Oliver drops his hands to his side and stares up at me expectantly. I wish I knewsomethingabout kids.
Finally, I do a quick, jerky, “No.”
“You didn’t see him at all? Did you go to his cabin?”
I shake my head, unease settling in my stomach again. “I found a cemetery,” I finally say, stumbling over the word forcemetery.I’m really going to have to amp up my vocabulary, living next door to this kid. “And a gravestone. With Theo’s name on it.”
I’m not sure what I expect to happen, sharing this information. I almost feel kind of bad about it, like I’m trapping Oliver in a lie. But he just grins.
“That’s his gravestone,” Oliver sighs, emphasizing thehiswith a dramatic surge of his shoulders. “Didn’t I tell you? He’s a ghost.”
I breathe out. A ghost. An imaginary friend. Not a murderer.
“You didn’t mention that,” I say.
“Oh, sorry.” Oliver shrugs. “Well, he is. And he was probably watching you, even if you couldn’t see him. He can make himself invisible.”
I smile at that, and some of the worry lifts off my shoulders. This is definitely getting into imaginary friend territory.
“That’s a pretty cool trick,” I say
“Yeah, it is.” Oliver studies me for a moment longer, squinting into the bright morning sunlight. “I hope you’ll meet him soon, though.” He signs more fervently. “He’s just shy. But just wait ’til I introduce you. I know the three of us will be best friends.”
8
THEO
Ican not stop thinking about her.
It doesn’t help that her scent seems to be everywhere, as strong as if she bled all over the woods. I tell myself it has to be my imagination. There’s no way it could linger this long, and there’s no sign of her out on the pier. But it follows me as I make my rounds, even when I’m on the far side of the peninsula, away from the lake houses. It’s like she’s attached herself to me somehow.
This obsession reminds me, a little, of the killing moon—that terrible, nagging urge that lights my blood on fire. I think maybe that’s what it is, the start of a killing moon, even though this does feel different. But it’s been so long since the last one that maybe I’ve just forgotten.
Still, when I finish with my rounds, I go back to the cabin and pull out my box of blades from its place in the old, cracked fireplace. I take them out one by one and arrange them in a neat row on the kitchen table: my axe, my machete, my butcher’s cleaver. In the past, when the killing moon would call out to me, the first thing I did was select a weapon. But none of them are singing to me. They glint in the lemony sunlight drifting in through the dirty window above the sink, and I think about allthe blood they’ve spilled and all the lives they’ve ended, but I don’t feel any terrible urge to kill
It’s something else.
I pace around my cabin, feeling antsy and agitated. My thoughts, of course, keep returning toher. Chloe. They keep returning to an undeniable but no less alarming truth:
I liked having her in my territory. I liked smelling her on the wind, and I liked watching her through the trees. I think I’m agitated because I want her to come back.
It’s an absurd thought. She’s human. I kill humans who come onto my land—well, adult humans anyway. But yesterday, I didn’t feel that hot spark of rage like I do when others come onto my peninsula. It was almost like?—
Like she belongs here.
So I put the weapons away. I find myself sniffing the air, even though I doubt she’ll return. Oliver might. And then I can—what? Tell him I do want to meet her after all?
Foolish. Just because I don’t want to harm her doesn’t mean she won’t immediately sense what I am.
There is a way I can watch her, though. My mother had a telescope that she got from her grandfather. When I was a boy, she used to take me out to our pier so we could look at the stars up close. The moon, too.
I haven’t thought about that telescope in decades, but I’m certain it’s still up in the little attic storage space where she kept it, along with the other items that belonged to her family.
Excitement spurs in my chest, and I dart into the hallway to drag down the attic steps. They creak as they slam to the scuffed wooden floor, expelling clouds of dust. I don’t care. I climb up into the storage space, which looks like how I remember from my childhood: Dusty. Cramped. The scent is so much stronger now, though. All the oils of my family’s skin—my mother’s, her parents’, her grandparents’—left to bake in the heat.
The telescope is exactly where it always was, right next to the storage space entrance. I hug it to my chest and step back down, heart hammering. I leave the attic yawning open as I step outside and make my way to the beach. There, I unlatch the storage case and carefully set up the stand and then the telescope proper. I’m surprised I still remember how, and while it’s true that my killer’s hands feel oversized and clumsy as I tighten the screws and insert the eyepiece, I get it done. Within a few minutes, my mother’s telescope is settled in a patch of sandy dirt, pointed at Chloe’s house.
My breath is tight as I peer through the viewfinder. For a moment, the image is blurred and bright, but I adjust it into sharpness.
