Page 38 of Beautiful Obsessions
Archie had already shown me the guns he’d pulled from their car.Two handguns.One knife.All tucked away neatly enough to prove their intentions.
They hadn’t been following me to ask for directions.
“Never seen them before,” I muttered.
My voice sounded flat.Hollow.
I kept my gaze on the men instead of on him.The dead no longer looked human after a while.They turned into shapes.Weight.Consequences.
Archie watched me for a second, then gave a short nod as if filing that away with everything else.
“Okay,” he said.“Let’s do this.”
He unscrewed the jerry can and began dousing the inside of the Mazda, the sharp chemical smell cutting through the cold night air.It soaked into the seats, splashed over the floor, over their clothes, over the ruined upholstery and the cheap plastic trim.The car was old and forgettable, the kind no one would mourn.A grey Mazda that looked like it had already lived three ugly lives before tonight.
Still, watching him do it—watching how practiced he was—made something dark twist low in my stomach.
The petrol glistened briefly in the weak light before disappearing into fabric and flesh.
Archie stepped back, reached into his pocket, and struck a match.
The sound seemed absurdly small.Just a scratch.A whisper.But in the silence of that field, it felt enormous.
For one suspended second, the flame lit his face from below.And God.He looked monstrous.Beautiful in the worst possible way.
His pale skin caught the glow, his sharp features thrown into hard relief, blue eyes turned strange and bright beneath the flicker.The dark blond of his hair looked almost bronze in the firelight, and that brutal Russian stillness of his became something older.Colder.As if violence was not merely something he did, but something he wore well.Something born into him.
He lifted the flame closer, the orange light breathing over his mouth and jaw, then—almost mockingly—kissed it before tossing it through the open window.
The fire took instantly.
A low whoomph sounded from inside the car, followed by a rush of heat as the flames bloomed fast and hungry, feeding on petrol and cloth and skin.Orange tongues licked up the seats, then burst higher, swallowing the interior whole.The windshield cracked with a sharp pop.Smoke began to curl thick and black into the sky.
I stood there, staring.Detached.Like my body had stayed behind while my mind hovered somewhere several feet above the scene, watching this impossible thing happen without fully belonging to it.
Fire consumed everything quickly.Faster than I would have thought.
The car glowed from within like a furnace.The shapes of the men blurred as the heat warped the glass.One arm shifted as the upholstery collapsed beneath it, and I felt a cold, sick pulse run through me.
Before I could think too deeply about it, Archie’s hand closed around mine.Hard.Warm.Firm enough that resistance wasn’t really an option.He dragged me backward toward my car, not roughly, but with enough purpose to make it clear he wasn’t interested in debate.
“What are you?—”
“No point in sticking around,” he said, already pulling me with him across the dirt.“All you’ll get is the smell of burning flesh.”
He opened the passenger door, then paused long enough to pin me with a look.
“Not a nice smell,” he added.
The bluntness of it hit me like a slap.
I stared at him, my pulse suddenly loud in my ears again.Then I slid into the seat because I was too tired, too wrung out, too goddamn rattled to fight him on every little thing.
He rounded the hood and got in behind the steering wheel as if my car belonged to him too.A second later he started the engine, shifted into gear, and pulled us away from the blaze before I could object.
In the side mirror, the fire shrank and flared against the darkness like a signal from hell.
I turned in my seat to look at him.
