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“Youdoheal fast,” I mutter, a little gobsmacked. Still, I reach for the wounds to press gingerly on them, finding that the deep gashes have healed over, leaving shiny pink flesh where there was raw, bloody red.
“I’m a lot of things, but I’m not a liar,” he says, his voice low and rough.
I graze my fingers across the taut, lean muscle, finding a glaze of sweat from the heat of the fire. The edges of the wound show pale and jagged on his tan skin, rising and falling with his breaths, which are growing more rapid by the second. I follow the new scar up to an old one which stretches all the way from his pec across his ribs and down to the waist of his jeans—
Only for Elijah’s hand to shoot out and grab my wrist.
I gasp, jerking my eyes up to his. “Sorry—did I hurt you?”
“No, I’m ticklish,” he says. “Reallyticklish.”
“Oh,” I say, my voice breaking.
A devilish smile curves his lips, and his fingers graze my inner wrist, giving me a full-body shiver.
“But you can keep touching if you want.”
I instantly jerk my hand away, glaring hard at him and getting up in a huff. He didn’t have to make it weird—I just haven’t seen a lot ofmen, or any really, outside of old books and magazines, and this is curiosity, it isn’t anything nasty.
I rifle through my bag and turn around to chuck a can of beans at his face, but Elijah catches it easily, still looking at me with those impossibly silver eyes and a cocky grin. He hasn’t put his shirt back on either, which is…well, I have mixed feelings about that, to put it lightly. I gape at him when he points his finger and a claw pops out, which he uses to open the can.
“Cool trick, huh?” he says.
“It’s a little creepy,” I cringe.
“Guess it could be, if you don’t spend a lot of time with people like me,” he says with a shrug. Elijah gazes across the fire at me as I settle in myself, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. He’s shining with a thin sheen of sweat from the day’s walk, gloriously gold and painted in metallic tones. Ican’tstop looking at those muscles no matter how hard I try, but I attribute my slack jaw and watering mouth to how hungry I am. We eat in silence for a few minutes, my eyes trained on the fire like it can burn all the weird thoughts and feelings out of me, until Elijah clears his throat.
“So you’ve never been outside until now,” he says. “You love your grandparents. And you’re not Blessed, but you have resources. You know things.”
I eye him. “What are you trying to say?”
He cocks his head. “You’re part of that cult, aren’t you? The one that hates the Blessed?”
I frown. “The Resistance isn’t a cult.”
“That’s not what I mean,” he says. Elijah sighs, setting his half-eaten can down on the ground and raking his hand through his dirty hair. “You know that humans fought the Angels at first, right? Twenty years ago, right around the time you were born, I guess. RightafterI was.”
“You were born before the Convergence?” I ask.
“A couple years,” he says. “I don’t remember a world without Angels, if that’s what you’re asking. But that’s not what I’m trying to tell you.”
I’m genuinely intrigued; when two people provide all of your education, it’s easy to lose sight of the real world. And now, here’s Elijah, telling me that what I know might be wrong, and I’m…
I’m not angry about it.
I just want to learn.
“Keep talking, then,” I say. “I’m listening.”
“Well,” he says. “There were people who agreed to be Blessed, of course—like my family. I didn’t get any say in it, but I got my Blessing real young. During the New Crusades, though, some people got especially angry at the Angels, and they didn’t direct their anger at the imposters; they directed it at us. They thought that people like me werewrong. Unholy, dirty, inhuman. And they came to our dens and they killed us where we slept.”
I stare at him for what feels like hours, and my stomach roils like I might be sick. I’ve heard my grandparents talk about the New Crusades before, sure, but it’s always been so quiet, and I’ve always felt like we were on the right side.
And as he speaks, I remember my grandmother’s stories about lycanthropes. How they’re unholy, dirty, inhuman.
How they steal away little girls.
“My grandparents wouldneverhave done something like that,” I say quietly. “They’re good people.”
