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CHAPTER TEN

JAXON

I ’m pretty sure I told Charlotte too much about Edie.

It was a fun little game, though, and I want to keep playing it. The back and forth between us—it almost felt like a conversation.

I take her into the den in the back of the house, where I don’t have any offerings to my gods set up. I saw how she looked at the offerings in the parlor, and I need her to stay focused on me.

“What are you going to do?” she mutters as we step into the room.

“Talk some more.” I sit her down on the sofa. She slides back into the cushions, wine sloshing around in her glass. Maybe I shouldn’t have let her drink so much. Or maybe it’ll make her more likely to play the game.

“Talk?” She scoffs and takes a long sip of wine.

I stay standing, kind of towering over her. She peers up at me through her lashes, her lips stained red from the wine. I force myself to focus.

“Don’t you want to find out more about Edie?”

“You’re not going to tell me anything.” She sounds annoyed, but I know she’s afraid of me. She puts on this mask that she’s not, the way she talks back to me like she’s trying to goad me into something. The wine just makes her even more bold. But I can smell her fear beneath her false courage, sweet and dark. I can see the way her eyes dart around like she’s looking for an escape.

It doesn’t matter. I move faster than her. I’m stronger than her. She’s lucky I can’t kill her.

You’re lucky you can’t kill her .

I push the thought aside.

“I told you,” I say. “You just have to ask the right questions.” I reach into my back pocket, fingers slipping past the silky tangle of her underwear until they wrap around her cigarette case, which I slide carefully out. Charlotte’s eyes narrow as the box gleams in the lamplight.

“Is that?—”

“You shouldn’t have brought these into Texas.” I pop the case open and pull out one of the joints. Charlotte watches me without saying anything. “It’s not California. Or even Louisiana. They’ll throw you in jail and?—”

“This is what you wanted to show me?” she snaps. “That you’re going to smoke my weed?”

I set the case aside and sit, somewhat cautiously, on the opposite side of the sofa from her. She watches me with baleful eyes, and I’m reminded why dead women are so much easier. They don’t judge. You can’t disappoint them.

They aren’t scared of you.

“Ask me the right questions,” I say to Charlotte. “And I’ll let you have some.”

She rolls her eyes. “It’s my weed.”

“It’s mine now.” I grab the lighter and ashtray from where they sit on the end table beside the sofa; as long as I can remember, there’s been an ashtray there. My father used to chain smoke in the living room whenever he started getting the urge to kill. When I’d come downstairs as a boy and see the smoke curling up around the ceiling like storm clouds, I knew it was almost time to Hunt.

I don’t smoke cigarettes like him, but I’ll smoke weed occasionally. When I need to clear my head. Like tonight.

I light the joint and inhale. Charlotte shakes her head, drinks her wine. “Fine. You want me to ask a question? Stop fucking around and tell me where Edie is.”

“That’s not a question.”

She glares at me, her pretty brown eyes full of poison. I take another hit, and then I let the joint burn.

“Fine.” She smiles coldly. “Where is Edie?”

I consider her question. I know the answer, of course. Sawyer told me and Ambrose all about it, how they bought a house in Pensacola and he finally saw the ocean. And then Ambrose told him the Gulf of Mexico didn’t count because he’s an asshole.

“She’s by the sea,” I finally say.

Charlotte blinks. I know she expected me to refuse to answer. I should have. But I have something she wants, and I like it, that she wants something from me. It’s—a strange feeling, from a living woman. From any woman.

“Where? Surely not California?—”

“No, not California.” I take another hit from the joint as Charlotte’s eyes follow the ember through the air.

She drains her wine. She’s not looking at me like she hates me anymore. She looks determined.

“She told me she met a friend from high school,” Charlotte says. “That she was staying with him. Is that true?”

I smile a little. I can’t kill her. Can’t hurt her. But I can toy with her the way I do my victims sometimes. “In a sense.”

She throws up her hands and tosses back her head, groaning in frustration—and giving me a view of her creamy throat. I imagine her wearing a necklace of blood, which stirs up the Unnamed.

Don’t .

What if it wasn’t her blood ?

It’s my question, and it still surprises me. But I like it, the idea of Charlotte covered in someone else’s gore. My cock stirs. The Unnamed seems to like the idea, too.

I lean forward, the joint dangling from my lips. Charlotte watches me warily.

“So her friend wasn’t from high school.”

I’d almost forgotten what we were talking about. “Not high school.”

“But there was a friend.”

I nod, even though I’m crossing into dangerous territory. There’s a reason Edie didn’t contact Charlotte to tell her she’s alive and safe. Probably to keep Charlotte out of this world. My world. The world of the Hunters.

And yet Charlotte came stumbling into it anyway. She’s right in the middle of it, sitting on my sofa, with her tousled cherry hair and wine-stained lips.

“You want some weed?” I ask her.

“Tell me who the friend was.”

I shake my head. Scoot a little closer to her. When she doesn’t pull away, I keep going, moving across the cushions until my knees knock into hers. She looks down at them. Up at me.

I suck down a deep lungful of weed smoke.

Then I lean forward, press my lips against hers, and exhale.

It’s not a kiss, but Charlotte reacts like it’s one—and one she wants . Because she doesn’t push me away. Doesn’t shriek and call me a disgusting weirdo freak.

Instead, she parts her lips and accepts the white cloud of smoke as it passes from my lungs into hers.

I sit back, trying to mask the trembling in my hands. I can’t believe I did that, although I can feel the Unnamed circling nearby, and I suspect that’s where the bravery came from.

Charlotte breathes, the smoke curling out of her lips and nostrils and forming a halo over her head for just a second before dissipating into the lazy circulation of the ceiling fan.

“What the fuck?” she says.

I want to do it again, desperately. Her lips are so astonishingly warm . But this is a game, and there are rules.

“Ask another question,” I say roughly. “The right one.”

It doesn’t matter what she says. I’m going to do it.

Charlotte’s lips part. Her fingers tug down on her dress hem. Her eyes bore into mine.

“Have you spoken to Edie?”

The question brings me up short. Edie is the last thing I’m thinking about. But at least I can answer truthfully.

“Yes,” I say. “Once.” She had been in the room when I called Sawyer not long after he faked her death. He introduced us. I remember her voice, small and a little scared. The shy, whispered, Hello . Nothing like Charlotte, who puts on her mask, trying to hide that she’s afraid of me. Edie didn’t care that I knew.

And why should she? She knows I won’t do anything to her. Not as long as she’s Sawyer’s girl.

Charlotte falters. Her eyes seem big and damp. “And she’s okay?”

I suck down another lungful of weed smoke and lean forward. Charlotte doesn’t lean forward to meet me, the way I want her to, but she doesn’t pull away, either. Nor does she protest when I press my mouth to hers and exhale.

In fact, this time, she tilts her head, sealing our mouths together, her hot living breath mingling with mine as she draws the smoke away.

She exhales, her eyes never leaving mine. Waiting.

“Yes,” I say. “Edie’s okay. You really don’t need to worry about her.”

Something slumps in her shoulders. “I just have to worry about myself,” she mutters. There’s a slight slur to her words, from the wine and the weed. A faint lack of focus in her gaze.

I don’t respond except to suck down the last of the weed to the joint’s cardboard filter, lean forward, and shotgun her again.

She lets me. Parts her lips. Tilts her head. I press a little harder against her strangely hot mouth, trying to make it more of a kiss, and she lets me do that, too.

At least for a few seconds. Then she jerks back, exhaling the smoke between us. Through the pale haze, her eyes are wide with confusion.

Not disgust.

Not disgust , which was all I had gotten from the last living girl I tried to kiss. Five years ago. I don’t even remember her name. But we had kissed in a motel room and she had seen what I was, even though I wasn’t going to kill her. My gods didn’t want her. The only one who wanted her was me.

It wasn’t reciprocated. It never is, with living girls. They know I’m a predator—even more of a predator than a human man. And they react like prey.

It’s strange how Charlotte is different. Maybe because I’m not trying to hide anything.

“You could have just passed me the joint,” she says, jerking me out of my thoughts.

“Where’s the fun in that?” My response startles me—how quickly I let it out. How my voice curves up like I’m flirting.

Charlotte’s response startles me, too, the way she tamps down a smile. Like she doesn’t want me to know she finds me charming.

Then she says, “You’re not what I would expect from a serial killer.”

I jolt, the words serial killer searing through my skin. “I’m not a serial killer,” I say sharply.

She laughs coldly. “You have corpses in your living room.”

“That’s a parlor. And those are offerings.”

“Are they or are they not corpses?”

I don’t answer. A human woman like her won’t understand.

“Did you not kill them?” she asks, arching up an eyebrow. Her fear has sharpened. She’s terrified, asking me this, but she’s doing it anyway, and that makes my chest feel kind of warm and tight, almost like something’s hugging my heart.

I scowl. “What I did to them is beyond killing.”

“Sounds like something a serial killer would say.”

“I’m a Hunter,” I snap.

“Sorry,” she says. “A serial hunter , then.” As strong as her fear scent is, there’s a kind of dancing light in her eyes that belies it. I can’t decide if that’s her mask or not.

“No,” I say darkly. “A serial killer is something a human becomes. I’m not human.”

“Then what are you?” She doesn’t believe me, that much is clear. She thinks I’m delusional, that I’m some human psychopath who thinks he’s better than his equals. “Or is that not the right question?”

“The question is fine,” I say stiffly. “And I’ve already answered it. I’m a Hunter.” I stand up, moving more quickly than I really need to. Quickly enough that her fear spikes and I hear her fast, frantic pulse through the quiet of the den.

“What’s a Hunter, then?” She looks up at me. Fearful. Expectant. I want to kiss her for real. I want to do so much more than that, too.

“We’re the ones who stalk your nightmares,” I tell her, which is the explanation my father gave me a long, long time ago when I was a little boy and hadn’t yet killed anyone. I grab Charlotte by the wrist and yank her to her feet. She doesn’t resist, but there’s a slackness in her body, like a rag doll. She’s stoned. A little drunk.

“That tells me nothing,” she says, but I only shrug and drag her back upstairs.