The thing about Los Angeles at midnight is it's never supposed to be this fucking hot.

Jared shifted in the passenger seat of Engine 27, swiping through his phone with his free hand while the other drummed against his thigh. The girl from last week—Hannah? Hailey?—had sent him a string of texts that graduated from flirty to explicit somewhere around the third message. He grinned, thumbs moving quick across the screen. Adult shit. Casual shit. Easy.

Then the radio crackled to life and shit got weird.

"Structure fire, 342 Pepper Street, Pomona. Neighbor reports—" The dispatcher's voice did something it never did: hesitated. "—reports a red glow emanating from inside the residence prior to ignition. Witness claims to have heard... chanting."

"The fuck?" Martinez said from the driver's seat.

Jared locked his phone, that familiar kick of adrenaline sharpening everything into focus. Chanting. Red glow. Probably some meth lab bullshit dressed up in Halloween decoration. He'd seen weirder.

Except when they pulled up to the address—a small craftsman cottage wedged between two perfectly normal houses—and he saw the smoke threading out from under the door in weird, deliberate patterns, and through the living room window, that pulsing red light, like hell ambient...like someone tried to DIY a summoning circle with IKEA lighting.

"Loxton, Santos, you're on entry. Garcia, water."

He grabbed his helmet, checked his SCBA, and followed Santos to the door. The heat hit him before they even breached—wrong kind of heat, the kind that felt angry—and when Santos kicked the door in, smoke poured out like something alive.

Inside was a fucking fever dream.

Candles everywhere. Tall black ones dripping wax in sad goth puddles across hardwood floors. A massive pentagram had been drawn—painted? burned?—into the center of the living room, symbols he didn't recognize spiraling out from each point. Posters covered the walls: sigils, demonic faces, shit that looked like it came straight out of a death metal album cover or some chronically-online occult forum.

And in the middle of it all, surrounded by smoke and flame and her own apparent catastrophic life choices, was a girl.

She wore a black dress—velvet, maybe?—and an actual cape, like she'd raided a Spirit Halloween after hours. Her hair was wild, mascara smudged down her cheeks in horror-movie streaks, and she was standing frozen in the center of the pentagram, eyes wide as dinner plates, holding what looked like a very old, very singed book.

A witch. A literal deranged, panicking, chronically-online witch. Or Satanist??

"Fuck," she said when she saw him. "Fuck fuck fuck—"

"Ma'am, you need to evacuate now." Jared moved toward her, boots crunching through debris and melted wax, through ash and whatever arcane bullshit she'd scattered across her floor.

"I can't!" She gestured wildly at the floor, at the flames licking up the walls. "I'm in the middle of the circle, if I break it—"

"If you don't break it, you're gonna fucking die."

He didn't wait for permission. Three strides and he was grabbing her by the waist, hauling her out of the pentagram and toward the door. She yelped, the book tumbling from her hands, and Christ—she was smaller than he expected, light in his arms, soft and warm and panic-trembling. She smelled like smoke and something else. Incense. Vanilla Coke. Something witchy he couldn't name.

She struggled for half a second before survival instinct kicked in and she let him carry her out onto the lawn.

The night air hit them both like a slap. Jared set her down, and she immediately collapsed onto the grass, coughing, that ridiculous cape pooling around her like she was auditioning for a goth production of Hamlet.

"You good?" He crouched beside her, scanning for injuries, pulling off his helmet. Sweat dripped down his temples, and he dragged a hand through his hair—honey-brown strands sticking up at odd angles, tattoos just visible above his collar where his turnout coat hung open.