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CHAPTER NINETEEN

JAXON

I t’s the middle of the day, the winter sun is bright and pale, and Charlotte’s asleep in her bedroom. I didn’t chain her to the bed this time, but I did lock the door.

Because I really, really can’t let her escape now. Not when she knows what I am. When she knows what Sawyer is.

What she is.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell her when she asked about it on the porch, even though I felt the Unnamed whispering in my thoughts that she needed to know the truth. There’s something on her , it said, something strangling her soul . Then my Guardian chimed in, its voice harsh and raspy: He must break that binding first .

Telling her will break it!

Telling her will break her !

Have you ever tried to have a conversation with a beautiful woman while two ancient gods argue in your head? I’m surprised I made it through unscathed.

Anyway, she’s sleeping now. I checked on her a few minutes ago, and she was curled up on the bed in the little silky nightgown from her suitcase. The temptation to crawl into the bed and play with her unmoving body nearly overwhelmed me, but I refrained. Partly because I didn’t want her to try and kill me again, to test to see if what I told her was true, and partially because I need to clear out these two actual dead bodies from my yard.

They’re right where I left them in the grass, and thankfully it’s cold enough today that I don’t hear any flies buzzing yet. The bodies still look decent—decent enough to throw into my freezer while I decide what I want to do with them, anyway.

I start with the first man I killed. I throw his balaclava into the start of a burn pile and take a minute to study his head, trying to get a feel for him. He has a scar across his cheek and three black teardrop tattoos dripping out of his left eye. I’ve no doubt he was someone dangerous before I got ahold of him.

The second one I killed doesn’t really have a head to speak of, not anymore. I’ll need to saw off what’s left of it, extract the teeth and the balaclava, and then throw the meat out into the swamp where it can decay into nothingness. Without a head, the second one is a bit harder to get a read on. He’s a little skinnier than the first man, and I suspect a little younger. His hands are smooth, although there are tattoos across his knuckles. Sigils of some kind, it looks like. Magic. Occultism. Nothing to do with my gods, though.

Thanks to Charlotte, I know the two of them are connected to my last victim, Dennis Randall. I knew his name, of course, but I never think of them by their names. I think of them in pictures, because that’s how my Guardian sends them to me. Faces. Maps. Bolts of electricity shooting through my veins. This one.

“ Who are these men ?” I ask in the language of the gods. The air shimmers as I speak.

Not your concern , answers the Unnamed. Your concern is the woman . Then I see Charlotte in my thoughts as I throw the first victim’s head into the freezer. She’s still asleep under the covers.

“ They’re a threat ,” I respond. More to my Guardian than the Unnamed, assuming it’s around, and listening.

Neither of them answer. I sigh in frustration and grab my bone saw from its place on the wall so I can go back out in the chilly morning and get to work.

There’s something meditative about cutting up a dead body. The careful, mindless repetition as you split through skin and ligament and bone. There’s no squirming or screaming. No suffering. It’s just meat and manual labor, shoving through the rigor mortis until everything’s in pieces.

And that makes it easier to think.

I was still in a revival daze when I killed both of them. I did it on instinct and strength, like an animal protecting its home and (even though I know shouldn’t think of Charlotte like this) its mate. I didn’t think about who they were, what they were doing here, how they got in. I was vaguely aware that the power was out since the house generator kicked in right as I killed the first one. Charlotte told me before her shower that she had flipped the breakers, but those were just the ones to the house. I’m not a dumbass. I keep the fence on a separate system.

A system that’s still connected to the electrical wires strung up along Guillmar Road. They probably cut them. Which means the house’s main power supply is probably still out, too. I’ll have to call and report it.

And keep a close eye on Charlotte in the meantime. I can’t have her escaping?—

Pain tears through my head, and I shriek and drop the saw and fall backward on my ass, slapping my hands up to my face even though they’re covered in gore. The pain explodes outward and then fades to a dull, pounding throb, punctuated by the Unnamed’s harsh voice.

Don’t. Let. Her. Escape.

In the gods’ language, the words feel like knives stabbing at the spot behind my eye. I groan and fall backward in the cool grass and blink up at the pale, cloudy sky.

Awaken her. Break the binding.

“ What binding?” I mutter. This was the same thing they had been bickering about earlier, and they hadn’t bothered to explain it.

She is bound by old magic. She must kill to break it.

Images flash through my head, courtesy of the Unnamed. Violent, bloody, fragmented, like I’m glimpsing them in a shattered mirror. Blood on a knife. Charlotte’s eyes, wide and furious. Blood splattering on a wall. Blood drenching her hands. Charlotte digging herself out of the dirt.

“Stop!” I shout in English, because with each image the pain comes back until vomit rises in my throat. I haven’t spoken English to the gods since I was a little boy, too young to know better.

SHOW HER , roars the Unnamed, and it’s like a bolt of lightning splits my head in two.

Then it’s gone. My head still throbs, but it feels like a typical headache, nothing a few Tylenol can’t knock out. I blink, eyes watering. A cloud of grackles passes overhead and cackle at each other.

“ Show her what? ” I mutter in the language of the gods. I don’t expect an answer, but I feel the presence of my Guardian nearby, slipping oily through my thoughts.

Take her with you , it whispers, low and staticky. And then it gives me a gift:

A new target.

It’s a big house. A mansion, really, with a circular driveway that winds around a glittering stone fountain, the whole thing tucked behind a veil of oak trees. The house itself looks like a time capsule from the 1970s: big plate glass windows, dark brown angular walls.

Here , my Guardian whispers, and I know with some certainty that the house is in Houston, in a rich neighborhood, and that living inside it is a man who must be sacrificed. He’s part of the same group of criminal occultists as Dennis Randall. As these men who trespassed on my property.

And then everything comes to me at once, the way it always does when my Guardian gives me a new project. I see the art that I will make with this man’s skin, the sculptures I will craft with his bones, the portraits I will paint with his blood.

A masterpiece.

But the biggest masterpiece of all will be the Hunter I’ll awaken in Charlotte when I slide my knife into her palm and guide her hand to deliver the killing blow.

“You want to do what? ”

Ambrose’s voice bursts out of the phone, and it occurs to me that maybe I was better off not asking for his advice in this particular instance.

“She’s human ,” he adds, which makes the muscles in her shoulders tense up. All I’ve told him so far is that I want to take Charlotte with me on my kill. I was putting off telling him why.

“Yeah,” I mutter, pacing around the sofa. “About that.”

My two offerings, Ada and Henry, watch me with their glass eyes. I crafted them two decades ago when I finally came back home after years away. Now they bear witness to everything that happens in this house.

Including me having to explain Charlotte to Ambrose.

“Tell me, Jaxon.” Ambrose’s voice is firm. “Stop fucking around.”

I take a deep breath and seek out Charlotte; she’s still upstairs, breathing softly. Asleep. “I think Charlotte is a Hunter.”

Ambrose goes quiet, and I stare at Ada and Henry and wait.

“That’s impossible,” he finally says. “Even if you were too pussy-addled to tell the difference?—”

“Oh, shut the fuck up.”

“You shut the fuck up. Charlotte is Edie’s friend, remember? And Sawyer would have said if Edie had a Hunter friend.”

I push my hand through my hair. He’s not wrong. “She smells human,” I tell him. “Feels human. But then, she, uh, she killed me.”

“Bullshit. It’s been, what? Three days since I talked to you last? You wouldn’t have revived so fast?—”

“Will you shut up and listen?” I snap. “I’m trying to explain things.”

And then I do, as best I can. I tell him what I felt when Charlotte was strangling me, and how the gods came to me and told me what she is, and the quick revival and how she has some kind of magic on her that’s smothering her nature. And I’ll give Ambrose credit because he does listen to all of it without interrupting.

By the time I’ve finished explaining, I’m sitting on the couch between Ada and Henry, my palm sweaty against my phone, and Ambrose is dangerously quiet.

“Taking her to kill seems drastic,” he says.

“The Unnamed said it would break the spell.”

Ambrose laughs, and even with me being a Hunter it chills me a little. He’s so old. So experienced. “It’s not a spell,” he says. “It sounds like a protection charm. The person who did it—if it’s even real—would probably never call themselves a witch.”

“It’s real,” I say. “I sensed the Hunter in her. We have to do something, Ambrose.”

“We don’t, in fact, have to do anything. You feel a religious obligation.” He pauses, and there’s a mocking tilt in his words when he asks, “Or is it something more?”

“The Unnamed told me to do this,” I snap back, grateful we’re on the phone so he won’t see the embarrassed blood rising in my cheeks. “And it’s not just a religious obligation. It’s an obligation to another of our kind. One who’s trapped.”

“If she really is a Hunter, she’ll break,” Ambrose says flatly. “She’s Edie’s age, right? Thirty years is a long time to deny what you are.”

“Exactly!” My voice rises dangerously loud, and I reel myself back in. I don’t want Charlotte overhearing. With the way this block or charm or whatever it is has her brain all addled, she’ll never agree to go with me if she knows what we’re doing. “She should have killed by now. And I told you, she feels human. Just not when she was attacking me.”

In the crackling silence, I can feel Ambrose thinking. Then he sighs, an ocean-rush sound on the phone’s speakers. “You’re right that there are—strange things in this world,” he says. “Stranger things than us.”

Like the gods . If anything, I know better than he does.

“I’m not going to stop you from doing this,” he continues. “Just be careful. And if it doesn’t work?—”

“It’ll work.” It’s an edict from the gods. It has to work.

“If it doesn’t work,” Ambrose says again, more firmly. “I want to meet her. Examine her. See if I’ve seen it before.”

There’s nothing particularly unreasonable about his request, but it still makes me vaguely uncomfortable. Charlotte’s not some object of curiosity for Ambrose to add to his collection.

She’s mine.

The thought hits me hard. Sudden. I don’t want to share her.

“This’ll work,” I say. “This’ll wake her up. And then?—”

“Then I’ll really want to meet her,” Ambrose says, and a jealous fire flares, briefly, in my heart.