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Penelope laughs as we spin our way across the dance floor and past the bar and then spill out through some side door, into a stone patio that juts out into a cold, dark garden. The music and lights of the party seem far away, and all that’s out here is the night and the shadows and the gods. They don’t speak, but I feel them, stronger than I ever have, watching us from the woods.
They seem pleased.
“The valet,” Penelope gasps out suddenly. “They’ll think it’s weird we’re leaving so early.”
“They won’t see us.” I pull out my spare set of keys, dangle them in front of her like she’s a real cat. Penelope laughs.
“And how are we supposed to find your car?” she says coyly.
I tilt my head against her. “It smells like you,” I say. “I know exactly where to find it.”
Penelope smiles, her exhilaration radiating off her. “Thank you,” she whispers. “I feel like myself for the first time in my life.’
“So do I,” I whisper back.
Then I grab her hand, and we cut through the garden, making our escape.
And I know, for the first time, neither of us is alone.
Neither of us will ever be alone again.
EPILOGUE
PENELOPE
THREE MONTHS LATER
Istir awake to the sound of tires rolling against asphalt. Syrupy golden sunlight pours in through the car’s windows, and I blink against it, the last vestiges of the day before twilight.
“How much longer?” I ask, my voice still slurred with sleep. I’m stretched out in the backseat, exhausted after being up all night stalking a pair of rapists through the surprisingly chilly Nevada desert. For all the dark things that Victor has woken up in me, I still need a full eight hours of sleep.
“We’re almost there.” Victor glances at me in the rearview mirror, and I lean forward between the seats. We got this car just outside Denver, paying for it with the cash that Victor had stashed away all over the Backwoods Gas and Go, which is currently boarded up for the winter. We’ll be back in the spring. For the last three months, we’ve been driving across the United States, leaving a trail of worthy victims behind us—first west, then south, and then back up through the desert.
Now, finally, we’re in Northern California. Victor wanted to see the Pacific Ocean.
I peer out the window at the empty, narrow road. The ocean appears in glittering flashes between the trees, like glass reflecting the sunlight. We’re almost to the edge of the world.
We’ve avoided the highways these last few months and always stayed close to the woods, where the voices of the gods are loudest. They tell us where to go, where to find our prey. I only have one rule: we kill people who deserve it.
Like the rapists last night, who screamed and begged while Victor and I corralled them toward the graves we dug into the salt flats.
It never gets old, doing this with Victor.
“Get up here,” Victor says, patting the passenger seat. I squirm over the console and plop down, kicking my feet up on the dashboard. The road twines around, and I can tell we’re close to the water. The sunlight feels like salted caramel.
“How’d you sleep?” Victor glances at me sideways. He hasn’t bothered to cut his hair in the last three months, and it’s long enough now to graze the tops of his shoulders. Last night, it was streaked with blood from when I grabbed his head, shoving his face down into my pussy so he could eat me out on top of the two corpses we left to mummify in the desert.
I shiver a little at the memory. A shiver of excitement, not fear.
“Would have been better in a bed,” I say.
“We’ll find a motel along the beach. There’s bound to be something open, even in the off-season.”
I sink further down into the seat, watching the scenery roll by. In some ways, my life isn’t that different than it was three months ago. I’ve always been nomadic, and I spent half my time following Callie around, so it’s not like my life was completely free from murder. I just wasn’t the one doing it.
I still check in with Chloe and Abi once a week, like always, and I know eventually Victor and I will make our way to Texas, to see Abi and Rowan and a whole group of Hunters that she knows down there. A family, of sorts.
Both my mom and my sister always turned their noses up at that sort of thing, as if all we needed was each other. But I never really believed it, and I especially don’t believe it now, not with Victor being the one to initiate me into this world.
