Page 24

Instead of finally getting the revenge I thought was lost to me.

I drag open the desk drawer, where I stashed Penelope’s phone from earlier, along with her car keys, which I found tucked in her jean pocket after I knocked her out with the ether. I pick up the phone and stare at the keys. The rest of her belongings I left in the car, which I towed around to a little clearing in the woods. It would be the polite thing to take them to her, wouldn’t it? So she can have a change of clothes.

Without thinking, I snatch up the keys and the phone in one swoop. That just leaves my own phone in the drawer, one of the burners I cycle through every few months. I grab that, too. It’s the only way I have access to the Internet, which makes it the only way I have to learn more about this Nicholas Wolrath, to make sure he is who I think he is.

I step back out into the courtyard, the wind whipping the dead leaves around. I sniff the air and catch Penelope’s scent; she’s still inside, although her heart’s beating a little faster than it was when I left. Planning her escape? She doesn’t seem that nervous. Maybe she’s just snooping. Well, let her. Anything really important, like my old photographs of Mary, is tucked away in the safe I have hidden in the walls of the store.

So I leave her, picking my way over to her car, still hooked up to the tow truck out back. Usually with these things, I put my victims’ remains in the back seat, then tow everything down to Lovelady Point, a craggy drop-off a few miles from here where I can put the car in neutral and shove it over the edge. Everything gone in a plume of smoke and fire.

Not tonight, though. Tonight, I peel her purse off the front seat and drag a worn-out suitcase from the trunk. I stack both on the cold ground, then heave myself up on the hood of the car and pull both phones out of my pocket.

Penelope’s, I look at first. It’s flush with messages, most of which I can’t see, but trying to open them just gets me the lock screen. I frown down at it. If she’s going to stay here, if I’m going to hand over her phone, I really need some assurance that she’s not lying to me.

“If you’re here,” I mutter in the old tongue, “maybe you can help me.”

There’s no obvious answer. No whispering in the shadows like when I was a boy. But my thumb flashes over the screen, almost acting of its own accord: 8-3-4-1.

The lock screen disappears.

I suck in my breath, skin prickling. I haven’t felt the gods that strongly in a hundred years. For a moment, I wait, all my muscles tense, expecting them to tell me I need to kill her.

Nothing but the creaks and groans of the forest.

I open up the messages. There are a handful from a group chat called MY FAV BITCHES. Something about Penelope missing a Zoom call, then some back-and-forth about how she’s probably still on the road. Whoever these people are, they weren’t the ones she was talking to this afternoon.

Most of the messages, though, are from Adrian, her partner-in-crime.

Adrian

Yo, where are you? You make it to Avens?

Just checking in. Call me.

Have you reckoned a thousand acres much?

When I read the last one, my whole body suddenly lights up like the lightning storms we get in the summer.

I know it, of course. Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?

My chest squeezes so tight that I can hardly breathe, and I remember sitting by the fire in the cabin I shared with the first Mary, listening to the hum of her voice as she read from the little chapbook her parents had purchased from Walt Whitman himself. That was before she got sick, when I still thought I’d lose her to old age, something I was too young then to properly fathom.

Tears burn at my eyes, blurring the phone screen. No wonder the gods gifted me the passcode. They wanted me to see it. They wanted me to feel this pain.

I shove Penelope’s phone into her purse and look in the direction of the house, not that I can see much of anything save for a sliver of light through the trees. I force myself to concentrate until I sense her. She’s still there. It seems she’s not going to make a run for it after all.

Agitation bubbles under my skin while the October wind howls around me, cold and forlorn and smelling of rot and soil. It makes me think of earlier, thrusting into Penelope in the decaying leaves. The quake of her pussy as she came, the fragility of her human body beneath mine. I haven’t fucked a human in decades, a fact I hadn’t let myself really dwell on until just now.

“I’m not replacing her,” I mutter, dragging out my own phone and swiping it open with more force than what’s strictly necessary. There have been so many coincidences since Penelope stepped into the Gas and Go. What are the chances that the daughter of a Hunter, a human who knows what I am, would be going to Clifwell to terrorize the ancestor of the man who killed my Mary? That I would find a fragment of a Whitman poem on that human’s phone, seemingly for no reason?

What the fuck is going on?

I don’t let myself think about it. My focus now is on making sure the Nicholas Wolrath in Clifwell is descended from the same Wolrath I knew a hundred years ago, the same Wolrath I never got a chance to kill with my bare hands.

On my phone, I type in Wolrath and Vas Pharmaceuticals and get a bunch of bullshit in return: a glossy website with photographs of smiling people in lab coats and not much else. Some corporate social media profiles, of course. News articles. A Wikipedia page.

That I click on, scanning through the text with my breath tight in my chest. It doesn’t take me long to see them, five words shining like a beacon:

Founded by Albert Wolrath in 1891.