Fire at Blue Lantern
Chapter 07 - Fire at Blue Lantern
Fire moves like gossip in an old building.
First a whisper under the door.
Then a breath in the walls.
Then, suddenly, it knows every room.
Dale grabbed Milo. Hannah grabbed the bundle from the safe. August tried to grab the pistol and nearly collapsed against the desk. Celeste, elegant Celeste who looked made for opera boxes and boardrooms, smashed the office window with a brass lamp.
“Out,” she ordered.
Shepherd went first, leaping through the broken frame. Dale passed Milo out to him, then helped Hannah climb. Glass caught her sleeve and tore it open. August refused help until smoke drove him to accept Hannah’s shoulder under his arm.
He was heavier than pride made him look.
They stumbled into the wet grass behind the lodge as flames grew gold in the kitchen windows.
Men moved near the trees.
Three shapes.
Maybe four.
August lifted the pistol, but Hannah pushed it down.
“You can barely stand.”
“I can still aim.”
“With one eye and a fever? Very comforting.”
He gave her a look that, under different circumstances, might have been amusement.
Then gunfire snapped through the trees.
The sound cracked open the morning.
Dale shoved Milo behind a fallen log. Shepherd planted himself over the child, snarling. Celeste took the pistol from August with the crisp efficiency of a woman who had never been as harmless as society preferred older women to appear.
“Mother,” August said.
“Not now.”
She fired once.
A man cried out in the trees.
Hannah stared.
Celeste did not look back.
They ran toward an old service road where Dale had hidden a second vehicle years earlier. Every few steps August’s breathing changed. Hannah could hear the pain in it. She hated that she noticed. Hated more that she cared.
The vehicle was a battered green Suburban beneath a tarp of pine needles. Dale cursed it alive on the third try.
They drove as Blue Lantern burned behind them.
Milo watched the smoke through the rear window without speaking.
Hannah pulled him into her lap though he was too big for it now.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“For what?”
“For all of this.”
Milo’s small hand found hers. “Shepherd bit the bad man.”
She laughed once, and the sound broke in the middle.
By afternoon, they reached a Catholic retreat house closed for winter. Celeste knew the caretaker. Celeste seemed to know everyone, which Hannah found less impressive each time and more exhausting.
They hid in a cottage behind the chapel.
August slept for six hours straight, not from peace but from blood loss and pain. Hannah changed his bandage while he slept, hands careful despite herself.
His chest was a map of old scars. Bullet scars. Knife scars. Burns. A life written by men who believed skin was paper.
Celeste stood in the doorway.
“My son was not always hard.”
Hannah did not look up. “People love saying that about dangerous men.”
“It is often an excuse. This time it is a warning.”
“A warning against what?”
“Believing hardness is the same as safety.”
Hannah tied the bandage. “I learned that before I met him.”
Celeste studied her. “Who taught you?”
Hannah thought of Milo’s father, Owen, who had arrived in her life all charm and promises and left when the pregnancy test turned positive. Thought of landlords. Bosses. Men who smiled while making women smaller.
“Everyone,” she said.
That evening, August woke to find Milo sitting on the floor nearby, drawing Shepherd as a superhero with a cape.
“You made him too small,” August said.
Milo frowned at the page. “He doesn’t fit if I draw him real.”
“That happens with protectors.”
Hannah, listening from the kitchenette, went still.
August noticed, of course. Men like him noticed everything except perhaps the cost of being noticed.
Later, he found her on the porch.
Snow threatened the mountains. The air smelled metallic.
“I’ll get you and Milo out,” he said. “New names. Money. Somewhere Silas won’t find.”
“No.”
“You don’t know what refusing means.”
“I know exactly what disappearing means. It means Milo spends his life looking over his shoulder for a man whose face he may never see. It means my father died for a truth I bury because I’m scared.”
“Fear keeps children alive.”
“So does courage when fear runs out of room.”
August looked at her as if she had said something in a language he had forgotten.
Then his phone, a burner Celeste had produced from God knew where, vibrated.
A photo appeared on the screen.
Hannah’s lakehouse.
Reduced to ash.
May you like
Under it was one line from Silas.
Bring me the woman, or I send the boy’s father to collect him.
