Page 22 of Watch Me Burn
If I got my hands on him now…
Elise’s brow furrows as she sniffs. “Do you smell smoke?”
Fuck.
The cell is getting a little hazy. It’s not black smoke, not like when the witch hunter was stalking me and some part of me recognized that he was a danger to me, but there’s no denying that the room we’re in is slowly filling up with hazy, grey smoke—and all because I got furious when I heard about how Peter is still harassing Elise.
Thorn was right. My temper is definitely a trigger.
I can’t stay here, either. And I don’t just mean the cell. Clarity. I have to go.
And if Elise wants to come with me…
“Do you really want to go to Alaska, though? It’s winter. Isn’t it, like, super dark there and really, really cold and snowy? You could probably find a better sanctuary.”
I’m a fire witch. Celeste thinks that Alaska is the only place for me to go, and now that she’s sure I’ll find what I’m looking for there—whether it’s the fire opal or not—I’m going.
But Elise… who knows? Maybe there’s a sanctuary town in California or something.
“I spoke about it with Thorn before I came down here. It makes sense if I go with you. If the point of going to one of the sanctuary towns is to keep you hidden from the witch hunters, the first step should be to go back to hiding the fact that you are a witch, Bridge. I can help with that. If I claim sanctuary because of Peter, I can take you with me. Pretend you’re my human donor. We can both hide out, and no one will be able to chase after us. What do you think?”
What do I think?
I throw my arm around Elise’s shoulder, giving her a sideways hug before resting my head against hers. “I think that, if I have to hide out in Alaska and go searching in caves for some mystical crystal that may or may not get rid of my witchy side, there isn’t anyone I’d rather go through it all with than you.”
CHAPTER 7
ALASKA
Alaska.
I’m moving toAlaska.
Glancing at the travel itinerary on my phone while we wait for the first leg of the trip to begin, I already get a strange pit in my gut when I look at the last stop.
“Dyea?” I pronounce it like ‘die-ee-uh’.
“Dyea,” corrects Elise.
She says it like ‘die-ee’. I guess the ‘a’ is silent, but when she emphasizes the ‘die’ part, the second syllable doesn’t really seem to matter much.
Die. I’m going to a hidden town in Alaska full of vampires, shifters, and who knows what else, and it’s calledDie. If that’s not an omen for how this is going to go, I don’t know what is.
I don’t have a choice. Fire witches are rare. Either their magic is too tamped down for them to even know they have any—like me—or they’re hiding out, but Celeste admitted she didn’t know of any currently practicing in the US right now. I get why they would hide out, too. When everyone looks at like you as though you’re going to point at them and they’ll blow up on the spot, it gets old.
Well, not everyone. Elise doesn’t seem to care. Thorn wasn’t worried. And Jasper… I don’t think anything fazes that vampire.
Celeste was nervous, though. I think her tip to find the fire opal was to get rid of the threat that I pose by being an untrained witch with a devastating power. Same thing with shipping me off to Alaska. It’s as far from her East Coast coven as I can get. And, sure, I know she suggested this hidden sanctuary because the cold temperatures would also help me conceal my fiery side until I mined some of the fire opal. Doesn’t change the fact that, as soon as I gave in and agreed to go with Elise, she jumped headfirst into making the arrangements.
Thorn threw all of Clarity’s resources behind us, too. He tried to make it seem like he was rewarding Elise for all of her decades in service to the Cadre, but while she beamed over at him, I know better. Like Celeste, he wanted me as far away from his people as possible.
He would’ve sacrificed Elise to get me to trigger my magic. In a way, he’s doing the same thing. Throwing one of his most loyal vampires at Alaska to get rid of me.
Oh, well. Good riddance to him.
I’m glad she’s coming with me. Now that I know that Peter’s been a bigger headache than I thought, no way could I leave her behind. She’s coming with me where I can keep an eye on her, and barely twenty-four hours after that witch hunter tried to jump me, we have all of our essentials packed up, our luggage checked, as we wait for our flight to Seattle to take off.
That’s the first leg of our journey. From Seattle, we have to take a second flight to Skagway, Alaska. It’s the nearest airport to where the sanctuary is hidden in the old ghost town known as Dyea, and though it had its heyday during the gold rush in the 1890s, it’s vacant enough now to conceal a small village made up of about fifty relocated supernaturals.
