They were coming for me. She was coming for me. Maybe I was going to die within the next ten days, but Mischa—or whatever she’d become—was going to make me suffer before then too.

Ravenous flames engulfed our entire roof. The living room windows were blown out, but smoke and not flames escaped through them. Before Mom reached our front steps, Glenn burst through the front door with a soot-covered face, his right arm wrapped in a towel. He was carrying several framed photos. I heard the roar of sirens behind me as two red fire trucks whipped around the corner.

In a slow-moving daze, I opened the passenger-side door and attempted to climb out, not realizing until I felt the strain of the seat belt against my chest that I’d forgotten to unfasten it. The fire trucks parked in front of our house, and Mom led Glenn to the driveway while the firemen rigged up their hoses to the closest hydrant. The sirens brought more of our neighbors out onto the lawn. I walked toward Mom and Glenn with a heart weighed down by the knowledge that this was my fault.

“… smelled smoke, so I put the dogs out, but I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from,” Glenn was telling Mom as the firemen began tackling the flames. Another high-pitched siren blared at the end of our street, and an ambulance turned the corner, honking and slowing down to wait for curious neighbors lingering in the middle of the road to step out of its way. “By the time I went back into the kitchen, convinced I was imagining things, the flames had already broken through the wall.”

Mom gently placed a hand on the side of his face. “Why didn’t you get out sooner? What were you doing in there?”

“I thought I could put it out,” he said, shaking his head. “It just moved so fast.”

A team of paramedics opened up the back doors of the ambulance and had Glenn take a seat on a gurney so they could check his vitals. Mom spoke with one of the firemen, and he took notes. She pressed her fingers to her temples, unable to tear her eyes away from our house as flames consumed it. Maude and Glenn’s dogs were running laps around the backyard and barking, and we all knew that his cat had been hanging out at the Waldbaums’ since the day before because Mrs. Waldbaum left food out for him.

Glenn had managed to save the family portraits and framed photos of me and Jennie from the living room, but had burned his arm badly enough that the paramedics insisted on sedating him and taking him to the emergency room. Mom tearfully told him she’d follow behind the ambulance in the car after settling the dogs at the Emorys’ house. The ambulance pulled away, and one of the firemen told me and Mom that they believed the origin of the fire to have been electrical in nature, to which I wanted to shout, Yeah, no kidding! They assumed that it had started in the kitchen but had spread through the wall separating the kitchen from the living room, and when it finally broke through the drywall, it released overwhelming amounts of black smoke.