Page 26 of The Fire Went Wild

I push the thought aside.

“I told you,” I say. “You just have to ask the right questions.” I reach into my back pocket, fingers slipping past the silky tangle of her underwear until they wrap around her cigarette case, which I slide carefully out. Charlotte’s eyes narrow as the box gleams in the lamplight.

“Is that?—”

“You shouldn’t have brought these into Texas.” I pop the case open and pull out one of the joints. Charlotte watches me without saying anything. “It’s not California. Or even Louisiana. They’ll throw you in jail and?—”

“This is what you wanted to show me?” she snaps. “That you’re going to smoke my weed?”

I set the case aside and sit, somewhat cautiously, on the opposite side of the sofa from her. She watches me with baleful eyes, and I’m reminded why dead women are so much easier. They don’t judge. You can’t disappoint them.

They aren’tscaredof you.

“Ask me the right questions,” I say to Charlotte. “And I’ll let you have some.”

She rolls her eyes. “It’s my weed.”

“It’s mine now.” I grab the lighter and ashtray from where they sit on the end table beside the sofa; as long as I can remember, there’s been an ashtray there. My father used to chain smoke in the living room whenever he started getting the urge to kill. When I’d come downstairs as a boy and see thesmoke curling up around the ceiling like storm clouds, I knew it was almost time to Hunt.

I don’t smoke cigarettes like him, but I’ll smoke weed occasionally. When I need to clear my head. Like tonight.

I light the joint and inhale. Charlotte shakes her head, drinks her wine. “Fine. You want me to ask a question? Stop fucking around and tell me where Edie is.”

“That’s not a question.”

She glares at me, her pretty brown eyes full of poison. I take another hit, and then I let the joint burn.

“Fine.” She smiles coldly. “Where is Edie?”

I consider her question. I know the answer, of course. Sawyer told me and Ambrose all about it, how they bought a house in Pensacola and he finally saw the ocean. And then Ambrose told him the Gulf of Mexico didn’t count because he’s an asshole.

“She’s by the sea,” I finally say.

Charlotte blinks. I know she expected me to refuse to answer. I should have. But I have something she wants, and I like it, that she wants something from me. It’s—a strange feeling, from a living woman. From any woman.

“Where? Surely not California?—”

“No, not California.” I take another hit from the joint as Charlotte’s eyes follow the ember through the air.

She drains her wine. She’s not looking at me like she hates me anymore. She looks determined.

“She told me she met a friend from high school,” Charlotte says. “That she was staying with him. Is that true?”

I smile a little. I can’t kill her. Can’t hurt her. But I can toy with her the way I do my victims sometimes. “In a sense.”

She throws up her hands and tosses back her head, groaning in frustration—and giving me a view of her creamy throat. I imagine her wearing a necklace of blood, which stirs up the Unnamed.

Don’t.

What if it wasn’t her blood?

It’s my question, and it still surprises me. But I like it, the idea of Charlotte covered in someone else’s gore. My cock stirs. The Unnamed seems to like the idea, too.

I lean forward, the joint dangling from my lips. Charlotte watches me warily.

“So her friend wasn’t from high school.”

I’d almost forgotten what we were talking about. “Not high school.”

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