Page 85 of The Fire Went Wild

I wonder if I should call Ambrose now, let her talk to him, but the truth is I don’t want to share her. And Ambrose probably won’t be much of a comfort anyway.

“Ambrose,” she says. “The itinerant preacher from the 1800s.” She shakes her head. “It’s all fucking weird. It’s like discovering vampires are real.”

“We arenotvampires,” I say quickly.

“Don’t tell me vampires actually exist.” She looks over at me. “Do they?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“Well, that’s something.” She slumps back. “Did Ambrose ever say what it was like? How he struggled?”

“He never went into details.” I wish now that he had. That I hadsomethingto give her. “Just that he struggled with the need, at first. To kill, you know. He thought it was wrong. He tried to repress it. But repressing it—” I stop, hesitating. “Well, that’s dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” Charlotte’s brow furrows. “How? Am I in danger?”

“No,” I say quickly. “When a Hunter represses their nature, they—they lose their mind, basically. They’ll kill indiscriminately. Hurt people they care about.”

“So it’s not me that’s in danger,” she says darkly. “Just the people who are important to me.”

“Well, you aren’t repressing anymore,” I tell her. “You stopped when we were in Houston.”

Charlotte stares at me for a long time, and I know I misspoke again. The truth is, I don’t know if the binding protects her from the repression-sickness. She’s young, for a Hunter. Hasn’t even died yet. But if she had never come looking for Edie, if she hadn’t waltzed into Bandit’s Diner and attracted the attention of me and my gods, if she had gone the rest of her life thinking she was human?—

Well, personally, I think it would have been a blood bath.

“You’ll be fine,” I say quickly, hoping it’s true.

She sighs. “I said I wanted to talk about you. Not me.”

I blush and look down at my crumbled, greasy hamburger wrapper. “What do you want to know?” My heart’s beating so fast I think it might explode out of my chest. I shouldn’t be scared, talking to Charlotte. I kidnapped her. I fucked her. I killed with her.

And yet when I glance up and see her dark eyes boring into me I feel like a scared little boy. Ahumanboy.

“How did you become an artist?”

I blink. It’s not the worst question she could have asked. “I always liked to draw. And Dad encouraged it because he said I could use it to serve the gods.”

“Is that how you graduated tomixed media?” Her eyes glitter mischievously.

“Yes,” I say stiffly. “And why are you making fun of me? How else am I supposed to explain it to people?” I lean forward, arching an eyebrow. “To humans? Which is what I thought you were?”

She rolls her eyes. “Fine. So you make art for your gods. Who are these gods?”

I feel them then, a sudden, radiating presence. “I won’t speak their true names,” I say. “But they watch over me. They watch over all Hunters.” I look at her and recite what my grandmother taught me when I was a child. “They’re death and destruction.Rot and decay. Blood. Viscera. The life leaving a body. And they’re the reason we can’t die.”

Charlotte trembles and I catch a whiff of her fear, sharp and pungent, like human fear. But there’s a strain of Hunter in it, too. A strain of darkness that makes my cock stir.

“There are two that watch over me,” I say. “My Guardian and the Unnamed.”

I swallow. I don’t take my eyes off her. I can’t. She looks like a painting in the strange, eerie light of the rest stop.

“They led me to you,” I add.

Charlotte’s eyes widen. Her lips part. Her cheeks redden.

I smell her arousal.

“Am I—am I the first woman they’ve led you to?”

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