“Done,” I said out loud, proud of myself. Then I caught sight of the bottle opener shaped like a penis that my stepmom had given me for my twenty-first birthday. She’d told me, The guys would rather use their teeth than this thing, so you’ll always know where it is. Genius. It was ridiculous and awesome and so Rose, a mix of practical and wild. I’d just throw it in my purse. No big deal.
But then, when I went to grab the bottle opener, I saw the picture of Charlie and I on the fridge and I wasn’t sure if we had a digital copy of it. I couldn’t even remember who’d printed it in the first place. There was a candle holder my baby brother Brody had made me in preschool out of a small glass baby food jar with colored tissue paper stuck to the outside. A vase that had been my Nana’s and she’d handed down to me when I moved out. All irreplaceable.
Thirty minutes later I had another bag full of things that I couldn’t stand to leave behind.
I had to stop looking around the house. How did people do this? How did you narrow it down? Maybe it was easier when the threat was imminent and you could only grab the absolute basics. I had too much time to worry about the things I’d leave behind.
Oh, shit. I strode over to the couch and grabbed the blanket I always slept with and rolled it into a ball, setting it on top of the milk crate. Who cared about the stupid birth certificate? If I accidentally left my blanket behind, I’d be devastated.
I was just about to reach for my phone to check the news again when someone started pounding on my front door.
Chapter 2
Draco
“You sure you don’t want to go somewhere else?” I asked my mom for the fifth time. She was sitting at the kitchen table with her hands wrapped so tightly around a coffee mug that her knuckles were white. Not exactly as calm as she’d like everyone to believe.
“We don’t need to go anywhere,” she replied, taking a sip of her coffee. “The fire won’t get to us.” The words were more of a mantra than a statement—as if she was willing the fire in a different direction.
I looked out the window behind her. The sky was so murky and thick that you couldn’t see a hundred yards from the house, but the glow of the distant wildfires still shone through, orange and creepy as all hell.
“You packed up the important shit anyway, right?” my brother Curtis asked.
Mom nodded.
We’d been through a fire before. When Curt and I were young, we’d been caught in a house fire with our cousin Gray and Aunt Lily. There’d been a whole lot of shit surrounding that situation that went way over my head at the time—but what I remembered most was the smell of smoke and the way we hadn’t been able to see anything.
The sky outside was a vivid reminder. It made me feel claustrophobic.
“It’s fuckin’ pea soup out there,” my dad complained as he stepped inside the kitchen door, closing it quickly behind him. “Can’t see shit.”
“You should be wearing something over your face, Cam,” my mom scolded.
“I was out there five minutes,” he replied easily. “Don’t need to cover my face.”
“Going outside to smoke when the entire house already stinks seems kind of stupid,” my mom mumbled, making dad laugh.
My phone vibrated in my pocket and I reached for it at the same time Curtis reached for his. I knew what the notification was before I even saw it.
“We’re at level two now,” Curtis told my parents, lifting his phone so they could see it.
“We’re packed up,” my dad said with a nod. “If we need to go, everything’s in your mom’s rig.”
“You takin’ the bike?” I asked.
“Better wear a mask,” Curt joked.
“He’ll wear the full helmet,” my mom said, pointedly ignoring dad’s disgusted expression. “Like he said, you can’t see shit out there, which means people are going to be driving like idiots.”
“Can’t breathe in that fuckin’ thing,” my dad replied, but I knew he’d wear it anyway.
“What’s the plan with the clubhouse?” I asked just as the power shut off.
“Dammit,” my dad bitched. “Knew that was gonna happen.”
“It’s fine. The power company warned that they were going to be turning everything off,” my mom said tightly, getting up from the table. “I’ll put the coffee in a thermos so it stays hot.”
“Couple of the boys went over last night and made sure everything was locked up tight at the clubhouse,” my dad answered me as he stopped my mom with a hand on her hip. He leaned down and kissed her, instantly calming her frantic movement around the kitchen before looking back at me. “Dragon and Casper made sure anything that couldn’t be lost was packed up and moved into town, but there’s a ton of shit that couldn’t exactly be transported or stored anywhere else. Dragon said they’re gonna park the RV at Poet and Amy’s for a few days while we see how this plays out. They left last night.”