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I almost trip over the body in the hall outside my door.
“It’s me!” Leo says, sitting up. I cover my mouth to muffle the scream that almost escaped. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
I take in a shaky breath. I don’t know where to begin, and I’m afraid that once I do, I’ll lose my grip completely. “I’m okay,” I lie. “Just tired. But what are you doing on the floor outside my room? I thought you were a dead body. And I am all dead-bodied out for the night. I don’t have another dead-body opening in my schedule for at least a week.”
It’s dim, the only light a bulb at the other end of the hall. But I can feel Leo smiling. I can hear it in his voice.
“I’ll do my best to clear your schedule of dead bodies, then. I’m sorry. I thought you were inside, asleep.”
“Weirdo.” I reach past him to open the door. But I’m secretly touched that Leo was worried enough to come guard me.
“Where’s Artemis?” He peers inside as I flip the light on.
“Sleeping in Jade’s room tonight. She’s still pis
sed at me.”
Leo hovers in the doorway. Seeing his hands jammed into his loose sweatpants pockets and his mouth twisted to the side is kind of adorable. He’s embarrassed and feeling awkward. I’m so fricking glad it’s not me for once that I’m instantly at ease and no longer feeling so desperate to get to Artemis right away. She didn’t want to talk about the prophecy before. I don’t know if that has changed. And I can’t handle another rejection if she refuses.
Doug’s camping and still being hunted. He’s not going anywhere. Neither is my mom. I’ll figure this out on my own. “Oh, come in,” I say. “It’s silly for you to be out on the floor. Besides, I’m a Slayer, remember? I don’t need a bodyguard.”
“And I’m your Watcher. It’s my job to protect you.”
“It’s your job to train and guide me. The protecting is my job.”
“Agree to disagree.” Leo finally steps into my room. His eyes take it all in, and I look at it as though for the first time. Artemis’s side of the room is tidy, weights stacked neatly next to demonic texts she’s been studying. A row of weapons hangs from a shelf above her bed.
My side of the room . . . less tidy. I have a bookshelf double-stacked and crammed with everything imaginable. CPR instruction manuals, anatomy books, first-year medical student texts I begged Cillian to buy me off eBay, my Redheads of Literature shelf. There’s the stack of the demon books I was looking through to find information on Doug. And there’s a huge pile of notebooks.
Ah, there’s the awkwardness I had been missing! I’m sure that Leo is eyeing the notebooks. Or am I just paranoid? “They’re notes. Not poetry! Anatomy. Health stuff. I watch a lot of medical tutorials and write down what I think will be useful. I also keep logs of stuff. So mostly it’s records of the Littles having a fever or a stomach bug. But Imogen takes good care of them, so even that’s not a lot.”
Leo nods. Then he looks up at the ceiling and his eyes widen. “Are those fan blades actual blades?”
I rub the back of my neck. He’s perceptive. “Oh. Right. Um. You know we lost our dad, and then there was the fire. After all that, I started having bad nightmares and was scared to go to sleep at night. So Artemis and I decided to set booby traps. Squirt guns with holy water hidden everywhere. Stakes. Actually, in the kitchen, every wooden stirring spoon still has a sharpened end. Anyway, as we got older, they got more elaborate. The fan was our project when we moved here and both needed a distraction from what happened with the Council going boom and all.” I go to the spot right under the fan. “See here? This board is loose. On a fulcrum. There’s a spring on the other side. The idea is you lure the vampire or whatever to this spot, then stomp on the board. Ta-da! Instant decapitation.”
Leo is still staring up at the fan. “I was always afraid ceiling fans would come loose and kill me. How can you sleep under this thing?”
“We don’t turn it on.” I point to the fireplace. “We never use that, either. Not huge fans of fires. But there’s a pressurized gas canister there.” I point to what looks like a normal gas feed for the fire. “Jade helped us rig it up. If you flip this switch right inside the mantel, it’s a flamethrower. But again, stationary. The vampire would have to be standing right here. We weren’t really big on practicality. It was mostly to keep ourselves busy, to pretend like we had some control.”
“You wanted to feel safe.”
I sit on Artemis’s bed, sad and exhausted. “Yeah. Artemis was always good at keeping me busy. And at making me feel safe.” But she’s not here. Maybe it’s better that he’s here. He’s easier to talk to than Artemis lately. “So, I just saw my mother out in the woods with Doug.”
“What? Did she catch him?”
“They were having a meeting. I went for a run, and there they were. My mom had her address book, which apparently also contains a who’s who of demons in Dublin. And a lot of other Slayers. I don’t know what they’re planning, or why. But I think it has to do with me and a prophecy. So I’m freaking out. A little bit.”
Leo nods, but he speaks slowly, like he’s holding something back. “Nothing is ever black and white. Not prophecies, and certainly not people. We don’t know what your mom is doing, but Doug didn’t kill Cosmina or Bradford. If there is a prophecy, it’s kept for this long. It’ll keep for a few more days. So we keep our cards close to our chests. We don’t talk to anyone else about this until we figure it out. In the meantime, you should get some sleep.”
As soon as he says it, I realize how bone-deep tired I am. “You too.” I feel his presence in my room acutely. It’s not a huge room to begin with, but he takes up far more space in it than just his body can account for. “You can, uh, use my bed. If you don’t want to sleep in the hall.”
“I’d like to read, if that’s okay?”
“Of course.” I lie back on Artemis’s bed. Leo pulls a book from my shelf—it’s called Joseph Lister and the Story of Antiseptics. “That’s good bedtime reading. Lister was the man who revolutionized surgery by introducing antiseptic procedures.”
“There’s a museum of surgery in Edinburgh that highlights his achievements.” Leo sits down with the book and opens it up. “We should go. Though it will break your no-dead-bodies rule.”
“I’d break that rule for you.” I turn away so he can’t see my blush. I can’t be as hopeless as I was three years ago. I peek over at him after a few minutes. He reads with his eyebrows drawn ever-so-slightly together, giving him a look of deep concern. I force my eyes closed. But there’s no way I’m falling asleep with Leo right there.
