The air in the small telegraph office of Havenwood, the nearest town with a direct line to Philadelphia, was stale with the scent of dust and the faint, electric tang of ozone. Alistair hunched over the counter, his pen scratching furiously across the flimsy paper of a telegram form.
He felt the operator’s bored gaze on his back, a silent judgment he couldn’t afford to acknowledge. Every nerve in his body screamed that Blackwood could have eyes everywhere, even here.
He had spent the previous night crafting the message in his head, turning it over and over until it was a dense, compact weapon. It had to be clear enough for his colleague, David, to understand, yet cryptic enough to pass a casual inspection.
David was sharp; he would see through the journalistic shorthand.
DAVID PETERSON, PHILADELPHIA CHRONICLE. STOP.
FOLLOW UP ON PSYCHIC STORY. STOP. NOTARY CLERK SAMUEL REED, 14TH STREET. STOP. CHECK DEEDS FILED FOR APPALACHIAN COAL & TIMBER. STOP. BELIEVE ALL SIGNATURES ON WHISPER CREEK PROPERTIES ARE HIS. STOP. CLIENT IS USING PRESSURE TO ACQUIRE LAND. STOP. STORY HERE MUCH BIGGER THAN MIRACLES. URGENT. FINCH.
It was all there. “Psychic story” was their code for a fraudulent scheme.
Samuel Reed was the name he’d found on every single suspect deed—the lynchpin. Naming the company directly was a risk, but a necessary one.
The final sentence was both a plea and a promise.
He pushed the paper across the counter. “Sending this to Philadelphia,” he said, his voice lower than usual.
The operator, a man with a drooping mustache and a profound lack of interest, scanned the message. His eyes barely registered the words.
“That’ll be forty-eight cents.”
Alistair’s hand trembled slightly as he counted out the coins. Forty-eight cents to save a valley.
It felt absurdly small. He watched as the man’s fingers began to tap out the message, the rhythmic clicking of the key sounding like a ticking clock, each press a beat closer to salvation or ruin.
He had fired his only shot from a distance, a blind prayer aimed at the heart of a corrupt machine hundreds of miles away. Now, all he could do was wait for the echo.
The ride back to Whisper Creek was fraught with a new kind of tension. The dread of Blackwood’s threats remained, but it was now overlaid with a fragile, dangerous hope.
He felt as though he were walking a wire strung between two cliffs—on one side, the life he had built, and on the other, a life he was just beginning to understand.
He found Sera near the creek, not gathering herbs, but simply sitting on a smooth, grey stone, watching the water rush over its fellows. The late afternoon sun filtered through the leaves, dappling her hair with gold.
She looked up as he approached, her expression calm, but her eyes held the same weariness he felt deep in his own bones.
“It’s done,” he said, sitting on the grass beside her. He didn’t need to elaborate.
She nodded, her gaze returning to the water. “Now we wait.”
“David is the best investigative man I know,” Alistair said, more to convince himself than her. “If there’s a trail in Philadelphia, he will find it.”
“And if he does?”
“He’ll publish. The company will be exposed, the deeds will be challenged in federal court. Blackwood will lose his power.” He laid it out like a logical proof, a sequence of events he clung to with the desperation of a man who had abandoned all other faiths.
Sera reached out and, for a moment, rested her hand on his. Her skin was cool, her grip surprisingly strong.
“You have to be careful, Alistair. A cornered animal is the most dangerous.”
Her words hung in the quiet air, a premonition that sent a chill down his spine despite the warmth of the day. He looked at her, at the fierce resolve in her gentle face, and knew that he wasn’t just fighting for a story anymore.
He was fighting for her, for this place, for the unexpected sense of belonging he’d found in the shadow of the mountain.
They sat in silence for a long time, the babble of the creek the only sound. It was a fragile peace, a deep breath taken before a plunge.
The first sign was the smell.
It came on the evening breeze, which had shifted unseasonably, now blowing down from the high ridges instead of up from the valley floor. It wasn’t the familiar scent of woodsmoke from a hearth, rich and comforting.
This was sharper, acrid, with a wild, resinous tang of burning pine.
Alistair lifted his head, sniffing the air. “Does someone have a bonfire going?”
Sera was already on her feet, her face pale, her eyes wide and fixed on the northern ridgeline. “No,” she whispered, her voice tight with a knowledge he didn’t possess.
“That’s not a bonfire.”
He followed her gaze. Above the dark silhouette of the trees, the dusky twilight sky was stained with a sickly, flickering orange.
It pulsed, like the light from a malevolent hearth, growing brighter even as they watched.
A shout erupted from a nearby cabin, then another. The single word was carried on the wind, a cry of pure terror: “Fire!”
Panic was a contagion, and it spread through Whisper Creek in an instant. Doors flew open.
People spilled out into the dusty lane, their faces turned toward the monstrous glow. The distant crackle of consuming timber began to reach them, a hungry, roaring sound that seemed to chew at the edges of the world.
Blackwood’s final, desperate move. Sera’s warning echoed in Alistair’s mind: a cornered animal.
He had sent his telegram, and Blackwood must have known his time was running out. This wasn’t just intimidation; it was an act of annihilation, designed to wipe the board clean, to burn away the evidence and the people who embodied it.
For a terrifying moment, Alistair was frozen. The journalist in him, the detached observer, was utterly gone, burned away by the sight of the inferno descending upon them.
All that remained was a man standing in the heart of a community under siege.
Then, his mind, honed by years of cutting through chaos to find the facts, kicked into gear. Logic became his shield.
He saw the wind whipping stray embers into the air. He saw the dry underbrush of late summer. He saw the path the fire would take, a fiery river flowing straight down the slope toward their homes.
He grabbed the arm of a man running past in a blind panic.
“Eli! Get your wits about you! Where is the main well?”
“The well? The mountain’s on fire!” the man yelled, his eyes wild.
“Exactly! We need a bucket brigade! Now!” Alistair’s voice was a bark, a commander’s tone he didn’t know he possessed. It cut through the man’s fear.
Eli stared at him for a second, then nodded dumbly and sprinted toward the center of the village.
Alistair turned and found Sera. She was not panicking.
Amid the swirling fear, she was an anchor of calm. Her storm was not one of logic, but of profound, immediate empathy.
She was already organizing a different kind of defense.
“Granny Mae!” she called, her voice clear and strong.
“Take the children to the deep hollow by the creek. The ground is damp there, and the banks will give you shelter. Take blankets soaked in water.”
She moved to a frantic young mother clutching a baby.
“Mary, your mother’s cabin is closest to the ridge. We have to get her out now. Jacob, Thomas, come with me!”
The two storms had arrived. One, a roaring, indiscriminate tempest of flame and smoke.
The other, the maelstrom of human action, rising to meet it. Alistair and Sera stood at the twin epicenters of the response, their methods a reflection of their very souls.
Alistair began to shout orders, his city mind imposing a fragile grid of order onto the mountain’s wild chaos.
“We can’t stop it head-on! We need a firebreak! Axes, shovels—anything that can dig! We clear a line at the bottom of the slope. We give it nothing to burn!”
Men who had looked at him with suspicion only weeks ago now turned to him, their faces grim in the flickering firelight, desperate for a plan. He was the outsider, but he was the one thinking, the one seeing the shape of the disaster instead of just its terrifying heat.
He mapped the terrain in his mind, calculating wind speed and fuel load with an instinct he’d only ever applied to political scandals.
Meanwhile, Sera moved through the community like a weaver, her knowledge of the people the thread that held them together. She knew who had a bad leg, which child was prone to asthma, which path offered the quickest escape to the safety of the creek.
She dispatched young boys to guide the elderly and directed women to gather what herbs they could—plantain for burns, mullein for the inevitable smoke-clogged lungs. Her hands were already stained with dirt and soot as she helped a gasping old man, pressing a damp cloth to his face.
For a moment, their eyes met across the growing bedlam. The air was thick with smoke, stinging their lungs and blurring their vision.
The roar of the fire was a physical presence, a living beast devouring the mountain they both loved. In that shared glance, there was no time for words of love or fear.
There was only a profound, silent acknowledgment. He was the mind; she was the heart.
He was the strategist; she was the healer.
Together, they were Whisper Creek’s only hope. And the fire was coming.