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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHARLOTTE

I guess I could leave if I want to. Jaxon doesn’t keep me locked up anymore.

The morning after the Dining Room Table Incident, I wander listlessly around his dusty old home, trying to understand who and what he is—and who or what I am. He doesn’t stop me. In fact, I don’t even see him until I glance out the window above the kitchen sink to find him repairing the hole in the fence, his hair in a knot on the top of his head and the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to his elbows to reveal his thick, strong forearms.

For a few moments, I just watch him, trying to embrace my new status as a killer. The events of the last forty-eight hours flicker through my head. Bare flesh, red blood, moans of pleasure.

And darkness. An endless, swirling darkness.

I killed a man, and I don’t even know his name .

Jaxon looks over his shoulder, eyes catching mine. Then he breaks into a grin. I’m caught.

I duck away from the window, cheeks flushing. I feel trapped, unsure if I should recede into the dusty shadows of the house or go out the back door and talk to him.

Jaxon decides for me. The back door swings open and he steps inside, bringing a rush of cool, balmy air with him.

“Hey,” he says.

I wait, expecting him to say something else or attack me for more “training” or tell me his gods have someone else to kill. Instead, he just stands in the doorway, arms at his side. I wonder what would happen if I pushed past him and tore through the half-repaired fence and dove into the swamp. I’m sure he would hunt me down.

But even if he didn’t, where the fuck would I go? What the fuck would I do ? I’m an accessory to two murders and the perpetrator of one. Jaxon’s property feels like some kind of fairy world hidden in the heart of the Louisiana swamp, accessible only by magic and spells. There are no police here. No laws.

No morality.

As long as I stay within the boundaries of the electric fence, I can pretend I’m still a normal person.

“You want to help?” Jaxon asks, jarring me back to the cool, sunny kitchen. He gestures toward the yard. “I’m repairing the fence.”

“I saw that.” I cross my arms over my chest and take a long, deep breath. “Do you need help?”

He shrugs. “Not really.”

We stare at each other, and I see the man I killed, his eyes wide and his mouth open at the moment that Jaxon released the knife and I didn’t.

“Do you have my phone?” I finally say.

Jaxon gives me a bland look. “Yeah…” He looks down at his palms. “Yeah, I smashed that. The day I…. uh, brought you here”

Of course he did.

“Who did you want to call?” he asks, lifting his gaze to meet mine, a hint of suspicion in his eyes.

“No one.” I hear the defensiveness in my voice. “But I’m bored. I want to—” To what? Post a selfie on social media? Doomscroll through an endless waterfall of cat videos?

No, I realize suddenly. I want to do what I’ve spent the last three months doing. I want to investigate a murder.

“The man I—” I cut myself off, bile rising in my throat. Jaxon frowns, a dark line forming on his brow, but doesn’t say anything. “You don’t know his name, right?”

“The gods didn’t tell me.”

He’s crazy. We’re both crazy. We’re both killers.

“Well, I want to know who he was.” I square my shoulders, look Jaxon dead in the eye. “There are these forums I was using to investigate Edie’s disappearance. They’ll have picked up on—you know.”

Jaxon smiles darkly. “Your first kill?”

“Don’t call it that.”

“What else should I call it?”

“Look, it doesn’t fucking matter, okay?” My voice comes out harsh and shrill. “Do you have a phone I can borrow? A laptop?”

Jaxon just keeps holding that darkly sarcastic grin. I want to smack him, but I’ve seen where that leads.

“I’m serious,” I say. “I want to know who he was.”

Jaxon’s grin flickers. “Yeah, I have a phone,” he says softly. “But you’ll have to sit out there with me while you use it. I don’t want you turning yourself in.”

The idea knots around my heart. A binding, like the binding Jaxon said was keeping me from being my true self.

The binding I felt snap when I drove a knife into that man’s chest .

No. I’m losing my goddamned mind.

“Jail isn’t a good place for us,” he continues, almost gently. “Better to die and revive than end up there.”

“I’m not going to turn myself in,” I snap. “I still don’t know for sure that Edie’s safe, if nothing else.”

Jaxon’s expression flickers again. “She’s safe,” he says. “Now come on.”

I follow him out of the kitchen and into the backyard. A cool, damp breeze blows in across the swamp, smelling of rotting plant matter. Jaxon vanishes inside his shed, but I hang back, staring at the gap in the fence. It’s not big enough for me to crawl through anymore.

“Here you go.” Jaxon slides a phone into my palm, then squeezes my hand and meets my gaze, his eyes black and burning. “Don’t fuck around, Charlotte. I need to protect you, and if you bring the cops out here, that’s going to be a lot harder for me to do.”

My mouth goes dry. I can’t look away from him. He’s serious about it. About protecting me.

I just nod, and Jaxon releases me slowly and turns back to the fence. I sink down to sit cross-legged in the grass and swipe his phone open. He doesn’t bother keeping it locked.

I pull up the CrimeSolvers forum, my heart fluttering inside my chest. It feels bizarre to be looking at it again. The last time I was on here, all I wanted was to find Edie. Now, it seems she’s living with the murderer who nearly killed her fifteen years ago, and I actually am a murderer.

Still, I scroll through the posts. I skip over the dedicated Scott Hensner thread even though there are a dozen new comments, my hands shaking a little as I swipe down.

Then I see it:

Another occult-related murder in Houston.

I stop and stare at it for a few seconds before tapping on the link, every atom in my body vibrating. Jaxon’s pretending to work on the fence, but I can tell he’s listening to me, or sensing me. Whatever it is he does.

The post takes a few seconds to load.

ajhollendar78: Hey, CrimeSolvers! I hadn’t seen this posted yet and thought it might be worth diving into, especially since there’s a very likely connection to another case .

A link here, although I don’t bother clicking on it.

I copied the article over from the Houston Chronicle.

Memorial Death Likely Homicide, Police Say

Oliver Raffia, 58, was found dead in his Memorial home this past Thursday in a suspected homicide.

“Oliver Raffia.” I roll the name around on my tongue and look up to find Jaxon has paused his work, although he’s not quite looking at me. “His name was Oliver Raffia.”

“Does that make you feel better?” Jaxon asks quietly.

I scowl at him and go back to reading the article.

Police have no leads for the death of Raffia, who was discovered by an acquaintance on Thursday afternoon. However, Houston Police Chief Eric Ramirez says that the department is putting its full efforts into locating the perpetrator.

“This was an unusually violent crime,” Ramirez said in a recent press conference. “Rest assured that we will see the killer brought to justice.”

Me, I think numbly. He’s talking about me .

For twenty years, Raffia was the owner of the Midnight Roux micro chain of all-night seafood restaurants, which currently has five locations throughout the Houston metro. He sold the chain two years ago and has been living in retirement since.

“He kept to himself,” says Raffia’s long-time neighbor, Allison Millner. “I can’t imagine why anyone would do this to him.”

For a long time, all I can do is stare down at the phone, at that last quote. I can’t imagine why anyone would do this to him.

Why did I do that to him? Sitting in the Louisiana grass, the sun warming my shoulders, it feels like it all happened to someone else. Like it can’t be real. But in the moment, it just felt right . An urge that needed to be satiated.

It still feels right, if I’m being honest.

“You okay over there?” Jaxon stretches another wire across the gap in the fence, hemming us in.

“Fine.” I hate that my voice comes out strangled. “I just—” I scroll down on Jaxon’s phone, skimming the rest of the post on CrimeSolvers. And then two words jump out at me:

Eclipse Brotherhood.

I’ve heard that before. One of the men who cut the hole in the fence said it to me, how they thought Jaxon had been working for some group with that name when he killed their—boss, or whoever it was. I scroll back up and start reading from the beginning.

ajhollendar78: So I’ve been following this story since they first found Raffia’s body since I’ve got some connections at HPD. This case would be interesting in and of itself, of course, but what really gets me—and what the papers aren’t talking about—is that Raffia, the victim here, has ties to the Occult Underground. I’m talking groups like the Eclipse Brotherhood and Promethean Fire. It’s an open secret in Houston that Midnight Roux was connected to the ULS before it got sold, and I’ve heard from my contacts that Raffia is heavily involved in their leadership. This is likely an OU killing, and I personally think it’s connected to Dennis Randall’s death a month or so ago. Remember, with the weird sigils?

My throat gets all tight and restricted as I click on that last link, and I’m not surprised at all when I see the same post that brought me to Jaxon in the first place.

“Someone knows,” I gasp. “Someone knows you killed Dennis Randall and I killed Oliver Raffia and they’re gonna connect us and?—”

Jaxon’s arms are wrapped around my shoulders before I totally understand what’s happening. He pulls me into his chest, his body warm from repairing the fence, and makes soft little shushing sounds against my hair.

“Look at this!” I cry, shoving the phone at him.

He takes the phone and balances it on top of my head as he reads. I press my cheek against his chest, listening to his heartbeat. It’s slow. Calm.

“The ULS,” he mutters. “I should have fucking known.”

“You know what that is?”

“The Undying Lineage of the Stars,” he says. “It’s a group of human demon worshippers.”

“ Demons ?” I bark out a laugh. “Is that what you are?” I can’t bring myself to say we , and the question feels absurd anyway. It reminds me of my childhood, of my insanely religious parents. Demons were everywhere. I stopped believing in them when I left home at seventeen.

“No, we are not demons,” Jaxons says firmly.

My face burns hot. We . I’m not like him.

You’re exactly like him.

“And demon isn’t really the right word, just the easiest.” He slides his phone into his pocket and squeezes my shoulders, making me look at him. “Hey, don’t worry, okay? These Occult Underground groups are always gunning for each other, okay? They’re like gangs, going after each other for encroaching on someone’s turf.”

“So why did you have to kill two people involved with them?” I shoot back. “Are you in one of these magic wizard gangs?”

Jaxon grins, but I see the flash of worry in his eyes. “No, cher. I’m not in a magic wizard gang. But it’s possible they got themselves entangled with my gods, and that was why I was sent to them.” He runs his thumb over my cheek, and despite my best efforts, I shiver beneath his touch. It is reassuring, even though it shouldn’t be.

“I don’t want to go to jail,” I mutter, which feels trite in comparison to the enormity of terror I’m currently experiencing. It’s not just about jail. It’s about the threat of some cosmic punishment. Looking up Oliver Raffia made him real to me.

I’m a monster.

Jaxon sighs and pulls me into an embrace. “I won’t let that happen,” he says softly. “You’re my responsibility now. I’ll keep you safe.”

I know I should pull away from him. I know I should run and turn myself in and end this all before it gets even more out of hand.

I can’t imagine why anyone would do this to him.

And that’s the really fucked thing.

Because I don’t know either, even though I did it.