“What?” She stared at me. “The building’s about to burn, and you want to know if I have an ax? Are you sure you’re not just having a really odd nightmare?”

“You got dressed,” I pointed at her. “The door is jammed. Someone broke the knob so that we can’t escape.” I sighed. “I’m going to need to kick the door down.”

“Oh, brilliant, that’s not dangerous at all,” said Shelby.

“Got a better idea?”

She looked away.

The smell of gasoline was stronger when we walked out into the living room; there was no way to pretend that I was just having a very vivid nightmare. I moved toward the door and fell into a position I’d learned during my long-ago karate classes, hoping I wasn’t about to splinter my ankle.

“Stop!”

“What?” I turned to see Shelby shaking her head frantically. “What’s wrong?”

“Just hold on, all right?” She stepped in front of me, shoving me aside as she leaned forward and pressed her hand against the door. She pulled it quickly away, looking grimly back at me. “It’s hot.”

“What?”

“I said, it’s hot.” She dropped to the floor, pressing her cheek to the carpet. “I smell smoke. Not much, not yet, but enough. We can’t go out this way. The building’s already on fire.” She rolled back to her feet, grabbing her discarded suitcase.

“Of course the building’s already on fire,” I muttered. “Call 911?”

“On it.”

While Shelby dialed, I ran to the living room window, looking outside. The lawn was clogged with people, some of them pointing up at the building like everyone else might have come outside for a nice midnight stroll, instead of fleeing from the fire. I tried to open the window, and groaned as it refused to budge. “Shelby?”

“Fire’s already been reported, firemen are on their way,” she replied, running to my side. She frowned. “You can’t open that, Alex, it’s been painted shut.”

“Shit.” Smoke was starting to come through the crack under the door, finally overwhelming the smell of the gasoline. “What about the bedroom windows? Do those open?”

“Yes!” Shelby realized what I was really asking before I could voice it. This time, she grabbed my hand, pulling me after her as she whirled and ran back to the bedroom.

There was no crowd of people outside the bedroom window. Instead, it looked out on the roof of the parking area—which was, naturally, on fire.

“Better outside on fire than inside on fire,” I muttered. “Wait here.”

“What? Alex!”

I ignored her as I grabbed our discarded towels off the floor, running with them back to the bathroom, where a few seconds under the showerhead soaked them—and me—all the way through. I ran back to where Shelby waited, flinging one of the towels at her. She squawked when it hit her, glaring at me.

“What—”

“Follow me!” Before I could lose my nerve, I stepped up onto the windowsill, wrapped the towel around my shoulders, took a deep breath, and jumped.

It was a ten-foot fall to the carport roof. The impact would have been enough to jar every bone in my body if I hadn’t been leaping into the middle of a blazing inferno. As it was, even my sister, Verity, who never met a building she didn’t want to jump off, would have been impressed. I began slapping the roof around me with my towel as soon as I landed, trying to clear something of a safe zone for Shelby. The smell of burning hair wasn’t as bad as the smell of smoke, but it was more immediate, since it meant that part of my body was on fire.

My shoes were waterlogged, but the fire was stronger than thirty seconds in the shower. It bit through the thin fabric, and I yelped, the last of my clean air escaping. Breathing in would mean getting a lungful of smoke, and then . . .

Well, there wouldn’t be much “and then.” I glanced up, still flailing around with the towel, and saw Shelby standing on the ledge, clearly trying to find the nerve to follow me. I beckoned with one arm, hoping that she would see the need to move. I could see the fire now, consuming the building all around her. Whoever had jammed our door had done us a favor: if we’d opened it, the fire would have come into the apartment, and we’d already be dead.

Shelby, please, I thought.

She jumped.

It was not a graceful fall; she pinwheeled her arms madly all the way down, and she landed hard, hitting her knees on the burning roof. But she bounced back quickly, swinging her towel hard as she fought to beat out the flames.

We were never going to defeat this fire on our own, but we didn’t need to; all we needed to do was get away. I grabbed her wrist, still struggling not to breathe, and pulled her with me as I jumped again, this time off the carport roof.

After a ten-foot fall into a blazing fire, an eight-foot fall into a puddle of rainwater was almost a blessing. My ankles didn’t agree, and they folded beneath me, pitching me to my knees on the pavement. I didn’t care. I was too busy scrambling to my hands and knees, turning to check on Shelby. Please be all right, I thought frantically. Please, please be all right . . .

She was sitting on her butt in the middle of the puddle, her suitcase lying off to one side. The latches had popped, but the lid had fallen back into the closed position after only half a bra had managed to make good its escape. She looked stunned, and the bottom few inches of her hair had been badly singed, probably during the first fall, when she dipped too low to bleed off the force of her impact.

“Shelby? Are you okay?”

“I . . . we just jumped out of a burning building in the middle of the night. That’s a thing which occurred in the actual world.” She tilted her head back, looking toward her apartment window. Flames were finally visible inside, going industriously about the business of consuming everything she hadn’t been able to shove into her emergency bag. “My apartment is on fire.”

“Yes,” I said. I wasn’t sure what else to say. My hands hurt. So did my feet, and my knees. I was going to have some incredible blisters; I was lucky if that was the worst thing I was going to have. I needed to get home and get some medical attention. I needed to help Shelby first.

“The door was jammed.” She looked back down, focusing on me as a new emotion overwrote her confusion: anger. Shelby Tanner looked like she was about to start a second fire through nothing but the power of her rage. “Somebody just tried to kill us.”