Page 1 of Bird on a Blade (Hunter’s Heart #1)

PROLOGUE

SAWYER

A ugust nights are the first gasp of summer’s death. There’s a chill that creeps into them like in a drafty old house; you can feel the leaves curling into themselves, the green starting to burn away. If you’re really lucky, a fog rises up from the valley, cobwebbing the forest.

I think that’s why I’ve always found August the sweetest time for killing.

I slide through the silent camp, heavy boots thudding softly against the grass. Three of them are dead already. I hunt the fourth now, a boy with shorn hair and big muscles. I’ve no doubt he’ll put up a fight, but it’ll be mostly bluster.

A crack of movement from my left. I turn in time to see a pale blur shoot out of one of the cabins. It’s him. He pants as he runs, arms pumping like a track star. He doesn’t see me.

He’s heading for the dining hall, probably assuming he can call for help there. He can’t; I already saw to that. Cut the landlines. Smashed the CB radio and all their cell phones. If he thinks he can get to a phone, then they aren’t communicating with each other, like the cruel, stupid children that they are.

I let him think he’s safe. I let him slam, panicked, into the dining hall. Then I walk slowly through the shadows, clutching my Bowie knife at my side, the blade wiped clean of blood. I like the way it catches the moonlight, flashing cataracts of terror into their faces right before they die.

He barred the dining hall door, half-heartedly. I consider creeping around the back. It’s a big building; it has three entrances and at least one of them I doubt this stupid boy knows anything about. But it’s late. I want to be done by sunrise.

So I shove the door open with a clatter, stacked chairs flying and splintering against the old linoleum. The light is on, sallow and buzzing. Footsteps echo from the kitchen. I go there, slow and deliberate, squeezing my fingers more tightly around the knife handle. He’s panicked; I can hear his breathing even though he’s not running. A low, keening whimper that makes me smile.

I shove through the swinging kitchen doors, and there he is, crouched next to the big industrial refrigerator, a pale glowing rectangle in one hand.

A cell phone. My heart rate spikes. I thought I had destroyed all of them?—

Not hers.

How does this worm have her cell phone? Did she leave it in here? I hadn’t sought it out when I was destroying the others—I’d left it for her. A gift, I guess. I knew it was a loose end, of course, but I had planned to work quickly.

“He’s here!” the boy shrieks. A voice spills out of the other end of the phone, tinny and distant. “He’s?—”

I swing my knife and spear the phone, setting aside the quiver of regret. It’s just a phone.

The boy scrambles away, too panicked to move properly. His feet tangle underneath him, and he falls on his ass, face lifted to me, features twisted in fear.

Maybe he isn’t going to put up a fight, after all.

I grab him by the hem of his shirt, Head Start Fitness Camp emblazoned across his chest, and then slam him up against the wall. He howls and kicks uselessly at me, face red with terror. I study him for a minute. It’s always an odd moment, seeing them up close for the first time after weeks of watching from the woods. It solidifies them. Makes them real.

“No,” he begs, a few fat tears streaking over his cheeks. “You don’t have to do this. You don’t?—”

I slide the knife into his side, positioning it just beneath his ribs, and then jerk it sideways so that a hot, pleasant waterfall of blood and viscera splatters across my chest. He twitches in my grip, one last gasp of life that I breathe into my lungs. My body shudders with pleasure, and I let him fall like old meat.

There’s a long stretch of silence.

And then I hear it. Soft, sweet whimpering.

Her.

My heart twists with excitement, knowing that she’s seen all I’ve done for her. I turn slowly, trying not to betray that excitement, and find her standing in the doorway of the kitchen, one hand on the frame as if she can barely hold herself up. This is the closest I’ve ever been to her since I first saw her through the dappled light of the trees.

She stares at me, eyes wide as saucers, plush body trembling. Blood stains the shirt stretched across her ample chest, and I startle at that, I’ll admit—it means she helped one of my victims, maybe provided them comfort as they lay dying. But why, when they’ve been so unrelentingly cruel to her for the last two months?

I step toward her, and she doesn’t move except to part her lips slightly, her terrified gaze drinking me. I wear my mask, the mask that at this point is a second skin. I consider taking it off, showing her who I am, but something stays my hand. Her fear, maybe. I don’t particularly want her to be afraid.

I take another step, half-expecting her to bolt like the feral cats that live around my house high up on the mountain. But she doesn’t, and that makes my heart flutter weirdly and my stomach knot up. Like maybe she’s not as untouchable as I thought. Like maybe I’ll be able to reach out and run my fingers over her thick black hair and smooth, satiny skin.

Another step. She whimpers, then slaps her hand over her mouth. Her eyes gleam with tears, and I realize she’s dropped her gaze down to my Bowie knife, which I hold unthreateningly at my side, even as it drips blood across the tile.

“Shh,” I say, as if I’m talking to the cats. Her eyes, somehow, go a little wider. “Don’t be afraid.”

She whimpers again, that low keening sound that makes the skin on the back of my neck prickle. Her fear is delicious to me. I won’t deny it.

Okay, so maybe I do want her a little afraid after all.

I keep moving toward her, talking in that same quiet voice I use on the cats. “You’re safe,” I tell her. “You don’t have to worry. They can’t hurt you anymore.”

With that last sentence, something changes in her expression. A flash of confusion.

“I took care of them for you,” I say, just as I realize I’m close enough to touch her. Her eyes keep dropping down to my knife. Does she really think I’m going to kill her?

So I slam my knife in the wall beside her head, the blade thrumming. She jumps and screams but makes no move for it.

And then I encircle her in my arms, hardly believing myself.

She stiffens, her breath fast and panicky. I can feel the wild, frantic thudding of her heart. But she doesn’t push me away. She doesn’t try to grab the knife.

I knew we were meant for each other.

I pull her into me, delirious at her closeness. Her fear has a wildness to it, like the scent of pine needles, and I breathe her in through my mask, cupping my hand against the back of her head.

Her hair is as soft as I had imagined.

“Don’t worry,” I whisper against her. “Don’t be scared. They can’t hurt you anymore. I won’t let them hurt you ever again. ”

She makes a sound like a sob, a kind of wet choking. I gently pull her around so that she can look out at the dining room and not at the body of the boy who tormented her the most. I was there when he screamed at her that she was lazy and fat and stupid as she begged him for a rest. I watched him taunt her with food when she was hungry. I heard the terrible things he said about her, laughing with the others, what a waste it was that her body has the lushness I find so appealing.

I relish that lushness now. That softness.

“Don’t worry,” I tell her. I keep saying it, over and over, wanting her to believe me. “He can’t hurt you now. I took care of him for you.”

And then something magical happens.

She hugs me back.

She hugs me back.

She lifts her arms, slow and hesitant, and wraps them around my waist, barely touching me. When she sobs again, I realize she’s crying, a wet spot forming on my shoulder.

“Shh,” I say, and her body shakes against mine. I pull her a little closer. I wonder if she feels my cock. It’s painfully hard from the killing, and from her.

Would she let me do that to her? Lie her down on the cold and bloody floor and fuck her? I don’t want to push my luck, even if every nerve in my body is screaming at me to do it, to slice her blood-streaked clothes away with my knife and kiss and bite at the soft flesh of her breasts until she’s moaning instead of crying.

No. No, I don’t want to risk her bolting like one of the cats and me having to chase her through the woods. Too much can hurt her out there, especially in the dark.

Still, restraint is hard for me, and I clutch a handful of her hair and then kiss her head through the mask. She gasps but doesn’t let go, and I think that Mama was wrong, that people like us can find Heaven because this is it, right here, the girl I’ve watched all summer gasping in my arms, her breasts pressed against my chest, her body hot and soft and yielding.

It’s as perfect as late summer.

It’s so perfect that I don’t hear the dining hall door scrape open, I don’t hear the footsteps on the linoleum. I don’t hear anything until I hear the hammer of a gun clicking into place?—

And then a bullet tears through my brain.