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“Where are Leni and Sara?” he asked, interrupting Lucretia’s theory of unattended candles.

“Oh, look! Here’s Dan now, everyone!” Lucretia looked up from her press conference as if welcoming a special guest to her own TV show. “Everyone, this is Dan. He’s the handsome reclusive shifter who’s been working on the tavern⁠—”

“Lucretia! Was anybody injured?” Dan interrupted her monologue and asked again.

“Everyone’s fine, Dandelion.” A diminutive woman that he recognized as Minerva Lathrop, stepped forward. “The child and her mother are having a spot of tea over in my shop. I thought they could use something to calm their nerves. Such a shame, and at the height of the summer season too. We were brainstorming some ways to repair their flower shop. I’m so sorry about your tavern, too. I know how hard you’ve been working to restore the building. So strange that this should happen now.” She laid a small hand on his forearm. Dan stared down at it, understanding she was trying to be kind, but still feeling next to nothing. Like he was watching a movie. Or having a bad dream.

Everything felt unreal to him.

He forced himself to look up at his half of the building. Next door to the still-smoldering flower shop, the tavern was still standing. But it wasn’t okay. He could see that now. He stood alone on the pavement and assessed the damage he could see.

The front facade was intact.

The windows were dark with soot but appeared to be unbroken.

The door was demolished. Someone had bashed it in.

A limp hose was still threaded through the opening and there was black water bleeding out onto the street. He could see, from where he stood, that the far wall was a blackened, soddy mess. The salvaged bar—the one he’d barely finished staining, polishing and restoring to its former glory—was gone.

A fire marshal in a yellow jacket peeled away from a cluster near the nearest wagon and came toward him. “Excuse me. Are you the owner of this property?” He pointed at the tavern.

“Yes,” Dan answered in a daze. “I sure am.”

“We’ve been trying to reach you for the last three hours, sir.”

“Sorry about that. I was up in the air.” Dan kept looking at the building. Up in the air. Now everything was up in the air. He turned to look at the fire marshal, who was looking at him with what he feared was pity. “So, tell me. How bad is it?”

“Fire’s out now. But let me walk you inside.” The marshal grimaced.

It was bad.

There was nothing but ash and a blackened footprint left where the bar once was. The metal uprights for the racks he’d installed to hold bottles had melted in the heat. The floorboards were warped, charred and damaged in several places.

The walls were also smoke-damaged from floor to ceiling. Big black swirls of soot had created a marbled effect all over everything. The original plaster crackled in long, branching, diagonal lines. And the acrid smell of an electrical fire permeated everything.

“You got lucky. The structure is still sound.” The marshal tried to soften the blow with his bright-side analysis but Dan was still too numb to appreciate this. “The bones are still good. I’m sure your insurance will cover a large part of the damage, and you’ll be able to rebuild it however you like now.”

Dan nodded gravely, still staring at where the bar had been. He’d been okay with the bar exactly how it was. That had been one of the tavern’s selling points. He could just reuse what was there. He hadn’t bothered with insurance. Couldn’t afford it till the place opened. He’d done the statistical analysis and decided his risks were low. He’d preferred to take his chances. Dan pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his bloodshot eyes shut and open again, half expecting to see a different scene. This could not be real, could it? Maybe he was still on the plane and had dozed off?

“I want to show you something,” the firefighter said. He led Dan to the back wall, where ancient-looking wiring ran exposed now that the plaster had cracked away from it. He pointed with his flashlight. “See that? That’s your junction box. See the scorch marks around the casing?”

Dan leaned in for a closer look. “Is this what caused the fire?”

“No, we haven’t been able to nail down the cause of the blaze. But I thought you might want to address this before it caused any more trouble. Substandard installation, probably original to the building and not up to modern magical codes.” The firefighter looked at him steadily. “Lucky that fire didn’t start here on your side. Place was empty, yeah? You were away last night?”

“Yes, I was,” Dan confirmed. He narrowed his eyes; not sure he was ready to hear what the marshal said next.

“If the fire had started here, with nobody present, it would have burned for even longer and hotter before anyone called it in. Could have been considerably worse for the whole courtyard. Could have been a real tragedy.”

The marshal didn’t have to say any more. Dan understood the implications. He felt heavy, and he knew exactly what that feeling was. It was the weight of all his childhood baggage showing up at once. He’d failed to foresee this obvious problem, and now? Now they were all lucky that nobody had died. It really could have been worse, he knew. So much worse. Yet Dan didn’t feel lucky.

Even though the fire hadn’t originated on his side of the building, he felt like a failure for not taking enough care to prevent fires in the first place.

Dan stared at the fire marshal but said nothing. He couldn’t stop staring at the junction box, and the dark marks around the casing that he had walked past every day for the last six months. Signs that he had looked at and not seen, that he should have seen, that he would have seen if he had been paying the right kind of attention, instead of whatever other stupid things he’d been obsessing about.

Why bother spending so much time on refinishing the bar, when the whole thing was a tinderbox waiting to ignite?

For someone who’s supposed to be so smart, you’re really quite an idiot, kid.