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“Penelope,” I say, and it’s the first time I’ve said her name out loud, and the shape of it jars straight down into my chest. “I—Thank you. For telling me that. About the gods.”

She looks over at me, her hair mussed.

“Hearing them, I mean. In the hurricane.” I pause. When she keeps watching me, I ask, “Did you hear them now? In the snowstorm?”

She shakes her head slowly. “I just thought it was weird,” she says, her voice quiet. “The storm coming out of nowhere. Forcing us to⁠—”

“To get a motel room.”

We stare at each other.

“Stupid, I know.” She slaps her hand on the chest of drawers, grabbing the room key. “I’m going to check out the vending machine, okay?”

“I’ll come with you.”

I expect her to protest. Part of me thinks she’s going to try to run. But she doesn’t. She just smiles a little.

“Yeah,” she says. “I’d like that.”

16

VICTOR

Penelope falls asleep after our makeshift dinner from the vending machine: peanut butter crackers and pretzels and a couple of Snickers bars, all washed down with a Diet Coke. I’ve certainly had worse meals.

I’m not going to sleep, though. I don’t need it, for one, and anyway, I’ve got too much energy to stay still. I keep thinking about what she said, about hearing the voices of the gods on the wind. My parents, wherever they are in this world, would have said it was impossible for a human to hear the gods. They speak to Hunters and Hunters alone.

But Penelope’s got Hunter blood running through her, even if it isn’t doing anything. And the way she described it, their voices on the wind—I know what she means. That’s how I would hear them when I was a boy in the cruel wilderness that would eventually become Wyoming. I used to stalk through the woods, creeping low to the ground, watching prey animals move through the underbrush like I was a wolf. I never did anything to them unless we needed meat, and we usually didn’t. Ma and Pa had that covered on their own. But I liked to watch them. I knew what I was, knew I’d be doing this for the rest of my long, long life.

It was around puberty when the voices started, low and muttering. It sounded like the trees were talking to me, or the little creek that ran through the woods. I’d sit in the sprawling root system of a towering old cottonwood tree, sniffing the air for prey, and I’d hear the whispers. When I realized it was the old tongue I was hearing, not English, I knew it was them. The gods I prayed to at night instead of the Christian god the traveling preacher would always go on about. He’d have called them demons if he knew about them, just like he screamed that my mother was the devil as she split his throat open with her favorite hunting knife.

They went silent when Mary came into my life. At least until yesterday, when I felt something rattling in the tree branches after I fucked Penelope to orgasm.

The thought makes me feel strange. Guilty. Hot. Confused.

I watch Penelope sleeping, her body curled up on the blankets. My blood is pounding heavily through my veins, and I keep thinking about that picture of Nicholas Wolrath, his stupid lopsided grin and his squinty eyes that are identical to the eyes of Albert Wolrath when he told me he had an experimental treatment that he’d like to try on Mary, if it was all right with me, her husband. She was too sick to answer for herself.

I stalk across the narrow space of the motel room, my blood pumping. Killing a Wolrath isn’t going to be easy. I have to get to him, and a rich man like that won’t be easy to get to, even if I am okay with dying to do it. I just don’t want to die before he does. I saw how well that worked out last time.

My footsteps fall softly. I don’t want to wake Penelope, don’t want her to see me like this. She knows Hunters, and I suspect she’ll know what’s twisting up my insides:

A need to kill.

I whip around by the wall, stalk back toward the dark TV. The storm’s ended, but the wind is still blowing, low and soft and whistling. I stop by the door, my head tilted, listening.

For a second, just a second, I think I hear words on the wind. It’s time to spill blood. It sounds like English and the old tongue all twisted up together, and I don’t know if it’s my imagination or not, if all that talk about speaking to the gods has me thinking I hear them now.

It can’t be them. Not after so long. But it is true, and I don’t need the gods to tell me, either. I’ve been needing to kill for a while. Leaving Penelope alive certainly didn’t sate the need, and neither does the promise of Nicholas Wolrath’s death. In fact, I think I need to get this out of my system if I want to make sure I don’t fuck up Wolrath’s murder.

I look over at Penelope again, her breath soft and rhythmic, her skin glowing a little in the soft light spilling around the windows. The notion of killing her passes briefly through my thoughts, and it makes my stomach knot up. No. Not her. And not because she’s the daughter of a Hunter, either.

Something outside bangs in the wind. Spill blood. Spill blood. Spill blood.

I snatch the room card off the counter, slip on my coat, and step out into the cold night.

It’s quiet out here. Just the wind blowing the fallen snow around, making it glint in the buzzing street lamps in the parking lot. I ease the door shut, listening for the automatic click of the lock. Penelope will be fine in there without me. With any luck, I can take care of this and be back before she wakes up.

And fuck her.