I dart to their doors, hammer them with my fists and kick them open. Then I’m running again, blurring through the flat to the source of the smoke and heat filling the hallway, a sharp chemical stench invading the air.
Definitely petrol.
What the fuck?
But there’s no time to question what I smell—I just run, sweeping every inch of the flat until I find the source of the heat already licking the air of this old-as-fuck building.
Fucking hell.
Smoke billows from Skylar’s open door. A crude device lies below the window, flames catching the bedsheets, choking black smoke filling the space, bleeding into every inch of the room like some cunt thinks it belongs there.
Put it out.
I rip the sheets from the bed and smother the device, my heart the steadiest it’s been in days.
Extinguisher.
It’s down the hall by the front door.
I turn.
Jack’s already there, eyes fogged with sleep, steps uneven. But he has the extinguisher and he thrusts it into my hands.
I put the fire out. Secure the device. Make it safe.Soldier mode. My second skin. Myonlyfucking skin until I came here, but as adrenaline fades and my surroundings become more familiar again, more personal, I see what’s just happened through a different lens.
Glass is everywhere.
On Skylar’s bed, jagged and sharp, a thousand blades in the folds of the wet sheets where he could’ve been sleeping.
Petrol and scorched cotton smother the air. I crouch to examine the device again. The thing’s a joke, a rag stuffed into the neck of a cider bottle, blackened and sloppy, like cartoon anarchy. A makeshift weapon built by someone sharing a brain cell with a twat who eats soup with a fork.
But it doesn’t always take brains to kill someone. Or hurt them enough that their life is never the same. Sometimes it’s luck, it’sfate, and the reality of what could’ve happened here tonight slams into me with the weight of the warning Folk Whitlock brought to our door.
It only takes one idiot to kill everyone you care about.
He was right.
He’sstillright, and something breaks clean through the wall I’ve tried to build around the newfound rage I’ve struggled to control.
I stop trying. Rise as I let it swamp me and burn me up, leaving nothing in its wake but deadly calm, cold as steel resolve coursing through me.
Jack.
Sol.
Skylar.
I move to the smashed window and my sharpened gaze cuts the likely path whoever did this has taken to get away with only one thought on my mind.
They’re dead.
26SKYLAR
Sunrise and I stand in the doorway of my wrecked bedroom. Soot-stained walls. Singed carpet. My bed stripped bare to the scorched mattress.
Jack is on his knees by the window with a torch, searching for fragments of broken glass from the shattered window. He doesn’t know I’m home. No one does. Jack’s locked in, hyper-focused on what he’s doing, and Sol’s pacing our tiny beach, phone pressed to his ear, free hand wedged in his hair, staring at the ocean as if she holds all the answers.
And Mal?