Read Fire & Dark (The Night Horde SoCal Book 3) for Free Online Page B

fire and smoke.
     
    They’d all learned early on to make the most of their off days because who the fuck knew what they’d face on the clock. Even a watch that had been fairly low-key could go to shit at any time. Like the last one.
     
    Sometimes, for Pilar, making the most of her time off meant heading up into the mountains for a hike, or maybe snagging Moore to go climbing with her at Joshua Tree. Other times, it meant shutting down as much as she could and just being quiet.
     
    After the last watch, Pilar had needed quiet. She’d spent her first day off as a homebody. She’d gotten up, taken her run, then come home to shower and spend the rest of the day in baggy shorts and a beater. She’d done her laundry, tidied up her apartment, watered her plants and then camped on the sofa for the rest of the day reading and watching television.
     
    The next day had been pretty much the same, except that she’d put on actual clothes and run errands and gotten some pampering, too—had her unmanageable mane trimmed, had a massage, went to the market. By that evening, Friday, when White called, she was ready to be social again. But White had wanted to try a new place, and the vibe had been too clubby for Pilar. Too much driving bass from the DJ, too many pretty people. Deciding she’d been wrong about being ready to be social again, Pilar had fended off the complaints and digs of her friends and headed home alone after only a couple of drinks.
     
    She’d lain in bed that night wondering if her life weren’t way too fucking small. It seemed strange, or even ungrateful, to have the kind of job she had, a job that made a real difference, that made her a goddamn hero, and then look around and think, meh .
     
    She’d never felt it before, not in almost eight years on the job. She was proud of what she did, of who she was. But she spent her whole life with the same people. Her colleagues were her friends—her only friends. Other than her grandmother and brother, she had no one else in her life. In fact, she intentionally shut everybody else out. She didn’t date; she fucked. She fucked actively and as often as she wanted, with a couple of fuck buddies or with a random hookup here and there, whichever struck her fancy at the time, but she couldn’t remember the last time she’d gotten dressed up to have dinner with a man she liked.
     
    There were reasons for that—she’d seen the stresses that this job put on relationships and families, and she knew why. Nothing about this life was normal—not the hours, not the work, not what it could do to your head. She thought her colleagues who tried to be with  normal people and make a normal home were either nuts or stupid.
     
    She couldn’t imagine spending a watch picking up burned parts of people and animals and then having to go home and be a loving partner to somebody who’d been sitting in a nice, tidy office all day. All she wanted to do after a call like that was drink, fuck, and be left the hell alone. She was better off sticking with people who got that.
     
    But that Friday night, she’d looked around at her friends, all of whom lived a life like hers, all of whom she loved and would die for without a blink, and thought Damn. I know everything there is to know about all of you. My whole life is at this table.
     
    And it wasn’t enough.
     
    Abbie’s mom was still clanging around in her head—not the scream, though that was there, too, but the complete focus she’d had on her little girl. Despite the woman’s own extreme physical trauma—she’d been sitting in the driver’s seat, bleeding out, half of both her legs gone—she’d never stopped talking to her little girl, trying to send strength to her, not knowing that Abbie wasn’t there anymore to take it. Her little girl. Her own child.
     
    For all the love and friendship Pilar had in her life, she didn’t have love like that. Maybe it was for the best—Abbie’s mom had had it and lost it horribly.