Fated to My Mate's Uncle novel · Chapter 12 of 32

Chapter 12: Wind Shift

The crew stood on the riverbank in the dark and watched it grow.

By midnight the red eye on the ridge was a red mouth.

By two in the morning we could hear it.

A low roar coming across the water.

Fraser didn't sleep. None of them did.

They stood there in their boots with their packs on the ground at their feet and their tools in their hands.

Twenty hotshots watching a fire they weren't allowed to touch.

"The pack's volunteers will have it," the medic said, not believing it.

"With what?" the gray-bearded wolf said. "They've got one engine older than the kid."

At dawn the pack channel crackled on Patsy's scanner.

Gregor's voice, calm and warm.

"The volunteer brigade has the fire under control. Families on the bluff, stay home. And a reminder: any exile who crosses the ford will be treated as an attacker. That includes the so-called Burn Crew 9."

"Under control," Fraser said.

He was looking at the smoke column. It was leaning east, toward the bluff, fat and brown at the bottom.

"That isn't under control. That's lunch."

I went and found Patsy.

She was already loading her truck with water jugs and sandwiches.

"A fire's a fire," she said. "Volunteers get hungry too. And I'm not an exile, I'm just fired."

"I'm coming."

"I figured."

Fraser caught me at the truck door.

"You can't go over there."

"I'm not exiled. I'm severed. I can go anywhere I want."

"Gregor's over there."

"Gregor's on the bluff in Charmaine's new house, talking on a radio." I looked at him. "Somebody on that side has to be able to smell this fire. Their reader is me."

He held my eyes for a long moment.

Then he took the handheld radio off his belt and pressed it into my hand.

"Crew channel's on six. You call, I hear it."

"I won't need..."

"You call, I hear it."

Patsy drove around by the highway bridge, fast.

The pack side was chaos.

The fire was coming down off the ridge through the timber in a line half a mile wide.

Below it, in the trees, sat the pack school.

A long log building with a playground and a flagpole, where every pup in the pack learned to read and to shift.

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