Chapter Eight
Edward lets me keep the knife.
It’s stupid, bringing it home, but there’s a riptide of morbid curiosity barreling through me. Now that I know that I stabbed someone with it, I can’t let it go. I really want to ask him if I could see the scar, but I’m way too embarrassed to actually do such a thing. Instead, I just trudge along behind him back through the forest. We sit on the porch in the dark, and I spin that knife in my hands while he glares off across the yard.
“Sorry for stabbing you,” I say.
Edward just shrugs like it was no big deal, like people stabbed strangers every day. Like it was normal or something.
“You couldn’t hurt me even if you tried,” he wheezes.
“Why did I do it?”
“I scared you. It was an accident.”
I peek at him out the corner of my eye, trying to imagine what it was like, sinking the blade into him. I wonder if I hit a bone or an intestine. Maybe I’d managed sheer stupid luck and slid it into the slim centimeter of space where nothing important was in the way, just like that girl on the highway a few years back. A big iron pole from a construction vehicle burst through her windshield and pinned her to the seat when it went through her chest. It missed her heart by millimeters. Missed her lung by even less. She was a miracle.
Maybe he was too.
“Where did you come from?”
“A different century,” he sighs and drops his chin to his chest. I can’t tell if he’s making a joke or just being sarcastic. He must hear me huff because he shakes his head and says, “Alaska.”
“So, you’re on vacation?”
“No, I live here.”
“I’ve never seen you.” I rack my brain for him but come up empty, which is weird. Small towns like this make strangers impossible to miss. How this guy with his sick face and his wheeze and that assassin suit could go unnoticed, I don’t understand.
“I own a house here,” he says.
“Where?”
“Out of town. Down the 101, on Hollow Road. ”
There’s only one house out that way, and it’s haunted. At least that’s the rumor. I haven’t seen the actual house, but I know the driveway is barely a driveway, overgrown and shadowed and not much more than a hole in the dense forest that borders the highway. Half the town would tell you that an entire family was murdered there. The other half claims that the family murdered each other.
“I thought that house was haunted,” I mumble.
Edward laughs. A hard, rough laugh that catches in his throat.
“You have no idea.”
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