Chapter 18 - The Glass and the Stone
"The chain..." Bradley choked out through a mouthful of black soot, his eyes rolling back in his head as he lay against the floorboards. "I... I forgot... I chained it before I cut the power..."
"Shut up," I coughed, my chest burning as smoke began to pour through the ventilation grates.
The glass in the French doors was modern hurricane-rated safety pane—installed five years ago to protect Eleanor’s rare book collection from coastal storms. Throwing a chair at it would only bounce off the laminated polycarbonate core.
I looked around the library. The fire was eating through the common wall; the vintage wallpaper was blistering, turning black and peeling away in burning sheets. Eleanor’s portrait above the mantelpiece looked down through the haze, her painted eyes steady amidst the chaos.
The hearth.
Beside the fireplace sat the antique cast-iron wood basket, loaded with split white oak logs, and beside it, Eleanor’s heavy wrought-iron fire poker—a four-foot bar of solid hand-forged steel with a tapered, pointed pike at its tip.
I dropped the hickory stick, sprinted to the hearth, and seized the iron poker. It weighed nearly fifteen pounds.
I turned back to the French doors, plant my feet, and drove the pointed steel tip directly into the corner of the glass pane, where tempered glass is structurally weakest.
*CRACK.*
A spiderweb of white fractures bloomed across the lower pane, but the laminate held.
I swung again. And again. The sound of metal striking reinforced glass rang out like a hammer on an anvil. Smoke was down to my shoulders now; the air was thick, sulfurous, choking. My vision blurred, tears streaming down my face as my lungs fought for oxygen that wasn't there.
On the fourth strike, the point punctured the laminate core.
I reversed my grip, wedged the hooked tip of the poker into the fissure, and heaved with everything left in my body.
*SHATTER.*
The entire bottom section of the French door blew outward onto the limestone terrace in a shower of fractured glass cubes. Cool, sweet, damp night air rushed into the room, creating an instantaneous backdraft that sucked the flames beneath the library door with a terrifying howl.
I grabbed Bradley under the arms. He was unconscious now, limp as a sack of grain.
I hoisted him over the jagged lower frame, tumbling through the broken opening out onto the terrace. We hit the wet limestone pavers hard, the sharp shards of glass slicing into my knees and palms, but the pain meant nothing compared to the glorious, ice-cold air that filled my scorched lungs.
I dragged Bradley across the grass, twenty feet, fifty feet, seventy feet away from the structure, until we collapsed beneath the boughs of the old weeping willow.
I turned around.
The Juniper Avenue house was fully engulfed.
Flames sixty feet high ripped through the roof, punching through the slate shingles and roaring into the midnight sky like a volcano. The stained-glass windows of the second floor exploded one by one, sending showers of ruby and sapphire light into the night.
May you like
In the distance, the first sirens began to wail—a desperate, mechanical chorus echoing across the valley.
I lay on my back in the wet grass, chest heaving, watching the home my grandmother built, the home I had bled for, dissolve into a roaring pillar of flame.
