Page 31

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHARLOTTE

T he next morning, I skip breakfast in favor of drinking a cup of coffee and smoking my last joint on Jaxon’s screen-in porch. I’m not sure where he is; the house feels empty and silent when I pad downstairs. But I know he’s around here somewhere.

I’ve taken two hits when Jaxon emerges from his shed, looking suspicious. Well, more suspicious than usual, anyway.

After all, he’s a murderer.

And so are you .

I drag on the joint, hoping the weed will drown that voice out instead of amplifying it.

Jaxon picks his way across the shaggy lawn. He moves like a cat, sleek and careful, and although he doesn’t look right at me I know he’s sensing me, if that makes any sense. Probably not. Nothing in the last few days makes any damn sense.

“Hey,” he calls out, stopping on the other side of the porch, his features blurred by the screen. I take another drag. The weed has me feeling floaty and warm, a welcome relief after a night of uneasy dreams.

“You want some?” I hold out the joint, smoke lifting in swirls. But he shakes his head.

“I came to tell you I need to go on a trip.”

Excitement flares like a firework and then explodes into dread.

“And you’re going to come with me.”

I watch him through the screen, the joint burning away between my fingers. Eventually, I stab it out in the vintage ashtray I grabbed from his creepy living room. The mummies who live in there certainly don’t need it.

“Do you want me to kill someone again?” It shocks me, how easily the question comes out. How natural it feels.

Jaxon squints at me. He has his hair pulled back, and it highlights his high cheekbones and big blue eyes.

“No,” he finally says. “But that’s all I’m going to tell you.”

I roll my eyes. “I thought we were over this mysterious, secretive bullshit.” I stand, and the porch tilts a little. Too much weed. Or too much excitement at the thought that I might get to kill again.

Stop. Stop. Stop. This isn’t you.

This is you, little Hunter .

I kick the screen door open and plod out into the yard, barefoot. The morning feels like spring even though it’s still January. Warm and balmy and damp. Jaxon smiles as I approach, not coy this time, and my heart flutters around.

“Tell me where we’re going.” I cross my arms over my chest.

Jaxon’s grin widens. “Or what? You’ll fight me again?”

The temptation is there, I won’t deny it. Both for the fight itself—for the spilled blood, the starbursts of pain—but for what I know damn well will come after it.

“No,” I say before I change my mind and launch myself at him. “I just—why do this? Why keep it a secret?”

Jaxon studies me for a long time, kind of contemplative. “I told you. It’s a surprise.”

“Asshole,” I mutter.

He’s unfazed, though. “We’ll leave tonight,” he says, and that’s it.

Once again, I find myself riding shotgun in Jaxon’s car. At least this time he doesn’t bother with handcuffs.

The night is dark and oily, but the headlights cut through it just enough to illuminate patches of the interstate. It’s late, nearly midnight. We’ve been driving for two hours and I still don’t know where we’re going. Just that we’re heading east, away from Texas.

“You awake over there?” Jaxon glances at me sideways

“No,” I say, curling up into my seat. I actually did doze off for a little while, my dreams smoky and strange, the way they’ve been since—since Houston.

“You can sleep if you want,” he goes on. “But you know you probably don’t really need it. Hunters can get by on less than humans.”

Sourness curls in my stomach. “And yet I get cranky when I get anything less than eight hours a night.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.” Headlights sweep across the car, casting Jaxon in a sudden camera flash. “Ambrose thinks it’s because you lived so long as a human. You’re having trouble adjusting.”

Ambrose . The name stirs around in my thoughts, an easier name to dwell on than Oliver Raffia. He’s another person like Jaxon. Another Hunter. “That’s your, uh, friend, right?”

“Yeah. He’s also kind of a—a mentor, you could say.” Jaxon taps the steering wheel, beating out a rhythm even though the radio’s off. We’re in the middle of nowhere, Louisiana. Or maybe it’s Mississippi, at this point. Either way, there’s nothing worthwhile to listen to.

So it makes sense that I want to talk to Jaxon about this. About Hunters. What else do we have to talk about?

That’s what I tell myself, anyway.

“A mentor?” I prompt.

“Yeah. Like, uh, like I could be to you.” He gives me another one of those nervous, hopeful glances, and I try not to let it go straight to my heart. Or my pussy. “Are you okay with talking about this?”

I’m surprised that he asked. “Yes,” I say, although it does take a minute for the answer to come out. “But I’m not promising anything, okay? I’m still not convinced—” I cut myself off because I don’t actually know what I’m convinced of. That Jaxon brainwashed me into killing Oliver Raffia? That I’m trapped in some kind of fucked up Charles Manson situation?

That there’s a supernatural serial killer inside me clawing its way out?

“When exactly did you talk to Ambrose?” This feels like the best way to change the subject.

“Last night,” Jaxon says. “While you were asleep.”

“And then you decided to, what? Pack up and go east?” I shake my head. “This feels like a trick, you know.”

“It’s not a trick,” Jaxon says darkly. “It’s a surprise .”

I roll my eyes. “I know what your surprises are like.”

Jaxon doesn’t say anything, and for a moment, I wonder if I hurt his feelings. Can I even do that, to someone like him?

“He and I did talk about where your binding might have come from.” Jaxon keeps his gaze fixed on the empty road ahead. “He said there are a few possibilities. Your parents?—”

“What about them?” The question comes out sharp and accusatory, and Jaxon glances at me, his face unreadable.

“Touchy subject?” he says carefully.

I look down at my lap, at the skirt of the pretty vintage-style dress I wore to make me feel better about this whole stupid trip. The truth is I don’t think about my parents much at all. They kicked me out of their tidy Santa Clarita house when I was seventeen after I got caught fooling around with another girl at church—a deacon’s daughter. She told her father that I had corrupted her with my lesbian wiles.

I told you that bullshit wouldn’t work! My own father screamed at my mother as I stood on the front porch after they slammed the door in my face. There’s no denying that flesh and blood’s what matters! It was the last time I ever heard his voice, and it was a reminder that I wasn’t a part of the family. Not really. They’d never hidden that I was adopted, but hearing his true feelings?—

“You could say that.” I look at my reflection in the window. My eyes are dry. “Let me guess. You think they put the binding on me?”

“I don’t know. It would be fucking weird if that’s the case because for you to be a Hunter, at least one of them would have to be a Hunter, too,” Jaxon says. “Although it’s usually both.”

Ice floods through my veins. He doesn’t know I’m adopted, and why would he? I barely even think about it. “What are you saying?”

“A Hunter wouldn’t put a binding like that on their child. It’s akin to torturing them, and we protect our own.”

But that’s not what I was asking about. My mouth goes dry. My parents adopted me when they thought they couldn’t have kids of their own. But then Mom got pregnant when I was almost thirteen, a fluke that turned into my baby sister.

The one they really wanted .

“But if you had one human parent, it’s possible they did it without the Hunter parent knowing.” Jaxon taps his fingers as he talks. “Ambrose says you don’t come across this kind of magic much anymore, but he used to see it a lot when he was younger. That was, uh, in the 1800s, by the way.” He glances over at me, grinning, but I’m still wrapped up in my own slow unraveling to register what he’s saying. “Ambrose was an itinerant preacher, and he said some of the old Pentecostal churches would do that kind of magic when they thought a child was possessed by a demon. Which I guess you could say our gods are, although I personally don’t?—”

“I was adopted,” I blurt out.

Jaxon snaps his mouth shut. For a minute, the only sound in the car is the rhythmic hum of the wheels against the asphalt. I can’t believe I said that to him. That I shared that part of my history. It’s something I only talk about with people I really, really trust. People like Edie. Like Alex, the ex I thought I was going to marry. Samantha, my best friend in college.

Jaxon.

“Oh,” he says softly.

I swallow. Knot my skirt up in my hands. I went this far. I might as well tell him the rest. “My parents were Christian,” I say softly. “Fundies. We belonged to this extremist church, the Church of the Well. ”

“Holy shit,” Jaxon says. “That’s the one with the guy who’s on TV, right? What’s his name?”

“Sterling Gunner, yeah.” We watched that asshole every Sunday night, broadcasting live from the Church of the Well compound in West Texas. “But yeah, the church did that kind of stuff. Weird prayers and things they said were protection against demons. My parents—” I take a deep breath. “I—I haven’t spoken to either of them in years.”

Jaxon glances over at me, his face wrapped in shadows, and I expect him to ask me if I know about my birth parents, if they were killers. He’s gonna be disappointed because I have no fucking idea. I never even think about them.

Instead, he says, “I’m sorry.”

I blink. “Sorry? Why?”

He shrugs as he turns his gaze back to the road. “I haven’t spoken to my father in a long time, too,” he says. “Or my grandparents. We all lived together in the house when I was a kid.”

“Did you kick them out?” It’s a dumb question, but it’s the first thing I think to ask since it’s what happened to me.

He chuckles. “No. They left. My grandparents have always Hunted together, and they were tired of Louisiana. So they want traveling. My dad said that I needed to strike out on my own, so he killed me and buried me in the backyard. I woke up a year later and then decided to rebel by joining the Army. By the time I came back to the States, he was gone.”

I stare at him, at his strong, handsome profile, his sleek black hair. And I want to kiss him because he’s the first person I’ve ever met who seems like he might actually understand. Who seems like he might know what it feels like.

My dad didn’t literally kill me—but hearing what he said, he may as well have.

And maybe that’s why I start talking. Why I tell Jaxon everything—about my childhood in the church, and realizing I was bi when I was in middle school because I kissed Mary Michaels behind the school gym during PE class, and about the deacon’s daughter and getting kicked out and what my father said behind the door that was closed to me forever. And he just—listens. He watches the road, and he nods along, and he listens .

I’ve dated men before, but none of them ever listened the way he does.

“When my sister was born,” I tell him, the words spilling out of my mouth because, for the first time in my life, it feels like I might actually understand why this happened to me. “My parents started to treat me like a changeling.” I watch the lights sweep across the road and reflect the green mile marker signs. “Like I wasn’t the baby they adopted.”

“Why do you think they did that?”

“Because they got what they wanted.” It comes out harsh. Bitter. “A real daughter.”

“Or maybe—” Jaxon hesitates, and I can sense what he’s going to say like it’s crawling over my skin.

“Or maybe they knew what I am?”

Jaxon breaths out. Squeezes the steering wheel. “Maybe,” he says. “I—I don’t know, but?—”

I love how flustered he gets sometimes. It’s such a contrast to the way he commands me when we’re fucking.

“Or maybe they were terrible people,” I say. “Maybe they never saw me as their daughter.”

I told you that bullshit wouldn’t work .

My father’s words echo around in my head. I always thought he was talking about the adoption, even if it was a strange way to phrase it—especially for him, a man who didn’t normally curse. That bullshit .

Electric heat seems to course through my blood. “These charms Ambrose told you about,” I say. “Did he say what they involved?”

Jaxon frowns a little. “No, he didn’t.”

The road unspools before us, hypnotizing me. Drawing me further and further into the past. I told you that bullshit wouldn’t work .

Me screaming at my parents that the deacon’s daughter was a liar, that we were in love, that they didn’t understand.

Mom praying softly, rocking back and forth. She was always praying. Before meals. Over my sister’s bassinet. On the front porch. She drew little wards on our walls she said drove away demons, and all the women in the Church of the Well drew them even though their husbands turned up their noses at the practice.

“The Church of the Well,” I say slowly. “The church I grew up in? They’re not like most evangelical churches. They go all-in on the spiritual warfare stuff.” I keep staring out the window, my chest tight with panic. “They think the devil is always trying to get in, and you have to use whatever means necessary to stop him.”

Jaxon doesn’t say anything, and I look over at him, watching the headlights slide across his face.

“Like charms,” I whisper. “My mom drew them everywhere in our house. I was surrounded by them.”

Jaxon squeezes the steering wheel, opens his mouth. But I don’t let him speak. Because I’m terrified that he’s right. That there was something broken in me, and my mother saw it and tried to pray it out of me, and in the end, it didn't fucking work.

“They were charms to protect us from being taken over by demons.” My voice rises, shrill and panicked. Tears line my eyelashes. “And what’s more demonic than a murderer that can’t fucking die?”

Jaxon finally looks at me, his face unreadable in the dark.

Then he jerks the car sideways, sliding across the empty traffic lanes, and pulls into the shoulder. Turns on the hazard lights, the mechanical clicking a metronome against my racing heart.

My tears spill over my cheeks.

“Charlotte.” Jaxon says my name with such an unexpected tenderness that I burst into a loud, choking sob. For a second, he regards me with alarm.

But then he unbuckles his seatbelt and reaches across the gear selector to unbuckle my seatbelt, too.

And then he pulls me into him. It’s awkward, the gear selector jutting up between us, but it also feels so good, so right, to have his strong arms wrap around my shoulders. I bury my face into his neck, my tears loud and ugly, and he runs his hand across my upper back. Kisses the top of my head.

“What if those charms—” I whisper hoarsely. “What if I’m really not hu—” I can’t say it. I still don’t know if I believe it.

“You’re not a demon.” Jaxon nuzzles against my hair. “But you’re not human, either.”

His arms tighten around me before I can protest, and he says, “You’re something better.”