The Wildfire Season by Andrew Pyper Page B

might have delivered himself—though, he used to believe, never to a woman or a child. If he hits Alex now, the last of the fading differences between him and Wade would be dissolved. And if he could do that to her, it might prove he could do it to a five-year-old, too.
    ‘You should have kept her away.’
    ‘Oh no! I wanted her to see the fine, upstanding stock she came from.’
    ‘And now she can have nightmares about me.’
    ‘There’s worse things.’ She splutters laughter again. ‘You’ll see.’
    ‘Who are you doing this for, anyway? Her or you?’
    ‘I don’t think you get it yet,’ she says, now pulling on her cigarette so hard he can hear the crinkle of retreating paper. ‘I’m doing it for you . To leave you with something you’ll always remember.’
    ‘Give it to me, then.’
    ‘You don’t get to keep it. You just get to look .’
    Miles watches Alex exhale and sees her triumph through the blue smoke. The spillover of loathing finally permitted to show itself.
    ‘You mean the girl,’ he says.
    ‘She’s seen you. You’ve seen her. But aftertomorrow, never again. I’m pretty sure Rachel has the better chance of forgetting. But you? You’ll always know that she’s real.’
    Alex puts her cigarette out on the table next to the little TV.
    ‘Right now you think you’re a ghost,’ she says. ‘But ghosts have it easy. Floating around, feeling sorry for themselves. After today, I promise, you are going to be the haunted one.’
    She slaps her palm against the front of the TV and the sitcom noises instantly disappear, leaving the room even more uncomfortably muffled than before. Miles’s hand involuntarily rises to his scar. Covers the worst of its fault lines with a joined pair of fingers.
    ‘Still so scared,’ she says.
    ‘I’m not scared of you.’
    ‘Not me. But you’re so terrified of who you are you can’t even look.’
    ‘You think—’
    ‘No?’ She takes two steps back from him and opens the closet door. On the inside, there’s a mirror she angles so that Miles is reflected in full. ‘Feast your eyes.’
    He tries. But after the first unexpected glimpse of corrugated cheek, he can’t keep his eyes on Alex, let alone himself.
    She comes close again but doesn’t lower her voice, so that he feels what she says as much as hears it.
    ‘Not as many mirrors up here, I suppose. Well,let me show you a picture.’ Her breath hot on his skin as she looks it over. ‘Trembly chin, crybaby eyes that can’t look at a woman straight. I don’t know which half is uglier. Your burned-up face or the one that looks like it’s already dead.’
    ‘I don’t have time for this.’
    ‘What do you have time for, Miles? I’m curious. How you’ve spent the last six years is a real puzzle to me.’
    It just goes by , Miles nearly says. Most of the time, you don’t even feel it .
    Instead, he runs.
    To get past her, he pushes Alex aside with more force than he intended, and she stumbles against the edge of the bed, nearly losing her balance. He thinks of apologizing but it’s years too late for words of that kind. There is no choice for him but to leave, to get out into the air. With both his arms swinging in front of him, he lurches into the light of the open doorway.
    She rushes to the door to watch him go. A stranger shuffling away with shoulders raised to cover his ears. Nothing he could do would prevent the next word she throws at him from getting through.
    Yet what she ends up doing occurs outside herself. As Miles stumbles into the full sun of the courtyard, Alex raises her fist, aims an index finger at the back of his head, and fires.

Chapter 8
    That evening, Miles walks into the Welcome Inn Lounge through the same door Alex and Rachel had only a day before, and immediately feels that he should have stayed at home.
    The entire fire team are there. Taking them in at once, Miles is reminded of how different the four of them look. Their ages (from King’s twentysomething to