Total pages in book: 218
Estimated words: 209489 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1047(@200wpm)___ 838(@250wpm)___ 698(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 209489 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1047(@200wpm)___ 838(@250wpm)___ 698(@300wpm)
Yeah. Cool, cool. I wasn’t bitter about it or anything.
Maybe I’d weirded him out telling him about his grandmother’s vision. Or holding his fingers the night before he’d left. Maybe I was cramping his space.
He’d already warned me that he wasn’t used to taking care of people. That he didn’t want to like me. If it had taken his family weeks to start worrying about him and his disappearance, it was for a reason. Why worry about people who were 99.9999999 percent invincible?
So why would Alex even think about calling someone to check in with them? Why would he think about calling me to let me know he was fine? We were friends, yeah, but we were top 10 best friends.
At least he was my top 10 best friend.
A little higher than that if I wanted to think about it.
I tried not to get too hung up on it.
Fortunately, I’d been busy while he’d been away. I still hadn’t decided how to proceed with my career as a teacher, which bummed me the hell out. If I launched a new site with conveniently all the same languages the cartel had found books for at my house, they would find me. Probably pretty easily unfortunately. I had changed focus to starting to learn the basics for Japanese. I’d known it was going to be hard, but I hadn’t anticipated just how difficult. I had taken for granted how easily I had picked up every other one I’d learned. One night, Hiromi had confirmed that my “talent” for languages was part of my Atraxian gift.
On that same night, Selene had taken my hand and told me about a cousin of mine that she’d found in Costa Rica named Valentina. One year ago, this Valentina deposited ten thousand dollars into her bank account in cash. Almost immediately, she used every penny to pay a hospital bill.
I couldn’t even muster up that much anger over it. If she had given away my name to pay off her debt, I understood. I was no one to her but a name.
She was a traitor, but I didn’t blame her.
I didn’t have a whole lot going for me being in this weird limbo situation, but I did have one thing that lifted my spirits.
I finally had people in my life. People I liked a lot. I had friendships with a twenty-five-year-old, a twenty-one-year-old, a three-year-old who was stronger than me, and a terrifying woman I had a feeling was a hell of a lot older than she looked.
It made me wonder how old Alex would eventually be. How old my grandfather had actually been. I knew now that he hadn’t been lying when he’d whispered to me that he was turning one hundred so many years ago.
He’d told me the truth.
The knowledge made my heart so full.
Over the last month, I usually spent time with at least one of Alex’s family members every day. On that first evening with Selene and Hiromi, we’d gone to buy groceries… and gone back to his house with a couple frozen pizzas and a pack of raspberry beer that we’d destroyed in record time while we watched a reality show about an attractive man on the hunt for the love of his life.
The day after that, Hiromi had shown up and taken me with her to get my hair cut and colored. I think they’d called it a “balayage job” or something like that. I didn’t remember, but apparently I’d told her all about wearing a wig the day before. She hadn’t let me pay for it either, saying it was an early birthday present. In hindsight, I couldn’t believe I’d drank enough to do that, but it made me glad I hadn’t trusted my big mouth around people, otherwise who the hell knows what I might have told a total stranger.
After that, Selene showed up with a USB-looking stick, and we’d watched a not-yet-released Shinto Comics movie about Justine Justice. That was the night I learned that she handled “privacy matters,” or as Hiromi had explained immediately after, she was a “fucking hacker.” Apparently, she had set up some kind of program or algorithm that alerted whatever member of the Trinity was closest to natural disasters and specific kinds of emergencies. And here I’d thought they had some kind of team with a hotline that people called into.
I’d also figured out the night before that Hiromi bounced around jobs because she couldn’t get to work on time, and the family wouldn’t hire her. The Akita side or the Shinto comics side, which was also known as the Drakos part of the family.
Another day, Grandmother and Asami had paid me a second visit with a different board game. Then she had asked me to drive her to her daughter’s house. I’d wanted to say no, but my balls had picked up and walked away, so I did. That’s where I got to meet Alex’s dad, a tall, lean man with dark, serious eyes but a warm smile that told me exactly where The Primordial got it from. The energy coming off him had been a warm, steady one that was the complete opposite of his wife’s. I had wondered just what gifts he had.