Page 76 of Half the Summer's Night
I stare at her, that cold rope of fear tightening in my belly.Not human.
I want to protest. What else could I fucking be?
Except my mother saw it.I gave birth to a monster, she screamed, and I stared at myself in the mirror as a little boy andtold myself I looked human. But I knew there was something broken inside me, and so did Uncle Nash.
Bones of steel. Stronger than you have any right to be. Let’s make full use of that freakishly good night vision, huh?
“Do you want to talk or do you want to fight? I’m prepared to do both.”
Charlotte’s voice jerks back into that damp, buzzing bathroom. I shuffle away from her, wary. My waist still aches from where I slammed into the sink.
“I wanna talk, ” Charlotte says. “So that’s what we’re gonna do. Sound good?”
“What is there to talk about?” I growl.
Charlotte arches an eyebrow. “Seriously? I just told you you’re not human. And I know you’re curious about how I know your name.”
The white static floods through my thoughts again. “That’s not my name.” A pointless lie. But it feels like the only response. I won’t want to acknowledge the other thing.
“It is.” Charlotte smiles. “Your mother is Maridel Hanover?—”
The white static brightens until it feels like a migraine pounding behind my eye. That’s her. My mother. I haven’t spoken to her in ten years.
“And your father is Johnson Baldys.”
That brings me up short. I never knew my father’s name because my mother refused to talk about him. She told me once, right before she sent me to Uncle Nash, that he was her biggest mistake, because he had given her me.You’re just like him, she said, staring out the window in our living room with a cigarette dangling between her fingers.Same cold eyes.
Uncle Nash never talked about him.
“Your mother’s human,” Charlotte continues. “But don’t worry, I didn’t do anything to her.”
I don’t know what to say about that.
“Your father, though. He isn’t. He’s like us.”
I stare at her, my body shaking, and think suddenly about all those times I sensed Charlotte’s presence on the wind.
Not human. Not animal.
“What are you?” I murmur, a sick, dark feeling coiling in my stomach.
Charlotte looks at me for a long time before answering. “There are a lot of names for what we are,” she finally says. “But the one I learned is Hunter.”
The word buzzes in the stale, warm air of the bathroom, as loud as the fluorescent lights above the salt-streaked mirror.
“And what does that mean?” My throat is dry. I don’t like how this is making me feel. I don’t like how it feelsright, the way fucking Abi felt right. The way it feels like I’ve found something I’ve been searching for my entire life.
“We kill,” Charlotte says. Any hint of mockery is gone. She’s very serious now, and her eyes never leave my killing face. “We have to kill, in fact. You can’t suppress it, or very bad things will happen.”
I think of my mother refusing to look me in the eye, the cigarette smoke curling between us.You’re a monster, Rowan. And a mistake.
I think of Uncle Nash sliding a gun into my hand when I was thirteen, one of his business associates lying bound and gagged on a cold cement floor.Just pull the trigger, boy. Easiest thing in the world.
It had been the easiest thing in the world.
“What kind of bad things?” I finally say.
Charlotte studies me. “You didn’t know,” she says carefully. “But you never tried to suppress it, did you? The killing?”
