Page 11 of Tourist Season

“Fucking … just … comply … with … instruction … Jake …,” Harper hisses between gritted teeth as she pushes and pulls until she finally yanks the head hard enough to dislodge it.

She shrieks as it faceplants into her chest, but it’s really more a sound of irritation than the abject terror I was hoping for.

“Even in the afterlife, Jake? Seriously? That is fucked up , dude.”

I just … do not understand. And frankly, I’m a little pissed off.

I spent all night chopping this asshole up and hauling him around, and I didn’t even finish, for fucksakes.

There’s still a bag of body parts strapped to my back.

It takes a long-ass time to saw a person into pieces in the pitch dark and not wake up your sleeping enemy.

And I was aiming for a big reaction. Screaming.

Tears. Horror. Panic. But what I’m getting just seems more like mild confusion sprinkled with a hint of annoyance, like this is nothing more than an unwelcome inconvenience to her morning routine.

She’s just standing there, seemingly unfazed, with the head clutched between her hands, staring down into the bloodied, vacant holes where the eyes once were.

The raven caws from the branch of a nearby apple tree. “Want to fill me in?” she asks the bird, who caws again, though I swear he looks in my direction. “For the amount of free food I give you, I think you need to start contributing more than the occasional trinket.”

Harper turns a bit more in my direction, but she doesn’t fully face me or notice me watching from the shadows, all her attention fixed to the head in her hands.

There are two bloodied marks on her tank top from when the eye holes smacked her chest, and I’m nearly overwhelmed by the unexpected urge to find a way to resurrect that gym-bro douchebag so I can kill him again.

I shake my head, trying to clear it of the intrusive thoughts that seem to appear every time I look at Harper.

It’s probably just the desire to claim my prey.

That guy was obviously a threat. It’s nothing but more biology.

I’m like any apex predator, unwilling to yield its next meal or slice of safety in an unforgiving world.

“You look like you had an eventful night,” Harper says to the head as she turns it over and examines the edges of his torn skin.

I never got a good look at it in the dark, but there must be marks from the ax on the vertebrae.

She lets out a low and thoughtful hum, sticking one of her gloved fingers right into the flesh to pull it back and scrutinize the bone as she turns the head in the light.

Her nose crinkles. She seems to deliberate.

Having reached some kind of conclusion, she shrugs, and though her expression still appears unsure, she gives Jake Hornell’s head a single, decisive nod.

And then, to my horror, she fucking sniffs it .

In an instant, she recoils. Harper’s face is a mixture of disgust and confusion when she holds the head away from her as far as she can. “So gross,” she whispers.

She wants to talk about gross? I’ll bring the fucking gross.

“I could not fucking agree more,” I say as I step from my hiding place.

I hold up Jake’s severed hands and give her a slow clap as Harper spins to face me.

The head is still clutched in her gloved grasp.

Her eyes are the color of sharpened steel, the surprise and confusion in them fleeting.

Her shock quickly dissolves into a glare that’s ready to flay the flesh from my bones.

“Ballmeat guy,” she hisses.

I give her a dark and devious grin, and her eyes narrow. “Is that how you remember me? ‘ Ballmeat guy? ’ Well,” I say, tapping one of Jake’s fingers to my cheek in the mimicry of a thoughtful countenance, “that kind of makes sense, coming from you .”

I creep a few steps closer, but I stop the moment I see her go rigid with fear.

Why I would halt so abruptly, I have no idea.

It’s just an ingrained response, matter over mind.

And my mind is saying she’s the person I’ve been searching for.

The soul I’ve come to collect. If anything, it should be a struggle to keep myself from rushing forward to close my hands around her throat. It’s the least that she deserves.

I force myself to take another step in her direction. “Who’s Arthur?”

Harper’s cheeks flush crimson. “You’re …” she counters, eluding my question. “You’re stalking me?”

“I’m not stalking. I’m hunting. He was stalking.” I wave to the head still gripped in her hands. Her brows flicker as she tries to work through everything that’s happening. When her gaze returns to me, she tilts her head.

“So you killed him for me …? To keep me … safe …?”

My mouth opens and closes, but no sound comes out.

No.

… Definitely not.

I feel like I’ve run face-first into a brick wall. Nothing about her is what I expected. Nothing about this has gone the way I wanted.

“Listen,” I say, dropping the severed hands to my sides, “if we’re going to be bitter enemies, I really think we need to improve our communication skills.”

“Why do I want to be enemies with you?”

“Perhaps because I just killed Jake, the man you have a crush on, and left his head in your bird feeder …?”

“I don’t have a crush on Jake.”

I sigh. “I’m starting to gather that.”

“If you’re stalking me—”

“I’m hunting —”

“You’re doing a pretty shit job of it, because you clearly didn’t notice that Jake Hornell is a fucking creep.

Hence his nickname, Touchy Feely Creepy Jakey .

I think you just did me a favor, actually.

” She shrugs, feigning a casualness that never makes it to her cutting glare. “Maybe that makes us friends.”

“We are not friends.”

Harper sighs, as though I’m merely here wasting her time, another inconvenience that she can just barrel through before returning to her clearly fucked-up life. “Figured. So, enlighten me. Why are you here?”

I take a step closer. “You really don’t remember me?”

“You like tea bagging and turkey sandwiches,” she says as she edges a step backward. “I think I remember you pretty clearly, yep.”

“That’s not the first time we met.”

Harper’s eyes travel over my face, roaming the contours of my features so slowly that I can feel her glare linger on my skin. “I guess I left an impression.”

I laugh. It’s the first genuine, uninhibited laugh I’ve had in a long time, now that I think about it.

Just like the smile that broke free when I teased Harper at the coffee shop yesterday was the first one since my accident that made my heart jump in my chest. I’d forgotten how much I missed that feeling, the one that swoops through you, like being at the top of a roller coaster and suddenly free falling.

“You can say that,” I finally manage when my laughter subsides.

Clearly, Harper doesn’t think it’s quite as funny as I do, and I’m a little surprised it hasn’t jogged her memory.

“Well, I think we’ve established that I have no idea who the fuck you are and, contrary to whatever you think, I’ve never met you before.

So, thanks, I guess, for doing me an obviously unintentional favor that could send you to jail for the rest of your life.

But unless you’re staying to talk about hobbies over breakfast,” she says as she raises the head between us, “maybe you should just leave.”

My grip around the bloodied severed wrists tightens. Harper seems to sense the threat, cataloging every minute change in the tension of my muscles, or the fury in my eyes, or the dark, merciless smile that creeps across my lips.

“I don’t think I’m going anywhere just yet,” I say, taking another step closer.

She’s only a few feet away. Just a flash of motion and she’d be within my grasp.

I force myself to remember that it’s not time yet—there are still a few weeks to go.

But it’s so fucking tempting to rush toward her now.

I could squeeze those words from her delicate throat, the ones I’ve been waiting to hear: It’s my fault .

“Harper?” a woman’s voice calls from inside the house. Harper’s eyes widen. Her mouth pops open around a silent oh .

“Who the fuck is that?” I hiss, but the kitchen door is already closing, someone’s footsteps nearing the outside corner of the house.

The raven caws and flaps away from his perch on the peak of the stained bird feeder to hide among the branches of the oak, as though he’s unwilling to become an accessory to the crime that will surely spell our imminent demise.

And Harper and I? We can’t seem to do anything but stare at each other, both of us frozen in time.

“There you are,” a woman says as she rounds the corner with a book in her hands, barely glancing up at us as she enters the back garden. She nods at me before turning her attention back to her book. “’Sup.”

I give her a weak, thin “Hey,” sliding the severed hands behind my back. But Harper is not so quick to move. She’s still got the head clutched in her grasp, and rather than try to get rid of it, she presses the face to her chest and folds her arms around it.

“Hi, Maya,” Harper squeaks out.

Maya glances up, her obsidian eyes narrowing behind gold-rimmed glasses as they dart down to the head and back up to Harper’s face. “You’re entering the gravity races this year?”

“Ha … yeah. I guess so.” Harper’s smile is too bright. Too forced. Her eyes move too quickly when she looks down at the head she clutches to her chest before refocusing on her unexpected guest. “Thought I’d … you know”—she pats the top of the head—“throw my hat in the ring.”