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“Shoot.”
Gabriel told him about the night he’d started the fire in the woods, how he’d lost control. He told him about Hannah, how she’d come to the house tonight, fishing for information.
Hunter didn’t say anything when he was done, just polished off the rest of his sandwich and shoved the wrapper into the bag.
“I couldn’t control it tonight,” said Gabriel. “There was too much. I lost it. That guy could have died.”
“That guy would have died.” Hunter started the ignition. “If we hadn’t been there, he still would have fallen through the ceiling, and he still would have broken his leg, but he would have been dead before anyone could get to him not to mention the rest of them. You want to stop?”
Gabriel hesitated. He did and he didn’t. It was addictive, drowning in fire every night.
And it was helping his control. He was getting stronger; he could feel it. But he eventually would kill someone if he couldn’t manage his element better than this. He was going to get caught.
He looked out the window. “I don’t know,” he ground out.
Hunter fell silent again, pulling his Jeep onto the main road.
But after a while, he glanced over. “Maybe we’re going about this all wrong.”
“What does that mean?”
“You’re a sports guy. You don’t just go out and play a game you practice, right?”
“This isn’t a game, Hunter.”
“Still. Practice makes perfect.”
Perfect. It made Gabriel think of Layne. He pulled his phone out of the center console.
No messages.
He sighed. “So what are you saying? We should go set a house on fire for practice? ”
“No, not a house. We’d start smaller than that.” Hunter glanced away from the road. “My grandparents have an old barn at the back of their property. It’s full of old hay bales, the lawnmower, stuff like that.”
Gabriel stared out at the road. He and Nick used to go down to the beach to set things on fire. Gabriel would always try to drive the fire as high as he could, to incite the flames to burn as much as possible.
He’d never tried to draw flames back, to convince them to settle.
Hunter hit him in the arm. “Come on. Do I really need to convince you to play with fire?”
Gabriel smiled. “No. You don’t.” He paused, noticing they were pulling into the Target parking lot. “Where are we going?”
“You sure can’t go home looking like that. I’ll go in and get you another pair of jeans. You have any cash?”
Gabriel pulled out his wallet and found a twenty.
Hunter shoved it into his pocket and jumped out of the Jeep.
He left it running. “Don’t steal the car,” he called.
Gabriel smiled.
He missed his twin almost to the point it hurt.
But it wasn’t so bad having a friend either.
Michael was waiting on the front porch when Hunter pulled his Jeep up the driveway.
