Page 29 of Turn That River Red

The afternoon is more of the same, with me pushingthrough the dull throb of my headache and trying to ignore the constant flurry of blood and breath roiling off the Church of the Well congregation. This was always the hard part—keeping up my ruse when what I really want is to kill.

Pastor Sullivan comes in around mid-afternoon, right after I finish praying over a mom and her baby, the baby with one of those wretched charms tucked into its swaddling clothes. The mom weeps while I pray—tears of fear, mostly. I can taste it in the back of my throat.

Pastor Sullivan, though, is not a man who’s afraid. I sense that immediately. Like Mrs. Gunner—the real one—he’s cautious. Distrustful. He hides it in front of the mom, flashing her a smile and pressing his hand on the baby’s forehead, but when the two of us are alone he fixes me with a cold, icy gaze.

“So you’re the traveling preacher,” he says.

“Ambrose Echeverría.” I hold out my hand for him, and when he grabs it, I’m struck with a sudden, nearly overpowering urge to hurl him to the ground and slam my cowboy boot into his jaw.

He fucked Mercy.

The thought comes to me out of nowhere, as hot and furious as summer lightning.

“Henry Sullivan,” he says, giving me a fake smile.

This scrawny, thin-necked man used Mercy to fulfill his own needs. I drop my hand to my side and study him with a Hunter’s eye: picking out strengths and weaknesses, measuring the steady beat of his body.

He’d be easy to kill.

We make small talk for a few minutes, a dull back-and-forth in which he tries to assert some kind of dominance over me and I pretend that I’m too friendly and oblivious to notice. The whole time, all I can think of is killing him. Him and Gunner both.

And it’s all because of a human woman and her big brown eyes.

CHAPTER TWELVE

AMBROSE

By the time night falls and the campus tucks itself in for the night, I’ve managed to turn my attention back where it needs to be—getting into that bunker.

I still don’t know how I’m going to do it. In some ways, seducing Mercy again seems my best bet. I can draw her into me, get her addicted to the pleasure she’s been denied, and convince her to extract the code out of Gunner.

There are a couple of problems with that, though. It’ll take too long, for one. The longer I’m here, the more likely it is that people will start looking me up and get suspicious—the Internet and social media have made my old schemes impossible in the long term. Worse, getting Gunner to give up the code would probably involve her having to fuck him, a thought that sends rage boiling through me, not dissimilar to the rage I felt when I spoke with Sullivan this afternoon. And thirdly?—

Well, I run the risk of getting addicted myself. I’ve already jerked myself off twice since I got back, my head filled with an escalating kaleidoscope of depravities: Mercy on her knees so she can worship my cock instead ofGod. Mercy bent over a pulpit while I ram into her tight asshole. Mercy naked while I open up the throats of any man who’s ever touched her against her will, their blood streaming over her lush body as she touches herself like I showed her last night.

But she’s a fucking human, and my obligation is to other Hunters. It’s bad enough that I kissed her this morning when I said I was going to leave her alone. But I gave myself a taste of something sweet and it was too hard to resist the temptation.

So no, I won’t use Mercy. Instead, I put on some dark clothes and head out to the bunker on my own. I’m strong. Maybe I can pry that door open.

I leave Roxi and Max at the cabin—if there’s trouble, I’d rather they not be involved—but I do take my hunting knife with me, a big mean blade that fits neatly in the holster on my hip. Then I slip out onto the compound, moving quietly through the shadows. It’s like last night, except when I take a quick detour by Gunner’s house, the room where he was fucking her is dark and empty.

Thank fuck for that. Maybe now I can focus on the actual task at hand.

I make it out to the bunker easily enough. The night is cloudy, with a new moon and hardly any starlight, but I’ve got a predator’s night vision so I don’t have to announce my entire presence to the Church of the Well with a flashlight. I go up to the door and crouch down so I can study the keypad. It’s mechanical, not digital, which means I might be able to break it. I’ve got the strength and I’ve got a knife. It’s worth a try.

Like most Hunters, I’ve picked up some basic lock-picking skills over the years—enough to know that this isn’t a standard lock that can be cajoled open with a few strategically placed hairpins. However, I also have a general idea of how to crack open a standard keypad lock, and I suspect the general principle applies here. I start by trying to wedge my knife behindthe keypad, hoping to pull it away from the door so I can get to the innards inside.

It doesn’t budge.

“Fuck,” I mutter, standing up straight so I can get leverage on my knife handle. I wrap both hands around it and brace one foot against the big steel door and pull with every ounce of my strength.

The knife whips upward. The lock remains unbroken.

“Dammit.” I try again, gritting my teeth at the metal-on-metal screech. I’m fucking up my knife blade, doing this.

I step back, studying the lock. There’s got to be something else I can do. Maybe if I can find a sledgehammer or something over in that training area on the other side of the field?—

Something stirs in the grass behind me.

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