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PROLOGUE

JAXON

T his neighborhood stinks of wealth. The houses are monstrosities, boils of architecture growing out of the cleared wetland. I wonder if the owners know what this place was before the developers smoothed it over with their little gated community. I wonder if they know the whole place will be underwater after the next bad storm.

I hope it’s a surprise for them.

I park my car in the shadows created by a blazing streetlamp, three houses down from the house I need to go to. It’s not late, only 9 PM, but no one’s out. The people who live in these houses are tucked away inside, faces illuminated by their blaring TVs or the little black boxes of their phones. I hate places like this, the way they subsume the marshland I love so much and spit it out as a glossy facsimile of—I don’t know what. Some British aristocrat’s manor? It’s all so fucking ugly.

But it’s also sterile. Empty. No one will see me coming and going.

I go now. Leave the car. My supplies are in my bag. No mask, of course, not until I’m inside. If anyone does happen to drive by or—unlikely—glance outside their window, they won’t register me. I look normal. It’s how we blend in, creatures like me. Monsters. Boogeymen. Hunters.

The house that contains my soon-to-be victim is understated compared to the others. It’s a little smaller, without all the hideous architectural flourishes these houses have. The yard is landscaped with native plants—beds of milkweeds, sunflowers bobbing around a stone birdbath, a few bursts of Gulf Coast yucca. Of course, it has the same flat carpet grass as the other houses.

I go around the side, toward the garage set in the back. I’ve been here twice already: once as a surveyor, the orange vest rendering me invisible, and once as a landscaper, offering my services for cheap. That second time, I spoke to my victim. He squinted at me from the doorway, the top few buttons of his shirt open, a glass of gin in one hand. “I already got someone,” he told me when I pressed my card on him. “Maybe try Frank Davila.”

I didn’t try Frank Davila; I’d gotten what I’d come for. I confirmed it was this man my Guardian wants, because as soon as he opened the door, all this light flooded my vision. He was haloed by it, my Guardian’s touch streaming out from behind his head. My eyes burned. My heart raced. All the usual signs.

The garage is closed up tight, but it has a little door on its side, and I break the lock easily. Inside I find two Audis. Expensive but tasteful. One of them is a hybrid.

Here, I work quickly. I pull my mask out of the bag, its power thrumming between my hands. I made it myself, welding the metal in endless spirals to create its shape and then affixing the antlers on top, the white bleached bones of the first creature I ever killed.

When I slide it on, I feel my Guardian awaken inside me, a burning core of heat in my heart. I’m hungry, it says, and I’m hungry too.

I pull my knife out of my bag. And the pistol, just in case. That I slide into a shoulder holster that I cover with a black suit jacket.

Then I go inside.

The door leading from the garage into the house is unlocked. It takes me into a dark and silent laundry room that opens into a dark and silent hallway. I follow the house’s arteries, guided by my Guardian’s urgent whispers as much as I am the smell of my victim: old cologne, chosen blood. Someone else is here too. A woman. My victim has an ex-wife. An adult daughter. It could be them. It could be someone else.

Whoever it is, both my victim and his companion are upstairs. I move slowly, listening through the hurricane of my Guardian’s hunger. It whispers to me in an ancient language, barbed like roses. A language that gets my blood up.

I lick my lips behind the mask’s metal cage, excitement urging me forward.

Light spills out of a room up ahead. So does the mindless buzz of a TV. Every part of my body is burning with electricity. My Guardian moves through me.

I push the door open so it swings inward, revealing the scene:

My victim, sitting in bed, shirtless, smoking, watching the enormous flatscreen TV on his wall.

A woman, naked, sleeping beside him. Neither his ex-wife nor his daughter. I don’t recognize her from my research.

He laughs at something on the TV. I step into the room, fingers curled around the knife’s handle. My victim drags on his cigarette. Laughs again. My Guardian sings.

I take another step closer, and that’s what finally gets him to turn toward me. His reaction is immediate and very satisfying. He jolts, eyes going wide, and slams up against the headboard. The woman beside him mumbles something and rolls over.

“Fuck fuck fuck,” he whispers. “Already?”

This brings me up short. It almost sounds like he’s… expecting me.

This changes nothing , my Guardian whispers. I can feel its hunger as my own, a wide, cavernous chasm deep in my belly.

My victim dives toward his bedside table, hands flailing, arms trembling. He pulls out a black pistol not all that different from the one I carry for backup. I stare at it through the mask as he holds it up toward me, shaking.

I served five tours in two different Iraq wars. I’ve been shot hundreds of times. I barely notice anymore.

“Tell Tyloch to go fuck himself!” my victim roars?—

Who’s Tyloch?

—before firing off three shots. Two of them miss. The third one lodges in my belly, a starburst of bright pain that makes my Guardian roar with pleasure and my cock stiffen.

The woman gasps awake, sees me, and screams.

Too much noise. It’s all too much fucking noise.

I lunge at her and draw the blade quickly across her throat. It’s fast enough I doubt she realized what happened, but her blood is hot and thick and jeweled in the fancy track lighting, and my Guardian rasps with need. She isn’t what it has a taste for, though.

“What the fu—” My victim fires again, too panicked to aim. Something shatters behind me. I grab his wrist and twist it so the gun falls onto the bed, thin white smoke curling up between us.

“She had nothing to do with it!” my victim babbles. “She doesn’t even fucking know about the deal, do you hear me? I literally picked her up at the fucking club, okay? Why the fuck did you do that? Why the?—”

I don’t know what he’s talking about, the deal and Tyloch, and I squeeze my fingers around his neck so I’ll stop hearing about it. It makes me uncomfortable, the way he’s talking to me like he thinks I’m someone else. As I grip his neck, I throw my whole weight on him so we topple hard against the floor. I’m still holding my knife with the other, my hand drenched in that woman’s honeysweet blood. I wish I could take her home with me so we can play, but I’m not prepared for transport.

Besides, my Guardian needs to be fed.

My victim strangles and gasps against my grip, his body flopping beneath mine. I lean close, listening to his frantic rasps and the wet gurgling noises he makes as I dig my fingers into his trachea.

Blood , my Guardian says.

My Guardian loves blood. I love bodies. It works out, how creating one provides the other.

I shove the knife up through my victim’s rib cage, pressing my weight against it until I feel the slight resistance of his heart. I release his neck as he makes a beautiful bony rattling sound and dies, and then I flutter my eyes closed, sighing into the release of penetration. His blood gushes between our bodies, hot and sticky, and I moan softly as my Guardian feeds, heat and energy coursing through my veins.

When it finishes, I peel myself away from the body, blinking and a little disoriented. That’s not unusual, not when my Guardian is along for the ride, but it feels worse this time. This room is very bright. There were gunshots. Screams. In a neighborhood like this?

Someone’s going to call the cops.

“Fuck,” I whisper, stepping away from my victim’s body. He stares up at the ceiling, jaw slack, eyes wide and glassy. I had big plans for him. I was going to slice him down the middle and split his ribcage open to display his heart, each chamber carefully cut open to reveal the emptiness inside. I was going to stuff his mouth with holly berries, scoop his eyes out and replace them with white camellias. Carve my gods’ true names in delicate patterns across his skin.

But I don’t have time for any of that now.

Still, I can’t leave the scene like this. I hate leaving bodies where they fall, where they’re just bodies and not works of art. So I shove my knife back into its holster and work as quickly as I can, rolling my victim onto his back, setting his arms carefully at his sides. He’s heavy, but I’m strong, designed by my gods to move dead weight. It’s not enough, though, arranging him on the floor. Do I have time to go back down to the garage and get my bag of supplies? The camellias and holly?

No , whisper my Guardian. No. Something’s coming.

I freeze, skin prickling, and listen. All I hear is the buzzing of the house’s electricity and the thrum of its central A/C.

A storm is coming. Be prepared .

“Shit.” I grab my knife and dig the tip into the skin of my victim’s chest. His dead blood oozes up, forming the sigil I leave at every scene: the true name of The Being Who Can Not Be Known. The God Who Created Me. The Unnamed.

It’s not much, but it’s enough. I turn to the woman. She’s exquisite in her death, already flat on her back, her arms draped gracefully across her belly, flaxen hair turning pink with her blood. I launch myself onto the bed and lean over her, smoothing a few loose strands of hair out of her shining eyes. She looks surprised more than frightened. The blood from the cut across her throat has already started to harden into a rusted breastplate, so perfect and uniform I refrain from squeezing her breasts the way I want to. Fucking her, of course, is out of the question. I only do that in the safety of my home, where I can dispose of the evidence.

Still, she’s so lovely and she died so beautifully that I can’t leave her unblessed. I don’t cut her, though. Instead, I scrape the Unnamed’s sigil into the dried blood right above her undamaged heart, using the dull side of my knife. Then I press my gloved hand over the design to swipe away the blood flakes. It creates a gorgeous contrast, the grey-white of her dead skin against the darkening crimson rust of the life I took from her.

Something’s coming , my Guardian whispers, and the soft feathery hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I can’t stay here.

With some regret, I drag myself away from the scene even though it’s woefully incomplete. I try to tell myself it’s minimalist, like a Donald Judd sculpture, but it still feels sloppy and amateurish. The kind of thing I did when I was a teenager.

Be prepared , by Guardian whispers, and an electric feeling races over my skin. This house feels tight and constricting. I bound down the stairs and into the garage. My bag is still there, undisturbed. I slide off my mask, breathing the clean air, and then I dart back out to the shadows, breath tight in my chest.

The street is dark and silent. No sign of the police.

Someone’s coming, my Guardian whispers, although it sounds further away, slipping back into the Abyss where it lives. A storm you’ve never faced. Be prepared .

I walk as quickly as I dare to my car, never letting it turn into a run. Running is suspicious in the middle of the night when you’re dressed in black and carrying an oversized duffle bag. I climb inside; I turn the ignition. The engine roars to life.

The neighborhood is as empty as the apocalypse as I drive away.