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But at the same time, I’m not sure I want to be here anymore.

Mostly?

I wish I were back on the top of the mountain.

22

VICTOR

Iweave through Clifwell’s leafy, winding streets, driving just a few notches below the posted speed limit while looking at the gated, secluded driveways that I can only assume stretch back to houses in which humans live. Humans like Nicholas Wolrath.

I’m hunting.

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve sought out prey instead of waiting for it to come to me. And even longer since I went looking for specific prey, putting my senses out until something connected. My dad was the one who taught me how to do it, back when the year started with an eighteen and not a twenty. The gods will guide you, he told me, the two of us creeping through the Wyoming woods together. Whoever you want, if it’s a worthy kill, they’ll lead you straight to him.

I believed that, once. Even after I lost Mary, even after I dug myself out of the ground to find her killer was already dead, I still believed it. I followed the gods’ whispers back to the sanatorium and painted its walls with the medical staff’s blood—Wolrath just wasn’t among them. I told myself it was enough. It felt like it, at the time.

Afterwards, my parents let me come back home, although they told me to forget about her. I pretended I had. I hunted in the old way, the way my father taught me, the way I’m trying to do now. Listening for the gods. Following their instructions. But without Mary, my life was empty.

The road twists precipitously, leading me deeper into the thick, forested areas that crowd in around what little Clifwell has in terms of civilization. I grew up learning that the gods live in the forest. That they were the forest, and that’s why the wilderness on this continent is so dense and dangerous, why it killed settlers by the thousands as they crawled their way across other people’s lands. I’m not sure I believe that, really, although I can almost feel it out here, the darkness of the woods.

I roll down my window, letting in some of the forest’s scent. It’s bright and piney and vaguely smoky, all those October scents I usually hate. But for a moment—a lovely, shining moment—it makes me think of Penelope.

“Focus,” I tell myself, eyes on the road. I worry I’m going to catch her scent, that my hunting is going to take me back to downtown Clifwell, back to the pretty little inn where I dropped her off. It’s been a fight all afternoon not to do exactly that, to go watch her instead of hunt down my prey.

The wind blusters in through the open window, bringing something new. A presence, faint and distant. Maybe a whisper.

Left, it says.

My skin prickles with goosebumps. Yes, I left her. And it needs to stay that way, until I find out where Wolrath lives, until I⁠—

A crossroads appears up ahead. A four-way stop surrounded by pine trees. I ease down on the brakes until I roll to a stop at the intersection. A scent blows in through the window, something sweet and familiar.

Fear. Coming from the left.

I squeeze the steering wheel, immediately feeling dumb as hell. Left, the wind whispered, and it wasn’t talking about Penelope at all. It was telling me where to go.

But what’s got humans afraid, off to the left of the crossroads? I guess I’ll find out.

I turn, keeping my eyes fixed on the road. I try to focus on the task at hand and not let my thoughts drift back to Penelope. I’ll check on her once I’ve found Wolrath. I know she’s more than capable of taking care of herself for a few hours.

The scent of fear brightens. It’s not the sharp, acute fear that I’m used to, the kind I sense radiating off my victims right before I kill them. It’s that kind of subtle, low-grade fear that will stick with people when they know something’s wrong, even if they’re technically safe in the moment. It was everywhere back in the middle of the twentieth century, back when I went on my little road trip of terror, and I haven’t had many opportunities to feel it since.

There’s no denying it now, though. And it’s getting closer.

I slow my car as I go around another deep bend, this one right on the edge of a cliff that drops into a tree-covered valley below. And thank god I do, because as soon as I’m around it, I have to slam on my brakes.

There are fucking cop cars everywhere.

Several yards up ahead, the road itself dead-ends into a big, wrought-iron gate, which is currently closed and, more annoyingly, guarded by a couple of uniformed police officers. However, the trees are bare enough here that I can see the house beyond the gate—a huge, glittering mansion that no doubt overlooks the cliff.

I know I should turn around, given that there are cop cars parked along the front of the gate, and cops milling around in the chilly October air. Some of the fear’s coming from them. Local cops, given the Clifwell Police Department emblazoned across the side of their cars.

Not all of the fear, though. Some of it is coming from the house itself, and I smile at that, a frisson of excitement winding down my spine. The wind blows in through my window, and for a moment, I feel the undeniable presence of the gods, dark and reassuring, just like when I was a child.

Or just like last night, when they whispered for blood in the snowy wind and waited as I chose my victims from the humans sleeping in the motel.

Perhaps they guided my hand more than I realized then, too.