Page 34 of The Fire Went Wild

My flashlight beam glides across the metal shed I saw from my room, and that weird sick feeling in my stomach surges again. I feel like something’s watching me in the darkness.

I keep going.

And then I hear a soft, low hum.

“Hello?” I call out stupidly, flashlight dancing on the grass ahead. Is it frogs or insects? But no, it sounds mechanical.

And then something catches in the flashlight. Thin, silver wires.

The sickness in my stomach plummets and all I feel now is a cold, overwhelming dread?—

Because stretching out in front of me, dividing me from the swamp, is a towering fence humming with electricity.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

JAXON

Well, that was stupid. But it seems I’ve found a way to enjoy dying.

Coming from Charlotte squeezing my trachea shut with the same chain I used to imprison her was transcendent. The grim, violent determination on her face as she wrapped the chain around her forearm and pulled—biceps bulging, lips parted with exertion? Gorgeous. Fucking gorgeous. The only way it would have been better is if she had been riding me while she did it, her cunt wet from my sloppy, eager kisses.

I’m dead, technically. Everything in my body is still. It always feels fucking odd, this part, to be floating in this technical death Hunters get before we revive. Six deaths and the stillness in my chest still unnerves me. Everything feels heavy, like I’m made of lead.

Strangulation is a fast recovery. With my experience, it’ll probably take a couple of months, although I’ll need to conjure up the will to drag myself downstairs and outside to burrow myself in the dirt, the way my dad taught me to do anytime we died. You heal faster underground. I also don’t want theauthorities finding my body and sending it to the coroner’s office.

Because they will be out here, sooner or later. Charlotte will figure out some way to get through my electric fence and she’ll go to the cops and tell them everything. I fucked up, no doubt about it. It just felt so damn good, her killing me while I stroked myself to completion.Waybetter than dying usually does.

But there was also another reason I let her keep going—I saw something while she was killing me. An electric shimmer in the air that I only get whenever I’m around one of my own kind.

Which isimpossible. She’s human. She smells like a human and acts like a human. Hunters can recognize Hunters, and I would have sensed her as such the second she walked into Bandit’s. Earlier, even. I would have tasted the fire in her blood and the adrenaline of another killer moving into my space.

There was none of that. She walked in like prey.

Death delusion, I think, something I’ve heard other Hunters talk about but not something I’ve ever experienced myself. But that has to be it, doesn’t it? The truth is I was so turned on that I let her kill me even though it was stupid as hell, and that weird electricity arcing between us was just wishful thinking on my part. Because it wasprofoundlystupid of me to die, even an easy death like strangulation.

Now she’ll escape. She’ll tell the cops that Edie is still alive, and fuck knows what Sawyer will do to protect his girl from getting found out.

Don’t let him kill her before I revive,I think in the Abyss of my mind, speaking the language of the gods. I can feel them stirring nearby, the Unnamed and my Guardian both. Listening, even if they don’t respond.

I don’t feel like dragging myself downstairs. I want to sit with the memory of Charlotte murdering me. One last gift wegave each other. I gave her freedom; she gave me a fucked-up Hunter’s sort of affection.

I do pull myself under the bed, though. Ambrose told me once that being covered can trick whatever magic it is that brings us back, make it think we’re underground. Every little bit helps until I make the journey downstairs to finish out my revival.

The chain scrapes against the floorboards as I pull myself across the floor. Time doesn’t mean much when you’re dead. It expands and contracts all at once. So who knows how long it takes. A minute, an hour, a day. By the time I’m done, all I know is I’m in a cramped, dark place, and coolness seeps up through the floorboards. It’s the only thing I can really feel right now, except for my own stillness.

Six deaths, and this was the best one even if Sawyer and Ambrose are both going to be furious with me. It’ll probably stay the best one until I go to sleep for good, centuries from now. My first death was my initiation ritual, my father drawing his hunting blade across my throat when I was seventeen years old. I was in the ground for a little under a year, and when I came out, I was a full-fledged Hunter, a monster to haunt the dreams of humans.

My second death, though, was unexpected. It was in 1991, out in the endless Kuwaiti desert. I was nineteen, still an infant by Hunter standards, and had enlisted out of rebellion against my family—I decided I would let the American government exploit my nature to protect freedom or oil or whatever bullshit they were fighting for then. I didn’t die in combat; almost no Americans died in combat in the First Gulf War. But I went Hunting in the desert town near the base, in a country where I didn’t know the customs or the people, and I was, predictably, caught. Shot in self-defense. It wouldn’t be the last time, although Charlotte’s self-defense was certainly much more enjoyable.

I replay the memory for a little while, drifting in the haze of death. I can’t see anything but darkness, can’t smell anything but emptiness. Charlotte is a billion miles away. I can’t smell her, can’t hear her moving through the house or scrambling across my yard.

My worry for her lingers, though, a fragment of my living self. It’ll take her some time to get through my electric fence, but she’s smart and crafty, and I have no doubt she’ll find a way. I doubt she found my car keys. I keep them well hidden, the way my daddy taught me. So she’ll be on foot. It’s ten miles before the road passes another house, and that’s old man Eli’s place. He might help her. More likely he won’t answer the door.

So if I’m lucky, it’ll be another five miles before she gets to that gas station on the highway. They’ll help her. Then the cops’ll find out everything she knows.

Fuck, I hope she doesn’t talk her way into an actual death. Ahumandeath.

But there’s nothing I can do now. Not in the realm of the gods. Not in the Abyss of annihilation.

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