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“Fuck!” she screams. It occurs to me that she has not once screamed for help, only threatened me with her mother. “Put me down!”

She kicks her legs, but she doesn’t have the strength to fight back against me, even if that head injury wasn’t making her woozy. Still, I move faster, and when I hit the path to the cabin, I break into a full run.

That, of all things, sends her panic spiraling. She tries to fight back in earnest, although I don’t have the sense she’s trying to escape so much as she’s trying to trip me or slow me down. A clever move. A clever victim, to not let her panic get to her.

“You are going to fucking regret this!” she slurs. Definitely still woozy from the injury. I say nothing, just focus on the cabin, which has come into view up ahead. I built it myself many years ago out of logs that I felled from these woods. It’s a gravestone as much as it is a cabin, marking the place where I buried the first Mary after she was lost to me forever.

When this Mary sees it, however, she gives another shriek of fear.

I push the door open with my shoulder and step inside. There’s only one room, but it’s spotless, despite all the Marys who have died within these walls. There’s no electricity here, but there is a window above the bed that I retroactively carved into the wood and then fitted with thick, swirling glass. Brand new then. Antique now.

The bed is where I deposit the Mary. As I expected she would, she immediately tries to roll away, but I shove her down by the shoulder with one hand while I use the other to drag open the little bedside drawer for the jar of ether I keep in there.

She recognizes it, the jar and the rag. That’s surprising in this day and age. “Don’t you fucking dare!” she shrieks as I tilt the ether onto the waiting rag one-handed. “My mother will kill you!”

There it is again. My mother. Oddly specific. Perhaps the mother is a cop. Or a politician, someone with enough pull to really investigate her daughter’s death. I look down at the Mary, and she thrashes wildly against my arm.

It almost gives me pause, the threat of discovery. But god, she’s too fucking perfect.

“She will hunt you down!” the Mary screams. “Your little backwards Deliverance shit won’t save⁠—”

I press the ethered rag against her mouth and nose, and she shrieks into it. I press down harder, forcing her to take a breath as she glares at me, hatred and fury raging in her pretty dark eyes through the mask of her blood. It hurts, seeing it. The first Mary never once looked at me like that.

It only lasts for a few moments, though. Eventually, the ether kicks in, and she slumps back against the bed, her breaths heavy. Then her eyes roll up, and she’s out.

I pull the rag away cautiously, waiting for her to surprise me again. My thoughts are heavy with doubts. She will hunt you down.

An interesting choice of words. Hunt. But there’s no way she could know what I am. Humans don’t learn about my kind and survive.

For a few minutes, I just watch the Mary breathing, her chest rising and falling. Something tickles my arm; the blood, I realize with a start, from when she cut me. I twist around to look down at the damage, which is more extensive than I realized. I had been too distracted to be cognizant of how long the cut is, how it traces over the width of my bicep. It’s shallow, and I don’t feel any real pain, but my shirt sleeve is soaked crimson.

Excitement flutters around, drowning out any doubt. She’s a wildcat, this Mary. Her claws are sharp.

I wipe her face clean of the blood, slow and careful. I know time is ticking outside, but it’s important to me that she not look wounded when I return.

Once I’m satisfied, I leave the cabin, dragging the chains in place over the door and securing them with the big metal padlock. My heart pounds furiously as I walk back to her car, undisturbed by the side of the road. I can’t just leave it, of course. She was in contact with someone—her mother, the one who’ll hunt me down? Unclear. Regardless, when she doesn’t arrive in Avens, someone will come looking for her. I can’t have them finding her car.

Keys first, then. I don’t see them on the road, but it doesn’t matter. I have a tow truck around the back of the Gas and Go that I use to haul these things off. It makes the process a little more arduous, but not by much.

Phone next. That, at least, is still sitting on the car’s roof, and I pick it up and swipe it open. A lock pad comes up, but perhaps I can hold it up to her sleeping face and open it that way. I shove it in my pocket to deal with later.

There’s a bit of blood on the car frame, and I wipe that off with the clean sleeve of my shirt in case someone comes by before I have a chance to move the car. I peer through the windows. The food she got from the gas station is scattered across the driver’s seat. Her purse is in there, too. I leave both. I can fetch them once the car is off the road.

Next, I crouch down and peer under the car until I find the knife she tried to fight me with.

It’s easy to find; I didn’t knock it that far under the car, and although it takes some finagling, I’m able to reach under and grab it by the handle. My breath feels tight as I pull it toward me and then look down at the blade, still smeared with my blood.

She did that to me. A human woman drew my blood.

The idea is exciting. That’s never happened before. Even when they try to fight back, they never land a real blow. She did.

It has a nice weight in my hands, the knife. It’s not cheap. It reminds me of the knives I used when I was a young man, the ones I had specially made by a French fur trader. Elegant. Well-cared for.

I flip it over, and that’s when I see the writing inscribed on the metal.

Penelope

My whole body freezes. A name. I don’t want to know the names they use before they wind up in my cabin. In my cabin, they’re Mary. Always.