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My skin prickles. “Old enough that you’d be dead if you were a human,” I say. “Great-grandpa old.”

“Jesus, do you have to put it that way?”

I shrug. “My mom’s the same way. That’s how I can tell, by the way.” I settle against the door again, watching him. The late morning sunlight is shining in behind us, and it makes his skin seem to glow. “You feel a little old-fashioned when you talk. There are certain movements that you do—like when you cleared the dishes away last night.”

“The way I cleared the dishes?” He laughs—a real, full-throated laugh. “You couldn’t possibly tell from that.”

“Dude, it’s hard to explain!” I throw up my hands. “But it’s like, you learned how to do chores a certain way when you were a kid, and we don’t do chores like that anymore, but you never shook the habit.”

“I suppose there’s some truth to that,” he says. “What about how I drive?”

“How you drive?” I lean forward, fixing my gaze on his hands, how his strong fingers are wrapped around the steering wheel. Those hands were on me, digging into my hips⁠—

I shake the thought out. The last thing I want is him sensing my thirst with his fucking Hunter powers. “You’re very, ah, formal,” I say. “Like you’re afraid of making a mistake.”

“Well, I’ve got fragile cargo,” he says.

I blink, my heart thumping. “What, you got a glass bookshelf in the trunk or something?” The question comes out breathy. God, that’s embarrassing.

Victor grins. “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.” Another glance my way, coy and teasing. “You’re human, and I don’t want your mother coming after me. Something tells me she won’t care if it’s an accident or not.”

I twist away from him. Dig my nails into my palm. No. No, I will not let this Hunter charm me. I’m not falling for it, not like Chloe and Abi did. I know better, and it’s not just the business about killing, either. That, I’m used to, as fucked up as it is to admit it.

But it’s the age thing. It’s the fact that I’ll keep getting older, that I’ll keep changing and warping out of recognition, and a Hunter stays the same. They don’t age. They die, yeah, but they come back, over and over until they don’t anymore. And that can take centuries.

I know Abi and Chloe are happy with their Hunters now. I hear it in their voices every time I talk to them. I saw it when I went to visit Chloe at her big pretty lake house in North Carolina, all the love passing between her and Theo, and between Abi and Rowan. And all I could think, sitting out on the dock while the warm breeze tousled my hair, was that time will rot my friends away and leave their lovers untouched.

It breaks my heart, the unfairness of it. Just like it did when I was a kid, and Mom sat me down and told me I wasn’t like her.

“Eighteen sixty-seven,” Victor says suddenly.

“What?” I have no idea what he’s talking about. I’m still at Chloe’s lake house, my feet in the freezing water, feeling my own mortality.

“That’s the year I was born,” he says. “Eighteen sixty-seven.”

My head buzzes, and I jerk my gaze over to him, looking at his profile in a new light, trying to see the nineteenth-century man in the sunlight of the twenty-first century. That’s much older than I was thinking.

He can sense my shock, too, because he laughs and glances over at me. “Not what you were expecting?”

“I figured you for a twentieth-century man.” I look away from him, out at the road again. “Depression era or something.”

“I do remember the Great Depression.”

“Jesus, don’t tell me that.” I slump down, counting backwards in my head. He went through the initiation ritual in 1884, assuming he did it at seventeen like Callie did. In 1884, he could have been what—a cowboy in the Wild West? A transcendentalist poet in New York? A Victorian gentleman haunting the streets of London?

“Were you Jack the Ripper?” I ask.

He laughs. I don’t want to admit it, but I do like the sound of that laugh, dark and full-throated. “I’ve never been to Europe,” he says. “So no.”

“Really?”

He shrugs. “I’m not much for traveling. Mostly stayed out west.”

“Wait, you haven’t been out of the United States?” I stare at him, the dappled October sunlight falling across his handsome, nineteenth-century face as we wind down the highway. “You’ve just—what? Stayed in the mountains for the last hundred and fifty years?”

“Didn’t want to leave.” Something’s changed in him, talking about this. His hands grip the steering wheel a little tighter, and he’s squeezing his jaw. “I like it here.”

There’s something else, something he’s not telling me. I might not have a Hunter’s extra senses, but I can pick up on that much. A shift kind of washes over him, turning him sad for a few minutes.