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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

JAXON

W ell, that was stupid. But it seems I’ve found a way to enjoy dying.

Coming from Charlotte squeezing my trachea shut with the same chain I used to imprison her was transcendent. The grim, violent determination on her face as she wrapped the chain around her forearm and pulled—biceps bulging, lips parted with exertion? Gorgeous. Fucking gorgeous. The only way it would have been better is if she had been riding me while she did it, her cunt wet from my sloppy, eager kisses.

I’m dead, technically. Everything in my body is still. It always feels fucking odd, this part, to be floating in this technical death Hunters get before we revive. Six deaths and the stillness in my chest still unnerves me. Everything feels heavy, like I’m made of lead.

Strangulation is a fast recovery. With my experience, it’ll probably take a couple of months, although I’ll need to conjure up the will to drag myself downstairs and outside to burrow myself in the dirt, the way my dad taught me to do anytime we died. You heal faster underground. I also don’t want the authorities finding my body and sending it to the coroner’s office.

Because they will be out here, sooner or later. Charlotte will figure out some way to get through my electric fence and she’ll go to the cops and tell them everything. I fucked up, no doubt about it. It just felt so damn good, her killing me while I stroked myself to completion. Way better than dying usually does.

But there was also another reason I let her keep going—I saw something while she was killing me. An electric shimmer in the air that I only get whenever I’m around one of my own kind.

Which is impossible . She’s human. She smells like a human and acts like a human. Hunters can recognize Hunters, and I would have sensed her as such the second she walked into Bandit’s. Earlier, even. I would have tasted the fire in her blood and the adrenaline of another killer moving into my space.

There was none of that. She walked in like prey.

Death delusion , I think, something I’ve heard other Hunters talk about but not something I’ve ever experienced myself. But that has to be it, doesn’t it? The truth is I was so turned on that I let her kill me even though it was stupid as hell, and that weird electricity arcing between us was just wishful thinking on my part. Because it was profoundly stupid of me to die, even an easy death like strangulation.

Now she’ll escape. She’ll tell the cops that Edie is still alive, and fuck knows what Sawyer will do to protect his girl from getting found out.

Don’t let him kill her before I revive , I think in the Abyss of my mind, speaking the language of the gods. I can feel them stirring nearby, the Unnamed and my Guardian both. Listening, even if they don’t respond.

I don’t feel like dragging myself downstairs. I want to sit with the memory of Charlotte murdering me. One last gift we gave each other. I gave her freedom; she gave me a fucked-up Hunter’s sort of affection.

I do pull myself under the bed, though. Ambrose told me once that being covered can trick whatever magic it is that brings us back, make it think we’re underground. Every little bit helps until I make the journey downstairs to finish out my revival.

The chain scrapes against the floorboards as I pull myself across the floor. Time doesn’t mean much when you’re dead. It expands and contracts all at once. So who knows how long it takes. A minute, an hour, a day. By the time I’m done, all I know is I’m in a cramped, dark place, and coolness seeps up through the floorboards. It’s the only thing I can really feel right now, except for my own stillness.

Six deaths, and this was the best one even if Sawyer and Ambrose are both going to be furious with me. It’ll probably stay the best one until I go to sleep for good, centuries from now. My first death was my initiation ritual, my father drawing his hunting blade across my throat when I was seventeen years old. I was in the ground for a little under a year, and when I came out, I was a full-fledged Hunter, a monster to haunt the dreams of humans.

My second death, though, was unexpected. It was in 1991, out in the endless Kuwaiti desert. I was nineteen, still an infant by Hunter standards, and had enlisted out of rebellion against my family—I decided I would let the American government exploit my nature to protect freedom or oil or whatever bullshit they were fighting for then. I didn’t die in combat; almost no Americans died in combat in the First Gulf War. But I went Hunting in the desert town near the base, in a country where I didn’t know the customs or the people, and I was, predictably, caught. Shot in self-defense. It wouldn’t be the last time, although Charlotte’s self-defense was certainly much more enjoyable.

I replay the memory for a little while, drifting in the haze of death. I can’t see anything but darkness, can’t smell anything but emptiness. Charlotte is a billion miles away. I can’t smell her, can’t hear her moving through the house or scrambling across my yard.

My worry for her lingers, though, a fragment of my living self. It’ll take her some time to get through my electric fence, but she’s smart and crafty, and I have no doubt she’ll find a way. I doubt she found my car keys. I keep them well hidden, the way my daddy taught me. So she’ll be on foot. It’s ten miles before the road passes another house, and that’s old man Eli’s place. He might help her. More likely he won’t answer the door.

So if I’m lucky, it’ll be another five miles before she gets to that gas station on the highway. They’ll help her. Then the cops’ll find out everything she knows.

Fuck, I hope she doesn’t talk her way into an actual death. A human death.

But there’s nothing I can do now. Not in the realm of the gods. Not in the Abyss of annihilation.

I settle down into the darkness, nothing more than a soul with memories. For a little while, I sift through those memories, focusing on my now-favorite one—the squeezing and gasping, the slow deprivation of oxygen as I stroked myself closer to orgasm. I timed it just right because the explosion of pleasure tore through me right in the seconds before I passed out. Sublime.

But there’s only so long I can think about my death, and I can feel my gods waiting for me in the dark. They’re closest when you’re in the ground, like my grandma always said. And that’s true. I first met my Guardian after my father threw my corpse into a grave I dug for myself. The Unnamed I met ten years later after a drastic mistake in Dallas. It was what led me to Ambrose, and then to Sawyer. The closest things to friends I have.

Friends I betrayed by letting Charlotte kill me. I need to warn them somehow.

So I do what I was taught to do when I was very young, long before I died for the first time, which is to pray in the dark cathedral of my mind, in a language I learned before I ever learned English.

I call you, Guardian. I call, and I will listen.

But my Guardian still doesn’t answer, even though I can feel its presence nearby. Something like dread tightens through my body, even though I shouldn’t feel anything in this state.

The Unnamed wants to speak to me.

I call you, The One Who Cannot Be Named. I call, and I will listen.

The air shifts. I feel like I really am in a tomb, a dank place made of stone , and not stashed under my grandmother’s old bed. There’s a dampness on the air that makes me think of rot.

I wish I could breathe so I can take a deep breath. Wish I had a heartbeat so I can feel the blood rushing through my ears. It’s always strange how much I miss anxiety when I can’t feel it.

Look , the Unnamed says. Listen . It sinks into me, that cold black rot, filling up my empty blood vessels with decay until I see what it sees.

Charlotte.

It sees Charlotte.

She’s a blackened husk beside my fence, her yellow dress smoldering, wisps of white smoke floating up toward the starry sky.

No , I think before I can stop myself. I know the Unnamed is mocking me from the way the rot curdles in my veins.

Then I see her again. This time, she’s trudging along the side of Guillmar Road, the sky that pearly grey of early dawn. I feel, briefly, all the aches of her body, her burning feet and sore muscles. But I also see what she doesn’t: a rattlesnake coiled in the grass. Docile from the cold, yes, but she steps right on it and it reacts anyway, sinking its fangs into her ankle.

Charlotte screams and falls into the tall golden grass and time passes and she dies there, because Guillmar Road is always empty, especially this time of year.

Why are you showing me this? I ask the Unnamed in the dark caverns of my thoughts, the language of the gods reverberating through my skull. Are you going to kill her?

It doesn’t answer. Only shows me another image. My house, Charlotte dead. But not from the electrical fence. She’s splayed across my porch and riddled with bullet holes, the blood blooming like roses across her chest.

This one bothers me the most of all. It makes no sense. Who could have shot her out here, on this side of the fence? On my property? MeeMaw and Papa are somewhere in South America. I have no idea where Dad is, but if he killed her, it wouldn’t be with a gun.

Watch , says the Unnamed.

I see all three visions at once. All three futures, I think, all three ways Charlotte can die by some hand that’s not my own.

Is this why you didn’t want me to kill her? I ask, yearning for a heartbeat and breath so my body can react to all this discomfort. I don’t like seeing her dead, a fact I’m only distantly aware of.

Watch , says the Unnamed.

I watch. It’s not like I have much of a choice.

Charlotte charred and blackened.

Charlotte’s ankle rotting away from a snakebite.

Charlotte bleeding into my feather grass.

And then, in all three visions, she gasps back to life, arching her back to sit up, all the death washing off her like black ink. My body vibrates strangely, almost like I have a heartbeat again. But it’s much too soon.

I think of the electricity buzzing between us as she choked me to death.

How can she be a Hunter? I barely know how to ask this question of the Unnamed. She feels like prey.

She is not prey . The Unnamed pulses through me, steady and rhythmic. The same oceanic push-pull as my heart. As my breath. She is ours. But suppressed. Dangerous, if she revives like this.

The rhythm quickens. I can feel the machine of myself grinding back to life. I don’t understand what’s happening—not with me, not with Charlotte.

It’s too soon for me to revive.

She needs a Guide before she’s killed . The Unnamed’s voice rasps through my thoughts and my body both. A lightning storm ignites in my head and sends white hot electricity sparking through my nerves until my limbs shake and convulse and flop against the floor. I shriek in agony, my vocal cords knitting back together so fast it’s painful. It never hurts like this, reviving.

The pain is necessary if you are to revive in time . The Unnamed seems to enjoy my suffering, but I’d expect nothing less from it, the black seed that grows in the heart of all Hunters.

My heart. Sawyer’s. Ambrose’s.

And Charlotte’s.

My neck twists, jerking my head violently sideways. The pain is blinding, worse than when I died. I feel it everywhere, a flooding surge as my blood rushes back into my veins and my lungs expand to contain my dust-choked breath. I scream and slam up against the underside of the bed. My skin feels brand new, tender and sensitive. I can smell everything in this fucking house. Mice that died in the walls. Bluberries that rolled behind the counter and rotted. The old blood out in my shed.

And my Hunter Charlotte, the sweet tangy scent of her sweat. She’s not in the house, but she hasn’t made it past my fence.

She’ll be there waiting , the Unnamed rasps, when you’ve passed through the fire .

And then the agony is too blazing for me to think of anything else.