burns that he must have gotten already. But it didn’t matter. Letting instincts take over, he threw himself against the truck once, twice, three times until it rolled back with a crash, embedding the bumper into the back wall of the workshop where flames were more than eager to latch to it.

Abigail was down there, passed out from the smoke. There’d been no way for her to get out and fearing the worst, Ragnar steeled himself as he jumped down, barely fitting in the tight space. He shifted back, holding his breath as he scooped Abigail up in his arms and threw her over his shoulder in a fireman hold. He climbed up the ladder with the seasoned ease of a man who’d done this far too many times, but this was the first time when he had truly felt afraid.

For his heart. For his Abigail.

The flames were building higher now and being in the shed was like a furnace. He could barely see a thing now and breathing was not an option. Running through the entrance with Abigail in his arms wouldn’t have worked. She couldn’t have taken the burns. Ragnar looked around, searching for another way. He yanked open the back door of Redmond’s double cab, finding a small fire extinguisher on the floor.

Grabbing it, he immediately doused the entrance with the white foam. The fire was too strong for it to make much of a difference, but Ragnar only needed a split second. He ran through the inferno, the monstrous flames closing behind him. Rolling Abigail into his arms and off his shoulder, he ran farther away from the workshop to be out of the range of the fire and set her down on the ground.

Small, wheezing gasps were strangled in her throat, but she was still breathing. Ragnar fell back on his haunches, heaving for breath. What had he done? His stubbornness had almost cost Abigail her life. They would have taken her along if it hadn’t been for him telling Redmond earlier that he thought it was best if Abigail wasn’t around them much. And it wasn’t lost on Ragnar that the workshop going up in flames was no accident. It was a warning; a threat. One that had almost been deadly.

Abigail coughed suddenly, her eyes fluttering open. Hell, if it wasn’t the best thing Ragnar had heard all his life.

“You’re safe now, Abigail,” he murmured, putting his arms around her as she sat up and looked from the fire to Ragnar and then back again.

“I… I don’t know what happened. I heard footsteps and I thought it was you guys, and then everything went up and I couldn’t get out.”

A tear rolled down her cheek, more shock than anything else, Ragnar knew. A feeling of certainty rose in his chest, one that he’d already made up his mind about as he was driving back toward Hamilton House, but that he could only now put into words.

“Don’t worry about it. It’s over. And I’ll never let you be in danger again,” he said sternly, planting a kiss on her forehead.

“Wouldn’t that be hard to do with you actively trying to ignore me?” she queried, her boldness apparently immune to the fire.

“I’m sorry, beautiful. It’s a long story and I’ll tell you all of it. But right now we need to get you checked out,” he said.

And catch the fuckers who did this to you,
he added quietly in his head, picking Abigail up and walking back to his truck.

There was no doubt in his mind who was behind this stunt. And they were going to pay.
 

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Abigail

The workshop fire had been put out easily enough as soon as Redmond and Royce returned from the forest fire. By then, of course, the shed was nothing more than a pile of rubble, along with Redmond’s new truck. The irony of him losing two trucks in about as many weeks wasn’t lost on anyone, though Redmond didn’t seem to find it too funny.

Despite her loud objections, Abigail had been taken to Warren’s wife Kacey, who was a nurse, for a quick check-up. She was administered a healthy dose of rest and relaxation, which she was obviously not going to follow. How could she when the world was going to shit around her? Someone had tried to kill her and she knew they must have heard her calls from within the pit when the match had been lit. Despite Ragnar’s reluctance, she’d weaseled herself along for the immediate drive to the Hassleback homestead.