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CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHARLOTTE

T he four of us have brunch in a sunroom that faces the piles of sand dunes leading down to the beach. Edie ordered it from some seafood place near their house: a big spread of crab eggs Benedict and fresh fruit and smoked salmon on thin, crispy toast. Mimosas, too, a carton of orange juice delivered with a bottle of sparkling wine that Edie and I dump into the juice before knocking the plastic flute glasses together.

It’s almost like being back in California. Almost.

“Sawyer killed Scott,” Edie tells me matter-of-factly, spearing a chunk of melon with her fork. When I blanche in surprise, she adds, “He was trying to kill me.”

Any reservations I had—and I didn’t have many—vanish. “That motherfucker,” I snap. “The military guys they found at the camp?—”

“Back up, I guess.” Edie shrugs. “Those two PIs he sent by your place were supposed to kill me when they found me. But Sawyer took care of them, too.”

The two PIs. I only met with them once, and they had asked me questions about Edie’s whereabouts and I had lied while Scott sat in the corner, scowling. Guilt tightens in my stomach. “I should have known,” I say, setting down my fork. “I should have called the cops the second they?—”

Sawyer and Jaxon look at each other, exchanging expressions I don’t fully understand, but Edie reaches across the table and lays her hand on mine. “You had no way of knowing,” she says. “It was Scott. It was all Scott. And he’s long dead now,” She settles back in her chair, her blonde hair a halo around her pretty face. “So am I.”

I can’t believe how calm she is about all of this. How accepting .

I wonder if she would be so accepting of what I’ve done. Doubtful. Scott was an asshole who deserved it. Oliver Raffia was a stranger.

I don’t dwell on it for long, though, because Edie starts to pepper me with questions. Jaxon doesn’t say anything, and I decide to tell her a revised version. That I’d been looking for her since November, digging into true crime sites for any clues I could find. How I connected the sigil on the street art during our last conversation to a crime scene in Beaumont. She looks pretty sheepish at that, and Sawyer gives Jaxon a death glare.

“I told you not to paint that stupid thing on my church,” he says, although he sounds like he’s teasing. Sort of.

Jaxon, though, is nonplussed. “I’m glad I did,” he says. “Otherwise Charlotte wouldn’t be here right now.”

He says it so lightly, so casually. And yet the words shoot straight through to my heart. Because he’s right. That sigil is the reason I found Edie.

That sigil is the reason I found him .

Jaxon looks at me from across the table, and for a moment those big blue eyes of his are the only thing I can see. But then Edie says something to Sawyer that makes him laugh, and the sunlight is bright and shining on everything in the sunroom, setting the table on fire. And that fire illuminates a dark spot inside me that I know, with a sudden and striking certainty, is meant to be there.

“—find Jaxon?”

Edie’s voice jars me back into the present. I blink and turn back to her.

“How’d you find Jaxon?” she says. “Or how did Jaxon find you?”

Her eyes are clear. Bright.

“He kidnapped me,” I say.

Edie and Sawyer both laugh and look at each other, some kind of familiarity passing between them. “Sawyer stalked me,” she says. “But that worked out, didn’t it?”

When Sawyer looks at her, I know he loves her. It’s a black sort of love, thorny like roses. But it’s love.

He’s a Hunter, and he can love.

I glance at Jaxon again, and he’s smiling a little, looking at me with an intensity that makes my insides shake.

I finish the rest of the story over the remains of our meal, although I leave out my strangling Jaxon and the trip to Houston. Jaxon doesn’t say anything about either incident, although he does go into surprisingly shocking detail about killing the two drug dealers who interrupted my escape attempt. It gets Sawyer riled up, and the two of them start one-upping each other with murder stories.

It doesn’t disgust me. Edie, though, wrinkles her nose and says, “Why don’t we leave them to this and you and I go outside?”

She’s human , I think. She’s not like me .

My chest squeezes.

Sawyer and Jaxon barely notice when we get up from the table. They’re too busy arguing about the benefits of using a machete over a hunting knife.

Edie takes me out to their backyard, which is as overgrown as the front, and we sit at a little wrought-iron table and finish our mimosas while the sea wind blows in from the Gulf.

“I know how fucked up this all is,” she says, not quite looking at me.

“Which part?” I swirl my drink around in its glass. “Faking your own death?”

“Falling in love with Sawyer Caldwell.”

It startles me, hearing her say it out loud. I jerk my gaze over to her, but she’s staring out at the garden, the wind pushing her hair back from her face.

“So you do love him,” I say softly.

Edie nods. Tilts her head toward me. “He saved me,” she says. “Not just from Scott, although obviously he did that. But from—from my own self-loathing. He’s—” She hesitates. “Did Jaxon explain what they are? That they aren’t—human?”

Her question thrums on the air. I consider how to answer it. I consider that I should tell her that Jaxon said I was one of them, too.

Eventually, I just nod.

“I feel like he killed the part of me that hated myself,” she says. “And that’s what made me whole.”

I feel tight and breathless. Of course I knew Edie had suffered. The anorexia. Her recovery. Scott trying to sabotage it, then nearly killing her when she wouldn’t let him. I tried my best to help her, but I never quite unlocked the code. Not, it seems, the way Sawyer did.

But I could have. The realization comes to me like a strike, as cold and clammy as the sea wind blowing through Edie’s dormant garden. I curl my fingers around the mimosa glass and see it play out in my head with a clarity so vivid it makes my hands shake. I should have gone to Scott’s mansion by the sea and slammed his head into the plate glass windows that looked down at the beach until his forehead split and his face was a mask of blood. I should have wrapped my hands around his throat and squeezed, pinning him down with my body weight, until his eyes bulged and his tongue lolled out. I should have carved open his torso like a Thanksgiving turkey and taken his organs out one by one, squeezing them until the meat crushed between my fingers.

I should have done all of that for Edie.

But I couldn’t, because there was a string of magic strangling the oldest and truest part of me.

“Charlotte?”

Edie’s voice cuts through the fantasy, and I blink back to the garden with a gasp. Edie frowns, leaning in close. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” My voice shakes, though, and I drown the rest of the mimosa and wish we’d brought the champagne and orange juice out to the garden with us.

“You don’t seem fine.” She scrapes her chair closer and puts her hand on my arm. My eyes flutter. “Is it because of me and Sawyer? I know it’s a lot, but?—”

“No.” My tongue is dry with the need to tell her the entire truth, but all I get out is, “I’m glad you found Sawyer. That he helped you like that.”

She smiles sheepishly. “And I’m glad you found Jaxon,” she says. “I’m glad—that you know about them. You were the only part of my life before that wasn’t total shit and now—” She laughs. “Sawyer doesn’t believe in Jaxon’s gods, but I don’t know. Look at where we are. That sigil brought you here, didn’t it?”

The sigil flashes in my thoughts. That darkness inside me flares, and it’s eager for release somewhere, somehow. With my hands or knife or—something. Anything.

I swear I can hear Edie’s heart beating.

“Yeah, it did.” I swallow and squeeze the plastic stem of my flute glass so hard that it snaps. Edie jumps.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asks.

I take a deep breath and set the broken flute glass on the table, where it rolls in the wind. “What if I—” I’m still not sure I can get it out. “What if I told you I’m?—”

She looks at me expectantly. But I can’t do it.

“Why did you accept Sawyer?” I ask instead.

“Accept him?”

“For what he is. I mean, he?—”

“You don’t have to say it.” Edie drains the rest of her mimosa and balances the empty cup on the table, holding it in place so the sea wind doesn’t blow it into the garden. “I don’t know,” she says. “It just—it’s part of him. What he is.”

The wind howls in my ears, and even though it’s cool, my skin prickles with sweat. My entire body feels like it’s on fire. “What if I told you I’m like him?”

I spit it out so that every word bleeds together, and then the question just hangs there, numb and strange.

Edie gives a sharp laugh. “Charlotte, what the fuck are you talking about? You’re not a Hunter. Sawyer knew what he was from the time he was a kid. It’s not just—” She falters, and I think she can see the shame on my face. “Charlotte. Tell me what’s going on.”

But I shake my head. She’s my best friend, and I still can’t bear to see her reaction.

“Stop this,” she snaps. “Something’s obviously got you fucked up. Tell me.”

The darkness surges inside me like it needs to be purged.

“I did things with Jaxon.” The wind catches my voice and flings it around the dry, rattling garden. “Things like what they were arguing about when we came out here.”

I can’t bring myself to look at Edie, so I stare at an unflowering hibiscus bush instead, waiting for her to react. To scream. To run. To call the cops.

“And you think you’re a Hunter?”

I let my gaze shift over to her, and she doesn’t seem scared or upset. She just studies me. Listening.

“Jaxon thinks I am,” I say. “He thinks all the weird prayers and stuff my mom did when I was a kid suppressed my urges and made me believe I’m, you know?—”

“Human.”

I was going to say normal , but I just nod.

“And what do you think?”

That darkness in me tightens. My throat is bone dry again. I dig my nails into my palm and listen to the wind and wish that the answer that comes to my mind isn’t Jaxon’s right .

“Charlotte.” Edie grabs my hand, her palm cool and dry. “I faked my death so I could start over with Sawyer fucking Caldwell. You can be honest with me.”

“Sawyer’s different.” I look away from her, squinting into the wind. “You said yourself. He saved you from Scott.”

Her fingers tighten. “So did you.”

I jerk my gaze over to her, and she smiles. “You’re the only reason I was able to get out of California,” she says. “But even before that, you saved me. Why did I go into recovery? Because of you. Why did I stay in recovery?” Her eyes glitter. “You, Charlotte. You saved my life.”

Tears form along my lashes, and I try to blink them away. It doesn’t really work. All the pain and confusion from the last few days pour out of me, and Edie pulls me into an embrace, squeezing me in close.

“If you’re like them,” she says against my hair, “if you’re a Hunter, a killer—it doesn’t matter.”

I sob, because it’s true. I am a Hunter. I can feel the truth of it pounding through me. It took seeing Edie with Sawer Caldwell to accept it, but I can’t deny it now.

“You’re still my best friend,” Edie whispers.

And that’s exactly what I needed to hear.