Page 12 of My Halloween Hunter

I come down that slope like a rockslide, boots skidding and branches breaking, loud enough that she hears every step and knows exactly what's coming for her.

Below me, between the pines, a flash of red in the moonlight. Her. Running.

7

Darcy

I hear him coming, and every nerve I have lights up.

He isn't hiding. He wants me to hear the branches snapping and the frozen ground cracking under his boots, the sheer size of him crashing down the ridge through the dark, and every sound of it goes straight down my spine and settles between my legs.

I run.

The moon is so bright the frost glows blue, and the pines throw long black shadows across it like bars. I run through them, light and shadow and light again, with the red wool snapping behind me like a flag. I'm easy to see. Edna knew it, and so did I when I put it on. I don't want to be hard to find.

My breath tears, and my legs burn, and a laugh bursts out of me, wild, and I clap a hand over my mouth. Behind me, the crashing stops.

The whole forest holds its breath.

I stop against a trunk, chest heaving, and listen to nothing at all. He's gone quiet. He's hunting me now, properly, the way he took me down that road the first night, silent and patient and learning me, and terror goes through me clean and cold, and I have never been so wet in my life.

"Cade." It comes out as a whisper.

A twig snaps to my left, close, and I bolt right. Three strides, four, and something big moves at the edge of my vision, pacing me. I veer, and he's there too; I veer again and he's ahead of me, herding me, and I understand too late that he's been in front of me the whole time. My boots skid on the frost.

I shriek—

An arm catches me around the waist and lifts me clean off my feet. He swings me around until my back hits something hard and warm, my boots dangling, his breath hot on my neck and his other hand spread across my belly, pinning me to him.

"Got you," he growls in my ear.

I'm laughing and crying and shaking so hard my teeth clack. "You let me get a head start."

"Wanted to watch you run."

He turns me around. The black kerchief is up over his nose again, frosted white where he's been breathing hard, and this time I don't wait. I pull it down myself. The moon is full on his face — wild beard, wild eyes, frost in his hair — and he looks like something that came down off the mountain to eat me, and he's looking at me like he'd die first.

"Well?" My voice wobbles. "You've got me. Say something."

His throat bobs.

"I'm freezing, I'm in a cape, and there's a pine needle somewhere I'd rather not discuss. Say something, Cade."

He takes my face in both hands, and they're shaking.

"Stay," he says, and it comes out of him like something torn loose. "Stay. If you go down that road, I'll find your street. I'll stand under your window in the rain, and every night you look out, I'll be there." His hands tighten on my face. "I don't want your window. I want you in that chair. I want to wake up and know where you are without having to hunt for you." His forehead drops to mine. "I don't know how to ask for things. This is me asking."

Something in my chest splits wide open. "Yes," I say.

He makes a sound like a wounded animal, and his mouth comes down on mine.

He spreads the red wool on the frost at the foot of a pine and lays me down on it. The cold hits my back through the cloth, and then he covers me before I can feel it, all of him heavy and hot, his coat falling open around us both like a tent. Moonlight comes down through the branches in silver pieces, and his face above mine is dark against the stars.

He opens my jeans and drags them off with my boots, and the air bites my bare legs until his hands are on them, rough and hot, spreading my thighs wide on the red wool. Then he stays there on his knees and looks at me, and doesn't say anything for so long that I start to squirm.

"Fuck," he says quietly, like a prayer. "Look at you."

I'm spread open under the hunter's moon on Halloween night, and I'm not cold at all.