Page 76 of The Fire Went Wild

As long as I stay within the boundaries of the electric fence, I can pretend I’m still a normal person.

“You want to help?” Jaxon asks, jarring me back to the cool, sunny kitchen. He gestures toward the yard. “I’m repairing the fence.”

“I saw that.” I cross my arms over my chest and take a long, deep breath. “Do you need help?”

He shrugs. “Not really.”

We stare at each other, and I see the man I killed, his eyes wide and his mouth open at the moment that Jaxon released the knife and I didn’t.

“Do you have my phone?” I finally say.

Jaxon gives me a bland look. “Yeah…” He looks down at his palms. “Yeah, I smashed that. The day I…. uh, brought you here”

Of course he did.

“Who did you want to call?” he asks, lifting his gaze to meet mine, a hint of suspicion in his eyes.

“No one.” I hear the defensiveness in my voice. “But I’m bored. I want to—” To what? Post a selfie on social media? Doomscroll through an endless waterfall of cat videos?

No, I realize suddenly. I want to do what I’ve spent the last three months doing. I want to investigate a murder.

“The man I—” I cut myself off, bile rising in my throat. Jaxon frowns, a dark line forming on his brow, but doesn’t say anything. “You don’t know his name, right?”

“The gods didn’t tell me.”

He’s crazy. We’re both crazy. We’re both killers.

“Well, I want to know who he was.” I square my shoulders, look Jaxon dead in the eye. “There are these forums I was using to investigate Edie’s disappearance. They’ll have picked up on—you know.”

Jaxon smiles darkly. “Your first kill?”

“Don’t call it that.”

“What else should I call it?”

“Look, it doesn’t fucking matter, okay?” My voice comes out harsh and shrill. “Do you have a phone I can borrow? A laptop?”

Jaxon just keeps holding that darkly sarcastic grin. I want to smack him, but I’ve seen where that leads.

“I’m serious,” I say. “I want to know who he was.”

Jaxon’s grin flickers. “Yeah, I have a phone,” he says softly. “But you’ll have to sit out there with me while you use it. I don’t want you turning yourself in.”

The idea knots around my heart. A binding, like the binding Jaxon said was keeping me from being my true self.

The binding I felt snap when I drove a knife into that man’s chest.

No. I’m losing my goddamned mind.

“Jail isn’t a good place for us,” he continues, almost gently. “Better to die and revive than end up there.”

“I’m not going to turn myself in,” I snap. “I still don’t know for sure that Edie’s safe, if nothing else.”

Jaxon’s expression flickers again. “She’s safe,” he says. “Now come on.”

I follow him out of the kitchen and into the backyard. A cool, damp breeze blows in across the swamp, smelling of rotting plant matter. Jaxon vanishes inside his shed, but I hang back, staring at the gap in the fence. It’s not big enough for me to crawl through anymore.

“Here you go.” Jaxon slides a phone into my palm, then squeezes my hand and meets my gaze, his eyes black and burning. “Don’t fuck around, Charlotte. I need to protect you, and if you bring the cops out here, that’s going to be a lot harder for me to do.”

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