Dragon Romance: Dragon Fire (Paranormal Shapeshifter Hero Protector Firefighter Romance) (Fantasy Shifter Werewolf BBW Pregnancy Women’s Fiction Short Stories)
Authors: Emma Taylor
Dragon’s Fire
Dragon Romance
By: Emma Taylor
© Copyright 2016 by Emma Taylor
All rights reserved.
In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved. Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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Chapter 1
Sirens wailing, the fire truck pulled up on the street that had begun to fill with emergency vehicles. Gabriel leapt down from the truck and made a dash for the burning house ahead of the rest of his squad. They let him go as they always did. Each man in the squad knew better than to try and stop him anymore. Everyone in Firehouse 54 thought that it was for the thrills and the adrenaline rush, but it wasn’t.
Gabriel was looking for something that would kill him.
Ever since his partner Brent had died Gabriel found that he didn’t much care if he lived or died. He looked for reasons to keep on living, but he couldn’t really find any apart from helping those in need as he and Brent always had. He figured that if he died while helping someone else it would be a good death and an end to the nightmare of living a life without his partner and best friend.
The house was a roaring inferno when his squad arrived on the scene, but they had just received a radio transmission from the chief who was already on the scene. The chief told them that a bystander claimed there was another person in the building on the top floor. The other firefighters waited until they were on the scene to completely suit up, but Gabriel had done so in the truck on the way over so that he was ready when they pulled up.
The door was closed, but he lowered a muscular shoulder and slammed into it at a full-out run. The door shattered inwards off the hinges as he hit it full force. He used his momentum to leap the first five steps of the stair case. He landed hard and began to run up the stairs, taking them three at a time with his long legs. Heat baked him inside his suit, but he shrugged it off like it was nothing. In fact, if you asked anyone in Squad 54 they would say that Gabriel was almost immune to heat. They would tell you stories of how the man had walked through solid walls of fire to get to people in need.
He rounded the corner of the stairs at a run and continued up. The building was only five floors tall, but running up five floors in full gear that weighed more than sixty pounds was not an easy task. Gabriel seemed to ignore the weight of his equipment entirely as he ran up the stairs three at a time until he reached the last floor of the building.
The fire had started on the fourth floor and the fifth was a raging inferno. Flames roared all around him as he made his way down the hall. Boards creaked and groaned in the ceiling and the floor as the flames compromised their structural integrity. Halfway down the hall Gabriel began to yell.
“Fire department! Call out!”
Over and over he yelled the same phrase to try and grab the attention of the person that was supposed to still be up here. He strained his ears for the sound of someone calling out, but nothing came to him. Further down the hall he repeated the call, but still no sounds other than those of the building as it collapsed around him. He made it to the door at the end of the hall and yelled one last time.
“Fire department! Call out!”
He started to turn around, but the smallest of sounds stopped him in his tracks. He yelled out once more and stood still, his ears strained to hear the noise again. The noise came again. The sound had been a woman moaning. He pinpointed that the sound had come from behind the door on his left. He thumped on the door with his hand as hard as he could and called out.
“Stand back from the door! Stand back!”
The roar of the fire made it hard to hear yourself think let alone the commands of someone on the other side of a door, but he hoped the woman had heard him. He took a step back and slammed a kick against the door just under the knob with all his might. If you asked his fellow squad members, they would tell you that no one could break down a door like Gabriel. This time proved to be just as easy as the times before. The door flew back, the top hinge broken and the jam was hurled into the room.
His eyes roved over the room in search of the source of the noise and then he spotted it. A silver blanket in the corner of the room near the window. He rushed across the room and pulled up the edge of the fireproof blanket. Afraid of what he would find he pulled back the blanket anyway and was pleasantly surprised when the wide-eyed stare of a woman came into view. Her face was blackened by soot, but otherwise she seemed to be alright.
“I’m gonna get you out of here!”
She nodded her head and tried to speak, but coughs racked through her body. Gabriel reacted without thinking of his own safety. He pulled off his mask, something a firefighter was never supposed to do and placed it over the woman’s face. He made her hold the mask in place since he didn’t have time to fix the straps to fit her head. The air was filled with smoke and it tasted bad, but otherwise it bothered him not in the least.
“I’ve got to lift you to get you out of here! Okay!”
She shook her head and yelled back at him. “You can’t!”
She threw back the blanket and right away he could see why she thought that he couldn’t lift her. She was a short, heavyset woman. Maybe two hundred pounds, probably a little less because she was short. He guessed in his head. Nothing that he couldn’t lift without a problem.
“Stop worrying! Let’s go!”
Before she could protest any more he reached out and lifted her into his arms like a man carrying his bride on his wedding night. Her eyes widened ever more behind the mask as he handled her as easily as he would have a young child. He raced out of the room as the ceiling began to collapse. The squeal of wood on wood resounded throughout the house as it began to fall apart beneath his feet.
He could vaguely hear the Chief as he yelled for him to ‘get his ass out of there now’ in the earpiece connected to his mask that was now on the woman. He ignored the voice and focused on running down the stairs. His long legs held firm as he ran down the stairwell at a breakneck pace. One slip and they would both be in a world of hurt, but he had no choice. The house had begun break up. With a grunt he leapt the railing on the last landing and hit the floor on bent knees. Boards rained down around him and the woman in his arms and he ran for the door. Just as they reached the door the house gave out a tremendous groan, shuddered on its foundation, and toppled inward. Gabriel leapt through the door and landed on his back with the woman still held tightly in his arms as the house crumbled behind him.
He rolled over and got to his knees as the paramedics rushed forward with a stretcher and oxygen. He laid the woman on the stretcher and took back his mask. She reached a hand out to him, but he turned away and started for the fire truck. For those few seconds inside the burning house he had been alive like he hadn’t been in years, but now it was over and all he felt was hollow and empty. The Chief laid a hand on his shoulder.
“That woman wants to thank you Gabe.”
“Have Romeo take the thanks for me Chief.” Gabriel said and shrugged off the Chief’s hand as he continued to the fire truck.
The Chief was a good man, but he just didn’t get it. Gabriel didn’t want to be thanked. He had saved her because it was his job and a dragon always does the job put before him no matter how hard or what the outcome was and he knew all about bad outcomes. He knew about those all too well.