“I’m not.” He turns his body toward me, and I’m struck again by how huge he is. Tall and broad-shouldered beneath his dark shirt.
“So you’re eighty years old?” I whisper, my voice shaking. He doesn’t look it, of course. He looks to be in his mid-thirties at most. But the Hunters don’t age. Penelope told me that, even though she wasn’t supposed to.
Theo frowns. “What I am is complicated.” His eyes flash. “But you already know that, don’t you?”
I tremble, my chest too tight for me to speak. I’m able to sign, though, even though my hands shake. “What do you want with Oliver?”
Theo tilts his head, and I swear, just for a second, that his expression softens. “I don’t want to harm him.” A pause, and then, with a simple flick of his hands. “Or you.”
My heart pounds. My room spins around. “But you do harm people.”
Theo’s eyes burn straight through me. I take another couple of stumbling steps back and hit the side of my bed. “You kill people,” I sign.
Theo nods his head yes.
I whimper and slump down on the bed.
“But I’m not going to kill you,” he says quickly. “Or Oliver. Truly.”
We stare at each other, the moonlight flooding around us. “I know what you are,” I finally whisper, my heart racing. “I know you aren’t human.”
Something flickers across Theo’s face. I think it might be surprise.
Then he makes a sign I’ve never seen before. He presses his fists together, then swipes his palm out like a blade. There’s something about it, about the harsh, curving shape of his fingers, that makes me shudder.
“I don’t know what that means,” I breathe out.
“A killer,” he signs, and my heart constricts, “whose only purpose is to kill.”
I whimper, jerking away from him. Tears blur my vision.
“But not you,” he says, signing quickly. “Not Oliver.”
“Why not?” I manage to sign it, even though my entire body is shaking. “What makes us different?”
Theo stares at me for a long, long time.
“Oliver is like me before I knew what I am,” he finally says. “Lonely and different. And you?—”
His expression changes, darkening into that expression from earlier, the one that made me relent to his kiss. Heat. Hunger. Lust.
Through the cloud of my fear, I feel my own bloom of arousal, and I hate myself for it.
“You are very beautiful,” he says.
It’s the last thing I expect. For a minute, I think I’ve misunderstood him. But I don’t get a chance to ask any more questions, because he whips around and bolts out of the bedroom.
11
THEO
My body feels the way it does right before a kill, like all my atoms are rioting, threatening to obliterate me. I race down the stairs and into Chloe’s living room and then erupt out into the warm, humid night, the frog song overwhelming. I don’t stop running until I get to the end of the pier, where I jump into the lake with a splash, sinking down in the murk.
For a moment, I consider staying down there, letting the water flood my lungs like it did sixty years ago, until everything goes black. At this point in my life, a drowning won’t take long for me to revive. Certainly not the five years it did the first time. A month or two, maybe. The longer you’re alive, the easier reviving becomes. Especially a relatively simple death like drowning.
But when my lungs start burning, I don’t have the willpower to stay in the dark. I shoot myself up to the surface, gasping as I drink in the humid air. Then I whip around to look at Chloe’s house.
The light is on in her bedroom. At first, that’s all I can see, the soft pinkish glow through the curtains covering her windows. My chest heaves in the water, and my skin buzzes.
