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CHAPTER TWO

AMbrOSE

W ell. That didn’t go how I expected, although I can’t say I’m disappointed by the result.

I had intended to take some inspiration from my friend Jaxon and set up a vaguely blasphemous sculpture with the inedible body parts on the bank of the Concho. Considering I’m doing this entire thing as a favor for his girlfriend Charlotte, it felt fitting, even though I normally prefer not to leave evidence of my crimes lying around.

Especially since, in the last fifty years or so, I’ve developed a taste for the meat.

At this point, I’m nearly two hundred years old, counting any time spent in the dirt recovering after a death, and I’ve had a baker’s dozen of those in my lifetime. You get tired of things, living this long. You get tired of sex and sleep. You get tired of food. But back in the ‘70s I befriended another one of my kind who argued we ought to treat humans the way the better humans treat deer and wild boar. Got to use them up completely.

She was an unusual one, and older too, about a hundred years older than me. She had fallen into the hippie shit that had been popular a few years earlier. Back to the land. Long hair and bare feet. Kill for food, not pleasure.

Still, eating her big succulent roasts gave me a taste for human meat, and so I started to collect the best cuts from my victims: the rump, the thigh, the belly—which makes a fine, salty bacon. The man from the church was no exception. Waste not, want not, my old hippie friend would always say. Sometimes, I wonder what she’s up to, if she’s still using every part of the human. She’s not in Texas anymore.

Anyway, my point is that most of my victim is currently sitting in my freezer. What I’d brought with me for my bait was just the unusable parts, since using every part of the human really isn’t feasible. The head, sans its teeth, being the main one. I also had both forearms and his hands, fingertips still intact since I want him identified. The feet. Big, awkward pieces that are so obviously what they are. Soft meats, like the innards and the lungs and such, I feed to my dogs. I was ready to get to work.

But when I arrived at the river, someone was there.

I smelled her before I saw her or heard her, a soft lilac scent that drifted on the balmy early morning air. I stood beside my Oldsmobile, dragging that sack of hands and arms and a single severed head, and breathed it in, trying to place where it was coming from.

Then I heard her over the rushing babble of the river—her soft, rhythmic heartbeat and the gentle whisper of her breath. I dropped the sack and crept forward along the riverbank until I saw her: Young, pretty, her long pale hair up in a braid and silvery in the starlight. As I watched from the brush, she waded into the ankle-high water, a flashlight dancing over the surface.

I knew immediately she was from the church because of how she was dressed, in one of those shapeless calico dresses. But what the hell was she doing out there at five in the morning ?

I had to consider my options then. Clearly, I couldn’t set up any displays. But I had my witness here already. A pretty little thing who could run screaming to the church and set off the turmoil I needed to worm my way inside.

Fortunately, we’ve had all those thunderstorms, which do little to break the heat but do put on a great light show and, more importantly, flood the rivers. This morning the Concho was churning its way through the West Texas desert, right past my witness. My job just got a lot more easy.

So I went back upriver and tossed in the body parts, one after another, throwing them toward the center of the river where she was shining her flashlight. I knew there was a chance she wouldn’t realize what she was looking at, but I figured if it didn’t work, I could just drive downriver, recollect them, and try again tomorrow night.

But then the poor thing slipped and fell into the water. And then I heard her start to scream.

In my many years walking this earth, I’ve become a connoisseur of screams. Humans can’t tell the difference between them, but I can. Screams of pleasure have a throaty undercurrent like good whiskey. Screams of pain have a desperation to them, a pleading, that always goes straight to my cock. And screams of fear—well, those are the classic, aren’t they? Pure adrenaline converted to audio. It’s like hearing the creation of the universe.

That girl screamed with fear, mingled with a touch of disgust and—most deliciously—sorrow. As soon as I heard it, that braided, multilayered scream, I knew she had found the head.

Even better, though, I suspect she recognized its former owner. That’s what the sorrow was.

At that point, I was about a half-mile upriver from her, but I’m not a human. I’m the boogeyman, and it only took me about a minute and a half to clear the difference. I got there just as she was dragging herself out of the other side of the river, the head still in the water.

She didn’t see me.

Of course not; it was still dark and she was panicked and I wasn’t about to follow her up to the church compound. But I saw her. She practically dove into her golf course and peeled out across the dirt, heading straight to the church in a cloud of panic.

Like I said, it all worked out better than I had expected.

I’m home now, home being an old ranch house set off the highway. I’ve got a half dozen houses scattered across the western half of the state, having collected them over the years. It’s easier to hunt if you have a wide area, a bigger pool of victims, and traveling’s a lot easier when you’ve got a semi-permanent home to go to.

This is always the hard part. Biding my time. Letting them steep before I sweep in and destroy their lives.

I pace around my hot, sunny living room while one of my dogs, an old mutt I call Max, follows around at my heels, hoping I’ve got more wet meat for him. I keep thinking about the girl I saw—my second victim, technically, even though right now I’ve got no intention of killing her. Sometimes, humans are better use to you alive.

I sink down on my couch and flip open my laptop and type in Cocana County murder, even though I suspect the church will try to keep this out of the press for as long as they can. I’m right. Nothing. I slam the laptop shut and toss it aside and Max hops up on the couch beside me, his big curling tail wagging. I pet his head distractedly, rubbing him on the spot between his ears that he likes, and just kind of stare at the wall.

I haven’t hunted like this in years, although there was a period of time when it was my preferred method. What got me on this kick was Charlotte. She’s another of my kind, but unlike most of us, she didn’t know what she was for the first thirty years of her life thanks to her upbringing in the California branch of the Church of the Well. Her adoptive parents—not Hunters themselves, of course—did some kind of charm meant to stave off the devil, but instead, it bound her nature. Kept her from killing. It wasn’t until Jaxon broke her open that she found herself.

I have a habit of collecting young Hunters—like Jaxon, when he first came up in the world, and now Charlotte, and our mutual friend Sawyer, currently stalking the balmy streets of Pensacola, Florida. Last year, I told Charlotte I wanted to find the names of her parents. Her birth parents. Because at least one of them has to be a Hunter like her and me and the rest of us. I’m finally getting around to it.

As it turns out, she was adopted through the Church of the Well. And, lucky for me, their main cell is up here in West Texas, so close to my own personal hunting grounds. Another convenient fact? I used to be a preacher myself, and I know exactly what to do and what to say to endear myself to someone like the Reverand Sterling Gunner, former televangelist and current High and Holy Prophet of the Church of the Well, whose gated compound is just a forty-five-minute drive north of the ranch house where I currently sit.

All I need to do is talk my way into the compound, find Charlotte’s adoption records, and get out. Once I have the names, Charlotte can find out where she came from, and I can get back to hunting the way I prefer.

I stand up and pace around, rolling my plan through my head. The girl at the river has almost certainly planted those first few seeds of fear and panic. I’ll let them marinate for a day, even though I’m itching to get this over with. I’m not terribly keen on the idea of going back to my old preacher persona, truth be told. All this nonsense with Charlotte has me thinking about my own youth, when I was a completely different person.

I grew up the illegitimate son of a Catholic priest in Mexican Texas with a murderess for a mother—a murderess who strangled me at twelve years old so she could put me in the ground and make sure I came back out like her. The boogeyman. El Coco.

A Hunter.

My father being a human priest always made me interested in human religions, which was why, when I was older, I went traveling across northern Mexico and the newly-formed Republic of Texas as an itinerant preacher, spreading the word of a god that hates me so I had a way to do the things my body needs to do. I’d go into frontier settlements and spread the Good Word for a few days. Earn their trust.

Then I’d slaughter them and slip off into the darkness like the wind.

I stop by my window and push the curtain aside. There’s not much of a view: just the flatlands around the house, my dusty old car, the dirt road winding up to my property.

A tail thumps my leg; I look down to see Max staring up at me, his long pink tongue lolling out of his grinning mouth. I’ve always kept a dog, ever since I left my mother’s side and struck out on my own. What’s a hunter without a hound dog, after all? His sister Roxi is around here somewhere, too. She’s the really vicious one.

I reach down and scratch his head. “I think you’ll be good at doing it this way,” I tell him. “You always liked being friendly, huh? I’ll need that.”

Max barks, his ears perked up.

“I just hope your sister can behave herself.” I turn my gaze back to the window, thinking through my plans. Give them a day for the initial shock. Keep an eye on the news, not that I expect to see much. The Church of the Well keeps to themselves, from what I’ve seen. Living off the grid and all that. But if someone does report something, I need to know.

Then I’ll drive up to the gate with my two dogs and ask them for a bit of Christ’s grace. An itinerant preacher, in this day and age? They’ll eat it up, I think. I hope so. Otherwise, I might have to kill my way in, which I’m not too keen to do.

I want to do this cleanly. Invisibly. And then I want to move on with my life.

Something snags in my thoughts, though. The blonde at the river. Her lilac scent and her lovely, symphonic scream.

I’ll get to see her again, won’t I?

The thought sets a fire in me—one I haven’t felt for a long, long time.