Page 27 of The Fire Went Wild (Hunter’s Heart #2)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHARLOTTE

I wake up in the bed at Jaxon’s house, still wearing the clothes I wore when I?—

When we drove to Houston.

The last thing I remember was curling up in the passenger seat of Jaxon’s car and staring at my pale reflection, Houston’s skyline at our backs and the world around us too dark to see. Jaxon talking softly, telling me about Ambrose. The man, he said, who can explain what’s wrong with me.

But I know what’s wrong with me. I killed a man. And not one who kidnapped me and came back to life anyway. A stranger, someone I’d never seen before in my life. Someone who had done nothing to me.

I slashed him to ribbons, and then I?—

I squeeze my eyes shut, crushing out the memories even though they make me feel warm and floaty. Or rather, because they make me feel warm and floaty. If they made me feel like the nightmare I am, then I’d wallow in them.

I push the blanket off and sit on the edge of the bed, taking deep breaths. I’m clean, and I feel like I shouldn’t be. But no, we took a shower together, in the bathroom of the man I killed. Jaxon had rubbed all the blood away from my skin, kissing me the entire time.

I kissed him back.

I want to kiss him again.

I want to?—

A dull ache forms behind my eye, a ghost of the migraines I usually get. I stand up, shaking a little, and test the door, out of habit more than anything.

I’m stunned when it swings out into the hallway.

What’s this? A show of respect? Of trust? Or is it just that Jaxon knows he’s trapped me in this other way. This worse way. Because where can I go now that I’ve killed a man and?—

And bathed yourself in his blood and fucked another murderer on his corpse and screamed when you came?

The memories hit me all at once, and I swoon, slamming up against the doorframe. My body throbs with a hot, angry need. My mind screams at me that I need to turn myself in, that I need to be thrown in jail before I hurt someone else. It also viscerally recoils at the thought, enough that I fall down to my hands and knees and retch.

A door slams somewhere in the house, followed by Jaxon’s voice: “Charlotte! I’m here!”

I retch again and spit up stomach acid. I hadn’t exactly had an appetite for food last night.

Footsteps thud up the stairs. I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand just as Jaxon appears at the top of the staircase. “Are you okay?”

I sit back on my heels, not sure how to answer. “How did you know—” I start, not sure how to phrase the question. “Know that I wasn’t feeling well?”

Jaxon helps me stand, his hand squeezing mine. “I can sense things, remember?” He gives me a wry smile. “It’s why I thought you were human until you?—”

The revulsion crawls over my face, and he must see it too because he snaps his mouth shut.

“Because you feel human,” he finishes instead. “Sort of.”

I’m dizzy, and I stare down where I spat up on his floor. “I need to clean that up,” I mutter.

“I’ll get it,” he says. “I’ve dealt with worse. Why don’t you go down to the kitchen and get some water?”

His kindness strikes me as suspicious, and I regard him accordingly, glancing at him out of the corner of my eye. There’s something hapless about him, which I do find charming in spite of myself. It reminds me of when I first saw him in the diner, which feels like a million years ago. An awkward weirdo instead of a psycho.

“I still don’t understand what’s happening to me,” I finally say.

“I’ll explain what I know.” His eyes bore into mine. “I promise.”

Yeah, I’ve seen how much he likes to explain things. But the truth is I do want a glass of water and I don’t want to go back into the bedroom where I had, up until this moment, been a prisoner. And if he wants to clean up my vomit, he’s welcome to it.

So I go downstairs, scurrying quickly through Jaxon’s creepy-ass living room. The faint throb in my head has vanished, thankfully, and I fill a glass with water from the tap and gulp it down, staring out the window above the sink as I do. It looks out at the swamp, lush even in the dead of winter.

Footsteps behind me. I whirl around as Jaxon slinks into the kitchen, peering at me through the sleek curtain of his hair. “You feel better,” he says. A statement, not a question.

“I guess.” I fill my glass with more water and then sit down at an ancient kitchen table with aluminum legs and a chipped Formica top. I run my fingers over the imperfections, wondering what other nightmares have happened in this house.

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. What don’t I 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 some gods are directing?—”

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

“No.” I push away from the table, blood pumping through my body. “No, animals have prey. They hunt for food . 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—he is a 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 just human and 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.

“I’m not a fucking Hunter!” I scream, thrashing beneath him. “I’m human!”

Jaxon raises an eyebrow and releases my hands and I swing at him without thinking. My palm makes contact with his face, and the force of the strike vibrates down my arm. Jaxon jerks his head sideways, then tilts his gaze back to me, his cheek red.

“Again.” His eyes blaze with a fire that frightens me. Arouses me.

I shouldn’t, but I give him exactly what he wants, striking him hard on the other cheek. This time, I use all that strange and unfamiliar strength, and Jaxon groans when I strike him, dry-humping me like a teenager.

“Again,” he roars, and I set upon him with all my fear and fury, a maelstrom of violence I can’t even begin to understand. He fights back just enough to roll us both off the table, and I don’t crash against the floor like I expect but somehow land deftly on my feet, crouched, hands up.

“How the fuck?” I choke out, staring at him over my burning hands. His face is red from my slaps. A trickle of blood runs out of his nose. Did I do that to him?

I want to taste it, his blood.

I throw myself at him, slamming him so hard against the wall that the deer’s head falls beside us with a thunderous clatter. He pulls me into him, rolling his hard cock into my thigh, and I sink my teeth into his pulsing neck, biting down until his skin bursts and salty, hot blood flows across my tongue.

I groan, rubbing my lips in it, swallowing some of the drops.

Jaxon groans, too, although his groans stretch out into words of praise: “That’s it, my little Hunter. Taste your prey. Just like that.”

I want to be furious with him. I want to hate him. Instead, I’m kissing him with my bloody lips, smearing his blood across his face until I find his mouth. Then I make him taste himself.

He returns the kiss with a terrifying fire, his mouth hot and angry and devouring. I’m distantly aware that my hips are thrusting against him, trying to fuck him again. Distantly aware that I’m on the verge of coming with the taste of his blood on my tongue.

He wrenches away from me to break the kiss, then flings me around like a rag doll. Throws me up against the table, its edge digging into my belly.

“Fuck me,” I shriek.

No. No, I meant to say fuck you.

Didn’t I?

Jaxon yanks on my pants, dragging them off my leg one by one. Then he does the same with my underwear. As soon as the cool air of his house kisses my soaked pussy, I moan and wriggle my ass back toward him.

He slaps it, hard.

“Be still.” I hear the zip of his flying coming down. The rustle of his clothes. Then he braces one hand on my lower spine and the other around the back of my neck, pressing me down hard on the table. I fight against him, bucking up against his grip.

But as strong as I feel, he’s stronger.

“I think I want to win this fight, little Hunter,” he says, right before he thrusts his cock into my pussy.

I’ve never been so happy to lose.