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CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHARLOTTE

“ T hey’re upstairs,” Jaxon says.

We’ve made it across the backyard and are now standing by the back door. My heart keeps turning circles in my chest. I tell myself it’s fear, but I know it’s not.

“You can tell that?” I frown at the shut door and squeeze my fingers around the knife blade.

He nods, his face dark with concentration. “You will, too, someday. Don’t worry about it tonight, though.” He looks over at me, and I have the sense that I’m seeing a part of him I’ve never seen before. The only time I came close was in Houston when he was wearing that mask. Tonight, though, he’s stripped bare, and it’s like I’m staring right into the pitch of his soul.

He grabs my chin, eyes boring into mine. “Do not die. Your first death needs to be special.”

I take a deep, shuddery breath. And nod. Because I agree with him.

I want you to do it , I think, the words dancing on the tip of my tongue. I can’t get them out, though, so I only lift my knife a little, like I’m showing him I can use it.

“Are you ready?” he asks, still holding my chin.

“Yes.” My voice cracks, but at least the word comes out.

Jaxon nods, then eases the door open The kitchen light is on, bright and garish. “They want me to know something’s wrong,” he mutters. “Toying with me.” He grins, and it’s manic and crazed. The grin of a killer. “They don’t know what I am.”

He slips in, and I follow.

The house buzzes and breathes. There’s a rackety rhythm coming from somewhere that really does sound like heartbeats.

This is what you were made for.

The voice isn’t mine, and it isn’t Jaxon’s, and it sends electricity shooting down my spine. I squeeze my knife handle and follow Jaxon’s strong, thick back as he slips through the house, barely making a noise. When we get to the stairs, he stops, listening.

I listen, too. There’s a riot of sound, like what I expect the swamp sounds like in summer—overlapping rhythms blending together into a kind of music. I study Jaxon’s face, wondering what he hears in all of it. More than I do, I’m sure.

Although I hear far more than I would have a week ago.

“I think they’re in my bedroom,” Jaxon murmurs, so softly I barely hear him over the strange noises of the house. “Be careful.”

I nod, afraid that anything I say will be too loud. Something flickers across Jaxon’s face—a surge of affection breaking through his killer’s countenance.

Then he kisses me.

It’s soft and chaste, little more than his lips brushing against mine, but it sends heat wracking through my core. His gaze lingers, just for a second.

And then he’s going upstairs.

I have a moment of hesitation. It feels like habit more than any real reservations—just a flash of a thought that I could turn around run out of here and keep running until I’m back in California. But something stops me. A truth locked away in my heart.

I don’t want to go back to California. I want to follow Jaxon. I want to stay here with him, just like I said in the car.

I want to stay in this dusty old house in the swamp. I want Jaxon to train me. I want to Hunt with him and make art out of bones and skin and fuck in pools of blood. I want to eat his fancy Cajun meals and drink red wine on his couch and have a whole life that was unimaginable to me a month ago but was, I realize now, the life I’ve been searching for since before I can remember.

Jaxon’s halfway up the stairs when he glances back at me, and I feel it again, a black thread of connection. But it doesn’t connect me to the knife. It connects me to him.

And so I go creeping up the stairs behind him, hardly daring to breathe. The sounds swirl around me, somehow louder than before, and I sense other things, too: a melange of scents like an old spice cabinet, a prickling in the air that tells me danger is nearby. Or prey. I’m not sure which.

Jaxon glides through the landing like a shark moving through water. I feel clumsy in comparison, a newborn foal. But a foal with teeth.

Bored male voices drift out into the hallway. They’re talking about an MMA fight, I think.

“Bullshit if you think Locasta can take Siminisky! It’s not even a fucking contest.”

“The fuck you mean? Lacosta is oh and three?—“

And then?—

“Shut the fuck up, both of you.”

There are three of them. Jaxon was right.

“I heard something,” the voice says. The leader, I think. “Coulter, go check it out.”

The floorboards creak. I sidle up behind Jaxon, who stands unbothered, clutching his machete in one hand and the meat cleaver in the other. He turns his head toward me, eyes glinting, and jerks his head. Stand behind me , he’s saying, and I know he’s thinking about guns.

The door to his bedroom opens, and a man steps out. He looks ordinary, dressed in a sleek leather jacket, his hair going thin on the top. He does have a gun, a black pistol.

Everything that happens next happens fast. He looks at us. Sees us.

And then Jaxon is on him, stabbing both blades into his side. The man screams and spits blood across Jaxon’s face before he topples to the ground with a loud thump.

Then there’s another man, but I don’t see much of him before Jaxon strides into his bedroom as if no one is here but the two of us.

“What the fu—” someone shouts, and a gun goes off. I feel it before I hear it, the splinter of wood and the whizz of a bullet brushing past my ear. Then—screams.

Adrenaline surges through me, an overwhelming need to join in on the carnage.

I plunge forward, toward the screams in Jaxon’s bedroom, nearly slipping in the blood of his first victim. I stumble through the doorway to find a man kneeling on the ground, clutching the stump of one hand to his chest, blood pouring out across the floor. He looks over at me, confusion in his eyes, and goes silent for half a second.

“Help,” he croaks.

Movement flickers from the other side of the room: Jaxon stalking the third man like a panther.

This man is the leader. I’m sure of it. He’s older, and he wears a casual tailored suit, which feels absurd given the situation. Blood is everywhere and the man missing his hand has started screaming again.

The leader has a gun pointed at Jaxon’s chest.

“What do you say?” he says amicably. “Let’s talk about it.”

Jaxon looks over at me, his face splattered with blood.

“Who is this?” I spit out.

The man tosses me a lazy glance like he’s unbothered by my presence. “This your girl?” He grins at me, but I can sense the fear in him. I can taste it, a syrupy darkness like my favorite Turkish coffee. “Sweetheart, I just told your boyfriend here that I’d pay him a million dollars each year to come work for me. You’d like that, huh? Fancy dinners. Expensive handbags.”

Expensive cliches, more like. I step forward, every muscle in my body quivering. “Who are you?”

The man glances at Jaxon, but Jaxon just keeps standing there like a nightmare, his blades dripping blood. I don’t think he’s moved at all. “Damien Tyloch,” the man says smoothly. “I’d offer my hand, but well, I’m currently engaged.”

I narrow my eyes. “But who are you?”

Tyloch studies me for a moment, his gun still pointed at Jaxon. “I run the Undying Lineage of the Stars,” he says. “And I’m afraid I made a rather grave error when I set up an arrangement with a certain entity .”

The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, and I can feel Jaxon’s bloodlust radiating off him. But I want to understand what’s going on. I want to know about the man I killed, the man who awoke the Hunter in me.

“So you knew Oliver Raffia,” I say.

Tyloch laughs—he’s nervous, the laugh edged in hysteria. “We were partners,” he says. “Until I had to sacrifice him to appease an evil god.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I feel like your girl is more reasonable than you,” Tyloch says to Jaxon. “This is what I was trying to explain. We have a shared benefactor from the Abyss.”

Jaxon’s gods. That must be who the entity is, the evil god—one of Jaxon’s gods.

One of my gods.

“That’s why I’m here,” Tyloch continues, glancing over at me. “Your boyfriend is one of the best assassins I’ve ever seen. I could use someone with his skills. So talk some sense into him, won’t you?”

Jaxon glances at me with an almost imperceptible movement, and I feel, just for a half-second, a deluge of emotions. He thinks this shit is funny . That’s the only reason he’s letting Tyloch talk, the only reason he’s letting Tyloch keep a gun trained on his chest. Jaxon’s toying with him, and he thinks I’m toying with him too. Playing the part of the scared girlfriend, Tyloch’s potential salvation.

“Why did Raffia have to be sacrificed?” I ask.

Tyloch frowns. “That’s of no concern to you, young lady.”

And then he sweeps the gun away from Jaxon and points it at my chest and, once again, my fear surges up.

So does Jaxon’s. I smell it, stronger than Tyloch’s fear, stronger than the metallic tang of the terror and suffering pouring out of the man Jaxon wounded, who’s still whimpering and bleeding beside me. Jaxon’s panic slams over me like a wash of cold air.

Do not die.

Tyloch laughs, hard and cruel. “So that’s how I break through to you, huh?” He looks at me, but he’s not talking to me. “You know the terms, boy. You’ve got ten seconds to decide before I shoot those gorgeous tits of hers.”

Jaxon looks at me and an inhuman voice echoes in my head.

Move .

I jump sideways at the same time that Jaxon swings his cleaver and lodges it in Tyloch’s neck. The gun fires, exploding a section of the wall into plaster and wood splinters. My ears ring.

I whirl around as Jaxon jerks his cleaver away with a fan of thick blood. Tyloch topples to the floor, wheezing out one last, rattling breath. Jaxon watches him, then lifts his gaze to me.

He looks like a god of death.

He’s drenched in blood. His hair is stringy with it, and his arms cord with muscle as he clenches the meat cleaver and his machete at his sides. He meets my gaze and smiles in a way that’s like baring his teeth, and I want him so badly it feels like my heart is going to burst out of my chest.

He didn’t even touch those knives on his belt, and I wonder if he brought them because he was worried about me.

Jaxon smiles at me, a beacon in the midst of all this carnage. “Do you want to take care of him, little Hunter?”

I don’t know who he means at first, but then he tilts his head and I remember the third man. At some point, he started inching his way toward the door, but he stops now, eyes flicking back and forth between us, his fear a scent that makes the back of my throat ache.

Another man who hasn’t done anything to me. Who was probably only here because Tyloch hired him. I’m sure he’s done terrible things. Trafficked young women. Carried out sacrifices and other strategic deaths. Slid heroin into the veins of broken communities.

He’s done terrible things, but so have I.

I turn away from Jaxon and walk over to the man, who whimpers and trembles in front of me. Some small part of me still whispers that wanting to kill him isn’t normal.

Except it is. For me, for Jaxon, it is.

“Please,” he whispers, and I’m struck with a hot, sexual power as I tower over him, my knife at my side. I know what it’s like to make someone come, to decide whether or not they experience pleasure. I’ve done that hundreds of times. But deciding if they get to live or not?—

It’s a million times better.

“Sorry,” I say, and then I jab the knife into the side of his throat, groaning as I penetrate through the muscles and sinew and some bony structure that grabs at the blade. Blood spurts hot across my face, and I pull the knife out to do it again, and then again, just like I did with Oliver Raffia. I keep doing it until this man’s dead, too, and then I leave the knife lodged in his flesh and drop back on my ass, drawing in deep, steadying breaths.

Jaxon’s footsteps thud behind me. He crouches down and uses his bloody hand to draw my hair away from my throat. Then he kisses me, licking the blood away.

“Fuck me,” I whisper, staring at the corpse I just created, wishing I could make another.

“I was hoping you’d stay that,” he growls, and then he yanks me up by my blood-drenched hair.