Page 36 of The Fire Went Wild

How can she be a Hunter?I barely know how to ask this question of the Unnamed.She feels like prey.

She is not prey.The Unnamed pulses through me, steady and rhythmic. The same oceanic push-pull as my heart. As my breath.She is ours. But suppressed. Dangerous, if she revives like this.

The rhythm quickens. I can feel the machine of myself grinding back to life. I don’t understand what’s happening—not with me, not with Charlotte.

It’s too soonfor me to revive.

She needs a Guide before she’s killed.The Unnamed’s voice rasps through my thoughts and my body both. A lightning storm ignites in my head and sends white hot electricity sparking through my nerves until my limbs shake and convulse and flop against the floor. I shriek in agony, my vocal cords knitting back together so fast it’s painful. It never hurts like this, reviving.

The pain is necessary if you are to revive in time.The Unnamed seems to enjoy my suffering, but I’d expect nothing less from it, the black seed that grows in the heart of all Hunters.

My heart. Sawyer’s. Ambrose’s.

And Charlotte’s.

My neck twists, jerking my head violently sideways. The pain is blinding, worse than when I died. I feel it everywhere, a flooding surge as my blood rushes back into my veins and my lungs expand to contain my dust-choked breath. I scream and slam up against the underside of the bed. My skin feels brand new, tender and sensitive. I can smell everything in this fucking house. Mice that died in the walls. Bluberries that rolled behind the counter and rotted. The old blood out in my shed.

And my Hunter Charlotte, the sweet tangy scent of her sweat. She’s not in the house, but she hasn’t made it past my fence.

She’ll be there waiting,the Unnamed rasps,when you’ve passed through the fire.

And then the agony is too blazing for me to think of anything else.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHARLOTTE

Isit in the damp, overgrown grass, my hands draped over my knees, staring at the fence as it crackles and hums in the dark. I’ve already walked around the perimeter and confirmed that it does, in fact, encircle the entire property, hemming me in with the house and with Jaxon’s dead body.

I never found the car keys, but I did find Jaxon’s car. My one consolation is that it’s all scraped up from when he rammed into me on the highway. He clearly managed to drive it home, but it needs to be fixed. I hope he can’t afford it.

Something tells me he can, though, if he can afford to build a fence like this. It looks like the sort of thing you’d find around a prison.

I stand up again, the hair on my arm tingling from the electricity pulsing through the air, and walk over to the garage for the third time tonight. My flashlight’s in the grass from where I threw it thirty minutes ago in frustration.

The reason for that frustration is that the fence has a gate big enough for a car to pass through—but it’s locked with a digital keypad. And I can’t figure out the code.

I punch numbers in randomly like I’ve been doing for the last hour. The keypad lights up a sickly green and buzzes every time I get the number wrong. Then a digital feminine voice chirps out,“Incorrect key. Try again.”

Part of me hopes that if I try enough times the system will send some kind of message to the police, but I know how dumb that is. There’s no way Jaxon would have this thing linked to law enforcement. I certainly wouldn’t, if I was him.

When I hear,“Incorrect key. Try again,”for what feels like the billionth time, I screech and whirl away from the gate. The house looms up ahead, a dark silhouette against the star-smeared sky. A thin, weak light on the porch seems to create more shadows than it does anything else. There’s a bug zapper, too, glowing pale blue.

Electricity, I think.

Maybe that’s my way out of here. If I can cut the power, then the fence won’t have electricity anymore, and maybe I can crawl over the thing.

I grab the flashlight and shine it over the fence, taking a good look at it again. It’s tall, maybe seven feet, and topped with loops of barbed wire. If I climb over it, I’ll probably cut myself. Assuming I can even get to the top. I’m not exactly the world’s most athletic person.

But I really don’t have much of a choice, do I?

For the first time since I looped that chain around Jaxon’s neck, I feel like I have an actual plan and am not just reacting on some long-buried instinct. I’m still buzzing with old adrenaline and there’s an ache in my arms and fingers that reminds me of what I did.

And Jaxon’s face keeps flashing through my thoughts, too. The way he grinned at me when I realized what he was doing. The way he didn’t even try to fight back.

That—that unsettles me more than anything.

I tell myself not to think about it, that there’s no point. My only goal now is shutting off this absurd fence.

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