Total pages in book: 209
Estimated words: 196141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 981(@200wpm)___ 785(@250wpm)___ 654(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 196141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 981(@200wpm)___ 785(@250wpm)___ 654(@300wpm)
“See me? You want … You want my brother to see me? Like this? Tell me, Kaleb. How am I gonna enjoy our life on the beach when I can’t touch sunlight without exploding? How am I gonna run a bakery with my brother when I can’t even—” He chokes on his words and shakes his head, silent for a time. “I’d rather just …” His voice tightens up. “I would rather have died a hero … than to live as this. As one of them. An abomination of nature.”
From the door of the bar comes Raya’s voice. “So that’s what we are?” she calls out dryly, eyes half lidded, annoyed. “We’re all a bunch of abominations? Your preacher friend you brought with you doesn’t think so. He spoke at the church last Sunday. It was a moving speech. I would have shed a tear were I capable. He said if this world is going to be saved, it will need people like us to stand against the ‘true evil’ … Demipire ‘abominations’ like you and me.”
Nico moves past Kaleb, stops halfway to Raya. “Y’know why he flatters you? Same reason us Bloods once revered your kind as our gods and goddesses when we were just prisoners beneath your feet.” He leans in. “He—and all the rest of this town—are fucking afraid of you.”
Raya flinches, like his words are a needle that pricked her.
Nico burns Kyle with his eyes, then Raya again, and finally backs away, heading off once more.
Raya steps forward. “I took half that sword, too, you know.” Nico slows, stops again. She comes back onto the sidewalk, boots crunching in the snow as she approaches him. “I can still feel it inside me. I told the doctors I didn’t care what happened to me, just keep this guy alive, keep Kaleb’s friend alive. Is it really such a big deal what you are now? Who says you have to like us? I don’t like half our kind either. They betrayed me. Used me. Hey.” She stops in front of him, brings her face close to his. “Remember what I said the night you were changed? … When it was just you, me, and Drake in that operating room? Do you remember?”
Nico meets her eyes.
Says nothing.
Kyle feels the warmth between them. It swells as the two lock eyes, something special and personal that no one else knows.
Raya peers back at Kyle and Kaleb. “You boys go inside. I’ll have my beer another night. I think … Nico can use a midnight stroll through the snow.”
Kaleb comes forward, pats Nico’s shoulder. Nico peers at him with hardened eyes. Quickly they become soft again, and without a word, he gives Kaleb a hug, like a silent apology, then lets go just as fast. He and Raya walk away, leaving a trail of off-white footprints down the road until they disappear around the corner.
Staring after them, feeling contemplative, Kaleb quietly asks, “Do you think our parents … are proud of us?”
Kyle smiles. “Are we playing the what-if game again?”
“No, no. Not a game. I’m … I’m not wanting to imagine it. I want to be literal. Them, watching us from the place where dead people go … Mom … Dad.” He turns back to Kyle. “I’d like to think they’re happy we’re together again.”
Kyle nods, brushes snow off his brother’s head. “Me, too.”
“No parent can predict what will become of their kids. What challenges they’ll face. Even unfathomable ones. Like magic spells and secret societies of vampires. A pandemic. War. It’s why we see the future as the great unknown. No one can possibly know it.” Kyle nods thoughtfully. Kaleb kicks gently at the snow, twisting his boot into it. “Raya asked me earlier tonight if my definition of sadness has changed. It was a question she asked me when we first met in the House of Vegasyn cells … Tristan was there, too.”
Kyle’s smile fades. He listens, studying the subtle changes in his brother’s face, which tells a story parallel to the words coming out of his mouth.
“I told her sadness is like a brother of happiness. You have too much of one, you always feel like the other’s about to appear.”
Kyle’s thoughts are on Tristan now, imagining his demeanor when he visited Kaleb in his cell, accompanied by Raya. All of this time. Tristan’s deep, dark secret … “And which one am I?” asks Kyle. “Happiness? Or sadness?”
“I was thinking again about Tristan,” Kaleb goes on, “how he saved me so long ago, and how you and Raya aren’t convinced of the goodness inside him.” He peers at his brother. “Drake told me the story of how you two met, how you insisted on saving Mikey’s life even at the cost of your own. And now Mikey is trapped here, unable to get home, but at least he’s safe. A part of me believes, had I not been caught as a teen, maybe in time, Tristan would’ve reunited us. Don’t you think? Isn’t saving Mikey from the cave and Tristan saving me from the fire … sort of the same thing?”