Page 2 of Bird on a Blade

She whimpers again, that low keening sound that makes the skin on the back of my neck prickle. Her fear is delicious to me. I won’t deny it.

Okay, so maybe I do want her a little afraid after all.

I keep moving toward her, talking in that same quiet voice I use on the cats. “You’re safe,” I tell her. “You don’t have to worry. They can’t hurt you anymore.”

With that last sentence, something changes in her expression. A flash of confusion.

“I took care of them for you,” I say, just as I realize I’m close enough to touch her. Her eyes keep dropping down to my knife. Does she really think I’m going to kill her?

So I slam my knife in the wall beside her head, the blade thrumming. She jumps and screams but makes no move for it.

And then I encircle her in my arms, hardly believing myself.

She stiffens, her breath fast and panicky. I can feel the wild, frantic thudding of her heart. But she doesn’t push me away. She doesn’t try to grab the knife.

I knew we were meant for each other.

I pull her into me, delirious at her closeness. Her fear has a wildness to it, like the scent of pine needles, and I breathe her in through my mask, cupping my hand against the back of her head.

Her hair is as soft as I had imagined.

“Don’t worry,” I whisper against her. “Don’t be scared. They can’t hurt you anymore. I won’t let them hurt you ever again.”

She makes a sound like a sob, a kind of wet choking. I gently pull her around so that she can look out at the dining room and not at the body of the boy who tormented her the most. I was there when he screamed at her that she was lazy and fat and stupid as she begged him for a rest. I watched him taunt her with food when she was hungry. I heard the terrible things he said about her, laughing with the others, what a waste it was that her body has the lushness I find so appealing.

I relish that lushness now. That softness.

“Don’t worry,” I tell her. I keep saying it, over and over, wanting her to believe me. “He can’t hurt you now. I took care of him for you.”

And then something magical happens.

She hugs me back.

She hugs me back.

She lifts her arms, slow and hesitant, and wraps them around my waist, barely touching me. When she sobs again, I realize she’s crying, a wet spot forming on my shoulder.

“Shh,” I say, and her body shakes against mine. I pull her a little closer. I wonder if she feels my cock. It’s painfully hard from the killing, and from her.

Would she let me do that to her? Lie her down on the cold and bloody floor and fuck her? I don’t want to push my luck, even if every nerve in my body is screaming at me to do it, to slice her blood-streaked clothes away with my knife and kiss and bite at the soft flesh of her breasts until she’s moaning instead of crying.

No. No, I don’t want to risk her bolting like one of the cats and me having to chase her through the woods. Too much can hurt her out there, especially in the dark.

Still, restraint is hard for me, and I clutch a handful of her hair and then kiss her head through the mask. She gasps but doesn’t let go, and I think that Mama was wrong, that people like us can find Heaven because this is it, right here, the girl I’ve watched allsummer gasping in my arms, her breasts pressed against my chest, her body hot and soft and yielding.

It’s as perfect as late summer.

It’s so perfect that I don’t hear the dining hall door scrape open, I don’t hear the footsteps on the linoleum. I don’t hear anything until I hear the hammer of a gun clicking into place?—

And then a bullet tears through my brain.

CHAPTER ONE

EDIE

FIFTEEN YEARS LATER

Ikill my car’s engine and sit, hands resting on the steering wheel, staring out at the camp through the windshield. The past fifteen years have certainly taken their toll. The dining hall is gone, of course. The paint on the buildings is faded and peeling off in long strips, and there are boards hammered over all the windows save for the counselors’ cabin, the only part of the camp that’s been in use since that night.

---