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He laughed and kissed the top of her head. “No?”

“No offense, but my bizarre life was a lot simpler before you.”

“Ha, um… you aren’t going to love this, then. So… Um… You’re my soulmate and thus you are destined to die.”

“What?” Eryn sat up straight and lifted her eyebrows halfway to her hairline.

“Sorry…”

Eryn sighed even more heavily. “Why not. I’m becoming an angel of death and I suck people’s souls. My hot neighbor happens to be exactly who I need to fight the fight of my life. Not just hot, but my soulmate. And he says I’m destined to die. This keeps getting better and better.”

Fuck, she was something. His smile broadened as he looked at her. Watched her process. The squinty crinkle in her eyes. The pout in her sarcastic smile. “Weird, I know.”

“How do you know?”

“That you’re my soulmate, or that you’re destined to die?”

“Let’s start with the soulmate thing.”

“Can’t you tell?”

She leaned back enough to look him in the eye. Her honey eyes glowed bright and curious. “You are pretty irresistible.”

He slipped a hand under her sweatshirt and stroked his fingertips along her back, feeling the goosebumps recede under his touch, her skin warming and smoothing in his wake.

“That’s why you won’t commit, because once you do, you’ve doomed your partner to die?”

“Yup.” Fuck. How to explain what made no sense in the human understanding of how the world worked. “Sometimes I know things I shouldn’t. Feel things that haven’t happened yet. My grandmother, though, she was an incredible seer. She documented some profound, potentially world-ending prophecies.”

“That’s terrifying. Like what?”

“In about thirty years, the veil is going to shatter, and Ryan and Quinn’s daughter is going to be the only one who can prevent it from happening.”

“Skye, right? What a fate to grow up with. Does she know?”

He laughed and shook his head. “She’s very smart, and so sweet. The prophecy also describes an altered werewolf—her soulmate, who happens to be Bodie’s brother. That is her favorite part. She doesn’t know what that means yet, but she and Noah have this adorable connection.”

“What? Bodie’s adult brother? Don’t you guys worry about, like, ew, grooming?”

“No.” Absurdity smacked him upside the head. “I mean, damn, that would be so fucking creepy. Thankfully, it’s not at all like that. You’ll see, when you meet him. Age gaps and growing up and, fuck, so much is different in our world. We live to be hundreds of years old.”

“This whole part-demon thing is so weird. You’re twenty years older than me, so that’s already weirding me out, but you don’t look a day over thirty.”

“My dad is more than two hundred years older than Sunshine. Adair is five hundred years older than Bennett.”

“So, so weird.”

He shifted his hand to her side and held her close. “You know when someone’s going to die. Can absorb people’s souls and find them particularly tempting when they’re on death’s door.”

“Your grandmother must have been heartbroken to have to tell you such a thing. How old were you?”

His grandmother’s pinch-wrinkled face, warning him as a bedtime story while his father was out hunting. “I was eight years old when she told me I should never fall in love, because death will take my wife soon after we marry, and she didn’t want that kind of grief for me.”

“When you were eight?”

“She wasn’t a chocolate-chip cookie sort of grandmother. I don’t have many fond memories of her.” He released her and rested his forearms on his knees. Every muscle in his body ached, like he’d been out of bed for days instead of minutes.

“This might sound like too easy of a fix, but why don’t we just not get married?”