The waitress passes our table, and I stop her. “You know, I’m sorry. I’m not sure I’m in the mood for French toast . . . anything else that might be good?”

I tip well, and I want the biggest cheeseburger you’ve got.

“Well,” she says conspiratorially. “We’re on breakfast, but we do have the best cheeseburgers outside the metro. I think I could talk Matt into firing one for you,” she says with a wink.

“That would be great,” I say tightly. “With everything, please.”

The moment she leaves, I suppress a shudder. The release of adrenaline that relieves my shaking hands is immediate, and real.

When I slide my gaze back to Luka, he’s nodding. “There’s the Audra I know,” he whispers.

*  *  *

By the time we leave, I’m full and so tired I’m swaying on my feet. Luka finally finds a residential neighborhood off the expressway, parks behind a little church.

“You should try to get some sleep,” he says.

I pull my sleeves down over my hands, tuck them under my arms. But despite my exhaustion, sleep feels like the last thing I’ll ever be capable of again.

“Who did you tell me you were when I met you? Before, I mean,” I say. Somewhere a transit train rolls in the distance.

“I said I was taking time off from university to work for my father,” he says into the darkness. “Making some money so I could transfer to a school in the States. Which was true.”

“How did you end up involved in this in the first place? How does someone even become a hunter?”

“It runs in families,” he says.

“Christmas must be fun at your house.”

“It isn’t exactly something people discuss. The call may skip a generation. Maybe two. There’s never more than one hunter in any generation from the same family. Out of two siblings, one might get the call and the other will never have any idea that such a thing—any of this—even exists.” His accent, normally light, is thicker when he’s fatigued.

“Or that his or her brother is a murderer.”

Do I imagine his flinch?

“What will happen to your family?”

“I don’t know,” he says quietly. But somehow I think he has a pretty grim idea.

“This ‘call’ . . . how does it happen?”

“It was after mass,” he says with a soft, bitter laugh. “I was thirteen when the new deacon invited me to join a secret group of ‘up-and-coming young people’ that my grandfather had been a member of. A kind of fraternity that supports the—what do they call it . . . ‘mutual advancement’ of its members.”

“What, like Skull and Bones?”

“What’s that?”

“Old boys’ club at Yale.”