Rise of the Phoenix novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: The Old One

Hedda marched me down to the lake at nine the next morning.

She carried a cup of coffee in one hand and a stack of firewood under the other arm.

The lake lay behind the lodge, flat and white and thick with ice, ringed by black pines.

She dropped the firewood in the middle of it and walked back to shore.

"Burn that," she said.

"Just the wood?"

"Just the wood. Not the ice, not the trees, not my dock."

"That's a very specific list."

"I'm a very specific woman."

Garth sat on the bank with a blanket around his shoulders and a mug of cold water in his hands.

He looked far better than he had the night before.

But he still wore the thin, careful look of a man who is counting his steps.

When I glanced at him, he lifted the mug to me.

"No pressure," he called.

"Thanks."

"I mean it. Hedda only has one dock."

I walked out to the pile.

The ice creaked under my boots.

I had put out fires all my life.

Now I stood in the middle of a frozen lake in front of two people who expected me to start one.

I held out my hands.

I thought about fire the way I had been taught to think of it.

It was a thing with appetites, a thing you starve or you feed.

The coal woke, and it didn't ask me anything.

It hit the woodpile.

The logs exploded.

A pillar of flame went thirty feet into the air.

A shock of heat knocked me flat on my back, and the ice under my shoulders began to crack.

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