Darci's Pride. Jenna Mills

as before, trying to orient himself. Around him, everything blurred, slowed. The strobe light still flashed in obscene synchronicity with the lights on the fire engines. The bullhorn still pulsed rhythmically. He could see his men, all of them doing what they’d been trained to do. And Christ, he could see the other barn then, Barn A, the original structure—the one used for boarding.

      Up in flames.

      All those horses…some of them weren’t young, weren’t in the same top-notch condition as the Thoroughbreds. Some of them were older, slower.

      One was blind.

      Anthem…

      “Here,” someone said, and he blinked to see a young man with soot-smeared cheeks thrust a glass of water into his hands.A towel then, damp, cool, against his face. He blinked and tried to bring the kid into focus, could make out little more than a scrawny frame and an old, torn bush hat.

      “Thanks,” he said, or tried to say, but wasn’t sure the words made it past the rawness of his throat.

      “D-Daniel—” But before he could locate his trainer, Peggy was there, with her long gray hair loose around her face, wearing what Tyler would swear was only a nightgown. She lifted her hands as if to inspect him.

      “Don’t you ever do that again!” she scolded, and then she started to cry. Peggy. Stalwart, unflappable Peggy, started to cry. “Going into that inferno like that!”

      “Easy now,” he choked, but every time he opened his mouth, air rushed the back of his throat, and he coughed abrasively.

      “Don’t talk,” she said as one of the paramedics—Pete Rutherford, he thought—kneeled in front of him and started to check him over.

      “I have everything under control,” she announced, tears over, and magically, with the same efficiency she did everything, she produced the laminated checklist they’d designed for emergencies. “I’ve called your parents,” she said as old Windbag materialized at his feet, panting frantically. “And Russ.” She glanced toward the shadows milling nervously in the far pasture. “He’s already here.”

      Russ Chaplain was their head veterinarian.

      “Have we…” Tyler coughed as Peggy shot him a look of reprimand. “The horses,” he got out with a hand to the dog’s back. “Have we lost—”

      “Too soon to tell.” That was Daniel. With the whites of his eyes glowing against a face covered in ash and maybe a smear of blood, he crouched in front of Tyler. Andrew and Shane flanked him. Daniel started to speak, but when he coughed instead, Shane took over.

      “As best as we can tell, all barns are empty,” Tyler’s brother said, and relief rushed in like oxygen. “We’ve evacuated Barn C as a precaution.” Shane was not a horseman, never had been. He’d chosen the family’s other business, a vineyard elsewhere in the Valley. But in that moment, with the hat pulled low over his head and the ferocity in his eyes, he looked as though he lived and breathed the land every bit as much as Tyler did. “The horses are in the pasture. They’re secure. We’re trying to count them, but…”

      The words trailed off, didn’t need to be said.

      Not all animals were accounted for.

      “Light…ning?” He could still see the animal frantically pawing the back of his stall.

      God, even over the shouting and the sirens, the fire and the water, he could still hear him….

      His brother and Daniel exchanged a tense look. “Russ is with him,” Shane said. “He took in a lot of smoke.”

      Tyler’s eyes burned. Lightning Chaser was a fighter, Tyler knew that. If any horse could survive—

      Survive. That was the best they could hope for. For Lightning Chaser to survive.

      But already Tyler knew his champion Thoroughbred, the big strong bay colt who loved nothing more than to run, would never race again.

      “The brigade is wetting down the surrounding area as a precaution,” Shane explained, but the words barely registered. Tyler stared dry-eyed at the gnarled flames devouring two of his barns, and felt the sickness churn in his gut. Just that afternoon—

      He could still see young Heidi sitting in the shade of a now scorched gum tree, with an apple in her hand.

      Acutely aware of his brother and cousin, he straightened his shoulders and stood, noticed the young groom standing with the other two dogs. The kid was covered in smoke, had rips in his baggy, long-sleeved plaid shirt and something that looked like blood on the side of his face. But his eyes…it was his eyes that got Tyler, the horrified, haunted glow of shock.

      No one would walk away from this unscathed.

      “Preston,” said a quiet, intense voice over the wail of the fire engines. Tyler turned, saw Detective Sergeant Dylan Hastings of the Pepper Flats station striding toward him, not in his normal attire of jeans and a button-down, but the protective gear of a volunteer firefighter.And in that instant the voice clicked and Tyler realized who had followed him to Lightning Chaser’s stall and pressed the breathing apparatus to his face. “Pete here tells me you’re going to be okay.”

      Tyler stuck out his hand. “Thanks to…” he started, but another spasm stole his words. He cleared his throat, tried again. “Thanks to you, mate.”

      Hastings’s eyes were hard, flat. “Just doing my job.”

      That’s all he ever said. Tyler had been teaching young Heidi the ins and outs of riding for almost a year, but her father still treated Tyler with a formality typically reserved for strangers.

      Heidi.

      He glanced toward the remains of Barn A. A smaller building, the fire there had already been put out. “A-Anthem?”

      Hastings shook his head. “Don’t know yet,” he said grimly, as Tyler again noticed the groom in the bush hat hovering nearby. “I’m needed back over there, but before morning we’ll need a full accounting of what happened here tonight.”

      A rough sound broke from Tyler’s throat. He turned toward the inferno that had once housed his Thoroughbreds, his entire stable of two- and three-year-olds, surrounded now by the fire brigade. Hoses shot water against flames that didn’t seem to give a bloody damn.

      “The note,” Tyler muttered, and Dylan’s eyes met his. The two had talked earlier in the day, when Tyler had called to report the threat against Lightning Chaser. “GodAlmighty.”

      Dawn brought an otherworldly glow to the eastern horizon.

      “We’re lucky,” David Preston insisted. He had been the one who had first walked the rolling hills of the northern Hunter Valley that had become Lochlain, who’d struck out from America almost forty years before, who’d used his inheritance to found the dynasty denied to him in America.

      He and Tyler’s mother had arrived from Sydney just as the main fire had been brought under control, less than two hours after Peggy had called them. The horror of what he’d found burned in his hooded, dark green eyes.

      “That’s what we have to focus on,” he insisted, standing with his two sons outside the corral where the horses milled. They were quieter now that the strobe light had been turned off and the bullhorn had fallen silent.

      Quieter after the fire went dark, and the remains of the stables had fallen.

      “We can rebuild,” David said in the same strong, stoic voice Tyler remembered from his childhood, when Tyler had found his father kneeling in the soft hazy light of sunrise, next to a mare and a foal who’d both been lost in childbirth.

      It was the same voice David had used six years before, when Tyler had gotten caught with his pants down, literally, and almost lost Lochlain.

      Tyler looked at him now, at his father, strong and robust even in his late fifties, at the lines carved into his weathered, rancher’s face, the