Fated to My Mate's Uncle novel · Chapter 4 of 32

Chapter 4: Holdover

The dispatch tones went off two days later, at four in the afternoon.

Lightning had dropped a strike in the timber up the West Fork, on Forest Service ground.

The crew went from lying around the fire pit to rolling out of camp in six minutes.

I'd never seen anything like it.

Boots, packs, saws, two buggies and a pickup.

Patsy threw a cooler at me.

"Sack lunches. Go with them. They'll forget to eat."

"Fraser said out of the trucks."

"Fraser isn't the one who has to feed them." She shoved me toward the pickup. "Ride with the medic. Stay at the vehicles."

The medic was a quiet wolf with reading glasses and a fishing vest full of tape.

He looked at me the whole first mile.

"You're really pregnant?" he said finally.

"Really."

"You throw up on my truck, you clean it."

"Deal."

That was the most anyone on the crew had said to me in two days.

The fire was small.

Two acres of grass and lodgepole on a south slope, mostly out by the time we got there.

The crew went up the hill in a line.

I stayed at the trucks with the cooler, the way I'd been told.

For an hour.

Then the wind shifted, and I smelled it.

Not smoke. Smoke was everywhere.

This was underneath the smoke.

Hot pine needles cooking without air. Roots smoldering under dirt. A sweet, tarry smell.

I knew that smell from the evidence bags in the Keeping.

Holdover. Fire that goes underground into the duff and the roots and waits.

It was coming from up the slope, on ground they'd already called cold.

I grabbed the medic's radio off his dash.

"There's fire under the black. Up by the big snag. It's in the roots."

The radio crackled.

"Who is this?"

"It's the Nose."

A long pause.

Then a voice I didn't know laughed. "Lady, that ground's been out for an hour. I'm standing on it."

I looked up the hill.

A kid in a yellow shirt was standing right beside the big snag, leaning on his tool.

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