Page 25 of Bird on a Blade (Hunter’s Heart #1)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

EDIE

I t’s dark by the time we get back to Sawyer’s place. He takes my suitcase for me and sets it down in his room with a finality that won’t be argued with. “You can sleep here with me.”

“Do you even sleep?” I ask, because I’m still not totally sure what he is, if he has the same needs as a human man. He just gives me a slightly irritated look.

“Yeah, I sleep. Same as I eat. Speaking of which—” He nods toward the kitchen. “How about you bring in the rest of those groceries, and I’ll make us dinner?”

I hesitate, just for a half-second, but he notices. “I know you’re hungry, after all that fucking we were doing.”

My face heats red hot. “Of course I’m hungry.” I’m starving, actually, but the hollowness in my stomach has a seductive quality, a calming quality, after everything that’s happened. It would be so easy to just… let it linger for a few hours more. Through the night. Until tomorrow morning.

“Then I’ll make you something. You eat meat? You didn’t have any.”

“Oh. Yeah, I do.”

“Venison stew, then.” He loops his arm around my waist and tugs me toward the back door, out to where my car’s parked in the grass. “I’ll use up those vegetables you got.”

“And what? Go kill a deer?”

He looks over at me before pulling open the car door. “I did that already. Salted and dried the meat since I can only run the refrigerator at night.”

“Good lord.” We start pulling out the groceries. “It’s like Little House on the Prairie or something.”

He laughs. “What? I gotta eat.”

It doesn’t take us long to unload everything. The church kitchen has a little pantry half-stocked with things I recognize from the grocery store in Altarida, rice and salt and canned vegetables. There’s plenty of space for my meager additions: brown rice, pancake mix, my collection of soups. When I’m done, I find Sawyer chopping up the potatoes and onions and garlic we brought back from my place.

“Let me help,” I say, an impulse born out of the days when my ED was at its height, and I used to cook lavish meals for Scott and his friends only to wrap my own plate up and slide it into the refrigerator, uneaten. It’s scary how just being near a man spurs that impulse out again.

But Sawyer shakes his head. “No. Absolutely not. I said I’d cook. You sit your pretty ass right there—” He points with this knife at one of the folding chairs beside the card table. “—And keep me company.”

I recognize the knife. It’s the one he stole from the cabin. “We should take that back.”

“Nope,” he says, turning back to the potatoes. “It’s been christened.”

A cold, shuddery feeling sweeps through me, and I stumble back until I bump up against the table. “ Christened ?” I squeak out. “You mean you’ve?— ”

He looks at me over his shoulder, eyes glittering. “I cleaned it.”

“You can’t be serious!” My mouth has gone dry, and I feel the weight of what I’m doing wash over me. He’s a killer.

He’s my killer .

“You think I didn’t clean it?” He glances at me again, smiling a little. Teasing me. “Would you like that better?”

“No! Gross.” I sink down in the chair and watch him work, his movements neat and methodical. Is this what he looks like when he kills someone?

It occurs to me, suddenly and sharply, that I’ve never actually seen him kill a person. I’ve seen the aftermath. Never the deed.

His shoulders move rhythmically. The knife sings out with each slice.

I should be much more frightened of him than I am. Instead, it’s everything else that has me scared: Scott. Charlotte. How much I want to cling to my hunger.

Sawyer dumps the vegetables in a big crockpot, the kind you use when you go camping, and sets it on the stove.

“You never answered one of my questions from earlier,” I say, wanting to break the silence. Wanting to get out of my head, too, with its swirl of anxiety.

“Oh, yeah? Which one is that?” He sets the knife down and goes over to the pantry and pulls out a big ceramic cookie jar, which, when he opens it, does not contain cookies but chunks of dried meat.

“How many of you there are. Hunters, I mean.”

He pulls out long, leathery strips of venison and starts cutting them, too. These movements make my skin feel strange, kind of hot and itchy. It wasn’t the vegetables, I realize. This is what he looks like when he kills someone.

I shouldn’t have asked about the Hunters.

“Hmmm, that’s a good question.” He pauses and looks up, like he’s thinking. “Not that many. There’s four that I know of for sure. No—five.” He goes back to slicing the venison. “There’s me, Mama, my two buddies. Plus one more in Texas that Ambrose mentioned. Don’t know their name.” He dumps the venison into the pot, then fills it with water from the tap. “But I know there have got to be others. I can sense them, sometimes. Moving around.”

That makes my skin prickle. “Sense them? What do you mean?”

Sawyer stirs the soup, then goes over to the pantry and pulls out some jars—seasoning, chicken bouillon. He looks over at me. “I’ve got heightened senses. I can smell things. Hear things. That’s how I knew you were in trouble earlier.”

And just like that, I feel this deep, strange warmth for him. I stand up, go over to where he’s working at the stove. He glances over at me, a lock of hair curling into one eye.

“I said I didn’t need any help.” He’s playful about it, though.

“I wasn’t going to help.” I look down at the pot of stew, already starting to steam. “I just—I wanted to thank you, I guess.”

Sawyer lays the soup ladle down and turns to me and I feel very much like a prey animal, a rabbit or a squirrel, caught in a wolf’s gaze.

But at the same time—I like it.

“I’ll be here to protect you as long as you let me,” he says softly. Then he runs his fingers over my jawline, tilts his head, leans down to kiss me.

I melt instantly. Melt into his lips, his chest. He makes a low murmuring sound and then buries his nose in my hair. “That scent, though,” he says, so soft it’s almost like he’s not speaking to me. “That’s my favorite one.” Then he breathes in deep, and I turn wobbly, and I’m suddenly remembering everything we’ve done today. In the shower. In his bed. How I gave myself over to him so completely.

How I know I’m going to do it again .

Sawyer steps away, taking a shuddery breath. “Sit,” he says. “Stop distracting me.”

“I wasn’t doing anything!”

“Yes, you were.” He grins at me. “Sit. And now it’s my turn to ask you some fucking questions.”

I roll my eyes. “Why? There’s nothing interesting about me.”

“That,” Sawyer says, “ain’t true at all.” He points the ladle at the chair. “Now, sit.”

I cross my arms over my chest, arch an eyebrow.

He growls a little. Playfully. “Don’t make me make you.”

“And how would you do that, exactly?”

He moves so fast I barely see him. One second I’m standing there, taunting him; the next, he has me pressed up against the card table, his thigh between my legs, his hands squeezing into my waist.

“Like that,” he rasps into my ear. He saws his leg back and forth, and I gasp a little, trailing my hand over his shoulder. I’ve never fucked this much in one day. Scott, for all his talk about physical optimization , treated sex like an item to check off his to-do list. Step 7 in his 15-step ideal life program.

Sawyer, in contrast, seems driven by his hunger, his lust. He bites gently at my throat as I grind down against his thigh, hating that there are layers of cloth between my clit and his skin.

Then, abruptly, he pulls away, smirking. I moan in frustration and lean back against the table.

“Sit,” he orders. “And I’ll make you come real good after dinner.”

“You’re such a tease.”

“No, you’re the one that’s been teasing me.” He gives me an admonishing wag of his finger. “Can barely keep my hands off you. Now keep your distance so we can talk.”

“About what?” I do relent, especially as he turns back to the stove. “I really don’t want to talk about?— ”

“I just want to know more about you.” His voice is kind of quiet. “You asked about me. It’s only fair.”

“I asked what you were,” I say. “You already know what I am.”

“Then ask about me .” He stirs the stew one last time, then turns to face me, steam rising up behind him. “And I’ll ask about you. It’s been fifteen years, Edie. Give me something.”

I tilt my head at him, settling back on my chair. My body pulses, still yearning for more of his touches. I do my best to ignore it. “We didn’t exactly know each other fifteen years ago, you know.”

He shrugs, although he has the decency to look a little sheepish. “I wanted to,” he says quietly. “Get to know you. Just didn’t know how. That’s why I—” He hesitates. “I wanted you to notice me,” he finally says. “And I hated how they treated you.”

“I hated how they treated me, too,” I say quietly, pulling my sweater sleeves over my hands. “But I don’t want to talk about that.”

“Then tell me what you do want to talk about,” he says. “Tell me where you were born, to start.”

And, somewhat to my surprise, I do. I tell him about growing up rich in the DC suburbs and how I never felt like I fit in. How I went to school out in California because I wanted to get as far away from here—not here , not him, but from my family, from all their expectations. I tell him how I love the Pacific Ocean, how it’s dark and cold even on the hottest days, and how Charlotte and I used to go swimming every chance we got. I tell him how I learned to surf. I tell him about Charlotte, how I met her at an art gallery opening and we became best friends because she was the only person in my life who let me feel like myself. And I tell him, shyly, that he makes me feel the same way, stunning myself by the truth of those words—a truth I’ve been avoiding since he stepped into my cabin nearly a month ago.

“That means a lot,” he says softly. “Something like that.” By this point, the soup is ready, and he scoops us up two big bowls and brings it over to the table along with two bottles of beer that he fishes out of the ice chest, the glass dripping with melting ice.

And while we eat, we talk. It shocks me how easy the conversation flows, between me and the killer who haunted my nightmares—or who was supposed to, anyway. He tells me he’s never actually seen the ocean, not even the Gulf of Mexico. He tells me how his mom had left him a few years before my final summer at Camp Head Start, how he roamed around the South and that was how he met his two friends, Jaxon and Ambrose. He tells me how he missed the mountains and the winter snow and that was why he came back, just a few months before I started my last season at camp. He doesn’t talk about killing, not directly, but it’s always there, simmering under the surface—his mother’s training, his time with his friends.

It should bother me.

It doesn’t bother me.

It’s just who he is .

We keep talking well after we finish eating. I help him clean up, laughing as we wash the dishes together, the water hot and soapy. Afterward, he takes me out to the front steps of the church. The clouds have all cleared away and the air is frigid, but that coldness sharpens the stars hanging over the clearing. I lean into his arms, staring up at them, trying to find the constellations I learned a long time ago, when I was a child, before my mother and Scott and my sickness and the world had done all their damage.

Being there, in Sawyer’s arms, it’s almost like I can find that wholeness again.