When Tori got home from school on Friday, she raided the kitchen, stuffing her backpack full of sandwiches, cookies, and fruit, and filling an old milk jug with drinking water. She carried them to the barn, but Nathaniel wasn’t there. She left the snacks and water and headed home.

She had a test to prepare for in Math and a paper to write for English, but she didn’t feel much like studying. And she didn’t want to sleep. Her nightmares had been riddled with blood, and fire, and drowning. And every time she woke from them, she felt like she should somehow understand why.

Instead, she put on her headphones and stretched out on her bed. Her playlist was loud and dissonant, and normally she felt better letting it drown out the world like white noise as it beat against the insides of her head. Tonight, it just made her irritable.

The playlist looped to the song Nathaniel hadn’t liked, and he drifted back into Tori’s thoughts, unbidden. She remembered the way they’d sat in the barn, nearly touching. And the way his nose scrunched up with distaste. How his smile had seemed to glow from inside him when he’d talked about playing the fiddle. And then again, when he’d compared her to Emmeline.

Tori rolled over on the bed to look out the window, searching the sky over the barn for a ribbon of smoke from his fire. She couldn’t help but wonder if anything in that smile had been for her. Or if, like her music, he found her ugly and grating.

Tori jerked the buds from her ears and turned off her music. The sky outside had deepened to violet-gray. A breeze rustled the autumn leaves, and Tori cracked her window, letting the soft sound spill into her room. She sat on the floor, breathing it in. The scent of smoke carried in with it, too strong and close to be from Nathaniel’s fire in the barn, and Tori waited for the smoke detectors to blare and the string of hushed swears her mother always uttered when she was burning something. But the house was quiet. Just the soft clatter of utensils being tossed in the sink and the tink-tink-tink of the water warming the pipes in her radiator. Even the Slaughters’ dogs were quiet tonight.

Tori shivered and got up to shut the window, pulling the thick curtains closed, unable to shake the feeling that something was wrong. She headed downstairs, following the rich aroma of chocolate brownies wafting from the kitchen, surprised to find the air in the lower hallway clear. Tori sniffed. No smoke smell.

Tori opened the front door, and a thick, dry smoke blew in on the wind, the moon a dull sliver through a charcoal-gray haze. Black pillars rose to the east in the direction of Matilda’s house.

Matilda’s house…

Tori ran back inside and skidded into the kitchen.

“Mom, I think something’s burning.”

“What are you talking about? It smells great in here. You have so little faith in me.” Her mother smiled sardonically as she washed a mixing bowl, not bothering to look up.

“No, outside. I think something’s on fire.”

“Alistair’s been burning leaves.”

“Mom!” Her mother’s hands stilled in the sink bubbles. “I think you should come look.”

Her mother dropped the mixing bowl in the water and rushed to dry her hands as she followed Tori out onto the porch, Kyle trailing behind them. Her eyes flew open wide as she took in the thick bands of smoke spreading over the horizon.

The smell of it was everywhere. All around them. A shrill whistle blared inside the house, where a thin gray line of smoke had begun to stream through the open door.

“The brownies!” her mother cried, rushing back into the house.

Tori and her brother stood side by side in the middle of the lawn, watching through the window as their mother shut off the oven and climbed on a chair, ripping the batteries from the smoke detector in the hall near the kitchen.

Through the ringing silence, Tori heard the whine of sirens in the distance.

The wind had died. Tori stood in her yard and watched the smoke settle like a heavy blanket in the air. Deep inside her, she could almost swear she heard someone laughing. She shut her eyes and shook her head, and when she listened again, all she heard was the wail of fire trucks as smoke climbed everywhere except the small stretch of sky above the barn in her woods.