Authors: Eden Maguire
Dark Angel
Also by Eden Maguire:
B
EAUTIFUL
D
EAD
1.
Jonas
2.
Arizona
3.
Summer
4.
Phoenix
Also by Hodder Children’s Books
Dark Heart Forever
Dark Heart Rising
Lee Monroe
Sisters Red
Sweetly
Jackson Pearce
Copyright © 2011 Eden Maguire
First published in Great Britain in 2011
by Hodder Children’s Books
This ebook edition published in 2011
The right of Eden Maguire to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form, or by any means with prior permission in writing from the publishers or in the case of reprographic production in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency and may not be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781444905304
Typeset in Berkeley Book by Avon DataSet Ltd, Bidford on Avon, Warwickshire
Hodder Children’s Books
A Division of Hachette Children’s Books
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
An Hachette UK company
For Caroline, for all the years of support and friendship.
So farewell Hope, and with Hope farewell Fear,
Farewell Remorse: all good to me is lost;
Evil, be thou my good.
John Milton,
Paradise Lost
, Book 4
O
ut here, fire eats up the forest. Tongues of flame lick the trees and dance like devils across the land. They swirl through valleys and jump rivers, carried by the wind. We’re talking total inferno.
Bobby Mackey, a smokejumper for twenty years, tells us how it is. ‘We bring in air tankers to drop the retardant, three thousand gallons at a time, plus Sikorsky Sky Cranes. They can douse a hotspot with two thousand gallons. Then the ground crews form fire lines to contain the blaze. If that doesn’t work, they drop more guys from choppers. That’s where I come in.’
A smokejumper makes a living by parachuting from a plane into forest fires. How crazy is that?
Sure, I’ve seen the tree canopy catch alight, watched the wind shift and send a wall of flame roaring down the valley – all from a safe distance. But jumpers get caught in the thick of it without shelter and in a sudden blowup it can all be over in the space of five minutes.
Bobby says, ‘Those guys about to die – I know what they’re thinking. You can’t breathe, it’s so hot. The fire is sucking in the air around you, there’s no oxygen. Your clothes and hair vibrate with the air rushing by you. Breathe, breathe, breathe. At the last moment you’re not thinking about fire, you’re thinking about air.’
What can you say? Men die. Rocks stay red hot for days. They slide down the mountains in clouds of ash. Burned branches fall on your head. You hear them thump to the ground and you don’t know which way to run.
Red, orange, yellow – I’ve watched a night-time finger of fire race down from Black Rock, small spurts of flame sneaking out of underground lairs days later. That’s wildfire. That’s how it is in the mountains where I live.
I tell you this because my house is built in the middle of a burnout. Eighteen years ago, the year I was born, fire ate up this place. That’s why there are no trees taller than the roof of a single-storey building, why all the homes are contemporary design and open plan, with clear views of Prayer River and Turner Lake out beyond the old historic centre of Bitterroot.
Smokejumper Bobby wore his yellow firefighter’s jacket, helmet and goggles to shock-jock us high-school leavers into seeing the dangers of setting fires during the dry season, telling us he never wanted to experience a repeat of August 2000 when blazes burned out of control in sixteen states. His skin looked like flames had creased and singed it, like smoke was ingrained in the lines under his eyes and down either side of his mouth. ‘Next time you kids camp out by the lake, observe to the letter those Red Flag fire hazard warnings – no campfires, no smoking cigarettes. Remember those pinon pines and junipers may take hundreds of years to regenerate.’
I was listening but my mind was drifting off. Personally I didn’t care too much about trees burning; more about the million rabbits, raccoons and porcupines too slow to take cover, and anyway where would they run?
And I was still picturing air being sucked out of my lungs – a whoosh, a wall, a swirl of flames engulfing me.
‘Tania?’ Grace pulled me to my feet at the end of the lecture.
Bobby was sitting in his yellow jacket at the front of the room, signing copies of
Smokejumper
, his recently reprinted autobiography, for a line of maybe fifteen or twenty students, mostly guys. If the girls were anything like me, they were too freaked out to invest the necessary twelve dollars.
‘Are you OK?’ Grace asked.
I nodded and stood up. Why did getting air into my lungs suddenly seem problematic? I took short, shallow breaths; could almost feel flames scorch my skin.
I should tell you. On the plot of burnout land where my dad built our house there was once a home where three people died – a husband, wife and baby girl. On the neighbouring plot, the fire cornered a widow in her sixties. She never made it through the smoke and flames.
In the three decades he’d been on this earth, Dad’s family had already been through so many hard times, both back home in Romania and here in the land of the free, that he claimed he didn’t ever feel queasy about building our house there on that plot – like a phoenix rising from the ashes, he said.
I didn’t learn about the fatalities until I was eight, when I was already having regular nightmares. The facts on the forest fire hit me hard. I was eight years old and having bad dreams about suffocating, struggling to draw breath and waking up in a cold sweat, screaming for my mom.
‘Who told Tania about the wildfire?’ she demanded, ready to blame Dad.
Nobody. I’d learned it from Bobby Mackey’s book in the town library, straying one Saturday afternoon from kids’ fiction into the adult section, where I’d found the smokejumper’s autobiography in the new book display. Glossy pictures of orange flames and black plumes of smoke rising above the green tree canopy drew me in, leading me to read details about the people who had died. Mrs Dorothy Earle, Karl and Maia Witney and their baby girl.
‘You’re sure you’re OK?’ Grace checked.
A branch falls among smouldering embers. Sparks leap into choking, smoke-grey air. Burned trunks rise like black pillars as far as the eye can see.
‘I need some air,’ I told her, walking quickly from the building.
‘Lighten up.’ Holly Randle’s advice had mixed motives. On the one hand she has genuine worries about my obvious mood dips, on the other she judges me for being way too thin-skinned and hypersensitive, which was what was behind her ‘lighten up’ lecture on this occasion.
We were driving home in her car after Bobby’s lecture. Holly lives in the house next door to me, in Mrs Earle’s plot on Becker Hill. She claims she has no dreams about the widow who lived there before the fire.
‘That guy really got to me,’ I explained. ‘Did he have to go into graphic detail?’
‘I guess. Shock tactics and all.’
‘I’m shocked,’ I conceded, leaning out of the car to gaze up at the clear blue sky. ‘I was there, living every last moment of those trapped firefighters.’
‘You looked awful, believe me – like you were going to pass out. If Grace hadn’t hauled you out of there, I’d have stepped in and done it myself.’
‘Thanks – I think.’
‘No, really. Your face turned whiter than my bedsheets; your breathing was bad. I’ve seen you do this a hundred times – someone paints a picture and your imagination goes into overdrive.’
‘My imagination,’ I echoed. ‘And thanks again.’ I sighed, shifting so that I sat upright in my seat. ‘But I already have a mother.’
‘Sorry for caring,’ Holly muttered, climbing the hill between the baby pine trees lining the sides of the road. ‘Anyhow, where’s the hottest guy on the planet when you really need him?’ Holly is also jealous of my relationship with Orlando and so always refers to him with lashings of sarcasm – did I mention that? Orlando, the hottest boy in Bitterroot, no contest. He looks like he works out daily but actually not true. Plus he can turn on that wide Irish smile and kill with a glance.
My boyfriend’s parents had flown with him to Dallas to check out the college campus. He would be away for three days and I was already experiencing withdrawal symptoms. It happened before when they took him to Chicago and left me for an entire weekend in a tactile desert – no touching, no kissing. ‘He’s in Dallas,’ I muttered as Holly stopped the car and I got out.
‘But he’ll be back Friday?’ she checked.
‘What’s Friday?’
‘The party, stupid!’
‘Yeah, the party – he’ll be back.’
‘Does he have his costume?’
‘No. Does Aaron?’
‘Yeah. My mom made it. And mine too. Do you even have yours?’
‘Not yet.’ I’d been thinking about the costume but not doing anything, which was normal for me. Think, think, think – no action. I mean, how hard could throwing together a party costume be?
‘No costume – no entrance through heaven’s gates,’ Holly warned.
What she meant was, I wouldn’t get to meet the living god, the rock legend that was Zoran Brancusi. He was our party host. The invites, sent out to every teen in Bitterroot, stipulated a theme – ‘Heavenly Bodies’. It was wide open to interpretation, but Holly had already settled on a fittingly divine outfit for her and Aaron. Likewise Grace and Jude.