Page 33

“You could’ve held on.”

“I could have,” I said, with difficulty. “That is the point.”

He was quiet.

I turned my face to the wall. My eyes were still red, and I could feel them, hot and wet, burning behind the lids, and I did not want him to see. I pressed my fists into my thighs and counted seven breaths in and seven breaths out, and I kept counting until my fangs slid back and the world dulled to its usual gray.

I did not hear him get up. I only heard the small creak of the bed and then, close behind me, a voice that was not at all what I expected.

“Hey. Ice prince.”

I turned.

He had put on a pair of sweatpants. He was standing about six feet away with one arm across his chest, holding his own elbow, looking at me the way you look at an animal that’s bitten you and then apologized.

“I’m not scared,” he said.

“You should be.”

“I know. I’m not. Don’t ask me why, I don’t have a good answer.” His mouth twisted. “You want to explain what just happened? Because I’ve got, like, three theories, and one of them is that you’re into me, and one of them is that you’re into eating me, and I honestly can’t tell which is worse.”

Despite everything, despite the ache in my jaw and the shame in my belly and the smell of him still thick in the air, I felt the corner of my mouth move.

“Neither is exactly wrong,” I said.

“ Great. “

“Sit down. Please. I will not come closer. I would like to tell you something, and you may hit me when I have finished.”

He stared at me. Then, warily, like a man approaching a live wire, he sat down on the edge of the bed. I took the desk chair, turned it around, and sat with the back between us like a barricade.

“I am no good at this,” I began. “Forgive me. I have never had to say it aloud to anyone but my sister.”

I took a breath. I did not need it. I took it anyway.

“There is a thing my kind believe. We say it is a story. Most of us do not think it is true, because it almost never happens. A vampire lives a very long time, Lex. We do not age. We do not get sick. We cannot easily love, because everyone we might love dies, and it is a form of madness to build a house on sand. So we learn to do without.”

He didn’t say anything. His hands were clasped between his knees.

“But there is an old law. Yelena, an elder who taught us, said it is the only law that matters. Somewhere, for each of us, is a person who is made for us. Not chosen. Not earned. Made. We call it a bond, or a mate. When you meet them, you know. You smell it, before anything else. Not perfume. A memory. The last time in your human life that you were entirely happy.”

I looked at my hands.

“Mine was my mother’s kitchen. It was the first snow. There was bread with honey in it, still warm.” I heard my own voice shake. “I have not smelled it in eleven hundred years. And then a man threw me against a locker and called me a sissy, and there it was.”

The room was very quiet.

“Me,” said Lex.

“You.”

“I smell like bread.”

“You smell like bread and honey and the best day of my life.”

He laughed. It was a strange, cracked, breathless laugh, and he put a hand over his mouth to stop it, and the laugh turned into something else, and he took the hand away and just sat there with his eyes bright and his face open in a way I had never seen. It made him look about nineteen.

“That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” he said.