Page 71 of The Fire Went Wild

Jaxon sits down beside me. And for a minute, that’s all we do. Then he clears his throat.

“So, yeah.” He pushes his hands through his hair. “What do you want to know?”

I stare at him, fingers curled around my water glass. Whatdon’tI want to know? I can trace every decision I’ve made in the last week and still can’t fully understand how I landed in this exact moment. I thought I was going to find my dead friend. Instead, I’ve uncovered a whole world of monsters.

“How can I be a Hunter?” I finally say. “You told me they—you—aren’t human. But I am. I don’t have this urge—to hunt, or whatever.” Or at least, I hadn’t. Not until Jaxon made me smell blood and then handed me a knife.

Jaxon takes a deep breath. “That’s what I’m not sure about,” he says. “When I first saw you in that diner, it was—” He gives me a surprisingly shy look. “It was like when I sense a kill, except not, because my gods said I couldn’t.”

“Your gods,” I repeat, remembering what he told me the other night.I pray, but not to the god you expect.

Jaxon nods. “They tell me who to kill. How to kill them. How to find them. That was how I knew how to get to the house in Houston, and how that man was the one who sent the hit men the other night—” He waves his hand around. “None of that actually matters, though. My gods told me you were a Hunter, but you had been bound by some kind of charm. And killing a human for the first time would break it.”

I listen to all of this with a growing sense of dread. “You are crazy,” I whisper.

Jaxon’s eyes narrow. “Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean I’m crazy for explaining it.”

Hot anger bubbles under the surface of my skin. “What we did last night,” I rasp, “was an abomination. And you’re trying to tell me that somegodsare directing?—”

“Abomination?” Jaxon’s eyes flare with an undeniable rage, furious enough that I feel a quiver of very real fear. “It’s what weare,Charlotte. Humans are ourprey.”

“No.” I push away from the table, blood pumping through my body. “No, animals have prey. They hunt forfood. What I did—” I sway sideways, pain surging up into my temple. “That was evil.”

Jaxon jumps up and catches me before I can collapse, moving with a swiftness that I want to see as supernatural. “Evil doesn’t exist,” he says flatly, like he’s reciting something from memory. “There are only those chosen by the gods to cull, and those to be culled.”

“That’s evil!” I shove him away, surprised by my own strength. I think he is, too, because he stumbles like he’s caught off-balance. “We can’t decide who?—”

“The gods decide!” Jaxon roars. “Because they see patterns in this universe we can’t even fathom.” He lunges at me, and I side-step him, moving on pure adrenaline, slipping out of his grasp at the last minute. Then I hurl my water glass at him, and he bats it away, water arcing out between us.

“The gods brought you to me,” he says in a low, dangerous voice. He stalks toward me, each step carefully measured, and my fear spikes again. I don’t know what I am. I did something monstrous, yes, but am I really a monster? Was I caught up in some spell that Jaxon wove around me?

But Jaxon, right now—heisa monster. A predator. And it doesn’t matter what I am, because I’m clearly his chosen prey.

I race out of the kitchen and into the dining room. Jaxon follows and grabs me by the waist, dragging me up against him. “Stop fighting it,” he snarls into my ear, his fingers digging into my flesh. “Stop letting that binding have control of you even though you broke it.”

“Fuck you!” I shove him away, hard enough that he slams sideways against the table, knocking the chairs away. He catches himself and looks up at me through his long hair and grins like a maniac.

“More of that,” he says.

“There’s no binding,” I say, ignoring his taunts. Ignoring what they do to me. How my whole body is coursing with the need to touch him—violently and otherwise. “I’m justhumanand you—you forced me to?—”

“I didn’t force you to do anything.” He ambles toward me, and I step away from him, walking backward. “I let go of that knife and you kept going.”

He’s right. I know he’s right. I remember everything about that moment. I could have stopped, but I didn’t want to.

And, right now, I hate him for reminding me.

I scream and launch myself at him, conjuring up a strength that feels unfamiliar in my body. For a split second, my feet lift off the ground and we’re flying.

Then we crash onto the dining room table, Jaxon sprawled on his back, me on top of him, straddling him, grinding my pussy down on his undeniably erect dick. He grins at me again, his teeth bright in dim light. I screech my anger and swing my fist at him, unthinking.

He catches it and then, in some graceful fighter’s move, flips me over. My head knocks hard against the table. The world flashes. I blink up at Jaxon as he presses my arms down beside my head, his hair falling across my face.

“This is how I know you’re a Hunter,” he says softly, gently, like I’m not straining up against his grip, trying to flip him off me. “No human woman could fight me like this.” He nuzzles against my cheek until his lips find my ear. “No human woman could have killed me.”

I thrust against him, telling myself I’m trying to throw him off me. Even though I’m not really sure that’s true.

“You want more?” he asks.

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