That’s why it’ll never work. I know what I am. A Hunter, my father calls us, and I came up with a name that I can say with my hands. We’re predators. Humans sense it, that we’re dangerousto them. The only reason Oliver doesn’t is because he’s a child, because he doesn’t understand the ways of the world.
“Please? Can I introduce you?” He signs this emphatically and actually looks me in the eye, and I feel his hopefulness jolt through me. For a second, I feel the way I do right before I end someone’s life. They always look at me with hope when they’re pleading for their survival.
“No.” I sign it and shake my head. Oliver’s face falls, but I prefer it to that look of hope. I don’t want to think about killing around him.
“Not yet,” I add, just because I feel some creep of empathy at his disappointment. “Maybe in a few weeks.”
“To clean your house?” Oliver scowls. “You told me that last time.”
“I know. It’s still true.” I force myself to smile, even though Oliver’s still sulking at me. “Thank you for the pictures. I always like them.”
“She won’t be afraid of you if she meets you,” Oliver says. “I know that’s what you’re scared of, that she’ll think you’re weird. But she’s not like normal people. She’s nice to me.”
His face is so earnest as he signs, his eyes blazing, and I wish it really were that simple.
9
THEO
Oliver comes and goes, but I still can’t get Chloe out of my thoughts. She really is like the killing moon: constant, urgent, obsessive.
I hang the new picture of her beside the old one, on the wall beside my bed. Then I go into my closet and pry back the floorboard in the left-hand corner to get at my metal lockbox. The lock is broken, but that doesn’t matter, not with the hiding place. That’s where I set the rest of the drawings, adding them to the collection that Oliver has brought me.
I’m not sure why I started doing this. For the last sixty years, the only things I’ve kept in that lockbox are newspaper clippings about my four killing moons and their aftermath. They’re still there, buried underneath the drawings, but I’ve read them so many times over the years they’ve become stale. The drawings are new and therefore interesting. I like to look at them sometimes, studying how the world outside my peninsula has changed. When the killing moon hits again, I want to be prepared.
I hope it doesn’t call me anytime soon, though. Not with Chloe’s sweetness calling me instead.
That night, I lie in bed and stare up at the ceiling. Like my father, I don’t sleep much, although I can sometimes will myself to drift off when my cold, obsessive thoughts become too much.
It doesn’t work tonight, though. This new obsession with Chloe is so different from what I’m used to. Where the killing moon is the ice of death, Chloe is the fire of freshly spilled blood. She makes me feel agitated and out of sorts, but in a way that I don’t ever want to end. The thought of her face makes my cock hard, and I have to touch myself to relieve the pressure. Before her, I only ever came when I was killing someone, and these orgasms feel strange and half-completed. They don’t slake the fire or the ice. They just leave me restless.
By midnight, I give up trying to sleep. I know from previous experience there’s no point in watching her house through the telescope, not this late. She usually goes to bed by eleven, so I’ll have nothing to look at but a dark, empty window. Unlike me, she’s asleep.
The thought stirs something in me. A wisp of an idea.
She’s asleep.
I’ve killed people who were asleep before. I’ve broken their locks and crept through the dark hallways of their houses, and I’ve watched them, lying in bed, their breaths slow and steady. Most of the time, they don’t even wake up until my blade is lodged in their throat.
I could watch her.
I could be near her.
I shove myself out of my bed. Yes, this is what I need to do. Chloe draws my attention across the water like the killing moon, and what is it I do when there’s a killing moon? I go across the lake and slake my urges. It’s true that my urge for Chloe is expansive and ill-defined. It’s just a need to smell her, to be close to her. But if that’s what it will take to clear my thoughts?—
I spring into action. Obviously, I leave my weapons behind, save for a slim little switchblade, which I can use to pick the lock on her door. My rowboat I drag out of its place under my cabin and down to the lakeshore. Heavy work that makes my muscles ache, yes, but it feels good. It feels right.
The lake is dark and still. The moon itself is only half-full, not a killing moon at all, but it casts just enough thin, hazy light to make the water glimmer as it laps against the sides of my boat. I row quickly across the water, keeping my gaze fixed on the houses along the shore. They’re all dark and shut up tight for the night, but this is my first time in years that I’m crossing the lake with the possibility of a real audience. Even Veritas, when it still existed, was a little further back, and the lake shore was overgrown.
I don’t sense any humans, though. Not really. They’re all tucked in their houses, safe and sound. And they’ll stay safe and sound tonight. I only have one target in mind.
I maneuver underneath Chloe’s pier, into the murk with the cobwebs and spiders and other crawling things. Then I let the water wash me up into the tangle of reeds growing along the shoreline, where my boat lodges in a wedge of mud. It’s not a perfect hiding spot, but it’s good enough. I’ll be gone before the sun rises anyway.
I slither up onto the pier and then stop, breathing hard. Chloe’s house rises in front of me, the huge window reflecting the moonlight but revealing nothing else, because she has the curtains pulled.
It feels strange, standing here on this side of the lake without the pull of the killing moon compelling me forward. For a moment, I’m not even sure what to do, and I just stand there, staring at her house, the warm, damp wind whispering along the back of my neck. My hand slips into my pocket of its own accord,almost, and pulls out my switch blade. I flip it open, let it catch the moonlight for a moment.
I look back up at Chloe’s house, considering the back door on the porch or the French doors on her balcony. The back door will be much easier.
