Page 90 of The Fire Went Wild

He says it so lightly, so casually. And yet the words shoot straight through to my heart. Because he’s right. That sigil is the reason I found Edie.

That sigil is the reason I foundhim.

Jaxon looks at me from across the table, and for a moment those big blue eyes of his are the only thing I can see. But then Edie says something to Sawyer that makes him laugh, and the sunlight is bright and shining on everything in the sunroom,setting the table on fire. And that fire illuminates a dark spot inside me that I know, with a sudden and striking certainty, is meant to be there.

“—find Jaxon?”

Edie’s voice jars me back into the present. I blink and turn back to her.

“How’d you find Jaxon?” she says. “Or how did Jaxon find you?”

Her eyes are clear. Bright.

“He kidnapped me,” I say.

Edie and Sawyer both laugh and look at each other, some kind of familiarity passing between them. “Sawyer stalked me,” she says. “But that worked out, didn’t it?”

When Sawyer looks at her, I know he loves her. It’s a black sort of love, thorny like roses. But it’s love.

He’s a Hunter, and he can love.

I glance at Jaxon again, and he’s smiling a little, looking at me with an intensity that makes my insides shake.

I finish the rest of the story over the remains of our meal, although I leave out my strangling Jaxonandthe trip to Houston. Jaxon doesn’t say anything about either incident, although he does go into surprisingly shocking detail about killing the two drug dealers who interrupted my escape attempt. It gets Sawyer riled up, and the two of them start one-upping each other with murder stories.

It doesn’t disgust me. Edie, though, wrinkles her nose and says, “Why don’t we leave them to this and you and I go outside?”

She’s human, I think.She’s not like me.

My chest squeezes.

Sawyer and Jaxon barely notice when we get up from the table. They’re too busy arguing about the benefits of using a machete over a hunting knife.

Edie takes me out to their backyard, which is as overgrown as the front, and we sit at a little wrought-iron table and finish our mimosas while the sea wind blows in from the Gulf.

“I know how fucked up this all is,” she says, not quite looking at me.

“Which part?” I swirl my drink around in its glass. “Faking your own death?”

“Falling in love with Sawyer Caldwell.”

It startles me, hearing her say it out loud. I jerk my gaze over to her, but she’s staring out at the garden, the wind pushing her hair back from her face.

“So you do love him,” I say softly.

Edie nods. Tilts her head toward me. “He saved me,” she says. “Not just from Scott, although obviously he did that. But from—from my own self-loathing. He’s—” She hesitates. “Did Jaxon explain what they are? That they aren’t—human?”

Her question thrums on the air. I consider how to answer it. I consider that I should tell her that Jaxon said I was one of them, too.

Eventually, I just nod.

“I feel like he killed the part of me that hated myself,” she says. “And that’s what made me whole.”

I feel tight and breathless. Of course I knew Edie had suffered. The anorexia. Her recovery. Scott trying to sabotage it, then nearly killing her when she wouldn’t let him. I tried my best to help her, but I never quite unlocked the code. Not, it seems, the way Sawyer did.

But Icouldhave. The realization comes to me like a strike, as cold and clammy as the sea wind blowing through Edie’s dormant garden. I curl my fingers around the mimosa glass and see it play out in my head with a clarity so vivid it makes my hands shake. I should have gone to Scott’s mansion by the sea and slammed his head into the plate glass windows that lookeddown at the beach until his forehead split and his face was a mask of blood. I should have wrapped my hands around his throat and squeezed, pinning him down with my body weight, until his eyes bulged and his tongue lolled out. I should have carved open his torso like a Thanksgiving turkey and taken his organs out one by one, squeezing them until the meat crushed between my fingers.

I should have done all of that for Edie.

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