Page 31 of Bird on a Blade

I eat the cupcake. Slow, luxurious bites that let me taste everything. I wash it down with my coffee. The freedom of that is almost as good as the release of orgasm.

Then I gather up the bird skull. It feels like nothing in the palm of my hand. But at the same time, it’s as heavy as my memories.

I carry it into the bedroom and set it down on my bedside table, where I know it will be safe.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

SAWYER

It takes me five strokes before hot cum spills over my fingers, my body shuddering. I groan and slide my other hand out of my mouth, where I lapped up the last of Edie’s taste, and lean back in the seat of my truck. My church waits for me on the other side of the windshield.

It was torture driving away from the old campgrounds, her scent wafting around me, filling up the truck cab. I had half a mind to pull over to the side of the road, but I made it home even if I didn’t bother to get out of the truck first.

I wipe the cum off my fingers using a handful of old fast food napkins that had been in the dashboard when I bought the truck, then step out into the cool forest air. I’m still buzzing from touching her again, especially since I hadn’t expected to even see her at all. When she came running out of that cabin, her dress streaming out behind her like a flag, my heart nearly erupted out of my chest. I wasn’t ready.

She wanted you.

I hear it in Mama’s voice, her whiskeyed Texas drawl. My brain fills in the rest of what Mama would say: If I want to fuck her, I should fuck her, and then kill her so shedoesn’t start causing me problems.You can’t be soft with these girls. You aren’t like them, Sawyer. Neither of us are.

I stalk over to my church, thoughts drumming. It’s been too long since I killed someone, that’s the real problem. Both of the heads from my earlier kill are still up in the tree, the flesh soft and rotting. I need to add more to my collection. The more bones I have, the quieter the urge’ll be, and then I can fuck my perfect prey without worrying that’ll be the end of her.

I go into the church, the door slamming shut behind me. The mask I bought is propped up on the old altar, glaring at me as I walk down the aisle. I swipe it off and go back outside, blood pumping furiously through my veins. Then I sniff the air.

It’s the usual scents: The forest. Edie. Faint whispers of other humans, hikers or campers making their way through some distant part of the woods. I’ll find one of them. It doesn’t matter who.

I just need a kill. I just need to feel the hot blood gush over my hands. Then she’ll be safe, my Edie. Then I can touch her the way I want.

Still, it takes me the better part of an hour to find my victim. A hitchhiker, grimy from travel, a threadbare backpack on his thin shoulders. I catch his scent as I wind down the mountain, wafting off the highway where he’s trudging along the side of the road. As soon as I see him, my vision goes red, and I get this hot surge of lust that isn’t exactly like when I see Edie, although it’s close. In the same neighborhood, as they say.

Killing him is easy. He doesn’t know I’m there, doesn’t see me coming. It’s not like the last kill, where I had a reason for it beyond my own raging hunger, and I do it pretty quick, stabbing him in the side so I can drag him behind the tree line, where I open his throat and let the blood run hot over my hands. I like the way it looks, the blood all red and glossy, and I have this fantasy about touching Edie with my bloody hands, leaving streaks of crimson across her pale belly.

It’s a nice thought, and it doesn’t send a hot fire raging through me, neither, so the killing really did help. Left me satiated, you know. I leave the hitchhiker where I killed him except for the head and one of the hands. Trophies for my collection.

It’s nice to have my head clear for the first time in a week. I take the long way home so I can pass by the old campgrounds, although I stay deep in the trees and shadows while I watch the house. Edie closed everything up, the windows and the front door. I don’t know if it’s because of me or because it’s late in the day and the temperature’s dropping. It is colder than when I set out, but I hardly noticed it from all the exertion.

The next day, I tell myself I’m going to work on my bones and my church. Now that I’m calmer, and she’s let me finger her sweet pussy on two separate occasions, it ought to be time to ask Edie if she wants to fuck. I don’t think she’ll say no. But I’m still hesitant about it. Someone like her, someone I’ve dreamt of for so long, I don’t know what it’s going to do to my brain the second I’m inside her. What if fucking her with my cock isn’t enough? What if I need to sink my knife into her smooth, soft flesh, over and over, while I draw in her last gasping breaths?

I can’t fucking stand the thought, even if at the same time it makes me rock hard.

So I focus on my first task of the day: stripping the meat off my victim’s head and hand as best I can. It’s too late in the season for the bugs and heat to do the work. I might have to bury everything, at least until the frost settles, so I work on tilling up a bone garden just outside the entrance of the church. The air’s cool but the sun’s out, and it bears down on me, slicking my skin with sweat.

When I’ve buried my bones, I move on to repairing another window in the church, stripping out the old sealing and replacing it with some new strips of rubber I picked up at the hardware store in Altarida. By the time I finish that, it’s noon, and mystomach is growling and my muscles are aching from all the hard work I’ve done.

I also successfully distracted myself from the thousands of things I want to do to my perfect prey.

I go inside and take a long shower, washing away the grime. Then I start fixing up my lunch.

That’s when I notice it. A change on the air.

Hunters.

I smell two of ‘em, the coppery blood scent that always marks another of my kind. I take my sandwich and cold beer outside to get a better handle on the situation. They’re close, from the scent of it, but they’d been downwind when I was out working, coming up from the south. North Carolina, probably.

I eat standing up, squinting out at the forest. If it’s who I think it is, they’ll be coming here. But if they don’t come here, then it’s not who I think, and we’ll have a problem.

Especially if they’re here for Edie.

Is her ex-husband rich enough to hire Hunters to track her down? I know some of us sell our services, even if I personally find the thought repugnant. I doubt he’s a Hunter himself, from what she said. Human men are as capable of killing as we are. They just aren’t as good at it. So with Edie still being alive?

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