Page 2 of Bird on a Blade (Hunter’s Heart #1)

CHAPTER ONE

EDIE

FIFTEEN YEARS LATER

I kill my car’s engine and sit, hands resting on the steering wheel, staring out at the camp through the windshield. The past fifteen years have certainly taken their toll. The dining hall is gone, of course. The paint on the buildings is faded and peeling off in long strips, and there are boards hammered over all the windows save for the counselors’ cabin, the only part of the camp that’s been in use since that night.

When you get overwhelmed, Dr. Valunzuela always says, deep breaths. Clear your thoughts.

I’m not exactly overwhelmed right now, but I do it anyway.

Four deep breaths.

Empty my head.

Listen to my body.

I pull the keys out of the ignition and step out of the car. It feels good to move after four hours on the road, winding through the Appalachian Mountains without stopping so I could just get here and know if I’d made the right choice, booking a two-month-long stay at the site of the infamous Fat Camp Killing Spree, as the website had so helpfully categorized this particular short-term rental.

God, I hate that fucking name.

It’s September, and the air is cool and breezy. The camp’s more peaceful than I’ve ever known it—certainly more peaceful than it was the last time I was here, covered in Sawyer Caldwell’s blood and brain matter while cops and EMTs and tenacious locals swarmed around in the pinkish dawnlight.

I shove the memory aside, something that became second nature years ago when the Fat Camp Killing Spree was still the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

I pull out my suitcase—sparsely packed with a few essentials I bought before I fled the Bay Area—and drag it up to the counselors’ cabin. I’ve never actually been in here, despite being a regular at this place back when it was still Head Start Fitness Camp and not just that fat camp where a bunch of people died . The keypad works like the instructions said it would, and when I push into the cabin, I’m pleasantly surprised by how clean and neat it is. An overstuffed couch in the common area. A big flat-screen TV. Pots and pans in the kitchen. A Keurig machine on the counter. I’ll need to go into town for groceries.

The only thing that ruins the decor are the framed newspaper articles on the wall about the murders. The one in the kitchen even has a picture of me, my school picture, eighteen-year-old Edie smiling like she doesn’t hate herself next to a big black headline screaming, Four Dead, One Survivor in Brutal Slayings.

I take it off the wall and slide it in the gap between the counter and the refrigerator.

Only one person who knows who I am knows that I’m here: my best friend Charlotte, who helped me with the preparations in those frantic hours after my husband—ex-husband?—Scott nearly killed me. I’d been planning to leave for good, and he found out.

When I told her where I wanted to go, she had been driving me into San Francisco so I could buy a car in cash, the sun just starting to stain the sky with a rosé sunrise. My left eye was swollen completely shut, instead of partially shut, like it is now. My voice still rasped from where he nearly crushed my trachea.

Charlotte’s mouth dropped open and she hissed, “Are you fucking insane?”

But I only shrugged. “It’s the last place he’ll ever look for me.”

“Until it’s all over the fucking Internet that Edie Astor’s back at the site of the murders!”

I stared out at the blur of a highway. My entire body ached—that’s what I remember most. “I’ll use a different name,” I said numbly. “It’s been fifteen years. No one in town’s going to recognize me.”

“What’s the real reason?”

“I told you. It’s the last place Scott will look for me.” Because he had known all the places to look for me in California. Sent his PIs trailing me to my therapy appointments, my shopping trips. I couldn’t go anywhere without Scott watching me.

But I knew, even then, he wouldn’t find me in Virginia.

“Besides—” I turned toward her. She was squeezing the steering wheel, eyes fixed on the road, worry lines creasing in her brow. “I need the reminder of what I’m capable of surviving.”

I think that was what did it. She nodded and sank back into the car seat. Six hours later, I was driving south down I-5, through the desert. Alone.

I hadn’t lied to Charlotte. All the memories of that night, all the blood, the screaming?—

the killer

—it feels so far away now. Something terrible happened to me, yes, but I walked away from it. I’d been face to face with the now- infamous killer Sawyer Caldwell himself and survived without so much as a bruise.

Not that I ever, ever told anyone what that encounter had really been like. Not even Charlotte.

I have bruises now, though, even four days later. All over my wrists, ringing around my neck. The swelling in my eye has gone down enough that I can see out of it, at least, but I’ll need to wear sunglasses in town. They’ll hide the cut on my cheek, too, from where Scott’s ring sliced me open.

I saw Sawyer Caldwell’s knife dripping with blood, but it was my husband’s wedding ring that actually cut me.

Four deep breaths. I count them in my head. When I’m done, I text Charlotte to let her know I’ve arrived, and then I wheel my suitcase into the hallway and pick the largest of the bedrooms, the head counselor’s room. It would have belonged to Lindsay Kirtle fifteen years ago, but she hadn’t been there that night.

That’s the thing about the infamous fat camp killings. They didn’t technically happen at a fat camp.

It’s a piece of trivia that pedants love, the sort of thing they’ll trot out when they need a trick question at a trivia content. Name the camp where the Fat Camp Killings took place and someone who read the Wikipedia entry two years ago after listening to a podcast will shout, “Head Start Fitness Camp!” and then the emcee will shake their head ruefully and say, “I’m sorry, but technically Head Start Fitness Camp was closed for the season.”

And that is true. The camp was closed for the year, but five of us were still on the campgrounds because my mother paid the camp owner $10,000 for the cruelest counselors to work with me, one-on-one, for an entire week after the camp closed. A last-ditch effort to make me thin before I went off to Stanford and embarrassed her for being fat.

That’s why Lindsay Kirtle wasn’t there the night of the killings, or Maggie, the swimming instructor who snuck us joints after hours. Or Vic, the Yoga guy who told us how beautiful we all were after his sessions. My mother didn’t want anyone who’d tell me I was beautiful. She wanted me to be humiliated. She probably thought she might finally kickstart me into an eating disorder—which, admittedly, did happen, in a roundabout way.

Four deep breaths.

I need to get groceries.

The thought of getting back in my car makes me vaguely queasy after the long drive from the last hotel, and Altarida, the nearest town, is only about a thirty-minute walk on the little hiking trail that winds away from camp. I won’t be able to bring much back with me, but I can fill up my backpack to get me covered for tonight.

I have to resist the voice, quieter now but still there, that tells me not to go at all, to just skip dinner and breakfast, it’s no big deal, just intermittent fasting, right?

I grab my backpack and stalk outside. My phone dings.

Charlotte

Thank God. Scott still hasn’t reached out to me at all. I think you’re in the clear.

I doubt that very much, but it’s still a nice thought.

The sunlight is warm and dappled with streaks of green from the fluttering trees. I find the hiking trail easily, even though the sign’s been knocked over and tall grass creeps around it. The trail itself isn’t terrible. I wonder if someone’s maintained it. The camp’s owner, maybe.

The forest settles around me. It’s too late in the year for the cicadas, and it feels quiet without them, even though there are other familiar sounds, like the faint hum of grasshoppers and twittering bird song. When I was at Head Start—the actual camp, not my mom’s $10,000 torture session—we used to walk to town every Sunday and spend the day buzzing between the little shops on Main Street. There was a comic book store for a while and a candy shop we’d sneak into when the counselors weren’t paying attention. One of those touristy five and dimes. It’s surprisingly easy to let those happier memories wash over me.

But then I hear a snap in the woods, a broken branch, and my heart jitters up in my chest. Just a squirrel, I tell myself. Still, I glance at the densely woven trees, half-expecting to see a flash of pale mask.

He’s dead. He is dead. I saw him die. He was holding me when he died. I saw his body afterward, the mask shattered and half his head gone, a red spongy cavity where his brain should have been. I’d thrown up, retching and choking while Deputy Crosier, the one who’d been on patrol outside the camp and gotten there so quickly, just stared at the body, hands shaking.

Sawyer Caldwell is dead.

But two officers had still come to visit me the day after the murders. I was back home in Arlington by then. They sat down in the formal living room and looked at me and told me they were posting an officer outside the house for the time being, because Sawyer Caldwell’s body had disappeared.

I push on down the trail. I know Sawyer Caldwell isn’t in the woods. It’s just a squirrel I heard. Just some animal stepping on a decayed branch.

And what threat is Sawyer Caldwell to me now, anyway?

It’s Scott I have to worry about. My husband, still. Technically.

But he won’t find me here, either. I’m alone. I’m safe. I’m registered under the name Hayley Lace.

I’ve got two months to figure out what I’m going to do next.

So I keep walking through the woods, fingers curled around the straps of my backpack. I got this far. I won’t be undone by noises in the forest.