Neither (The Noctalis Chronicles 3)

“Really? I didn't know that.” You learn something new every day.

“You make me a list and when you get back, it'll be done.” She glances at the clock. “I should get back. I still have some research to do before I go to bed.”

“What are you working on now?”

“Some branding irons. Nothing too fascinating. I'll keep you updated.”

“Okay. See you tomorrow.”

“Bye, kiddo. Tell your parents I said good-bye.”

“I will. Thanks, Aj.”

“Anytime.” We share another hug and then she leaves. I shut the door behind her and the house is calm and quiet.

I suddenly can't stand the flowers anymore. They're ugly and dying and they smell thick and disgusting. I haven't been able to breathe since they've been in the house, but no one else seems to be able to get rid of them. Might as well be me. I get a big black trash bag and shove every single damn flower in the whole house that I can find into the bag. I kind of want to smash the vases, but some of them are pretty, I guess. Most of them are ugly and plastic, so I toss those in the bag. It gets full fast. I tie the top with multiple knots and drag it outside to the shed. When I get back inside I open all the windows to air everything out, and then I stack the vases in the sink.

Feeling satisfied, I go upstairs to see my Peter.

“Feel better?” he says, his eyes glued to a textbook. I turn my head and see it's one of the books I got him on medieval life. It is. Aj would be so proud.

“Much,” I say, pulling my hair out of my ponytail. “I still can't figure out why people think dying flowers are a good way to say, 'I'm sorry you have terminal cancer.'”

“What would be a good way?”

I yank my hands through my hair, trying to work through the curls that have turned themselves into knots. “I don't know,” I say, grabbing my brush. “Will you help me with this?” Peter's very good at brushing hair. I don't have the patience. “I just want people to be sincere. They say they're sorry and they have that look in their eyes, but you know it's bull. It's like they get something out of it. I don't know what. People are pretty sick.”

“Humans are fascinated with death. When they see someone who is close, who has touched it, they are interested.”

“Well, it's stupid.” He slides the brush through my hair gently. I close my eyes and listen to the sound of the brush on my hair. “Something Aj said got me thinking.”

“About what?”

“That Mom's going to have a funeral, and be buried and have a headstone. What are we going to put on it? I mean, where is she going to be buried? I don't know any of those things. I feel ashamed I never thought of them.” How could I not have considered that? Ever?

“Your father will take care of it.”

“But I should want to be involved. I don't want him to have to do it all himself. That's not fair.”

“You are young, Ava. The reason they have not involved you is because they didn't want to.”

“That's not really fair to them.”

“It's not fair to you, either. To have to deal with those arrangements when you're losing your mother.”

Something about the way he says I'm so young irritates me. Does he see me that way? “I'm not a baby, Peter.”

“I know.”

I turn to face him. “Is that how you see me? As a child that needs to be protected?”

He puts the brush down and puts both hands on the side of my face. “I don't see you as a child, but it is my natural instinct to protect you. Part of this is because I adore you, and another part is because I have Claimed you.”

“So you don't see me as a little girl? Someone you're stuck with?”

“You are not a little girl, Ava.” His hands drift down my face, and his thumb brushes across my lips, then drifts down both sides of my neck. “I would not do this to a little girl,” he says, kissing my mouth slowly. I kiss him back. I certainly don't feel like a little girl.

“Sorry, that was childish,” I say when he pulls back and smiles. “I should know better.”

“You are human.”

“I guess.”

Eighteen

Brooke

“Hi Jamie,” I said when he opened the door to his room and found me sitting on his bed. His first reaction was shock, and then a smile spread across his face.

“What are you doing here?”

“I needed to see you.” Granted, I'd seen him all day. I'd hung out outside his school with Helena as my annoying shadow. She was out there now, ready to do whatever she was going to do.

It didn't make sense to me. Yes, I understood why Jamie's friends were reluctant to accept me as a part of his life, but I didn't see where Helena fit in. Why was she helping them? What was she getting out of it? It had been my experience that people, immortal or not, didn't do things unless they got something out of it.

She'd barely talked to me, but when she did, it was about stupid things like where I was from and things like that. She was fishing, clearly. She wanted to know what I was doing here and what I wanted with Jamie. The thing was, my original reason for coming here, to find Ava, didn't seem important anymore. I wasn't really sure why I had done it in the first place. I guessed I had lost my direction and was trying to find it again. I hadn't known this immortal life without Ivan, and I needed to find a piece of him, and that seemed like the only way. Now that I'd found Jamie, I had something else. Something warm and bright that I could look forward to. Someone who understood what it was like to be alone in the world.

“So you decided to just hang out in my room and wait for me?”

“I didn't think your family would take a strange girl walking through the house very well.”

Jamie snorted.

“Well, my dad probably wouldn't notice, and my sister and mom are at work. So you could have.” I'd heard his dad downstairs, grunting at a game of some sort. He seemed like a real winner. “So what do you want, Brooke?”

You.

“I don't want anything from you, Jamie.”

“Listen, this is a lot for me to take in. I know you've explained everything, but I still wake up in the middle of the night thinking this is a dream. It's just so hard to believe that immortals exist and no one has ever discovered them.”

“We don't want to be discovered. Besides, what do you think would happen if someone said they saw me jumping out of a tree?”

“No one would believe it. But what if they took a video?”

“They'd say that it was faked. And you'd be hard-pressed to find a noctalis that would let you live long enough to take a video. So there you have it.”