Page 5 of Bird on a Blade (Hunter’s Heart #1)

CHAPTER FOUR

SAWYER

M y body courses with electricity, every nerve firing at once. I want to kill so bad it feels like a physical ache. There are six humans in this store (five humans and her ) and I can sense every single one of their heartbeats, pounding arrhythmically in my head.

I never should have come into town.

But I couldn’t stop myself. Because Edie’s here. Because when she stepped out of the woods, I didn’t want to let her go. I wanted to keep stalking my perfect prey.

Now I’m surrounded by actual prey, and I’m losing my fucking mind.

She buzzes around the books, eyes glancing furtively around behind her sunglasses. I pretend to read the book I’m holding, but really I’m trying to cut through the rackety noise of human heartbeats to follow her—her scent and her body’s lovely symphony, pulsing blood and soft panty breaths and a kind of quiet rushing sound like the lake lapping against its stone shore.

But it’s like listening to music when you’re driving down the highway with the window rolled down. The other humans are too fucking loud. Especially the two men in the bakery, talking to each other about some girl they both want to rail. Their laughter scrapes against my skin. Their idiotic chatter makes me want to stalk in there, grab them both by the back of their necks, and slam their heads against the pristine glass displays until everything, the cupcakes and the girl behind the counter and the glossy white tiles, are covered in blood.

But then I feel her, my perfect prey. She’s watching me from behind her oversized sunglasses, and for a moment, I almost feel calm.

Then I look at her. I can’t help it. I want to see her seeing me.

She startles, jerks her gaze away. I like it, that flush of panic. It gives my cock a little rise in my jeans.

Not as much of a rise as killing those two idiots in the bakery would, though.

She ducks away, slipping toward the cupcakes. I watch her over the edge of the book, considering what to do next. It was stupid of me to come into town, but I got rewarded for it with a glance from her, even though I wasn’t able to see those pretty dark eyes.

One of which is nearly swollen shut.

My anger surges again. My bloodlust. I drift closer to the bakery, closer to my perfect prey but also the two idiots, snickering and joking with each other. I imagine that the man who hurt her was like one of those assholes, smirking and smug. Someone too stupid to see the treasure in front of him.

The lights are brighter in the bakery, which I don’t like. It makes it feel harder to hide. My perfect prey is looking at the display, and for a moment, I let myself admire her, the lush swell of her hips, her strong shoulders. There is a semi-circle of unbruised skin at the base of her neck, beneath the place she’s swept her black hair up into a knot and above the neckline of her thin shirt.

I want to sink my teeth into it and taste her blood.

But then I hear something that shatters that warm dreamy feeling I get when I think about her, when I see her. The men waiting in the bakery.

They’re fucking talking about her.

“Look at that,” one of them says, and my skin gets tight over my bones. “They’re always flitting around here, huh? The huge ones.”

And the other one laughs, and that sends the blood surging up into my head, sounding like the ocean. Everything goes burnt at the edges. My knife presses into my side and I’m going to use it to shatter everything in this place, to turn everything red.

I take one step forward?—

And so does she.

She nearly runs into me. Stops herself just in time, gaze jerking up. We’re close enough that I see her eyes beneath the lens of the sunglasses.

She’s crying.

She heard .

She pushes past me, the moment lost. For half a second, I consider following her, but she’s not my prey right now. Not anymore.

Still, something about her tears focuses me. I don’t need to kill the other humans here, the old woman and the two cashiers. It would be stupid, anyway. I can hear Mama chiding me already: Don’t draw attention to yourself, Sawyer. Kill smart . She doesn’t approve of bloodbaths. Says they’re stupid. They are stupid, considering the last one got me killed.

I calm the rage. I’ll follow the two men, kill them someplace private.

While I wait for them to leave, I go over to the display that Edie had been looking at. A cupcake too pretty to eat, just like she’s too pretty to kill.

The counter girl calls out a name and hands over a big white box to the bigger of the men, the one trying to impress a woman. I turn sharply and go outside through the bookstore, listening behind me for heavy-soled footsteps. Back before I died, I always kept a pack of cigarettes and a lighter in my pocket so I could fiddle with them, eyes down and face hidden while I waited for a victim. I don’t have that now, so I try to press back against the wall, squinting at the boarded-up old storefront across the way. My perfect prey is gone, which is good—no distractions. I’ll look in on her when I’m done.

I might even bring her a gift or two.

It takes them five minutes to leave the shop, the two assholes. They don’t notice me. You’d be surprised how little people notice predators.

No, they just breeze past me, still laughing and assholing. I watch them through the fringe of my lashes as they climb into a big blue pickup truck, which is more perfect than I could have hoped for. I was prepared to hotwire one of the old junkers parked on the street, but this is even better, because I move quick as lightning to pull myself into the pickup bed as they roar away. Hunters like me, we can move so soft we can become invisible if we like.

And, like I said, you’d be surprised how little people notice predators.

I flatten myself down on the truck bed, let the engine rumble up through my bones. My knife sears at my side, and I finger the blade, my skin itchy and hot. I’m ready for the release, that gush of hot red blood. Ready for the screams and the begging. Ready to breathe in their last gurgling breath. I need this. It’ll calm me so I can focus my attention back on Edie.

The truck pulls out of town, flying down a bumpy country road lined with trees. Already I can feel my next steps forming in my mind. They probably won’t look back here, so I can go slow, slide myself out, watch them for a bit before launching my attack. But even if they do, my body’s quick and strong after reforming in the dirt. Quicker and stronger than either of them.

We slow; the truck turns. Gravel crunches under the tires and tree branches zip up overhead, concealing the blue sky. My heart thuds with anticipation.

Almost time.

The truck stops. The engine turns off. The doors open, and the men’s voices spill out. More grating laughter. They’re talking about a football game from three days ago. Mindless chatter. They do not look in the truck bed but instead walk away, voices fading.

I slide the knife out of its sheath and rise up, slow and careful. The truck is parked in front of a run-down little house, and the men are just stepping through the front door, letting it slam shut on its hinges.

My blood is up, raging like a thunderstorm. I can taste copper in the back of my mouth, my jaws aching with an old and primordial hunger. Hunter’s hunger, that’s what Mama calls it. Jaxon and Ambrose, the closest thing to friends I have, call it the void.

I walk across the yard, sliding through the dappled shadows. The house seems to yawn open for me. I can hear them inside, shuffling around like rats. Laughing. More of that awful, aggravating laughter.

Silencing it is going to be so fucking satisfying.

I go in through the front door because they didn’t bother to lock it. Doing this without my old mask feels a little odd, like I’m naked, but I’m so hungry for a kill it’s gonna be quick. They won’t even see my face.

I find them in the living room.

They don’t notice me. They’re sitting on the couch, drinking beer, talking and talking and laughing and laughing. The TV’s on, some action movie, the volume turned up high even though they aren’t watching the stupid thing. For a minute, I just watch them, taking deep slow breaths. I always liked this part, these moments before the blood, when everything’s normal for them and my body’s on the verge of exploding.

And then I attack .

It is quick, just like I expected. I kill the one on the left first, lunging up to him and slamming my blade into the side of his neck, cutting through all the fat blood vessels there, which I can feel like drumbeats on the air. It cuts him off mid-word, and there’s a two-second gap before the other realizes what’s happening. He turns toward us just as I pull out the knife, spraying more blood, and then he screams, scrambling to his feet, fumbling around at his jeans for what I can only assume is a gun, even though he’s not wearing a holster.

“What the fuck?” he shouts. It’s the one who said that terrible thing about my perfect prey, and I slam my blade into his belly so he won’t die right away like his friend. He shrieks again and falls backward against the glass coffee table, which shatters with his weight, glass flying everywhere like diamonds. He stares up at me, mouth opening and closing, eyes wide.

I let him see my face after all. He recognizes me from the bakery, a little furrow of confusion between his eyes.

I crouch over him and breathe in deep, inhaling the salty, coppery tang of blood. It all happened so quickly that I didn’t have a moment to feel the release, but I feel it now, like a calming current rushing through my blood. My first kill in fifteen years.

“Who—” he gurgles, but doesn’t finish the question. Maybe he decides it’s not important. “W-why?”

I just look at him, not speaking. There’s no answer to that question that he could understand. I marked him and his friend because of what he said about Edie, it’s true, but that’s not the why . That’s a human why, and my whys are different.

I’m a Hunter. I hunt. I cull. I wash my hands in blood because that’s what the universe has chosen for me.

“Why?” he asks again, crying this time, tears turning his eyes to glass.

I grab at his hair. He lets out a terrified whimper of fear, which surges adrenaline through my entire system. My cock strains against my jeans, and the pressure’s gonna make me come quick. But that’s not the important part. Not really.

I press my knife to his throat. He gasps with terror.

Then I dig in with it, slow and careful. Blood beads up like a string of rubies. I cut and I cut. Cut through skin and muscle and snapping tendons until I reach the fragile notches of his spine. Then I wrench through those, too. His blood splatters hotly across my face, and I lick it off my lips as I work.

I feel it when he dies, a shudder in the air. I breathe it in. Come in my jeans, a quick explosion of pleasure. An afterthought.

And then I keep cutting until he’s free.