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“Break the glass!” Jace yelled. I didn’t have anything to cover my hands. I punched blindly, the glass breaking, my closed fist smeared with blood. I used my arm to clear the spikes of glass from the frame before sliding my body out sideways. I hoped Jace could fit.
I couldn’t do anything but cling to the roof as he finally cleared the window and slid down to where I was. We’d escaped the house, but we still had a big problem. It had to be forty, maybe fifty feet to the ground. And I couldn’t see a way down.
Jace’s breathing was too shallow as he lay flat on his back, his heels digging into the roof to keep from sliding down any farther. Beneath us, the house burned. The roof we lay on was warm and comforting. But staying on it meant death.
“We have to move, Jace,” I said, but his eyes were closed, and he didn’t respond.
Stupid man, I thought. He’d be in the hospital recovering if he’d listened to me. If he was smart, he’d have stayed far away from me in the first place. This wouldn’t have to cost him his life.
Stop it, Greer. Think!
We had to get off the roof. There was no way around it. And we had to do it soon. Worst-case scenario, we’d have to jump and hope we survived. If we stayed here, we definitely wouldn’t. Best case…there had to be another way.
“Jace!”
He groaned in response.
“It’s over, sweetheart. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I can’t save you.”
“Shhh,” I hissed back, remembering something Anna had said. “Don’t come at me with that shit right now. We have to move. Slide to the side of the house. Follow me.”
Jace did follow me, copying me as I shuffled, moving my hips and lower body and then sliding my torso over to catch up until we came to a decorative wooden post I could use to stand and look around the corner of the eave. The view was like something out of a nightmare. Flames shot out Richmond House’s second-floor windows in the front of the house. My room. My clothes. Everything I owned was gone. Even the letters I’d packed to take with us. But the flames were only just licking the scaffolding. If Anna could climb down, maybe we could too. It was worth a shot.
I glanced down at Jace one more time, assessing the damage.
“Jace, we’re going to have to climb down.” Nothing. “Jace!”
He turned his head to me. Blood trickled from underneath him. The climb up the ladder and the shuffling had reopened his wounds, but I couldn’t tell how badly.
“Just one more thing. You can make it!”
I heard sirens in the far distance but couldn’t see lights through the trees. Someone had spotted the fire, thank God. But even if they were already on the peninsula, getting a long truck through the hairpin turns was laughable. They might as well be hours away, and we didn’t have hours. We didn’t have minutes. Seconds were what we had.
So, I slapped him. Hard. Harder than I had that first time on the porch. Harder than on the night we broke up. He jerked in pain.
“I can’t carry you, baby. I’m not strong like you.”
My words seemed to rally him. Jace shuffled his body to the post and sat up, grabbing it as I had and using it to balance. Lips practically white, he towered over me. Blood dripped from his back, droplets clinging to the eave and falling to the ground below.
“If we can get around the corner, we can lower ourselves down the metal frame of the scaffolding on the other side,” I explained to him.
He nodded. “Hurry,” he huffed out as if it was the only word he could manage.
Together, we carefully edged around the corner of the roof. It was flatter here than on the backside of the house, but once we let go of the post, we had nothing to hold on to. It was a good twenty feet to the corner of the scaffolding.
I’d insisted Jace go first. I didn’t know why. If he fell, I couldn’t help him. Maybe I’d just jump off the roof after him, and we could die together. But he didn’t fall. He’d hunched over to the point where he could almost use his hand on the sloping edge of the roof for balance, and I followed suit. We shuffled forward, foot by foot until Jace reached the scaffolding.
“You first,” he choked out.
“Not a chance.”
“Sweetheart,” he said, pained, “please…don’t argue.” The entire back of his shirt was drenched in blood from his exposed wounds. The blood ran in trails down his arms and dripped off his wrists. Any longer and he’d bleed to death. He had to be so weak. But I refused to think he wouldn’t make it. “Don’t argue…with me,” he said. “We don’t…have time…for that.”
I nodded, carefully stepping around him and grasping the metal pole that made up the corner of the scaffolding in my hand. It was hot to the touch; the flames shooting out the windows farther down had super-heated the whole structure. I wasn’t going to be able to hold on without covering my hands, and I didn’t think I’d be able to grip with something covering them.
I whipped my shirt over my head and looked at Jace one last time. His eyes blazed like black coal in his pale face; his lips were set in a single white line. Across the roofline, a cracking sound precipitated a hole opening up in the roof. Flames shot to the sky.
“I love you, Greer,” Jace said. “I fucking love you. Now go.”
I wanted to stand there living in his words forever, but I couldn’t. I wrapped my shirt around the pole and stepped off the roof, trying to brace my feet against it. I immediately slid down fast to the next bracket, panic shooting through my veins. Each time I hit a joint, I had to pull a piece of my shirt down underneath it and re-grip before the next slide. There were five “stories” in all. I jumped the last ten feet and looked up. Jace was also using his shirt to protect his hands, leaving long streaks of blood down the side of the pole. But when he came to the first joint, he couldn’t seem to cross it. I looked on in horror as he placed his bare palms on the metal and started descending by hand instead of sliding. He only made it ten feet before letting go—plunging thirty feet to the ground below, landing in the barren flower beds surrounding the front porch that had once held evening primroses.
I rushed to him but stopped short as movement caught my eye. There, in the frame of the front door, stood Eugenia. Dressed in red. She emerged from the smoke smiling, like a mother dragon from a lair. She looked down at Jace’s broken body through the porch slats, then at me.
“Eugenia, come off the porch! Hurry!”
But she did nothing of the kind. Said nothing to me.
She smiled indulgently before turning and walking back into the house, closing the heavy door behind her. As I worked to pull Jace’s heavy body away from the fire, unsure whether he was even still alive, another unwelcome visitor emerged from the smoke.
Garbage. Walking slowly, calmly, as Richmond House collapsed all around him.
