Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta

finger-size. He jumped to the second stage too fast, and the smoke began to come thicker and darker, the sign of a fire fighting death, and Ethan said, “This is where you use your brace.”
    Jace took a free end of the brace piece and lifted it gently. Ethan’s design wasn’t the tepee style Jace had seen before but more of a ramp, everything angled over the flame and toward the brace. When Jace lifted the brace, the fire that he’d been threatening to smother from above received immediate oxygen from below and the flame caught and grew and crackled.
    The sound of it got attention. Everyone in the group murmured a little, impressed.
    “We all get to try it?” Drew said.
    “Yes. Nice work, Connor. It’s a fine fire. May I have that knife back?”
    Jace took it by the bottom of the blade, offered Ethan the handle, and said, “Get it?”
    “Got it.”
    “Good.”
    The Nighthawk was gone from him then, and Ethan was moving on, but Jace didn’t care. He was staring at the flames. He lifted the brace piece again, gave it another gust of air, and couldn’t keep from smiling.
    I can make fire, he thought.
      
    When Claude woke, the sun was hot on his face and his arm ached worse than his head, though that pain was powerful too. He blinked and saw nothing but a harsh golden sun and a cobalt sky and for a moment the pain was forgotten, because he believed they were gone, that they’d moved on and left him there.
    He tried to sit up and discovered that his arms were bound back over his head, and then he was concerned but still not scared because at least the two strangers were gone. This situation he could deal with somehow; with the two of them, he’d have had no chance.
    “Seems to be among the living again,” a gentle voice said from behind him, and that was when the fear returned, icy prickles bubbling along his flesh.
    “The waking dead,” a second voice said, and then they rose and again Claude saw only shadows as they returned to him. He was aware for the first time of the smell of wood smoke and the soft poppings of a small campfire.
    They circled around in front of him. The one called Jack had the gun back in its holster, but the one called Patrick was still holding on to the chain-saw blade. Steam rose from the oil and grease trapped in the links, wisps of black smoke. It had been in the fire.
    “We’ll take that location now,” Jack said. “Where Serbin has the boys. We’ll take it from you.”
    Claude tried to move, scrabbling his boots in the dirt. They’d bound his hands back against one of the trees he had felled, and there was no chance of moving its weight.
    “I’ll give it to you,” he said. His voice was a high fast rasp. “I’ll tell you.”
    The man looked down at him and shook his head.
    “No, Claude,” he said. “You misunderstood me. I said that we were going to take the name from you now. Your chance to just give it away is gone.”
    The one with the smoking chain-saw blade approached from the right and Claude tried to kick him but missed, and then the long-haired one grabbed his boots and held his feet down as the other wrapped the hot string of saw teeth around Claude’s arm. His skin sizzled on the metal and the smell of burned hair and flesh rose to him as he screamed. The one holding his feet had steady, unblinking blue eyes. They never changed expression. Not even when his brother began to tug the blade ends back and forth, back and forth.
    They’d gone through all of the muscle and arteries and half the bone in his left forearm before Claude screamed Allison Serbin’s name loud enough to satisfy them.
      
    The blackness came again and this time it would not leave, he could not clear himself from it, he just faded in and out, and the fade-out was better, because the pain was numbed some then. Not enough, but some. He knew that he was going to die here on the hill above his own home, on a sunlit, blue-sky day, and he was less troubled by that than by what he’d just