Whatever he looked like, that was not a human boy. His hand hadn’t burst into flame or blackened with third-degree burns. No human could have touched Joel when he was running that hot without getting hurt. Tad released my arm with a pat. I took two steps so that I stood next to Adam’s prone body, in case the tibicena decided to do something rather than just stand under the boy’s touch, because fire was only one of Joel’s weapons.

The hot air on my face faded, replaced by river-cooled wind. Joel staggered and collapsed. The curious blackened-stone exterior of the tibicena lost the redness of heat and became entirely black.

“I told you it would be okay,” Tad said.

“He’s not hurting Joel?” I asked anxiously.

“Joel?” he asked. “Is that the name of the fire-breathing foo dog? I thought you killed it. How did you manage to take the volcano god’s servant? I assume he’s yours from the way he was fighting.”

“Not a foo dog,” I said tightly. “He’s a tibicena. They are very hard to kill, and when you do, they go out and invade the body of friends. Like Joel. But we . . . I made him pack.”

The black stone surrounding the tibicena cracked and fell away, leaving Joel in his human body, pale, naked, and unconscious, facedown on the roadway. The boy stepped back. When he met my eyes with his own, for a moment I could see that fire lived inside him. Then they were just ordinary hazel eyes.

“Did you hear that, Aiden?” Tad said. “The fire dog is a friend.”

“Yes,” said the boy, “I hear you. I heard, when the big man who killed the troll told us both the same thing before we set foot on the bridge. I’m not an idiot. I need them. The man who bears the fire dog will come to no harm from this. I didn’t kill anything, just banked the fire for a while.”

The boy’s accent wasn’t so much a matter of pronunciation but of cadence. English wasn’t his first tongue.

I took a good long breath and took stock.

Darryl, the big-man-who-had-killed-the-troll, was a couple of yards away—in position to step in if the boy hadn’t defanged the tibicena. His hair still dripped water, but his various cuts and bruises from the fight had begun to fade.

“How did you get out of the river?” I asked. I didn’t move because, beside me, Adam had awakened and was considering rolling to his feet. Where I was standing, my legs touching him, he could use me as an unobtrusive crutch.