Page 54 of Bird on a Blade

My face heats red hot. “Of course I’m hungry.” I’m starving, actually, but the hollowness in my stomach has a seductive quality, acalmingquality, after everything that’s happened. It would be so easy to just… let it linger for a few hours more. Through the night. Until tomorrow morning.

“Then I’ll make you something. You eat meat? You didn’t haveany.”

“Oh. Yeah, I do.”

“Venison stew, then.” He loops his arm around my waist and tugs me toward the back door, out to where my car’s parked in the grass. “I’ll use up those vegetables you got.”

“And what? Go kill a deer?”

He looks over at me before pulling open the car door. “I did that already. Salted and dried the meat since I can only run the refrigerator at night.”

“Good lord.” We start pulling out the groceries. “It’s likeLittle House on the Prairieor something.”

He laughs. “What? I gotta eat.”

It doesn’t take us long to unload everything. The church kitchen has a little pantry half-stocked with things I recognize from the grocery store in Altarida, rice and salt and canned vegetables. There’s plenty of space for my meager additions: brown rice, pancake mix, my collection of soups. When I’m done, I find Sawyer chopping up the potatoes and onions and garlic we brought back from my place.

“Let me help,” I say, an impulse born out of the days when my ED was at its height, and I used to cook lavish meals for Scott and his friends only to wrap my own plate up and slide it into the refrigerator, uneaten. It’s scary how just being near a man spurs that impulse out again.

But Sawyer shakes his head. “No. Absolutely not. I said I’d cook. You sit your pretty ass right there—” He points with this knife at one of the folding chairs beside the card table. “—And keep me company.”

I recognize the knife. It’s the one he stole from the cabin. “We should take that back.”

“Nope,” he says, turning back to the potatoes. “It’s been christened.”

A cold, shuddery feeling sweeps through me, and I stumble back until I bump up against the table. “Christened?” I squeak out. “You mean you’ve?—”

He looks at me over his shoulder, eyes glittering. “I cleaned it.”

“You can’t be serious!” My mouth has gone dry, and I feel the weight of what I’m doing wash over me. He’s akiller.

He’s my killer.

“You think I didn’t clean it?” He glances at me again, smiling a little. Teasing me. “Would you like that better?”

“No! Gross.” I sink down in the chair and watch him work, his movements neat and methodical. Is this what he looks like when he kills someone?

It occurs to me, suddenly and sharply, that I’ve never actually seen him kill a person. I’ve seen the aftermath. Never the deed.

His shoulders move rhythmically. The knife sings out with each slice.

I should be much more frightened of him than I am. Instead, it’s everything else that has me scared: Scott. Charlotte. How much I want to cling to my hunger.

Sawyer dumps the vegetables in a big crockpot, the kind you use when you go camping, and sets it on the stove.

“You never answered one of my questions from earlier,” I say, wanting to break the silence. Wanting to get out of my head, too, with its swirl of anxiety.

“Oh, yeah? Which one is that?” He sets the knife down and goes over to the pantry and pulls out a big ceramic cookie jar, which, when he opens it, does not contain cookies but chunks of dried meat.

“How many of you there are. Hunters, I mean.”

He pulls out long, leathery strips of venison and starts cutting them, too. These movements make my skin feel strange, kind of hot and itchy. It wasn’t the vegetables, I realize.Thisis what he looks like when he kills someone.

I shouldn’t have asked about the Hunters.

“Hmmm, that’s a good question.” He pauses and looks up, like he’s thinking. “Not that many. There’s four that I know of forsure. No—five.” He goes back to slicing the venison. “There’s me, Mama, my two buddies. Plus one more in Texas that Ambrose mentioned. Don’t know their name.” He dumps the venison into the pot, then fills it with water from the tap. “But I know there have got to be others. I can sense them, sometimes. Moving around.”

That makes my skin prickle. “Sense them? What do you mean?”

---