Chapter 8 Theo
THEO
Ican not stop thinking about her.
It doesn’t help that her scent seems to be everywhere, as strong as if she bled all over the woods.
I tell myself it has to be my imagination.
There’s no way it could linger this long, and there’s no sign of her out on the pier.
But it follows me as I make my rounds, even when I’m on the far side of the peninsula, away from the lake houses.
It’s like she’s attached herself to me somehow.
This obsession reminds me, a little, of the killing moon—that terrible, nagging urge that lights my blood on fire. I think maybe that’s what it is, the start of a killing moon, even though this does feel different. But it’s been so long since the last one that maybe I’ve just forgotten.
Still, when I finish with my rounds, I go back to the cabin and pull out my box of blades from its place in the old, cracked fireplace.
I take them out one by one and arrange them in a neat row on the kitchen table: my axe, my machete, my butcher’s cleaver.
In the past, when the killing moon would call out to me, the first thing I did was select a weapon.
But none of them are singing to me. They glint in the lemony sunlight drifting in through the dirty window above the sink, and I think about all the blood they’ve spilled and all the lives they’ve ended, but I don’t feel any terrible urge to kill
It’s something else.
I pace around my cabin, feeling antsy and agitated. My thoughts, of course, keep returning to her. Chloe. They keep returning to an undeniable but no less alarming truth:
I liked having her in my territory. I liked smelling her on the wind, and I liked watching her through the trees. I think I’m agitated because I want her to come back.
It’s an absurd thought. She’s human. I kill humans who come onto my land—well, adult humans anyway. But yesterday, I didn’t feel that hot spark of rage like I do when others come onto my peninsula. It was almost like—
Like she belongs here.
So I put the weapons away. I find myself sniffing the air, even though I doubt she’ll return. Oliver might. And then I can—what? Tell him I do want to meet her after all?
Foolish. Just because I don’t want to harm her doesn’t mean she won’t immediately sense what I am.
There is a way I can watch her, though. My mother had a telescope that she got from her grandfather. When I was a boy, she used to take me out to our pier so we could look at the stars up close. The moon, too.
I haven’t thought about that telescope in decades, but I’m certain it’s still up in the little attic storage space where she kept it, along with the other items that belonged to her family.
Excitement spurs in my chest, and I dart into the hallway to drag down the attic steps.
They creak as they slam to the scuffed wooden floor, expelling clouds of dust. I don’t care.
I climb up into the storage space, which looks like how I remember from my childhood: Dusty.
Cramped. The scent is so much stronger now, though.
All the oils of my family’s skin—my mother’s, her parents’, her grandparents’—left to bake in the heat.
The telescope is exactly where it always was, right next to the storage space entrance.
I hug it to my chest and step back down, heart hammering.
I leave the attic yawning open as I step outside and make my way to the beach.
There, I unlatch the storage case and carefully set up the stand and then the telescope proper.
I’m surprised I still remember how, and while it’s true that my killer’s hands feel oversized and clumsy as I tighten the screws and insert the eyepiece, I get it done.
Within a few minutes, my mother’s telescope is settled in a patch of sandy dirt, pointed at Chloe’s house.
My breath is tight as I peer through the viewfinder. For a moment, the image is blurred and bright, but I adjust it into sharpness.
Her big picture windows fill my vision, and then—her. Chloe.
She’s upside down. Everything is upside down through the telescope.
Still, it lets me see through the big window and into her tidy living room, where she’s sitting on her couch, a computer resting in her lap. She stares at the screen, frowning a little, fingers skittering across the keyboard. Her hair is loose around her shoulders. Her legs bare.
I suck in my breath. Yes, the entire scene is upside down, so she looks a little like a spider hanging from a web. But it’s better than nothing. Certainly better than what I can see with my naked eye, even if my vision is superior to a human’s.
Chloe pauses her typing and looks up. I don’t know at what; it’s out of the range of my view.
She tilts her head a little and goes back to her computer.
And stays like that, for a while. I can’t tear my gaze away from her, though.
There’s a comfort to it, and the magnification almost makes me feel like I’m with her, like we’re breathing the same air.
When she stands up, setting her laptop aside, my breath catches in my chest. She stretches, lifting her arms overhead, and her shirt rises enough to reveal a flash of her pale, soft belly. I bite down on my lip, shift my hips around. My cock is growing.
Chloe walks around the width of the sofa and then, to my excitement, stands in front of her window.
She puts her hands on the glass and gazes outward, and I study her face, memorizing the lines of her cheekbones and the fullness of her lips.
Even upside-down, magnified through glass and light, she’s so beautiful.
If I were another type of killer, the kind that leaves the flesh of their victims unblemished, maybe then I could share in the intimacy of her death.
I could kiss her as she breathed her last breath and find some way to preserve her so she could stay with me in my cabin until the end of my very long and very unnatural life.
But I’m not that kind of killer. I rend and destroy. If I were to kill Chloe, she would be nothing but meat. The pleasure of her hot blood on my hands would be temporary. A single moment of ecstasy that would not be worth the annihilation of her beauty.
So I watch her, my breath ragged. I watch as she turns away from the window, as she settles back on the couch, as she takes a long drink from a water bottle.
That’s all I can do. Watch.
Oliver comes to visit me a few days after I pull out the telescope.
Thankfully, he doesn’t time his visit while I’m watching Chloe, so I don’t have to explain myself to him.
Instead, I smell him while I’m making my rounds.
Although nearly all of my free time has been swallowed up by watching Chloe through the telescope, following her movements through the back half of her house and along the pier, I do maintain that one crucial aspect of my routine.
I save it for when she disappears from my view, though.
Normally, when Oliver visits during my patrols, I let him wait at the cabin. He knows not to go snuffling around in the woods. There are other dangerous things on this peninsula, rattlesnakes and black widow spiders chief among them. I don’t want to take the blame for their violence.
But today, when I sense him, I cut my rounds short and intercept him while he’s still on the trail to my cabin.
He yelps when I step into his path, then laughs. “You scared me,” he signs.
“Sorry,” I respond. I’m not sure what to say next. Should I ask about her? Or should I let him bring her up?
Fortunately, Oliver is usually the one to drive the conversation, and today’s no exception.
“Sorry I haven’t been by in a few days.” He doesn’t elaborate, and I sense something from him, a kind of quiet fear.
It’s always there when I haven’t seen him for a while, and I don’t know what it means.
It’s certainly not like the fear I instill in humans, the fear I’m used to.
When I tried to ask him about it once, he put his hands in his lap and didn’t move until I changed the subject.
“Got you some good pictures, though.” He takes off down the path toward my cabin, and I follow behind him.
Once we’re there, he plops down on the porch swing, as usual, and pulls a new set of drawings out of his backpack and hands them to me.
I flip through them, the way I always do.
He brought me comic book characters this time, and some of them I even recognize from my own childhood, although I watch attentively while he explains who they are.
The only one that isn’t from a comic book is Chloe.
It’s not just her face but a sketch of her from the knees up, one hand on her hip, with her pretty features furrowed in concern.
I stop here. I can’t stop myself. The likeness is so good, and it’s nice to see her right side up. And the expression Oliver captured, with that faint trace of fear—
My body heats.
When Oliver taps my knee, I nearly jump out of my skin. “That’s Chloe,” he signs.
My heart hammers. “Your friend?” I respond, afraid my face gives everything away. “Who can sign?” As if I didn’t immediately recognize her.
Oliver nods. “She said she came over here the other day, but she didn’t see you.”
Blood pulses in my temple. “I didn’t see her,” I lie, barely able to keep my hands from shaking. “I was probably on the other side of the peninsula.”
Oliver shrugs, unbothered. “That’s okay. She saw your gravestone, though, so she knows you’re a ghost. I think she’s scared of you.”
My blood sparks. “Did she say that?”
“No, I can just tell. I told her you were nice, but I guess she thinks ghosts are scary.” Oliver sets his hands down in his lap and looks out at the little patch of my front yard.
The wind pushes his hair away from his eyes.
“That’s why I think you should meet her.
” He signs it without looking at me. “So she knows you’re real, and that you’re nice. ”
Panic flares up in me. I see her, just for a moment, hanging upside down in my head the way she’s always hanging upside down in my telescope.
And I wish I could meet her. I wish I really were just the ghost Oliver thinks I am.
But if Chloe is already frightened by the threat of me, then it’s hopeless.
She almost certainly read about my previous killing moons.
That’s why it’ll never work. I know what I am.
A Hunter, my father calls us, and I came up with a name that I can say with my hands.
We’re predators. Humans sense it, that we’re dangerous to them.
The only reason Oliver doesn’t is because he’s a child, because he doesn’t understand the ways of the world.
“Please? Can I introduce you?” He signs this emphatically and actually looks me in the eye, and I feel his hopefulness jolt through me. For a second, I feel the way I do right before I end someone’s life. They always look at me with hope when they’re pleading for their survival.
“No.” I sign it and shake my head. Oliver’s face falls, but I prefer it to that look of hope. I don’t want to think about killing around him.
“Not yet,” I add, just because I feel some creep of empathy at his disappointment. “Maybe in a few weeks.”
“To clean your house?” Oliver scowls. “You told me that last time.”
“I know. It’s still true.” I force myself to smile, even though Oliver’s still sulking at me. “Thank you for the pictures. I always like them.”
“She won’t be afraid of you if she meets you,” Oliver says. “I know that’s what you’re scared of, that she’ll think you’re weird. But she’s not like normal people. She’s nice to me.”
His face is so earnest as he signs, his eyes blazing, and I wish it really were that simple.