Chapter 30
ROWAN
Ican not believe I’m doing this, riding shotgun in a rented Honda Civic with a woman who isn’t Abilene Snow.
Charlotte hums along to the music playing softly in the background.
Some mournful female singer backed by orchestral swells.
I study Charlotte’s profile through my killing face, looking at the family resemblance.
She doesn’t look anything like my mother, that’s true.
But she really does kind of look like me.
“You can take off your mask,” she says suddenly, her eyes still on the road.
“I told you, it’s not a mask.”
Charlotte glances sideways at me. “Then what is it?”
I hate this. I feel like I’m under a microscope. “My face.”
Charlotte doesn’t say anything to that. The music plays along softly, and the scenery flashes by. Big empty fields full of short, stubby Texas corn.
“Where are we going?”
“Out to the middle of nowhere. I know what you look like, by the way.”
“Obviously.” I shift around in my seat and cross my arms over my chest. “I mean, I assumed so. Since you know my real name.”
I still hate that, too. I don’t like this stranger knowing anything about me. Knowing my secrets. Secrets I haven’t even been able to tell Abi—like what my disguise is.
“I’m just saying, you can take it off,” she says. “Put it on when we do the kill, you know? That’s how my boyfriend does it.”
“It’s different.”
Charlotte chuckles a little. “How could you know that?”
“Because it is,” I snap. “This is my face. This is me. The other face, Rowan—“ It feels weird saying my name out loud like this, and it feels cottony in my mouth. “That’s the mask. The disguise.”
Charlotte goes quiet again, tilting her head a little, like she’s thinking on what I just said.
I hope this is the end of it. To be honest, I’m regretting coming with her.
My responsibilities are in Rosado. Both the hotel—which I had to leave in Judy’s capable hands—and, more importantly, Abi.
I tell myself she’s fine. I rarely watch her during the day, and the biggest threat to her is dead.
But I still don’t like it, leaving her alone.
“Has she seen it?” Charlotte asks suddenly. “Your, ah, disguise?”
I whip my gaze over to her. She’s still looking at the road, hands ten and two, all very responsible. But she’s wearing that smug, satisfied smile.
“Who?” I say, even though I know perfectly well.
Charlotte rolls her eyes. “The woman who lives at the funeral parlor. The one you’re always following around like a lovesick puppy.”
“I don’t do that,” I snap.
Charlotte just laughs again. “Sure. You don’t sit outside her house every night instead of sleeping, right?”
“I sleep,” I say, somewhat defensively.
“Not much.” Charlotte leans back a little in her seat, tapping the steering wheel in time to the music. “That’s another benefit of being a Hunter, by the way. You barely have to sleep.”
I think of when I was younger, when Uncle Nash was still alive.
How I would wander around his big mansion in the middle of the night, restless.
I didn’t get tired the way he did. It would be three in the morning, and I would be vibrating with a kind of weird, antsy energy.
I used to try and burn it off by playing video games.
Then, later, I found I could burn it off by killing for him.
After a kill, that’s when I sleep.
“What else is there?” Charlotte says. “That you need to know. I told you that we come back from the dead.” She keeps tapping her hands against the wheel, the rhythm pounding into my head.
“We sense things, told you about that. We’re stronger than humans.
Kind of innately know how to fight.” She glances at me again.
“I should have brought Jaxon with me. He could explain this stuff better. Or Ambrose.”
The names rattle oddly around in my head. “Who are they? Other—” It feels odd to say it. “Other Hunters?”
“Yeah. Jaxon’s my boyfriend. Ambrose is, like, his mentor, I guess. He’s super old. Oh, that’s the other thing.” Charlotte grins. “When I say we can’t really die, I mean it. We don’t die of old age. Ambrose is like two hundred. Jaxon’s about sixty.”
I stare at her through my killing face, and I honestly can’t decide if she’s making fun of me or not. “How old are you?”
“Thirty-four.” She grins. “Just a baby by Hunter standards, like you.”
I scowl. “I’m not a baby.”
“Sure thing, lil bro.” Charlotte leans forward over the steering wheel, squinting out at the landscape. We’ve been going west, out into the big, empty ranch lands that surround Rosado. “This should work.”
“What exactly are we doing?”
Charlotte answers by yanking the car suddenly off the road, flinging me up against the door. I cry out, and suddenly, my guard’s up. This is a fucking trap.
“Calm down,” Charlotte says as the car plows through the scrubby field, jostling us around. “I’m not gonna do shit to you. We’re both Hunters, remember?”
I brace myself against the dash, my teeth rattling around in my skull. “What’d you think I was thinking?”
The car slams to a stop. Charlotte glances over at me with dark eyes. “You thought I had just turned on you. You were bracing yourself for it. Not like a human does when they get scared. Our kind, we don’t really experience fear.”
“That’s not true,” I mutter, and I’m thinking about Abi when I say it, the absolute terror I felt when I saw that piece of shit in her upstairs hallway.
“We don’t get scared for ourselves,” Charlotte says softly. “But I guess we can get scared for humans.”
She knows. She’s looking at me with those dark eyes, so similar to mine, and she fucking knows what I was thinking.
And maybe that’s why I do it. Why I say, “Her name’s Abi. Abi Snow.”
Charlotte smiles. “Has she seen you without the mask? You didn’t answer me earlier.”
“Killing face,” I correct, stiffly. “And n—” I stop myself. “Yes, she has,” I say, after a pause. “But she doesn’t know it was me.”
“Ah.” Charlotte nods like a sage. Then she asks, “Does she know?”
I know exactly what she’s asking. “Yes.” I turn away from Charlotte to look out at the vast, sweeping field. “Everyone I kill is for her.”
I’m not sure why I said that. Why I shared that with this stranger—a stranger in every sense of the word, honestly. Not just someone I don’t know. Someone who’s strange.
Strange, like I’m strange.
“And she knows that?” Charlotte sounds surprised.
“Yeah.” I’m tired of talking about this. I push the door open, letting in the hot, stale wind, before turning back to Charlotte. “What are we doing here again? Are you going to kill me so I can—what? Resurrect, or whatever?”
Charlotte laughs. “I’m not going to kill you,” she says. “Because that would make poor Abi sad, wouldn’t it?”
I stiffen. Would it make Abi sad? I think about how she clung to me as she came, my victim wedged beneath her back. How she swallowed me whole in the graveyard.
“No, we’re going to kill someone else today,” Charlotte says. “Someone random. You’ll feel it, I think. What it means to be a Hunter.”
“I don’t kill people like that.” The car door’s still hanging open, the hot, humid air making me sweat beneath my mask. “I have a system so I won’t get caught.”
“We won’t get caught,” Charlotte says. “Promise.” She shuts off the engine. “Besides, if we do, just make sure the cops shoot you dead. You’ll come back.”
She hops out of the car with that, her laughter chiming on the air.
When she slams her door shut behind her, I step out, cautious and uncertain.
My killing face feels uncomfortable in the daylight, and there’s already a thick layer of sweat on my skin.
Charlotte bounds up to the side of the road, completely unconcerned that her face is exposed to the world.
“Follow my lead!” she calls back. “Though it’d really help if you took that mask off.”
“It’s not a mask!” I call back.
“Then stay back there.” She looks at me, her hair blowing like a red spiderweb across her face. “Don’t let them see you.”
“Who?” I hate this. I’m completely exposed out here. The sun is a giant spotlight revealing all my sins, and I don’t have a single fucking plan in place. “How are you planning to do this, exactly?”
“Got a knife.” Charlotte hikes up the hem of her shorts, and sure enough, there’s a big dark hunting knife strapped to her thigh. “How about you?”
“I don’t have anything.”
“So you have your hands.” Charlotte crouches down in the grass and grabs it in big handfuls and then scrunches it up in her hair, making her look wild and feral. She smears dirt across her face. “Actually, you know what? I have an idea.”
“What are you doing?” Maybe she has more of a plan than I realized.
Charlotte grins at me. “Laying a trap. If you don’t want to take off that mask—I mean, killing face—you can be the bad guy.” Then she reaches down and grabs the knife out of her holster and holds it to me, the blade pointing at her chest. I stare at it.
I could kill her. End this whole charade and get back to my life in Rosado. Get back to Abi.
But I don’t want to. The real truth is that I’m intrigued by all this—by the idea that there are other people out there like me. That even if I am the monster my mom said I was, at least I’m not the weapon Uncle Nash shaped me into.
I take the knife, and Charlotte grins.
“I’ve never met our dad,” she says. “I was adopted, raised by humans, and my sister and I weren’t close. But I hope you and I can be, you know?”
I look down at the knife, the metal glinting in the hot, blazing sun. “We just met.”
“I mean, I’ve been following you for weeks.” Charlotte straightens up, smearing more dirt on her clothes. “And I know you felt me. You kept yelling at me like a crazy person.”
“I wasn’t crazy.” I scowl. “You were there. I thought you were coming after Abi.”
Charlotte laughs. “Fair enough.” Then she stops and tilts her head to the side. “Okay, someone’s coming. You hear them?”