The man's mouth was on my throat before I had my boots off. "Rhea," he murmured against my skin, and his hands found the hem of my county jacket and pushed it off my shoulders. It landed somewhere in the dark of the cabin with a sound like a dropped newspaper. I had spent the whole day telling people where to go. North on the highway, east past the fairgrounds, not the river road, never the river road. My throat was raw from it. Now I let someone else do the talking. He was warm in a way that had nothing to do with the August heat sitting in the valley like a lid on a pot. His palms slid under my shirt, rough at the heels from years of gripping an axe handle, and I arched into it and heard myself make a noise I would have denied in daylight. "Slow down," I said, though I did not want him to. "No." He kissed the corner of my jaw. "You slow down. You have been running since five this morning. I can smell the smoke in your hair." "You smell like a campfire yourself." "Then we match." I laughed, and it came out unsteady. His fingers found the clasp of my bra, and the room was dark enough that I could pretend I was someone else, someone who did not have a radio on the kitchen counter hissing with the county frequency, someone who did not have to be back at the evacuation center by dawn. He turned me toward the window. Moonlight came through the glass and lay across the floorboards in a pale bar, and I watched his reflection behind mine, sandy hair falling over his brow, the amber of his eyes catching the light. I knew those eyes. I had known them for fifteen years and had spent most of that time not looking at them. "Rhea," he said again, softer this time, and his hand came up to my face and turned it toward him. "Stay." I woke in my truck. The radio was going. It had been going for a while, I think, and the dispatcher's voice had reached some part of my brain that did not require consciousness to obey. "Unit seven, do you copy? Unit seven, Canyon Creek Road is closing. Repeat, Canyon Creek Road is closing." I sat up. My neck had a crick in it from the window glass, and my jacket was bunched under my shoulder, and the cab smelled of old coffee and the pine air freshener Nell had hung from the mirror three years ago. My strawberry blonde curls had come loose from the clip and were stuck to my cheek. I pushed them back and grabbed the mic. "Seven copies. Where are we on the east side?" "Fire jumped the line at Baker's Ford twenty minutes ago. It's moving north. You have got maybe forty minutes before it reaches the cabins at the top of Canyon Creek." Forty minutes. I looked at the clock on the dash. Four fifty two in the morning, though the sky above the Sapphires was already going the color of an old bruise. I had evacuated Canyon Creek twice in the last week and both times the fire had turned away. People had started to treat me like a weather forecast they did not like. The Hendersons had told me on Tuesday that their grandfather had built their cabin and no fire was going to take it, and I had stood on their porch and said I understood, and then I had gone back to my truck and written their names on the list anyway. "Seven is moving," I said into the mic, and pulled the truck onto the road. The canyon road climbed through lodgepole pine and the burnt skeletons of the nineteen ninety nine fire, and every few hundred feet the trees gave way to a gap where the land fell off toward the creek. The smoke had settled into those gaps like water. Sometimes I could see the fire itself, a red-orange shiver in the trees on the far ridge, and sometimes it disappeared and there was only the smell, that sweet resinous reek that got into the lining of my jacket and would not leave. I had been doing this job for six years. Before that I had done dispatch, and before that I had waited tables at the diner in Hamilton and answered the phone at the clinic where my sister worked. I knew every road in this valley. I knew which bridges washed out in spring and which driveways were too steep for the county plow, and I knew, the way you know your own hand, that the Hendersons would not leave their cabin on the first knock. I parked across the road from their gate and got out. The air was hot already. It was four in the morning and the air was hot. "Mrs. Henderson!" I shouted. "It's Rhea, from the county. You need to come out now." The porch light came on. The door opened a hand's width, and Irene Henderson's face appeared in the gap, sixty eight years old and set like concrete. "We talked about this," she said. "We talked about it on Tuesday. The fire is at Baker's Ford. That is two miles from your back porch, Irene. I am not asking you to move the cabin. I am asking you to get in my truck." "Ray won't leave the horses." "Then Ray can ride in the back with me and we will take the horses down to the fairgrounds, and I will personally sign the paperwork. You have my word." The door closed. I stood in the yard with my hands on my hips and counted slowly to ten, and behind me the sky above the ridge had turned the color of a lit cigarette. The door opened again. Irene came down the steps with a canvas bag in one hand and a small brass birdcage in the other, and behind her Ray Henderson was pulling on his boots and muttering about the government. "Thank you," I said, and took the bag. "Where is the boy?" "Wes is with his mother in Missoula. I told you that on Tuesday." "You told me a lot of things on Tuesday." We got the Hendersons into my truck and their three horses into the Hendersons' own trailer, and Ray drove the trailer himself because he did not trust the county to do it right, and I followed them down to the fairgrounds and watched them park, and then I turned the truck around and went back up the canyon because the radio was saying there were more. By six the sun was up and the sky was the color of a peach that had been left too long on a windowsill. By seven the wind had come up out of the south, and the fire was running. I want to be clear about something. I have been around fire my whole adult life. I know what it does to a hillside and what it does to a town, and I know that the word "running" does not mean what people think it means. It does not mean the fire is hurrying. It means the fire has stopped being something you can push against and has become a thing with a mind of its own. At eight my radio cracked and Tessa's voice came through, and she did not bother with the county script. "Rhea, you need to get out of there." "I have got two more cabins on the upper road." "There is a spot fire at the switchback. Bryan says it came out of nowhere." Tessa had been my best friend since we were both nineteen and working the same diner counter, and in twenty two years she had never once told me to leave before she thought it was genuinely time. "I hear you," I said. "Two cabins, Tessa." I got the first cabin out. A retired couple from California who had bought the place in March and were already talking about selling it. The second cabin was empty and had been for years, and I stood in its overgrown yard for a moment and looked up the slope toward the switchback, and that was when I heard the sound. I have heard a lot of things in a fire. Trees exploding from the inside. Metal warping. Once a propane tank went and I felt it in my chest for an hour afterward. What I heard was a child. It was a thin sound, a few notes, like something being torn. It came from the trees above the switchback where the fire was coming down the slope, and I stood there with my radio in my hand and the whole valley roaring and I thought: that is a kid. "Unit seven to any unit," I said. "I have a possible child in the trees above the switchback. I am going in." The radio spat at me. Tessa said my name twice. I dropped the radio into the truck and started up the slope. The fire was above me and to the left, and the smoke rolled down through the trees in gray curtains that came and went. I had my bandana over my mouth. My eyes were streaming. The ground was hot through the soles of my boots, and every so often a pine would go up somewhere close and throw a wave of heat against the side of my face. I heard the child again. Closer. Then I saw the wolf. It came out of the smoke ahead of me and stopped in a clearing between two burned trunks. It was gray, the gray of ash before the wind takes it, and it was large, larger than any wolf has a right to be, and it was carrying a child by the back of the shirt the way a dog carries a puppy. I stopped walking. The wolf looked at me. I have seen wolves in this valley. I have seen them at a distance, moving through the trees, and I have always had the same feeling in my chest, a kind of recognition that I never let myself examine. This was different. This was a wolf standing in the middle of a burning forest with a human child in its mouth and looking at me as though it had been waiting. It came toward me. It did not run. It walked, deliberately, through the smoke, and it did not stop until it was close enough that I could see the child's face. A boy, maybe four years old, red-cheeked and limp but breathing. There was a burn on his wrist. The wolf lowered its head and set the boy down at my feet. I crouched. My hands were shaking, and I did not know whether it was the smoke or the wolf or the child, and I gathered him up against my jacket and felt his small chest move. He was burning up. He was alive. "Where did you come from?" I said, to the boy, to the wolf. The wolf was still there. It was looking at me with eyes the color of a low sun, and its ears were up, and I had the sudden, ridiculous certainty that it understood every word I said. "Go," I said to it. "Get out of here. The fire is coming down the hill." The wolf's head tilted. And then, because I was not moving fast enough, it took two steps forward and pressed its muzzle against my hand. I felt the touch go up my arm like a current in a wire. There was a sound in my head, a long low howl, and it was not coming from the trees or from the fire or from the radio I had left in the truck. It was coming from somewhere under my own ribs, from a place I had walled off and paved over and told myself did not exist. My knees went. I got one hand on the ground to keep from dropping the boy, and the wolf was gone, and the smoke came down over the clearing, and I was on my hands and knees in the ash with a child in my arms and a sound in my head I had not heard since the night my sister died. I staggered down the slope. I do not remember most of it. I remember the heat on the back of my neck and the boy's breath against my collarbone and the trailer of a county truck appearing out of the smoke, and someone's hands pulling the boy out of my arms, and someone else's hands on my shoulders, and then I was sitting on the tailgate with a bottle of water being pressed into my hand and a paramedic calling me ma'am. The boy went into an ambulance. I watched the doors close on him. Then I stood up and walked away from everyone and around the side of the truck, where the fire was visible above the trees and no one could see me, and I leaned against the metal and put my hand over my mouth and tried to breathe. Something had woken up inside me. It had been asleep for fifteen years, since the night my sister died, since the night I ran out of the Bitterroot Valley with my sister's blood on my shirt and a hole in my memory and a promise I had made to myself, and it was awake now, and it was hungry, and it knew the wolf that had carried the child. It knew it the way you know your own name. "Ma'am." I looked up. A man was walking toward me across the gravel, tall, with sandy hair falling over his forehead and the strap of a fire shelter bag across his chest. The smoke had painted his jaw dark. He was thirty feet away and I could smell him, and that was wrong, because there was smoke everywhere and nothing else should have been able to reach me. Then he stopped. He was close enough now that I could see the amber of his eyes, and those eyes were not looking at me like a stranger looks at a county officer. "Rhea," he said. His voice was quiet and careful, and it broke in the middle of my name. I had not seen Dane in fifteen years. He looked older. There was a line between his eyebrows that had not been there, and there was a mark on his forearm that I had put there myself, one night in a cabin at the edge of the valley, with my teeth. He took one more step and stopped, and his jaw was tight, and I watched him fight something and lose. "It is you," he said. "I thought the scent on the ridge was a memory. I told myself it was a memory." "Dane." My voice came out flat and strange. "What are you doing here." "Fighting a fire." He looked at the trees, at the ambulance, at my hands. "That boy. There was a report of a wolf on the slope. A big grey one. It carried him out." "There was no wolf," I said. The line between his eyebrows deepened. "Rhea," he said, "I know what I smelled. I have known that scent since I was twenty four years old. Do not stand there and tell me there was no wolf." My radio went off on my hip, and Tessa's voice cut through the gravel and the smoke and the fifteen years between us, and I did not look at the radio. I looked at Dane, and he looked at me, and somewhere above us a pine went up with a sound like a door slamming. "They are saying the boy was bitten," he said. "They are saying the wolf bit him on the wrist before it carried him out. Rhea, the boy is one of mine. The boy is pack. And the only wolf on that slope this morning was me." I opened my mouth to tell him he was wrong, and then I remembered the burn on the boy's small wrist, and the way the wolf had set him down at my feet, and the howl that had gone off in my chest. I knew, with a certainty that had nothing to do with evidence, that the wolf had not bitten the boy. The wolf had marked him. And I knew that whatever had been asleep in me was awake now, and it was looking at Dane, and it wanted something, and it was not going to go back to sleep.

I did not go back to the evacuation center. There is a protocol for what happened to me on that slope. I know it by heart because I helped write the county's version of it. You get checked by a paramedic. You get a bottle of water and a lecture about smoke inhalation. You fill out a form that goes to a file cabinet nobody opens. I did none of it. I walked away from the ambulance and got into my truck and drove north until the road turned to gravel and the gravel turned to a track that only county vehicles and lost hunters ever used. The lookout had not changed since the last time I climbed those stairs. It was a green wooden box on stilts at the top of a ridge, with a map table and a cot and a woodstove with a crack in its door. It had been decommissioned in the nineties, and nobody had bothered to take it down. The stairs complained under my boots the way they always had. I shut the door behind me and sat down on the floor with my back against the cot frame, and I let it come. I want to explain what a shift is like when you have spent fifteen years refusing to have one. It is not a matter of deciding. It is like a sneeze that has been building behind your eyes since you were twelve, and you have been holding your breath, and you have been pressing the back of your hand to your nose, and you have been telling yourself that if you just keep very still, it will go away. And then something presses a muzzle to your hand in the middle of a burning forest, and your whole body forgets every lie you ever told it. My spine went first. It always went first. There was a slow grinding along the vertebrae as though someone were running a thumb down a bead necklace, and I felt my shoulders roll forward and my hips shift and my jaw begin to lengthen, and I made a sound that was not a human sound, and then I stopped. I stopped because I was afraid. That is the ugly truth of it. I had a fire burning a mile wide outside and a wolf howling behind my ribs and I could not get past the picture in my head: the night my sister died, the door of the clinic swinging on its hinge, and me on the floor with my hands still human and my sister's blood seeping between them. I had told myself for fifteen years that if I ever let it out again, someone else would end up on that floor. So I held it. I held it while my muscles cramped and my skin crawled and something behind my eyes clawed to get out. I held it until my vision went grey at the edges and I had to put my forehead on my knees, and then I vomited into a bucket by the stove that had been there since before I was born. The sun went down while I sat there. The smoke outside thinned and then thickened again as the wind moved it around. Somewhere down in the valley a helicopter went over and went away. I drank two swallows from the water bottle in my pack, and I did not shift, and eventually the thing inside me went quiet. Not asleep. That was finished. Just quiet, the way a dog is quiet when it hears a door open. It was full dark when I stood up. My legs were shaky. I got the lantern going and stood at the big window with my hands on the sill and looked out over the valley, and the valley looked back at me in bits of orange where the fire was working. The sill under my hands was rough. I ran my palm along it out of habit, and my fingers caught on something that was not grain. I looked down. There were scorch marks on the wood. Not old ones. The lookout had been used before, and the woodstove had made its own marks on the floor over the years. These were on the windowsill, at the corner, a fan of blisters where something hot had touched the wood and pulled away, and there was a finer trail of them running along the edge of the frame and down to the corner of the wall. I put my face close. The smell was faint and chemical, and it was not pine and it was not the stove. I have been around accelerant. I have smelled it in burned-out garages and on the edges of suspicious fires and in the county's training pit out at the airport. Gasoline. I got out my flashlight and went over that windowsill like a woman reading a legal document. The marks were a splash, a stop, a change of direction. Something had caught fire here, against the glass, and someone had put it out or it had burned itself out. There were two tiny holes in the window frame that did not belong there, and when I got close I could see where something had been driven in and pulled out again. I thought about the arson call I had answered last spring. A man in Corvallis who burned his own barn for the insurance and did such a bad job of it that the burn pattern looked like a child's drawing. The investigator had shown me the mark of a propane torch against the sill and I had said, well, that is not how lightning works, and he had laughed and said no ma'am, it is not. This was not lightning either. This was not a cigarette thrown into dry grass. Someone had opened this lookout's window and set something burning against it. I sat back on my heels in the middle of the floor with the flashlight beam trembling on the wood, and I made myself think it through in order. The lookout sits on the ridge above the den. You can see the pack's roof from the north window if you know where to look. Whoever put those marks on the sill knew exactly how far away the ridge was and wanted to watch something burn. There was no better seat in the whole valley. I got up and walked the lookout from end to end. I did not know what I was looking for. I found it anyway, under the mattress of the cot: a folded sheet of paper gone soft at the creases, and inside it, a picture cut from a magazine and a single line written in pencil in the corner, in a hand I did not recognize. The picture was of the Sapphire Mountains. The line said: nine is not enough. I stood there with that paper in my hand and the lantern guttering and the smell of gasoline still in my nose, and I felt the ground move under me in a way that had nothing to do with the fire. Nine is not enough. I say nine when I am scared. I have said it since I was a child and I could not tell you why, and I said it under my breath the way other people say a prayer. It is not a thing I tell people. My sister knew it. My mother knew it. That is the whole list, and my mother has been dead for twenty years and my sister for fifteen. I put the paper in my jacket pocket, and then I stood in the middle of the lookout and listened to my own heartbeat and told myself the obvious thing, which was that anyone in the valley could have said a number. It was a coincidence. Coincidences happen. The paper had been under a mattress for years, probably, and someone had written a note to themselves about a road, route nine, evacuation route nine, because everybody in the county had been arguing about route nine since June. But the window was scorched. The window was scorched and the note said nine, and the fire on the ridge had started at the bunker and the bunker sat under the lookout like a coin under a cup, and Dane had said the boy was pack and that the only wolf on that slope was him. I had to get out of there. I had to get back to my truck and down to the fairgrounds and find Tessa and put all of this in front of somebody who would listen. I picked up the lantern and turned to the door and stopped, because there were boots on the stairs. One set. Heavy. Coming up at a pace that was not apologetic. I had left my radio in the truck. I had left my phone in the truck too, in the cup holder, because the fire season had gotten into the habit of saving me from having to answer it. I looked around the little room for something to hold in my hand and found the fire axe in its bracket by the door, and I took it down and held it across my body and stood to the side of the doorframe. The boots reached the landing. There was a knock. "Rhea." I knew the voice. I had known it for fifteen years and it had said my name that morning in the gravel by an ambulance. I did not lower the axe. "It is Dane," he said, through the door. "I saw the lantern light. I have been looking for you since noon." "Go away." "I cannot do that." A pause. "I need to tell you something, and I need to tell you before someone else does. The boy in the ambulance. He woke up on the way to Missoula and told the doctor a grey wolf bit him. He also told the doctor that the grey wolf was a woman." I had the axe head against my palm and my back against the wall and my heart going like a bird in a sack, and I did not say anything. "Rhea," Dane said, quieter now. "Open the door. There is a box of matches on this landing and a scorched spot in front of the window, and you and I both know what that means. I have been at the fire all day and I have been thinking about a word your sister used once, a long time ago, when she was trying to tell me something without telling me. The word was nine." I looked down at the folded paper in my jacket pocket. My mouth was dry. "Open the door," he said. "Please." I put my hand on the latch.

I did not open the door. I told him to meet me at the evacuation center instead, and I said it through two inches of pine board with the fire axe still in my hands, and I heard him exhale on the other side and say, fine, and go back down the stairs. I waited until his truck started up and the sound of it went off along the ridge before I came out. I am not proud of that. But fifteen years is a long time to build a wall, and I was not going to knock it down on a landing in the dark. By the time I got down to the fairgrounds the parking lot was full of headlights and horses and people standing in knots with their arms crossed. The fairgrounds had been the county's evacuation center since the first week of August. The 4 H barn had been turned into a shelter for dogs and cats and one very unhappy parrot. The grandstand had cots under it. There was a plywood board by the gate with names written on it in dry erase marker, and every morning someone went through it and tried to find out who was still missing. Tessa found me before I got out of the truck. She had her radio in one hand and a paper cup of coffee in the other and her dark hair pulled back in a clip that was giving up. "You went off the air for nine hours," she said. "Nine. I have been calling every unit in the county. I had Bryan out looking for your truck." "I am sorry." "Sorry is not a thing that helps me at four in the morning." She looked at my face and her voice changed. "What happened up there?" "I found something." I took the folded paper out of my pocket and turned it over in my fingers. "Not here. Later. Where is the boy?" "Missoula. They airlifted him out around noon. He is going to be fine, they think. His mother is with him." Tessa drank some of her coffee and made a face. "There is a man in the grandstand asking about you. Tall, sandy hair, says he runs the smokejumper crew out of the ridge. He has been here for two hours and he has drunk three cups of our terrible coffee, which I am choosing to take as a bad sign." "His name is Dane." "You know him?" "I used to." I started across the lot, and Tessa came with me, because Tessa has never once let me walk into anything alone. "Tess, I need you to pull the fire reports for the whole season. Every one of them. And I need the county archive records for this ridge, going back, say, twenty years." She stopped walking. "Why?" "Because the fire that started on the ridge did not start from lightning, and there is a burned windowsill in the old lookout that says somebody lit it, and I want to know who has been up there and who signed off on the reports that said otherwise." Tessa looked at me for a long moment with her cup halfway to her mouth. "Rhea," she said. "You know I will do it. But I need you to tell me something. You came out of that canyon this morning with a kid in your arms and a look on your face like you had seen a ghost, and you have been driving around this valley for six weeks telling everyone the fire is normal. Is it normal?" I thought about the wolf in the smoke. I thought about the howl under my ribs, and the paper in my pocket, and the word nine written in pencil by somebody who had scorched a windowsill. "No," I said. "It is not normal." The grandstand was mostly empty at that hour. There was a family asleep in the corner under a blanket, and a woman folding clothes on a bench, and a row of cots with nobody in them. And there was Dane, sitting at the end of the lowest bench with his elbows on his knees, and he stood up when he saw me. The morning light was coming in flat through the gaps in the roof, and it did nothing to hide him. Sandy hair, longer than he used to wear it, falling over his forehead. The dark line of the fire shelter strap across his chest. He looked like a man who had not slept, and he was looking at me like the whole grandstand had gone quiet. The wind changed. It came in through the open side of the grandstand, and it carried the ash and the smoke and the smell of horses, and underneath all of it, Dane. I had forgotten what he smelled like. That is what I told myself for fifteen years. I told myself it was a young woman's foolishness, a crush on the Alpha's son, a summer thing, and that memory had grown fat and soft with time and whatever I had felt had been nothing more than a girl wanting to be wanted. The smell hit me and my knees nearly went. It was cut cedar and woodsmoke and something under it, something warm and animal that had nothing to do with smoke or cedar, and it went straight past my nose and into a part of me I had been sitting on since I was twenty six. My wolf stood up behind my ribs and pushed, and I had to put my hand on the bench rail to stay upright. Dane's jaw went tight. I watched him feel it too, the way a man feels a hand on the back of his neck. He took a breath and let it out. "Rhea," he said. "It has been a long time." "Fifteen years." My voice was steadier than I expected. "You look tired." "I have been fighting a fire." He glanced at Tessa, then back at me. "Can we talk somewhere that is not a grandstand?" Tessa looked between us and decided, with the wisdom of twenty two years of friendship, that she had paperwork to do. She walked away toward the office trailer with her coffee, and she turned around once and mouthed something at me that I chose not to read. Dane sat down again and I sat down across from him on the bench, and there were maybe four feet between us and it felt like the width of the county. "The boy," I said. "What is his name?" "Wes. Wesley." Dane rubbed his thumb along the edge of the bench. "His mother is human. His father was one of mine. He died two winters ago, a car on the highway at night, and the mother did not know what her husband was until after. She has been raising the boy in Missoula and she has been in touch with Owen, off and on, about what will happen when Wes is old enough." "How old is he when it happens?" "Fourteen, usually. Sometimes twelve, if the wolf is strong." He looked up. "Wes is four. He is not going to shift for a decade. But he was born pack, and there is not a wolf in this valley who would not have gone up that slope for him." "The wolf on the slope was not a wolf," I said. "It was a woman. That is what the boy told the doctor. You told me so yourself." Dane was quiet for a moment. Outside the grandstand a truck went past and somebody laughed, and the paper cup in my hand buckled a little at the seam. "His mother told me what he said. He said the grey wolf had the face of a lady." Dane looked at the floor between his boots. "He is four years old and he was choking on smoke. Children see what they need to see." "And you do not believe that." "I believe I have been the Alpha of the Bitterroot pack for eleven years, and I have never known a wolf who could carry a four year old child out of a fire and not be burned." He looked at me. "The boy had one burn on his wrist. One. The whole canyon was on fire." I thought about my hands on his small chest. I thought about the way the wolf had set him down at my feet, and the sound in my head. "Silver," I said. Dane went very still. "It is what my sister told me," I said. "That silver could hold it back. She said there was a way to stop a wolf from shifting if you wanted to, and she said she had a way of doing it that did not hurt anybody. I never asked her what she meant. I did not want to know." "You are talking about the clinic," he said, and there was something new in his voice, something careful and hard. "Your sister's clinic." "Yes." Dane stood up. He walked three steps to the end of the grandstand and stood with his back to me and one hand on the roof post, and I watched the muscles in his shoulders move under his shirt. "Rhea," he said. "I need to tell you something, and you are not going to like it. When your sister died, there was a fire at that clinic. The county called it an accident. There were two bodies in the building and one of them was your sister and the other one was a wolf from my pack who was supposed to be on patrol on the ridge. The Council sent a man down from Denver to look into it and the man said it was an electrical fire and the case closed." "I know all of this. I was there." "No." He turned around. "You were not there. You ran. I came to the clinic at dawn and the building was still burning and you were gone, and I did not hear one word from you for fifteen years. I have been trying to find out what happened in that building since before I could shave, and every door I open has a man in Denver standing behind it. Then a wolf carries a child out of a canyon fire and puts him down at your feet and there is a scorched windowsill in a lookout that has been closed since I was a boy." He came back toward me. The smell of him came with him and I sat very still on the bench. "I know what you are," he said. "I have known since I was twenty four and I put my hand on your arm in the pack house and everything in me went quiet. You are my mate, Rhea. You have been my mate since before your sister died and you will be my mate when the last of this valley has burned down to the rock. Do you understand what I am telling you?" My mouth was dry. "I understand that you are saying it." "I am saying that I will not let you run this time. Not from me and not from whatever is in that lookout. There is a man from Denver arriving in this valley in two days and he has the power to sign my pack out of existence. And I think the two of us, you and I, are the only people in this valley who know that the fire is being used." "And if I tell you I do not want your bond?" "Then I will put the bond aside," he said. "And I will still need your maps and your evacuation routes and your arson investigation. The pack has forty two wolves and there are children in the den. I am not too proud to beg a county officer for help." "Everybody begs a county officer for help," I said. "Eventually." That surprised a breath out of him. It was not a laugh. It was close. Then he moved. He put one hand on the bench beside mine and leaned down, and the smell of him filled my head, and I did not pull away and neither did he, and the whole grandstand, the sleeping family, the radio on my hip, the fire season, all of it went out of my mind like a match. I leaned up and he met me, and his mouth was warm and tasted of terrible coffee, and he kissed me as though he had been waiting fifteen years and had decided on the walk over that he was done with waiting. I kissed him back. My hands came up and one of them went to the back of his neck and held on. He made a low sound against my mouth and pulled me closer, and the county jacket and the arson and the word nine were very far away. The radio on my hip squawked. We broke apart and I grabbed it before my brain had caught up with my hands. "Unit seven," I said. "Go ahead." It was Bryan, at the north station. His voice was flat and fast. "Rhea, you need to come up to the ridge road. Somebody left the gate open at the pack's firebreak, and there is a truck up there that does not belong. And Rhea, there is a family living in the old bunker. A woman and two kids, and they say they have been there for a week." I looked at Dane. His face had gone the way a wolf's face goes when it hears a sound in the trees. "I will be there in twenty minutes," I said. I turned the radio off and stood up, and Dane stood up with me, and I put my hand flat on his chest for a moment before I could think better of it. He covered it with his own. "There is a bunker under the ridge," I said. "I found it today. Or I found the door of it, anyway. It was open and there was a camera inside pointed at the pack house and a cot and a safe." "And now there is a family in it." "And now there is a family in it." Dane picked up his fire shelter bag off the bench and slung it over his shoulder. "Get in my truck," he said. "Yours is running on empty and I know a shortcut." "That shortcut is not on any county map." "I know," he said. "That is the point." We were halfway across the lot when Tessa came out of the office trailer with a folder in her hand and her face gone white, and she called my name, and I turned. "Rhea," she said. "I pulled the fire reports like you asked. The report from the first week of August, the one that says lightning started it on the ridge. The signature at the bottom is not the district ranger's." I looked at the folder. "Whose is it?" Tessa held the page up. In the handwriting I had been looking at an hour ago in a dry erase board and a thousand times on a hundred county forms, was a signature I would have recognized anywhere. "Yours," she said. "It is your name on the report, Rhea. Signed the night the fire started."