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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

AMbrOSE

M ercy’s fear is like the fine, smokey tequila I used to drink in my youth. The Aguirre family in my hometown distilled it in a little wooden building outside their house, and I always carried a bottle with me whenever I went on my travels. But that branch of the Aguirre line died out sometime in the 1950s, and I haven’t tasted anything like it since.

Until now.

Mercy stares at me from where she’s curled up on the couch, a vision drenched in blood. She’s tucked her skirts around her thighs, but I saw what her cunt looked like when I slid out of her, how my wound painted it crimson while I fucked her. There’s a part of me that wishes I could skip the conversation we’re about to have and dive between her legs and clean her with my tongue.

Maybe I’ll do it when we’re done. A reward for breaking a promise to myself and my mother to never tell a human about the nature of my people.

“What do you mean when you say you’re a Hunter?” she asks, her voice trembling. “ You hunt people?”

“Yes,” I say. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

Her fear spikes, and I breathe it in, getting drunk on it like I used to the Aguirres’ tequila. But not so drunk I can’t stop her when she tries to scramble off the couch. I grab her by the waist and pull her onto my lap, all in the span of a few seconds. Mercy lets out a terrified gasp and goes petrified on top of me. Can’t say I mind.

“Let me explain,” I mutter into her ear, smoothing her hair away from her neck. The blood looks so pretty on the blond, violence mixed with sunlight. “I keep telling you I’m not going to hurt you, and I mean it.”

“Why not?” she sobs. “Why do you keep—touching me and making me—” Her voice falters.

“I’m fond of you.” I shift her around so she’s draped across my lap sideways and I can stare down at her blood-streak face, her features even more delicate when she’s terrified. “Would rather keep you in this world than take you out of it.”

“But you weren’t fond of Raul,” she spits out.

I sigh. “Raul was a means to an end. If it makes you feel any better, he didn’t suffer.”

He’s also currently tucked away in my deep freeze, or at least the meaty parts of him, but I don’t mention it.

“But why ?” she demands, fury momentarily working through her fear. I like it. A sprinkle of cayenne mixed in with the smoke.

“I needed to get on the Church of the Well compound to find Charlotte’s file. That part was true.” I smile at her, hoping to reassure her a bit. It doesn’t work. “But Gunner keeps y’all isolated, and I needed a way to destabilize things so I could get on the campus.” I brush my fingers through my hair, and it pleases me when she doesn’t pull away. “Fortunately for me, there was a beautiful woman down by the Concho when I?—”

“Don’t do that,” Mercy snarls. “Don’t compliment me like that. ”

“It’s true, though.” I smooth her hair away from her face, and she keeps glaring at me, but she doesn’t bat my hand away. Doesn’t try to scramble off my lap. Maybe she’s too afraid to move—but I don’t think so. She did let me fuck her, after all.

“You still haven’t told me what you are,” she says. “Why you were able to cut yourself like that.”

My chest squeezes with tension. Talking about killing is one thing. Human men kill all the time. But this, the truth of what I am—this is what I don’t want to tell her.

“You called me a demon,” I say carefully. “But I’m not from hell. I’m not a spirit. Not in league with Satan.”

Mercy glares at me, even though the fire of her anger still hasn’t overtaken her fear.

“But I am—more than human.” Her body is warm against mine, her heart thudding wildly. “Better than human. Capable of hunting humans to fill an urge I don’t think you could ever understand.”

Mercy pales beneath the blood. “But what are you?”

I consider this question for far longer than I probably should. “There’s no word for what I am,” I finally say. “My people, people like me—we have different names for ourselves. My mother called us los cocos.”

“The coconuts?” Mercy says flatly.

I bite back a smile—she’s terrified, my pretty blood-soaked human, but she still has some fight in her.

“No,” I say. “El Coco is an old name for the boogeyman in Spanish.”

Mercy studies me. I risk snaking my arm around her waist to pull her a little closer. She frowns.

“You’re the boogeyman.”

“Sí.” I trail my fingers along her arm so that the delicate hair there stands on end.

“Why did your cut heal so fast?”

“Why can I hear your heart beating, pretty human? ”

She scowls when I say pretty human.

“ Why can I smell your fear?” I tuck my fingers under her chin and force her to look at me. “Your arousal?”

Her eyes widen and she squeezes her legs shut. I laugh.

“I’m designed to hunt humans like you,” I tell her. “I can sniff your kind out in the dark. I’m stronger and faster.” I lean close, tilting my head like I’m going to kiss her. And although I had been teasing earlier, now I do catch a whiff of her arousal, faint beneath the coppery tang of blood and the maelstrom of her emotions. “But most importantly, I’m impossible to kill.”

Mercy’s eyes are enormous as she stares up at me. And I take a deep breath. Because this is it. This is the part my mother told me I should never tell another human. Es nuestro vantaja mejor, mi cielito , she would say, her long fingers stroking through my hair. Nunca deberías regalarlo.

“That cut I gave myself,” I say. “If I were a human man, I would be bleeding out right now. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to fuck you.”

Mercy’s cheeks turn crimson.

“I healed quickly because I was—” I grin devilishly. “Engaging in vigorous activity, shall we say? If you had been fighting me, you might have thought you had the upper hand. But the harder I fight, the faster I heal.”

“We weren’t fighting,” she mutters.

“Fighting and fucking are the same as far as the boogeyman’s concerned.”

That scares her. I breathe the scent in deep. “Now, if I had cut deeper,” I continue. “If I had sliced through my organs, I unfortunately would not have been able to fuck you. And you would have thought I was dead.”

Mercy watches me warily. When I run my hand up her leg, she jolts a little.

“Remember,” I purr. “I can smell your arousal. ”

“You w-wouldn’t have really been dead?” she stammers out, my fingers slipping between the thick press of her thighs.

“Not in the way you’ll die someday.” I stop and look her straight in the eye. “Which won’t be anytime soon, by the way. Not for decades.”

Mercy doesn’t say anything. I keep going.

“But I would have appeared dead.” I gently pry her legs open. “My heart would have stopped, I wouldn’t be breathing, all that shit. But I would have been able to drag myself outside and burrow in the dirt like a cicada. Then I would have revived.”

I stop, my hand nearly to Mercy’s softly throbbing clit—I can feel it, undeniable to my Hunter’s senses. She’s still draped across my lap and my head’s still bowed over hers. We’re like a bloody pieta. Except she’s not dead, and I meant it when I said she won’t be.

“Revived?” she whispers.

“Come back from the sort-of-dead,” I say. ‘That’s what I am, humanita. A nightmare. And you can’t kill nightmares.”

I wait, unmoving. Whatever we do next, it’ll be up to her. If she wants to try and test if I’m telling the truth—well, the knife is still lying in my blood a few feet away. I won’t let her do any real damage, of course, but I also hope she at least tries it. It’ll be fun to let her sink my own blade into my skin, let her know what it’s like to be a killer.

But Mercy doesn’t go for the knife. She shifts in my lap, rubbing her plump ass against my semi-stiff cock. When she feels it, she bites her lip and presses her thighs around my hand. But she doesn’t say anything. Instead, she slides her hand over my belly, feeling once again for my wound.

“It’s closed up,” she whispers. “It shouldn’t—that’s impossible.” She looks at me, her eyes wet with tears. “You’re telling the truth, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” Something surges up in me, a kind of strange protective desire. “I know I lied to you, Mercy. I’m not a traveling preacher anymore, although I was, a long time ago?—”

“How long?”

“A little under two hundred years.”

She goes pale again and kind of swoons against me. I can feel her blood pressure dropping, and I scoop my hand behind her head and prop her up.

“But there’s a lot I didn’t lie to you about,” I say fiercely. “Every time I touched you—I meant that. I did. And when I say I’m not going to kill you, that’s not a lie, either.”

“Why not?” she whispers. “What’s so special about me?”

The question brings me up short. Because I don’t actually know.

I wonder, briefly, if this is what Sawyer felt like the first time he saw Edie.

“It just feels wrong,” I finally say. “To kill you.”

Then, because I’m not sure what else to do, I kiss her, taking her face in both hands and pulling her up close to me. She yields to me as beautifully as she did in the Church of the Well bunker, her lips melting into mine. For a long time, all I do is kiss her mouth, slow and sweet, neither of us making a sound.

And then I start working my way down, kissing over her throat to taste the salt of my own blood. Mercy whimpers softly, her hand coming up to tangle in my hair, and I keep going, over the place where her breasts strain against the blood-soaked fabric of her dress. Then I slide her off my lap so I can go even lower, until I’m able to push up her skirt and find the treasure hidden inside.

“What are you do?—”

I bite the inside of her thigh, making her yelp. “Licking you clean.”

“You can’t,” she gasps, shifting her hips into my face.

I don’t tell her how much I like the taste of blood. Baby steps. But I do drag my tongue along the blood caking her thighs until I find the soft silk of her pussy—and effectively silence any of her protestations. Mercy falls backward, hips bucking up as I dive into her blood-encrusted cunt, devouring my taste in hers with long swipes of my tongue.

“Ambrose,” she whimpers, tangling her hands in my hair.

“Be quiet and come for me,” I growl before attacking her pussy again, parting her lips open with my tongue so I can give her a good fucking. She groans her appreciation, thighs already starting to tremble around my ears.

And she thought she couldn’t come .

I chuckle at the thought as I withdraw my tongue from her pussy so I can lick the blood away from her clit, which just makes her moan and writhe on the couch. I know she’s close; all the signs are there in her body, all that fluttering and pounding and rushing. And that just makes me eat her harder, my own blood bursting on my tongue. It’s almost enough for me to imagine that I’m devouring her for real, pulling her into me bite by bite.

“Ambrose!” she cries, arching her back with ecstasy. “You shouldn’t be doing this—The blood?—”

I tear myself away from her sweet cunt to look at her over the ruined mess of her dress. “I’m the fucking boogeyman, remember?” I grin at her, knowing my mouth is smeared with my blood and cum and her arousal, and Mercy’s fear spikes, and I nearly come in my goddamn pants again.

“You like this,” she whispers.

“No.” I shake my head as I slide two fingers inside her to stroke along her inner wall. That undoes her, the way I knew it would. “No, I fucking love it.”

Then I dive between her legs again, licking the blood away as I fingerfuck her closer and closer to release. Mercy’s leg muscles quiver wildly, and her heartbeat is like a thunderstorm filling up the room.

“Come on, humanita,” I murmur. “Come for me. ”

Then I press my lips to her swollen clit and suck.

Mercy screams, a beautiful shattering sound that goes straight to my dick. Her orgasm moves through her body in waves, and I keep licking her—licking up my blood, licking up her desire.

I keep licking until she’s nothing but a quivering mess, melting at my command.