Chapter 14
The board creaked under me as I awoke from a pained sleep. Ropes bit into my wrists and chest, my flesh burning and smelling of overcooked meat.
The shack smelled of gasoline, fresh death, and that sour stench of the decaying organs on the ground. Sloshing wet noises sounded from the side of me, where my father was chopping into the dead woman he had killed.
I tried to calm my breathing, to prevent him from seeing me. His lantern light bounced through the gaps in the walls, making the thin lines look like hands ripping through the dark.
He was larger than me by a mile. I was just a stupid kid, and I couldn’t comprehend how my father was…this. Maybe it was there all along. His solo hunting trips took him away for days, sometimes weeks, until hunger got the better of me and I had to call him to tell him we ran out of food.
When my father moved, the whole world would listen, as if they were afraid of what would become of them if they chanced ignorance.
He had always smiled differently from others.
It was nothing like my mom’s warm smile when she held me in her arms. Even when sick, she still gave the kind of hugs you knew were everything she possibly had to give.
Dad was more stiff, like showing affection was painful somehow.
Everything from the scrape of his boots to the ragged inhale of his shitty cigarette-filled lungs was always final.
Now he leaned over me with that casual cruelty I’d learned to avoid by placating him.
The disappointment threaded through everything he said, like he’d been rehearsing it for years and was finally spelling every verse to destroy my heart piece by piece.
“Pathetic,” he said, the single word folding around me so tight I couldn’t breathe.
I expected him to question me. Maybe explain what this was and why he shot me. But instead, he set the knife down beside his knee, with finite precision.
Everything he did was exact. There was not a hair out of place, just like his usual appearance. My hands wanted to claw at my face, but the ropes held me strong, bringing tears to my eyes as I tried to free myself.
Maybe this is my test. To see if I can survive a hunter.
His hand lifted, dumping a metal, white-covered can onto the ropes.
I couldn’t breathe. My chest shrank in pain, my screams echoing around me from the burn.
His laughter sounded wrong. Nothing like I’d ever heard before.
It was light and airy. It felt more real than anything he had ever done.
My breathing was fast and panicked, a desperation gripping me, holding strong as the acid on my skin.
“D-dad,” I choked. “Why?”
He ignored me, and visions of my mother came floating into my mind. Her warmth was trying to chase away the burn. My father’s gaze was fixed and cold on my body. The way he steadied his hand, the slight tilt of his head. It was his tell.
When I was little, he used to make that face before he walloped me so hard that I flew backward.
He never yelled at me or showed me what I did wrong.
He just reared back his hand and smashed forward.
He palmed my jaw and forced my eyes to meet his, as if he were checking whether the kid inside me had been burned away yet.
“Please, Dad. Stop.”
“You always looked like hope,” he murmured, and it was the worst line he could have picked, because it cut through the place where the memory of my mom rested.
She called me the hope of their marriage when she thought I couldn’t hear.
She told her friends I was the last thing she held onto.
“Now you’re all soft like her. I’m disappointed, Shiloh.
I left her for you to extinguish, and you betrayed me. ”
I coughed, choking on my own blood. “She’s not a candle, Dad! You can’t just snuff out a person. You’re sick. We can…we can get you help to get better. It’s not too late.”
His black eyes flashed with something, but his expression remained unchanged. The blade in his hand, my blade, grazed my skin like a damning promise. Heat flared in my body, sharp and bright, then a pain that demanded every shred of focus began.
It wasn’t like the chemical. There was no start and build. This was just an inferno. He cut into my skin with precision and clean skill. I tasted the metal at the back of my throat, as the room started to fade in and out, tight around the edges.
“Dad…please.”
I tried to focus on anything but the burning.
The foliage peeking through the slats of the shed took me back to the garden at home.
I remembered how my mother used to cut squash in the fall, and hollow them out until they were empty so I could paint and decorate them for the holidays.
He was doing the same thing to me. Trying to hollow me out to paint over who I was and make me his own.
“You had one task, Shiloh. The most important one, and you failed. You only had to kill her. Why couldn’t you kill her? I know you saw her beauty. I know you wanted to touch. So why?”
The world shifted at his words. He was right.
I did think she was beautiful. I couldn’t stop my body from feeling that lust from seeing her so broken, but unlike him, I wasn’t going to use her.
How is a hunt any fun if the opponent can’t fight?
That’s like stepping on a mouse and calling yourself a master hunter. It was pathetic.
“You’re…” I said. Trying desperately to inhale a breath. “W-Weak.”
He dug the blade deeper, and this time right into my bullet wound, stealing my breath.
“I…loved…you…Dad.”
His laughter hurt worse than the knife. “So did your whore mother. But alas, she betrayed me by trying to run with you. Now, you’ll meet the same fate, my son.”
I prepared to die, unable to fight the pain that was dragging me under. I couldn’t feel the burn anymore. Just my mother’s warmth as I was pulled farther and farther into a serene light.
No, not peaceful.
They were red and blue lights that tore across the boards where the shutters had been, and I could hear the faintest sound fill the air.
It felt like I was underwater, my hearing muffled, and my vision gone.
The faint sound grew softer, the voices warbled.
I tried to open my eyes, but the darkness persisted like I was looking through a pinhole.
My father jerked, like a man awakened from a dream. The knife skittered away and clattered against the floor with a muted clang.
“Police! Down! Hands where we can see them! Step away from the child!”
Blurry officer after blurry officer surrounded my father. Maybe a dozen of them, or maybe it was only a handful, and my heart wanted the numbers to be bigger so I could believe I had been saved. My father’s face was the clearest thing I saw.
Pressed up beside me, he became the thing I hated most, small now, his panic swallowing the arrogance I’d seen fuel him my whole life. Even though he tried to kill me, I couldn’t help but fight to keep him with me. I had no one, and if they took him away, I may as well have died because…
Now I was alone. And no one would accept me. I was different. I was as dark as he was, like Edmund Anderson. And one day that darkness would consume me, too.
I awoke with a pained exhale and shot up from the covers, still in zombie mode, the sheets twisted around my thighs like the ropes from the dream.
My heart was running laps in my chest. I fought to control my mind, but I couldn’t remember where I was.
It wasn’t my home. Its walls were covered in rock bands and frilly girly shit.
Calm down. This is Xanthy’s room. You’re in the Harding mansion. The hunt was yesterday, and you came to volunteer…
The more aware I became, the more grounded I felt. I squeezed the comforter under my fingers, inhaling the flowery scent of my girlfriend’s pillow. She was having coffee with a friend and studying for a school play she was in.
I was okay.
I wasn’t in that damn shed…
But I wasn’t safe either.
Carrington was going to be pissed when he saw what I had done, coiled tight like the snake on his neck.
He would retaliate, and admittedly, that scared me.
I knew all along he wouldn’t be stupid enough to get caught, but I couldn’t resist goading his fragile ego into realizing he wasn’t as efficient as he believed he was.
How’s the taste of fear feel, Care Bear?
My palms were slick with sweat, and when I touched my ribs where the blade had seared me in the dream, I felt the raised scar left there.
A reminder to never trust anyone, not even someone I loved.
I kept my hand there, as if to reassure my body the pain was over, the proof I’d survived etched into my skin.
The smell in the room lingered, faint and impossible, yet it clung to my memory. I blinked a few times, smacking my stupid head to get a grip on my reality. I felt fragile, irritated at the realization that I’d be jumpy, waiting for Carrington to retaliate somehow.
“Get a grip, Shiloh.” I got up from the bed and walked over to the window.
Outside, somewhere on the ridge, a truck rolled down, and for a second the sound lined up with the sirens. I braced like I always did.
The old reflex to freeze and to make no sound.
Trying to hide and not be noticed. It took longer than it should have to reassemble myself and find calm.
The truck was already in the driveway by the time I managed to pull my ass out of the horror loop.
A figure in Vytek stepped out, and goddamn him for looking hotter in nerdy forensic gear than when he was half-naked and wearing a mask.
Did I just call Carrington hot?
When I finally pushed away from the window, the house was just as it had been, quiet, except for Carrington coming in, skulking upstairs to his room, and slamming the door. I’d bet the plaster cracked from that. It was so loud that my body froze as the vibrations rippled through me.