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As I spun to make sure my warning had been heard, my gaze caught on a smoke detector on the ceiling not far at all from the Vigil office. But the round contraption was strangely dented. Had it been broken somehow?
Someone had set a fire purposefully and made sure it wouldn’t be detected quickly. If I hadn’t gone to the back of the room ten minutes before our meeting, who knew how far it’d have spread by then?
Footsteps thumped behind me. One of the librarians caught sight of the thickening smoke and gasped. A hint of orange flickered in the tiny gap at the threshold—flames licking at the door.
As the librarian whirled and hustled back the way she’d come, hollering for all the students to vacate the building, I hurried after her. Enough smoke had filled my throat to leave me coughing hard enough that I nearly spilled what remained of my coffee. I took a gulp of it to try to wash away the irritation.
Students and staff were all grabbing their belongings and rushing out the doors, a few of them with phones raised to their ears. Just as I came outside, one of the smoke alarms toward the front of the room finally let out its frantic wail. The whole room behind me was hazing with smoke.
Sirens pealed in the distance. I pushed into the crowd that’d gathered outside the building, not just the people from the law library but several classes of students and professors from the upper floors of the building. Everyone was murmuring in confusion and concern.
God, I hoped the firemen were quick enough to stop the whole place from burning up. All those books!
And all the stuff in the Vigil’s office. My throat tightened. That room had obviously been the main target—it was where the fire had started. I wasn’t sure I’d have believed this could be an accident, a mere coincidence, even if I hadn’t noticed the damaged smoke detector.
Just as the first firetruck roared into view, a figure burst from the front of the crowd and ran at the doors. The frantic motion was so unlike the guy I knew that it took me a moment to realize those were Dexter’s black curls bouncing wildly as he reached for the library entrance.
One of the professors caught him and hauled him back, saying something I couldn’t make out. Dexter turned, and I saw his face, even paler than usual and tight with panic.
“My—my girlfriend could be in there,” he protested, his normally subdued voice taut with worry. “I haven’t seen her—she was supposed to meet us at the library. She’s never late.”
My heart stuttered. I squeezed through the crowd to reach him, a sudden swell of emotion filling my chest—the urgent need to calm his panic, but also a rush of affection at hearing him call me his girlfriend and the fact that he knew my habits so well.
“No one can go in there,” the professor was saying as I approached, ushering Dexter away. “The fire department is here—they’ll get anyone who’s stuck inside to safety.”
“But what if—”
Several firefighters were already jogging over, shouting for the crowd to move farther back. I grabbed Dexter’s arm, and he spun to face me with a flinch.
In my hurry to get his attention, I’d forgotten his usual aversion to touch. I jerked my hand back automatically, but as the panic in his eyes faded into relief, he snatched my fingers to hold on to them.
“There you are,” he said, his voice still a little shaky. “I saw the smoke—I couldn’t see you in the crowd—”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m fine. I was actually the one who spotted the smoke first and sounded the alarm. Not a scratch or a burn on me.”
I held out my other arm as if to display myself. Dexter sucked in a ragged breath and then grinned at me, squeezing my hand tight. I wanted to hug him, but I wasn’t sure if he’d want that in his current keyed-up state.
I hadn’t known he could get that emotional about anyone. I gripped his hand in return, wishing I knew how to express how much it meant to me.
“Hey, Piccolina!” Slade came up next to me with a gentle bump of my shoulder.
I’d been so focused on Dexter that I hadn’t realized the other Vigil guys had arrived. Logan joined us at my other side and motioned for us to step farther away from both the building and the rest of the crowd.
I glanced over my shoulder. The firefighters had yanked open the library doors and ventured inside, the hiss of water from their hoses and the sizzle of doused flames carrying through the air. More smoke billowed through the doorway.
We stopped on the other side of a nearby path under the slim branches of a sapling. Logan’s mouth had set in a tense line. “How the hell does a library end up catching fire?”
He didn’t know—of course, he couldn’t know yet.
“I think it was on purpose,” I said, still clinging to Dexter’s hand. “There was smoke coming from under the door of your office, but the alarm hadn’t gone off. The nearest smoke detector looked busted.”
Slade’s eyes widened, and my stepbrother’s shoulder’s went rigid.
“Fuck,” Logan spat out. “They’re trying to ruin the whole investigation now.”
A different sort of fear rippled through me. “The firewon’truin it, will it? I mean, you have everything backed up outside the office, don’t you?” I couldn’t imagine a guy as computer savvy as Logan failing to make backups.
“Of course,” he said, his gaze still fixed on the building. “The digital files are stored in the cloud, and we took photos and scans of most of the paper records… but those won’t count as proper evidence if the actual objects are destroyed. It’s too easy to doctor digital images. Your dad’s notes… the flyer from the seafood market… Hell, even the shipping records from the trucking company.” He glanced at Dexter. “You left those in the filing cabinet and just took a photo to go over at home, right?”
