Page 105 of The Fire Went Wild

I listen, too. There’s a riot of sound, like what I expect the swamp sounds like in summer—overlapping rhythms blending together into a kind of music. I study Jaxon’s face, wondering what he hears in all of it. More than I do, I’m sure.

Although I hear far more than I would have a week ago.

“I think they’re in my bedroom,” Jaxon murmurs, so softly I barely hear him over the strange noises of the house. “Be careful.”

I nod, afraid that anything I say will be too loud. Something flickers across Jaxon’s face—a surge of affection breaking through his killer’s countenance.

Then he kisses me.

It’s soft and chaste, little more than his lips brushing against mine, but it sends heat wracking through my core. His gaze lingers, just for a second.

And then he’s going upstairs.

I have a moment of hesitation. It feels like habit more than any real reservations—just a flash of a thought that I could turn around run out of here and keep running until I’m back inCalifornia. But something stops me. A truth locked away in my heart.

I don’t want to go back to California. I want to follow Jaxon. I want to stay here with him, just like I said in the car.

I want to stay in this dusty old house in the swamp. I want Jaxon to train me. I want to Hunt with him and make art out of bones and skin and fuck in pools of blood. I want to eat his fancy Cajun meals and drink red wine on his couch and have a whole life that was unimaginable to me a month ago but was, I realize now, the life I’ve been searching for since before I can remember.

Jaxon’s halfway up the stairs when he glances back at me, and I feel it again, a black thread of connection. But it doesn’t connect me to the knife. It connects me to him.

And so I go creeping up the stairs behind him, hardly daring to breathe. The sounds swirl around me, somehow louder than before, and I sense other things, too: a melange of scents like an old spice cabinet, a prickling in the air that tells me danger is nearby. Or prey. I’m not sure which.

Jaxon glides through the landing like a shark moving through water. I feel clumsy in comparison, a newborn foal. But a foal with teeth.

Bored male voices drift out into the hallway. They’re talking about an MMA fight, I think.

“Bullshit if you think Locasta can take Siminisky! It’s not even a fucking contest.”

“The fuck you mean? Lacosta is oh and three?—“

And then?—

“Shut the fuck up, both of you.”

There are three of them. Jaxon was right.

“I heard something,” the voice says. The leader, I think. “Coulter, go check it out.”

The floorboards creak. I sidle up behind Jaxon, who stands unbothered, clutching his machete in one hand and the meat cleaver in the other. He turns his head toward me, eyes glinting, and jerks his head.Stand behind me, he’s saying, and I know he’s thinking about guns.

The door to his bedroom opens, and a man steps out. He looks ordinary, dressed in a sleek leather jacket, his hair going thin on the top. He does have a gun, a black pistol.

Everything that happens next happens fast. He looks at us. Sees us.

And then Jaxon is on him, stabbing both blades into his side. The man screams and spits blood across Jaxon’s face before he topples to the ground with a loud thump.

Then there’s another man, but I don’t see much of him before Jaxon strides into his bedroom as if no one is here but the two of us.

“What the fu—” someone shouts, and a gun goes off. I feel it before I hear it, the splinter of wood and the whizz of a bullet brushing past my ear. Then—screams.

Adrenaline surges through me, an overwhelming need to join in on the carnage.

I plunge forward, toward the screams in Jaxon’s bedroom, nearly slipping in the blood of his first victim. I stumble through the doorway to find a man kneeling on the ground, clutching the stump of one hand to his chest, blood pouring out across the floor. He looks over at me, confusion in his eyes, and goes silent for half a second.

“Help,” he croaks.

Movement flickers from the other side of the room: Jaxon stalking the third man like a panther.

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