Page 83 of Half the Summer's Night
“You can take off your mask,” she says suddenly, her eyes still on the road.
“I told you, it’s not a mask.”
Charlotte glances sideways at me. “Then what is it?”
I hate this. I feel like I’m under a microscope. “My face.”
Charlotte doesn’t say anything to that. The music plays along softly, and the scenery flashes by. Big empty fields full of short, stubby Texas corn.
“Where are we going?”
“Out to the middle of nowhere. I know what you look like, by the way.”
“Obviously.” I shift around in my seat and cross my arms over my chest. “I mean, I assumed so. Since you know my real name.”
I still hate that, too. I don’t like this stranger knowing anything about me. Knowing my secrets. Secrets I haven’t even been able to tell Abi—like what my disguise is.
“I’m just saying, you can take it off,” she says. “Put it on when we do the kill, you know? That’s how my boyfriend does it.”
“It’s different.”
Charlotte chuckles a little. “How could you know that?”
“Because it is,” I snap. “This is my face. This is me. The other face, Rowan—“ It feels weird saying my name out loud like this, and it feels cottony in my mouth. “That’s the mask. The disguise.”
Charlotte goes quiet again, tilting her head a little, like she’s thinking on what I just said. I hope this is the end of it. To be honest, I’m regretting coming with her. My responsibilities are in Rosado. Both the hotel—which I had to leave in Judy’s capable hands—and, more importantly, Abi. I tell myself she’s fine. I rarely watch her during the day, and the biggest threat to her is dead. But I still don’t like it, leaving her alone.
“Has she seen it?” Charlotte asks suddenly. “Your, ah, disguise?”
I whip my gaze over to her. She’s still looking at the road, hands ten and two, all very responsible. But she’s wearing that smug, satisfied smile.
“Who?” I say, even though I know perfectly well.
Charlotte rolls her eyes. “The woman who lives at the funeral parlor. The one you’re always following around like a lovesick puppy.”
“I don’t do that,” I snap.
Charlotte just laughs again. “Sure. You don’t sit outside her house every night instead of sleeping, right?”
“I sleep,” I say, somewhat defensively.
“Not much.” Charlotte leans back a little in her seat, tapping the steering wheel in time to the music. “That’s another benefit of being a Hunter, by the way. You barely have to sleep.”
I think of when I was younger, when Uncle Nash was still alive. How I would wander around his big mansion in the middle of the night, restless. I didn’t get tired the way he did. It would be three in the morning, and I would be vibrating with a kind of weird, antsy energy. I used to try and burn it off by playing video games. Then, later, I found I could burn it off by killing for him.
After a kill, that’s when I sleep.
“What else is there?” Charlotte says. “That you need to know. I told you that we come back from the dead.” She keeps tapping her hands against the wheel, the rhythm pounding into my head. “We sense things, told you about that. We’re stronger than humans. Kind of innately know how to fight.” She glances at me again. “I should have brought Jaxon with me. He could explain this stuff better. Or Ambrose.”
The names rattle oddly around in my head. “Who are they? Other—” It feels odd to say it. “Other Hunters?”
“Yeah. Jaxon’s my boyfriend. Ambrose is, like, his mentor, I guess. He’s super old. Oh, that’s the other thing.” Charlotte grins. “When I say we can’t really die, I mean it. We don’t die of old age. Ambrose is like two hundred. Jaxon’s about sixty.”
I stare at her through my killing face, and I honestly can’t decide if she’s making fun of me or not. “How old are you?”
“Thirty-four.” She grins. “Just a baby by Hunter standards, like you.”
I scowl. “I’m not a baby.”
