Page 84 of Half the Summer's Night
“Sure thing, lil bro.” Charlotte leans forward over the steering wheel, squinting out at the landscape. We’ve been going west, out into the big, empty ranch lands that surround Rosado. “This should work.”
“What exactly are we doing?”
Charlotte answers by yanking the car suddenly off the road, flinging me up against the door. I cry out, and suddenly, my guard’s up. This is a fucking trap.
“Calm down,” Charlotte says as the car plows through the scrubby field, jostling us around. “I’m not gonna do shit to you. We’re both Hunters, remember?”
I brace myself against the dash, my teeth rattling around in my skull. “What’d you think I was thinking?”
The car slams to a stop. Charlotte glances over at me with dark eyes. “You thought I had just turned on you. You were bracing yourself for it. Not like a human does when they get scared. Our kind, we don’t really experience fear.”
“That’s not true,” I mutter, and I’m thinking about Abi when I say it, the absolute terror I felt when I saw that piece of shit in her upstairs hallway.
“We don’t get scared for ourselves,” Charlotte says softly. “But I guess we can get scared for humans.”
She knows. She’s looking at me with those dark eyes, so similar to mine, and she fucking knows what I was thinking.
And maybe that’s why I do it. Why I say, “Her name’s Abi. Abi Snow.”
Charlotte smiles. “Has she seen you without the mask? You didn’t answer me earlier.”
“Killing face,” I correct, stiffly. “And n—” I stop myself. “Yes, she has,” I say, after a pause. “But she doesn’t know it was me.”
“Ah.” Charlotte nods like a sage. Then she asks, “Does she know?”
I know exactly what she’s asking. “Yes.” I turn away from Charlotte to look out at the vast, sweeping field. “Everyone I kill is for her.”
I’m not sure why I said that. Why I shared that with this stranger—a stranger in every sense of the word, honestly. Not just someone I don’t know. Someone who’sstrange.
Strange, like I’m strange.
“And she knows that?” Charlotte sounds surprised.
“Yeah.” I’m tired of talking about this. I push the door open, letting in the hot, stale wind, before turning back to Charlotte. “What are we doing here again? Are you going to kill me so I can—what? Resurrect, or whatever?”
Charlotte laughs. “I’m not going to kill you,” she says. “Because that would make poor Abi sad, wouldn’t it?”
I stiffen. Would it make Abi sad? I think about how she clung to me as she came, my victim wedged beneath her back. How she swallowed me whole in the graveyard.
“No, we’re going to kill someone else today,” Charlotte says. “Someone random. You’ll feel it, I think. What it means to be a Hunter.”
“I don’t kill people like that.” The car door’s still hanging open, the hot, humid air making me sweat beneath my mask. “I have a system so I won’t get caught.”
“Wewon’t get caught,” Charlotte says. “Promise.” She shuts off the engine. “Besides, if we do, just make sure the cops shoot you dead. You’ll come back.”
She hops out of the car with that, her laughter chiming on the air. When she slams her door shut behind her, I step out, cautious and uncertain. My killing face feels uncomfortable in the daylight, and there’s already a thick layer of sweat on my skin. Charlotte bounds up to the side of the road, completely unconcerned that her face is exposed to the world.
“Follow my lead!” she calls back. “Though it’d really help if you took that mask off.”
“It’s not a mask!” I call back.
“Then stay back there.” She looks at me, her hair blowing like a red spiderweb across her face. “Don’t let them see you.”
“Who?” I hate this. I’m completely exposed out here. The sun is a giant spotlight revealing all my sins, and I don’t have a single fucking plan in place. “How are you planning to do this, exactly?”
“Got a knife.” Charlotte hikes up the hem of her shorts, and sure enough, there’s a big dark hunting knife strapped to her thigh. “How about you?”
“I don’t have anything.”
