“Everyone out!” Alessandro’s voice cut through the panic. “Now! Move!”
He was shepherding people toward the door, his body between them and the spreading flames. Marina saw Bea throw her hands up and shout something, chaos magic, wild and instinctive, trying to contain the fire before it consumed the building.
Dante appeared from nowhere, sprinting through the front door with fear on his face. “I saw smoke from the hotel! Is everyone…”
“Get them out!” Alessandro shouted. “Help Bea!”
Marina started toward the stairs. Her apartment. Her grandmother’s things. The recipe book…
Alessandro caught her arm. “No. It’s not safe.”
“My pelt is up there. My grandmother’s locket. Everything I…”
“You can’t save things if you’re dead.”
She struggled against his grip, but he was stronger. And his terror bled through, even past the dampened bond. Not for himself. For her.
He pulled her toward the door, and she let him.
Outside, the street had erupted into organized chaos. Sweetwater Cove’s supernatural community was mobilizing: a nixie directing water from the nearby fountain toward the flames, brownies ferrying possessions out of neighboring buildings, Estelle’s ancient voice cutting over everything like she’d done this drill before. Maybe she had.
The fire trucks arrived, regular human ones from the next town over, but the supernatural response was already containingthe blaze. This was what community meant in Sweetwater Cove. When one of their own was in trouble, everyone came running.
Marina watched her bakery burn and felt herself shatter.
Three generations of her family had worked in that kitchen. Her grandmother had taught her to bake in that kitchen. The counter where Alessandro had learned to roll fondant, badly, was probably ash by now. The dent in the wall from when she’d dropped the KitchenAid mixer at seventeen. The window seat where Mrs. Thornberry told her terrible jokes. The storage closet where she’d hidden the recipe book.
All of it, burning.
Alessandro stood beside her, close but not touching. Scales flickered across his forearms, barely visible in the firelight. Smoke curled from his nostrils with each breath. He was fighting to stay human when every dragon instinct screamed at him to shift and hunt.
“Don’t,” she said, her voice hollow. “Not in front of the fire trucks.”
“He did this.” The words came out guttural, barely human. “He burned your home to steal your pelt. I’m going to?—”
“What? Kill him? Right now, in front of witnesses, when we still need to break the curse?”
The logic penetrated his fury. Barely.
Bea and Dante worked together at the fire’s edge, magic and dragon-heat combining in ways that shouldn’t work but somehow did. Dante breathed fire, controlled and precise, to consume the most damaged sections faster, denying the flames fuel to spread. Bea threw chaos magic at the edges, disrupting the fire’s patterns, making it easier for the nixie’s water to extinguish what remained.
They argued constantly about technique, about positioning, about whose approach was more effective.
“Your fire is too hot!”
“Your magic is too chaotic!”
“That’s literally what it’s called!”
“That’s literally the problem!”
But their movements were perfectly synchronized. Every time one of them stumbled, the other was there to catch them. Every gap in defense was covered before it could become dangerous.
“They’re good together,” Alessandro said beside her, low.
“They hate each other.”
“That’s what they think.”
