AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He still hadn’t said anything.
The horse snorted, lifting his head to look at the barn, his ears pricked. He’d moved down the hill a ways, but not far enough for her to worry.
She looked back at Gabriel. “A lighter?” she said again, bewildered. Intuitively, she knew that the time for easy answers had come and gone. It’s my brother’s, or I found it in the woods.
Maybe something like, It’s dead, but it used to belong to my father.
Gabriel sighed and pushed the hair back from his face. “That,”
he said, “is part of my secret.”
The horse snorted again, pawing at the grass. He was probably ready to spook at nothing.
Layne sighed and rolled to her feet, zipping up her jacket as she moved. She caught the horse’s lead rope and kept her voice even, trying to figure out the mystery before Gabriel laid it on the line. But she had no idea. “Your secret has to do with a lighter?”
He reached out to take it from her hand. “No. My secret has to do with fire.”
And at that precise moment, the roof of the barn burst into flame.
CHAPTER 31
Gabriel stared at the flames shooting through the barn roof, blazing flares of orange and red. Smoke poured into the sky. There was plenty of fuel here hay and wood and probably dozens of things he couldn’t even imagine. This fire didn’t rage it celebrated. The entire building would be consumed in minutes.
Something was banging inside the barn. He heard screams, inhuman cries that made him want to clamp his hands over his ears.
Horses.
He could feel his heart in his throat. He’d been pulling power from the sunlight, his emotions riding high.
Had he done this?
This made his mistake in the woods look like a campfire.
Layne was all action, shoving at his chest. Her horse was dancing at the end of his rope, but Layne held fast. She was yelling, her voice hoarse.
He realized she’d been yelling at him for some time.
“Take him, damn it! Get him in the field!” She punched him in the chest again, shoving the rope at him.
Take him. The horse. Gabriel’s fingers closed on the rope automatically, just as the animal reared up, nearly jerking the rope free.
“Just get him through the gate!” Layne cried, pointing behind him.
Like he could do that without getting trampled. The horse had to weigh a thousand pounds, and he was dragging Gabriel in a circle, a snorting panicked mess of muscle and hooves.
He managed to get to the gate, somehow working the latch before the horse swung around, knocking Gabriel into the fence with his shoulder. Gabriel lost hold of the rope but before he could panic, the horse bolted through the opening, tearing along the fenceline with a thunder of hooves against turf.
But the animal was trapped in the field. Gabriel latched the gate.
When he turned around, Layne was gone.
He spun full circle. Gone.
Smoke poured from the barn doors now. Horses were still screaming, banging on the walls. Trapped. Layne couldn’t have . . . she wouldn’t But he was already running before those thoughts could complete themselves.
He made it to the barn doors just as Layne burst through the wall of smoke, coughing as she ran. She had a rope in each hand, two horses trailing behind her. Her face was streaked with soot already. One of the horses had bits of flaming debris on its back. Both were wide eyed, their steel shoes skidding on the concrete outside the barn.
“Layne!” he said. “Don’t ”
