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“Maybe I want to see if you can kill me.”

6

VICTOR

This can’t be happening, this painful, insistent tugging toward her. I don’t desire Marys. Only the first Mary ever got my desire or my love, and I can not be feeling any sort of attraction to this one, staring up at me with her dark eyes, her back pressed against the wall.

The cuts on my arm sting a little, reminding me how this Mary is different from the others. Not just that she was able to get a cut in, but that she knows what I am. I suppose it must be true, this business about her mother being a Hunter. It would explain her training, the lack of panic when she first saw me.

She’s glaring at me now, and there’s heat simmering just beneath her anger that only seems to heighten the attraction I should not be feeling toward her. I suspect she likes the idea of killing me, although I don’t think she’ll manage it. Unless I let her, of course.

And I very well might. Since I stepped onto the road, everything about this encounter has been wrong. She’s not a perfect Mary at all. I’m not sure what she is. It would be easier to let her win. I’ll get her outside in the woods, so it’ll be easier for me to bury myself in the dirt after she slits my throat or splits open my belly. A few months in the ground and I’ll be back to normal. A reset, like turning off a recalcitrant computer and then turning it back on again.

At the moment, though, it’s a moot point. She doesn’t move to attack me, nor does she move to try and grab the knife, still lying a few feet away on the floor. She just watches me, cautious. Wary.

“Go on,” I tell her, stepping back even if it means dropping my hand away from her dark, silky hair. It’s so like the first Mary’s, that hair, if she had been able to cut it short. She always wanted to. Maybe that’s why I feel the way I do, even though I shouldn’t. “Pick up your knife. Try and kill me.”

“Why?” she asks. Penelope. The name jars in my head. But it’s hard to keep thinking of her as a Mary.

“You’ll enjoy it.” And so will I, I think suddenly, my belly twisting at the thought. Not the dying, but everything that comes before. The fighting, the chasing. The giving in.

Fuck, what’s wrong with me?

“So that’s your deal.” She edges toward the knife, one cautious step, her eyes never leaving my mask. “You try to give us hope, is that it? Before you kill us?”

“No.” I’m surprised by how forcefully the word comes out. “No, that is not my deal.” She will not, in fact, be learning my deal. She’ll either kill me and escape, and I’ll go through the revival and hope I come out normal on the other end. Or I’ll get bored with fighting and kill her.

The idea is less appealing to me than it was an hour ago, a thought I push out of my head.

Penelope laughs nervously, and it makes her sound like a victim. She’s still moving toward the knife, though.

“I’ll let you pick it up,” I say, tilting my head toward it. She doesn’t react. “Or how about this? A ten-second head start. I’ll count to ten and do nothing, and you⁠—”

She dives for the knife, and her quickness excites me. “One,” I say, eager to see what she does next. “Two.”

But she doesn’t attack me. Instead, she runs for the door. On “three,” she drags it open, letting in the light of the single bare bulb I have affixed outside. I bark out my “four,” my “five,” my “six,” watching her scramble into the gloom of the forest. She doesn’t even look back. Smart. Or well-trained, I suppose.

I finish the rest of my count alone in the cabin, listening to her footfalls against the pine needles. I shout out, “Ten!” as loud as I can, knowing she’ll hear it. Then I follow her out into the chilly woods. She’s monstrously loud, the way humans always are when they’re in a panic—I don’t just mean because she’s crashing through the underbrush, trying to find her way back to the road. But her heart is racing and her blood is pumping and her fear and hope and adrenaline all perfume the air like night-blooming jasmine. A multi-sensory trail for me to follow.

I run.

I run at my full speed, something I haven’t done in some time. With humans, I don’t need to, since terror makes them clumsy. I haven’t had a violent encounter with another Hunter in decades.

But something tells me this Penelope won’t be so clumsy, an idea that just sparks more excitement in my belly.

She’s made it about fifty feet into the woods. I clear that space in a second and a half, wrapping my arms around her from behind and tackling her to the damp leaves. She screams and rolls on her back and whips the knife back and forth, slashing at my mask. The rubber splits in one place, although not enough that I feel the cool wash of night on my skin.

It still makes my cock jump in excitement, though. I want to be angry about it, but I’m not.

I grab her wrist and wrench it overhead. She howls in frustration, kicking and squirming against me, fighting with all her strength. It’s admirable.

“Let me fucking go!” she screams, slamming her free fist into my side. It surprises me more than anything, and just for a second, I loosen my grip on her wrist enough that she’s able to swing around and slice me open, just below my ribs.

Like her other cuts, it’s not deep enough to be a problem. But the sudden, unexpected sting of it rushes through my system, and hot blood drips down the side of my body. I gasp out, and she realizes what she did.

I know this because her eyes go wide and the sudden scent of her arousal drowns out everything, even the alpine haze of the October woods. It’s absolutely undeniable what it is, and my own arousal flares just as suddenly.

“You cut me.” I slam all my weight on top of her, pinning her to the ground. She keeps fighting. It seems the idea of my blood has her blood up, too.