“Wait,” I say, and I bolt through the front door. I take the stairs two at a time, I stumble at the top but push myself up. Beneath the bed I find the spellbook, I reach for it and tuck it under my arm, scrambling back downstairs and out through the door.

Suzy glances at the book but doesn’t ask.

“Okay,” I say, giving her a nod, and we rush down through the trees, running along the shore.

“Here it comes,” Suzy says.

I swivel around to see the fire making its way down the slope behind the row of summer homes, tearing through the trees. It sounds like a train roaring down tracks. The flames are so hot now that the snow is beginning to melt all around us, dripping off the eaves of roofs, forming puddles at our feet.

The fire won’t stop until everything is gone.

I should have grabbed more, I think. Some of my mother’s things. Photographs. Her jewelry. Her favorite seafoam-green sweater hanging in her closet.

But now there’s no time.

The stars overhead slink into the background, no longer visible through the smoke and ash and embers swirling all around us. We run through the trees, back to the shore, until we reach the marina.

“What are you doing?” Suzy shouts when I dart toward the boathouse.

“Keep going!” I yell back. “I have to warn someone.”

She shakes her head and stops in the snow, refusing to go without me. I rush up the porch steps and pound my fist against Mr. Perkins’s door. I hear him cursing on the other side, ambling to the front door. A second later it swings open, and for a moment, the breath is caught in my lungs as I gasp for air. “A forest fire,” I manage, pointing out at the lake where the trees are burning on all sides.

Mr. Perkins steps out onto the porch, holding a hand over his eyes. “What the hell?” he asks in disbelief.

“You have to get out—now.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he answers, lowering his hand and shuffling back toward the door.

“It’s going to burn everything,” I say.

He nods, wrinkles pinching around his mouth. “And if I’m lucky, it’ll burn me right along with it.”

“Please,” I say. My lungs rasp with each inhale, smoke in my throat, suffocating me with every breath. “You have to go.”

He lifts his gaze and stares out over the water—the place he’s lived his whole life—then he points a long bony finger up into tree line. “Why don’t you go warn whoever’s been holed up in the old Harrison place?”