SIXTEEN
It was worse than we could have imagined.
I watched Alden as he stumbled away from speaking with the fire chief, his face gilded red and gold by the light of the fire as it consumed his house. The fire trucks had given up trying to stop the blaze in the house—it was fully engulfed, thick oily black clouds rolling upward into what otherwise appeared to be a flawless morning sky. Instead, they sprayed the nearby trees, the garden, and the outbuildings, soaking them so that stray embers wouldn’t spread the fire.
“I didn’t think a stone building could burn like that,” I said in an undertone to Fenice, who stood huddled with Lisa, Vandal, and Alec (the last of whom had arrived once he heard about the fire).
“The stone was only on the outside, I guess,” Fenice said, casting a worried
