Dies the Fire Read Online Free Page A

bald on top with a ponytail behind. As if to compensate he had a bushy soup-strainer mustache and muttonchops in gray-streaked brown, and big, mournful, russet brown eyes.
    He always reminded her of the Walrus in Alice , even more so given his pear-shaped body, big fat-over-muscle arms and shoulders and an impressive gut. Now he turned his great hands palm-up.
    â€œPhone’s out,” he said. “Shit, Juney, everything’s out.”
    Juniper swallowed. “Hey!” she called. “Has anyone got a working car? A motorbike? Hell, a bike?”
    That got her some yeses; it was a safe bet, right on the edge of a university campus. “Then would you get over to the clinic and get someone to come?”
    Another student went out, a girl this time. Juniper looked around at a tug on her arm. It was Eilir, her daughter—she’d be fourteen next week, scrawny right now to her mother’s slimness. She had the same long, straight-featured face and the same pale freckled skin, but the promise of more height, and hair black as a raven’s wing. Her eyes were bright green, wide now as her fingers flew.
    Juniper had been using Sign since the doctors in the maternity ward told her Eilir would never hear; by now it was as natural as English.
    I saw a plane crash, Mom , Eilir signed. A big plane; a 747, I think. It came down this side of the river—right downtown.
    Are you sure? Juniper replied. It’s awful dark.
    I saw bits of it after it hit, the girl signed. There’s a fire, a really big fire.
    Dennis Martin knew Sign almost as well as Juniper did—mother and daughter had been through regularly for years, when Juniper could get a gig like this, and for the RenFaire and the Fall Festival. She knew he had a serious thing for her, but he’d never been anything but nice about its not being mutual; he was even polite to her boyfriend-cum-High Priest Rudy, and he really liked Eilir.
    Now their eyes met.
    I don’t like the sound of this at all, Dennis signed. Let’s go look.
    Juniper did, with a sinking feeling like the beginnings of nausea. If there was a fire raging in downtown Corvallis, where were the sirens? It wasn’t a very big town, no more than fifty thousand or so.
    The brick building that held the Hopping Toad was three stories, a restored Victorian like most of the little city’s core, built more than a century ago when the town prospered on shipping produce down the Willamette to Portland.
    They went up a series of narrow stairs until they were in the attic loft Dennis used for his hobbies, woodworking and tooling leather. Amid the smell of glue and hide and shavings they crowded over to the dormer window; that pointed south, and the other side of Montrose was Oregon State University campus, mostly grass and trees.
    The two adults crowded into the narrow window seat; Dennis snatched up a pair of his binoculars that Eilir had left there. After a moment he began to swear; she took the glasses away from him and then began to swear too. There was a fire over towards downtown, a big one, flames towering into the sky higher than any of the intervening buildings. It was extremely visible because there wasn’t a streetlight on, and hardly any lit windows, or a moving car.
    She could see the distinctive nose of a 747 silhouetted against the flames, pointing skyward as if the plane had hit, broken its back, and then skidded into something that canted the front section into the air. She could even see the AA logo painted on its side.
    â€œ Lady Mother-of-All!” Juniper whispered, her finger tracing a pentagram in the air before her.
    The fire was getting worse, the light ruddy on her face. She knew she ought to be running out there and trying to help, but the sight paralyzed her. It didn’t seem real , but it was; a jumbo jet had plowed right into the center of this little university town in the middle of the Willamette Valley.
    â€œLooks like it came down on