Page 1 of The Fire Went Wild

PROLOGUE

JAXON

This neighborhood stinks of wealth. The houses are monstrosities, boils of architecture growing out of the cleared wetland. I wonder if the owners know what this place was before the developers smoothed it over with their little gated community. I wonder if they know the whole place will be underwater after the next bad storm.

I hope it’s a surprise for them.

I park my car in the shadows created by a blazing streetlamp, three houses down from the house I need to go to. It’s not late, only 9 PM, but no one’s out. The people who live in these houses are tucked away inside, faces illuminated by their blaring TVs or the little black boxes of their phones. I hate places like this, the way they subsume the marshland I love so much and spit it out as a glossy facsimile of—I don’t know what. Some British aristocrat’s manor? It’s all so fucking ugly.

But it’s also sterile. Empty. No one will see me coming and going.

I go now. Leave the car. My supplies are in my bag. No mask, of course, not until I’m inside. If anyone does happen to drive by or—unlikely—glance outside their window, they won’tregister me. I look normal. It’s how we blend in, creatures like me. Monsters. Boogeymen. Hunters.

The house that contains my soon-to-be victim is understated compared to the others. It’s a little smaller, without all the hideous architectural flourishes these houses have. The yard is landscaped with native plants—beds of milkweeds, sunflowers bobbing around a stone birdbath, a few bursts of Gulf Coast yucca. Of course, it has the same flat carpet grass as the other houses.

I go around the side, toward the garage set in the back. I’ve been here twice already: once as a surveyor, the orange vest rendering me invisible, and once as a landscaper, offering my services for cheap. That second time, I spoke to my victim. He squinted at me from the doorway, the top few buttons of his shirt open, a glass of gin in one hand. “I already got someone,” he told me when I pressed my card on him. “Maybe try Frank Davila.”

I didn’t try Frank Davila; I’d gotten what I’d come for. I confirmed it wasthisman my Guardian wants, because as soon as he opened the door, all this light flooded my vision. He was haloed by it, my Guardian’s touch streaming out from behind his head. My eyes burned. My heart raced. All the usual signs.

The garage is closed up tight, but it has a little door on its side, and I break the lock easily. Inside I find two Audis. Expensive but tasteful. One of them is a hybrid.

Here, I work quickly. I pull my mask out of the bag, its power thrumming between my hands. I made it myself, welding the metal in endless spirals to create its shape and then affixing the antlers on top, the white bleached bones of the first creature I ever killed.

When I slide it on, I feel my Guardian awaken inside me, a burning core of heat in my heart. I’m hungry, it says, and I’m hungry too.

I pull my knife out of my bag. And the pistol, just in case. That I slide into a shoulder holster that I cover with a black suit jacket.

Then I go inside.

The door leading from the garage into the house is unlocked. It takes me into a dark and silent laundry room that opens into a dark and silent hallway. I follow the house’s arteries, guided by my Guardian’s urgent whispers as much as I am the smell of my victim: old cologne, chosen blood. Someone else is here too. A woman. My victim has an ex-wife. An adult daughter. It could be them. It could be someone else.

Whoever it is, both my victim and his companion are upstairs. I move slowly, listening through the hurricane of my Guardian’s hunger. It whispers to me in an ancient language, barbed like roses. A language that gets my blood up.

I lick my lips behind the mask’s metal cage, excitement urging me forward.

Light spills out of a room up ahead. So does the mindless buzz of a TV. Every part of my body is burning with electricity. My Guardian moves through me.

I push the door open so it swings inward, revealing the scene:

My victim, sitting in bed, shirtless, smoking, watching the enormous flatscreen TV on his wall.

A woman, naked, sleeping beside him. Neither his ex-wife nor his daughter. I don’t recognize her from my research.

He laughs at something on the TV. I step into the room, fingers curled around the knife’s handle. My victim drags on his cigarette. Laughs again. My Guardian sings.

I take another step closer, and that’s what finally gets him to turn toward me. His reaction is immediate and very satisfying. He jolts, eyes going wide, and slams up against the headboard. The woman beside him mumbles something and rolls over.

“Fuck fuck fuck,” he whispers. “Already?”

This brings me up short. It almost sounds like he’s… expecting me.

This changes nothing,my Guardian whispers. I can feel its hunger as my own, a wide, cavernous chasm deep in my belly.

My victim dives toward his bedside table, hands flailing, arms trembling. He pulls out a black pistol not all that different from the one I carry for backup. I stare at it through the mask as he holds it up toward me, shaking.

I served five tours in two different Iraq wars. I’ve been shot hundreds of times. I barely notice anymore.

“Tell Tyloch to go fuck himself!” my victim roars?—

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