The afternoon passed slowly. I boosted the fire a couple of times and kept the heat at a white-hot level. It was close to four in the afternoon when his spirit form began to jerk and tremble, a sure sign that his inner fires had fully awoken. An hour later, he began to keen—a high-pitched sound so filled with pain that tears stung my eyes. Rebirth was never pleasant, but the pain was so much greater when we died before our time. I had no idea why, but figured it was the mother’s way of making us a little more careful about how we lived and, ultimately, how we died.

Dusk had begun to seep across the skies in fiery fingers of red and gold by the time his spirit gave way to flesh. By then the bonfire was little more than softly glowing coals, but they didn’t burn him. Which wasn’t to say that we, as spirits of fire, couldn’t be harmed by our element. The scars down my spine were evidence enough of that. But they’d come from a situation in which I’d been unable to either control or feed on fire; I’d been rescuing a child, in full view of a crowd of people. Vampires and werewolves might be out and proud—and had generally been accepted into human society far better than most of us had ever expected—but because there were still enough people who deemed them a threat to civilization, in need of erasing, the rest of us thought it better to remain in the shadows.

Who knew how society would react if people ever realized just how many of us were living among them?

Even though Rory was unconscious, the process of feeding during rebirth was automatic; the coals continued to fuel him, until the light within them was completely drained and nothing remained but cold ashes.

Only then did he stir.

Only then did he open his eyes and look at me.

“Emberly.” His voice was little more than a harsh whisper, but it was a sound so sweet it brought tears to my eyes. Because it meant everything had gone right; he was back, and whole, and life for the two of us could go on as it always had.

I smiled. “Welcome once again to the land of the living.”

“Not sure this can ever be called living. Not when every fucking piece of me is aching like shit.”

“That is the price you pay for getting yourself shot.”

He grunted and rolled onto his back. Ash plumed skyward, then rained back down, covering his flesh in a coat of fine gray. “Did you get the bastard who did it?”

“That depends.”

He raised a pale, red-gold eyebrow. “Meaning?”