Page 35 of The Fire Went Wild

I settle down into the darkness, nothing more than a soul with memories. For a little while, I sift through those memories, focusing on my now-favorite one—the squeezing and gasping, the slow deprivation of oxygen as I stroked myself closer to orgasm. I timed it just right because the explosion of pleasure tore through me right in the seconds before I passed out. Sublime.

But there’s only so long I can think about my death, and I can feel my gods waiting for me in the dark. They’re closest when you’re in the ground, like my grandma always said. And that’s true. I first met my Guardian after my father threw my corpse into a grave I dug for myself. The Unnamed I met ten years later after a drastic mistake in Dallas. It was what led me to Ambrose, and then to Sawyer. The closest things to friends I have.

Friends I betrayed by letting Charlotte kill me. I need to warn them somehow.

So I do what I was taught to do when I was very young, long before I died for the first time, which is to pray in the dark cathedral of my mind, in a language I learned before I ever learned English.

I call you, Guardian. I call, and I will listen.

But my Guardian still doesn’t answer, even though I can feel its presence nearby. Something like dread tightens through my body, even though I shouldn’t feel anything in this state.

The Unnamed wants to speak to me.

I call you, The One Who Cannot Be Named. I call, and I will listen.

The air shifts. I feel like I really am in a tomb, a dank place made of stone,and not stashed under my grandmother’s old bed. There’s a dampness on the air that makes me think of rot.

I wish I could breathe so I can take a deep breath. Wish I had a heartbeat so I can feel the blood rushing through my ears. It’s always strange how much I miss anxiety when I can’t feel it.

Look, the Unnamed says.Listen. It sinks into me, that cold black rot, filling up my empty blood vessels with decay until I see what it sees.

Charlotte.

It sees Charlotte.

She’s a blackened husk beside my fence, her yellow dress smoldering, wisps of white smoke floating up toward the starry sky.

No, I think before I can stop myself. I know the Unnamed is mocking me from the way the rot curdles in my veins.

Then I see her again. This time, she’s trudging along the side of Guillmar Road, the sky that pearly grey of early dawn. I feel, briefly, all the aches of her body, her burning feet and sore muscles. But I also see what she doesn’t: a rattlesnake coiled inthe grass. Docile from the cold, yes, but she steps right on it and it reacts anyway, sinking its fangs into her ankle.

Charlotte screams and falls into the tall golden grass and time passes and she dies there, because Guillmar Road is always empty, especially this time of year.

Why are you showing me this?I ask the Unnamed in the dark caverns of my thoughts, the language of the gods reverberating through my skull.Are you going to kill her?

It doesn’t answer. Only shows me another image. My house, Charlotte dead. But not from the electrical fence. She’s splayed across my porch and riddled with bullet holes, the blood blooming like roses across her chest.

This one bothers me the most of all. It makes no sense. Who could have shot her out here, on this side of the fence? On my property? MeeMaw and Papa are somewhere in South America. I have no idea where Dad is, but if he killed her, it wouldn’t be with a gun.

Watch, says the Unnamed.

I see all three visions at once. All three futures, I think, all three ways Charlotte can die by some hand that’s not my own.

Is this why you didn’t want me to kill her?I ask, yearning for a heartbeat and breath so my body can react to all this discomfort. I don’t like seeing her dead, a fact I’m only distantly aware of.

Watch,says the Unnamed.

I watch. It’s not like I have much of a choice.

Charlotte charred and blackened.

Charlotte’s ankle rotting away from a snakebite.

Charlotte bleeding into my feather grass.

And then, in all three visions, she gasps back to life, arching her back to sit up, all the death washing off her like black ink. My body vibrates strangely, almost like I have a heartbeat again. But it’s much too soon.

I think of the electricity buzzing between us as she choked me to death.

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