Page 32

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

JAXON

I pull the car into a rest stop right on the other side of the Mississippi border, the street lights garish and bright. It would be a pretty spot during the day. Lots of big winding oak trees. As it is, I park in one of the darker corners, kill the engine, and turn to Charlotte.

“Thanks for the food,” she says, clutching the McDonald’s bag in her lap. Her eyes are still red from her crying jag earlier, when I wasn’t sure what to do so I just held her on the side of the road, eighteen-wheelers rumbling past us every few minutes. She’s calmer now.

“Hey, I’m starving, too. Hand it over.”

She grins at that, even though her smile’s kind of sad. Still, she does as I ask, pulling out the two burgers and then propping the bags of French fries up on the dash.

For a few minutes, we just eat, not saying anything. I want to say something. Everything she told me about her parents, the adoption, them kicking her out—it sends this weird hot anger surging through me. She didn’t deserve that. Not just because she’s a Hunter. Even if she was human, she wouldn’t have deserved it.

I wash a bit of burger down with a swig of Coke and stare out through the front windshield. “Are you feeling better?” I finally ask. It seems the safest thing to say.

But Charlotte doesn’t answer right away, and I cringe inwardly, knowing I fucked up. Where are my gods when I need them? The Unnamed has no problem helping me fuck her like I’m some kind of sex demon, but the second I want to actually talk to her, it disappears, and I’m on my own.

But then she says, “A little,” and when I look over at her she smiles at me. Another sad smile, but I’ll take it. “I—I appreciate you listening to me.”

“I’m always happy to listen to you.” More cringe.

But Charlotte’s smile brightens and finally works its way up to her eyes. Then it fades, and she bites into another fry and stares out the window. “I’m still trying to work through things,” she says. “What it means. What—what I am.”

My heart clenches, and I nearly tell her where we’re going. But I stop myself. I wanted to surprise her, and it’s not a surprise if I tell her in the middle of a rest stop parking lot.

She looks over at me, eyes dark and intense. “What was it like?” she asks. “Growing up knowing that you’re a Hunter?”

Her question catches me off-guard. I wasn’t expecting to have to talk about myself. In fact, I was fully prepared just to listen to her some more. I never talk to my dead lovers—I figure their ghosts, if they’re around, don’t want to hear my shit. And a living woman like Charlotte really doesn’t.

But she’s staring at me expectantly, slurping her Coke up through the straw, and the attention makes my face hot.

“I don’t have anything to compare it to,” I finally say. “It just felt normal.”

Disappointment flashes across her eyes, and I scramble to correct. “I mean—I always knew what I was. My dad talked to me about it as long as I can remember. My grandparents, too. They would tell me stories about their kills when they were trying to get me to go to sleep.”

“No wonder it’s so easy for you,” Charlotte mutters.

I shrug. She’s not wrong. “Ambrose was more like you,” I offer. “I mean, he knew what he was, too, but he told me once that he struggled with it.” I pause.

I wonder if I should call Ambrose now, let her talk to him, but the truth is I don’t want to share her. And Ambrose probably won’t be much of a comfort anyway.

“Ambrose,” she says. “The itinerant preacher from the 1800s.” She shakes her head. “It’s all fucking weird. It’s like discovering vampires are real.”

“We are not vampires,” I say quickly.

“Don’t tell me vampires actually exist.” She looks over at me. “Do they?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“Well, that’s something.” She slumps back. “Did Ambrose ever say what it was like? How he struggled?”

“He never went into details.” I wish now that he had. That I had something to give her. “Just that he struggled with the need, at first. To kill, you know. He thought it was wrong. He tried to repress it. But repressing it—” I stop, hesitating. “Well, that’s dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” Charlotte’s brow furrows. “How? Am I in danger?”

“No,” I say quickly. “When a Hunter represses their nature, they—they lose their mind, basically. They’ll kill indiscriminately. Hurt people they care about.”

“So it’s not me that’s in danger,” she says darkly. “Just the people who are important to me.”

“Well, you aren’t repressing anymore,” I tell her. “You stopped when we were in Houston.”

Charlotte stares at me for a long time, and I know I misspoke again. The truth is, I don’t know if the binding protects her from the repression-sickness. She’s young, for a Hunter. Hasn’t even died yet. But if she had never come looking for Edie, if she hadn’t waltzed into Bandit’s Diner and attracted the attention of me and my gods, if she had gone the rest of her life thinking she was human?—

Well, personally, I think it would have been a blood bath.

“You’ll be fine,” I say quickly, hoping it’s true.

She sighs. “I said I wanted to talk about you. Not me.”

I blush and look down at my crumbled, greasy hamburger wrapper. “What do you want to know?” My heart’s beating so fast I think it might explode out of my chest. I shouldn’t be scared, talking to Charlotte. I kidnapped her. I fucked her. I killed with her.

And yet when I glance up and see her dark eyes boring into me I feel like a scared little boy. A human boy.

“How did you become an artist?”

I blink. It’s not the worst question she could have asked. “I always liked to draw. And Dad encouraged it because he said I could use it to serve the gods.”

“Is that how you graduated to mixed media ?” Her eyes glitter mischievously.

“Yes,” I say stiffly. “And why are you making fun of me? How else am I supposed to explain it to people?” I lean forward, arching an eyebrow. “To humans? Which is what I thought you were?”

She rolls her eyes. “Fine. So you make art for your gods. Who are these gods?”

I feel them then, a sudden, radiating presence. “I won’t speak their true names,” I say. “But they watch over me. They watch over all Hunters.” I look at her and recite what my grandmother taught me when I was a child. “They’re death and destruction. Rot and decay. Blood. Viscera. The life leaving a body. And they’re the reason we can’t die.”

Charlotte trembles and I catch a whiff of her fear, sharp and pungent, like human fear. But there’s a strain of Hunter in it, too. A strain of darkness that makes my cock stir.

“There are two that watch over me,” I say. “My Guardian and the Unnamed.”

I swallow. I don’t take my eyes off her. I can’t. She looks like a painting in the strange, eerie light of the rest stop.

“They led me to you,” I add.

Charlotte’s eyes widen. Her lips part. Her cheeks redden.

I smell her arousal.

“Am I—am I the first woman they’ve led you to?”

“Yes.” I don’t take my eyes off her. “There’s no one else, Charlotte.”

She jerks her gaze away, the red deepening in her cheeks. “Well, you clearly have experience,” she says softly. “With women.”

Now it’s my turn to blush. And to consider all the ways I can answer that question. Lying makes me look the best, of course, and it’s my first inclination.

But then Charlotte looks at me again, and the lights catch the crimson highlights in her hair so she looks drenched in blood, and I know I can’t lie to her. Not her .

“Not exactly,” I say roughly.

She gives a sharp, disbelieving laugh. “What does that mean? Not exactly ?”

I look out the front windshield, at the shadows crawling through the rest stop. It’s the sort of a place a Hunter feels at home. Dark and isolated and liminal.

“Human women can tell what I am,” I say softly. “Maybe not at first. But when things get—you know.” I force myself to look over at her. “They know. And they act like the prey they are.”

Charlotte’s anger shivers on the air. “I don’t understand what you’re getting at,” she says darkly.

She thinks I’m a rapist . The thought comes to me sharply, and I suppose it’s not entirely unfair, given what I did to her in her sleep. What I actually am, though, is worse.

Even for a Hunter.

I swallow, my throat dry. My Guardian whispers around me, although I can’t quite make out what it’s saying. “All my life I’ve been surrounded by the dead,” I finally say. “The dead are how I worship my gods. How I make my art.”

Charlotte’s face is blank, carved out by the streetlights.

“And when living women didn’t want me, I turned to dead ones.”

I wait for her to respond, my heart racing. She just keeps staring at me, eyes dark in the shadows. When she finally does speak, her voice makes me jump.

“Am I—” She hesitates like she’s considering her words. “Am I the first, um, living woman?—”

“Yes,” I blurt out. “The other ones I’ve been with never let me go as far as you.”

I wish I didn’t care so much about her reaction to this. Killing is a Hunter’s work, and everyone does it differently. Most people just kill. My family is all like that. Even they find my predilections unnatural.

Charlotte shifts and finally turns away from me, staring out at the rest stop. “Is that why you ate me out while I was asleep? Because it was like me being dead?”

Guilt stabs through my chest. “I told you. I did that because I—I didn’t want to disappoint you.”

She turns toward me then, and there’s no disgust on her face. No anger.

“And you did kill me afterward,” I add.

“You jerked off while I was doing it,” she counters. “Which I also didn’t consent to.”

Embarrassment flushes through my face. “Sorry,” I mumble. “I just—I was worked up from?—”

There’s a rustle of fabric as she leans over the console, and when I feel her warm fingers against my face I look up, startled. She peers at me.

“I can’t believe I’m going to say this,” she says softly, fingers curling a little against my cheek. She uses just enough pressure that it’s like she’s holding me in place. “I feel like I should be furious with you. But I just—” She sighs, and her voice comes out small. “But the truth is, I kind of liked it.”

I suck in a breath. “Which part?”

Charlotte leans closer, lips parted. She’s turned on. I can feel the heat of arousal blooming in the air. “All of it,” she whispers.

Then she kisses me, firm and chaste, before settling back in her seat, her eyes never leaving mine. And suddenly I want to feel that chain around my throat again, only this time I want her pussy clamped around my dick. I want her to come from my death throes.

“And I don’t know what that says about me,” she whispers. “I’m not supposed to—” She shakes her head, looks away again. “This is all so fucked up.”

I want to say it’s the binding, that it’s still strangling her and keeping her from accepting herself. But really, I think I fucked everything up because I treated her like a dead girl and not the living, breathing woman that she is.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Really, I really am. I shouldn’t have—” Charlotte keeps watching me, listening. She doesn’t seem upset. “I’m not—I don’t know how to do any of this. The other Hunters I know, they’re either related to me or they’re men. You’re?—”

She looks over at me, waiting.

“You’re very pretty,” I finish lamely.

And to my shock, she breaks into a big, dazzling grin. “Thanks. You’re not too bad yourself.”

I blush again.

“And I accept your apology.” She looks at me, eyes blazing. “Just don’t do it again.”

A beat passes, and her lips quirk up.

“At least not without asking me beforehand.”