Page 105 of Fangs with Benefits

She looks terrified, and her anguish brings a pang of guilt to my chest.

‘The council—’

‘We’ll never tell them,’ Evangeline says. She moves between us and looks Gregory in the eye. ‘You will never tell them.’

A vein in Gregory’s jaw twitches, and his nostrils flare as he attempts to keep his emotions in check in the face of our sister’s words. He turns to me.

‘You can’t do this, I won’t allow it.’

‘It’s not your choice to make,’ I say.

‘It will kill Mother.’

‘And yet, she will continue to live, just as we all did after Father, after every person we’ve ever loved has met their end.’

‘But you do not have to,’ Gregory says. He grabs my shoulders in his hands, hands I’ve known for centuries, so like my own, like our father’s, too. I think he might punch me, or shove me again, but he just locks his eyes onto mine and begs me to see his side. ‘Do you not think of us at all? Of how you’ll let us watch you age and die?’

He shakes me as he speaks, his voice cracking, and I don’t fight him or push him away. Gregory and I have not seen eye to eye in centuries, but he is my brother above all, and I would grieve him intensely. My eyes are soft, and I lift a palm to press flat against his chest where his own heart once beat.

‘I will never be gone,’ I tell him. ‘So long as you live to remember me, I’ll exist here. Like Father still does, lying in the sun with the peel of a stollen orange discarded beside him, listening to his sons bickering, his wife and daughter laughing nearby.’

He turns to Evangeline, pleading with our older sister, who’s always been the smartest and most sensible of us. ‘Is there no chance of convincing him?’ Jellie shakes her head and Gregory’s face falls further. ‘Mother, tell them no.’

We all turn to look at her, the matriarch who made us this way because the thought of losing us was too much for her to bear. She steps slowly towards us, all of her years suddenly showing in her sad, sad eyes.

‘I’m sorry, Mother,’ I say, and I mean it.

‘My boy,’ she sighs, and comes near enough to touch my cheek. ‘This life has always fitted you wrong. You were such an explorer, always in your dreams, and immortality chafes at your soul, like it would have your father. Always has.’

‘It’s not that I’m ungrateful,’ I whisper.

She shushes me, comforting me even as I break her heart. ‘I know, of course I know.’ She turns to look at Gregory, then Evangeline. ‘We will never speak of this,’ she says, a promise as much as a command. ‘When a century has passed, we’ll tell the council he died by accident. You will be free, Elijah. To live.’

Gregory lets out a sound like a sob and squeezes my shoulder tighter. This is one thing about being a family for so long–we’ve learned how to disagree quickly. We know each other too well by now to know what battles are worth fighting. Gregory is stubborn enough to pick at old fights for years, but not so stubborn that he won’t follow our mother in this.

He pulls me to him, the first true embrace from my brother in over a hundred years. Jellie joins us, her arms wrapping around the both of us, and after a moment, our mother does too, holding on most fiercely of all.

Chapter 37

Molly

Christmas morning in Utah starts way too fucking early when my brother comes into my childhood bedroom and starts shaking the edge of the mattress, accomplishing his goal of waking me in the most disorienting way possible.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ I groan into my pillow.

‘Get up, c’mon.’

‘Mom and Dad will tell you to go back to bed if you try to wake them up to open our three presents, Caleb. You’re thirty-three.’

Caleb pulls the very warm, very soft blanket off my legs. Gemma meows indignantly and jumps off the bed. I didn’t want to leave her in New York, so I brought her in a carrier on the plane, this cat that Elijah abandoned with me when he fucked off to who knows where. I can admit that I would have been sadder if he’d taken her, though.

‘Molly, it snowed.’

This has my attention, and I push my torso off the bed to glare at him. ‘You’re lying,’ I accuse.

‘Would I joke about this?’

I swing my legs over the side of the bed because, if he is lying, I will whoop his ass. I don’t care that he’s bigger and taller and older than me.