I pushed the door and stepped inside.
The room hadn’t changed much. There was no dead body on the coffee table (thank goodness) and the furnishings were clean line modern from a few decades ago, the walls a soft pastel and all of them lined with glass lighted shelves.
On those shelves were carved eggs, all of them powerful in their intricacies, commanding the gaze even though they were the most fragile of prisons.
Rossi sat on the couch, very still. There was something about the way he was just suspended in that position that made me think he had been sitting there, exactly like that, for a long time.
His hands were flat on his thighs, head level, and eyes…oh, his eyes.
“What happened?” The words were out of my mouth before I could think them through. Because I knew what had happened. He’d been shot too. In the face. With a bullet meant to kill a vampire just like him.
He’d been shot other places too. His chest, I thought. My eyes ticked down and I stared at his very crisp, very clean white shirt that was just loose enough it could be covering bandages, wraps.
“Death,” he said, his voice rusty and deep. “Death happened.”
A hundred years of sorrow rode those words. A hundred more of longing.
“Death might have happened, but life won. We won.”
“I am not a living thing, Delaney.”
“Well, not right now, apparently. You should go to the hospital and have your face looked at.”
He turned his head just slightly, as if it weren’t used to moving anymore. He stared at me balefully out of one eye. The other was covered in a black satin patch, the bands of which disappeared beneath his long salt and pepper hair. The wound on his cheek that rode at the bottom edge of the patch looked too raw, as if fresh skin could not find purchase there.
“There is nothing they can do for my face.”
“Will you heal?”
I could tell he didn’t want to answer me, but he did anyway. “In time.”
The silence between us stretched out. The coast guard chopper rattled its way down the shoreline, enough I could hear it, not enough to disturb the precariously balanced eggs on glass shelves.
I wondered if this was what grief, what mourning looked like on him.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
His eyebrow rose. “My loss.”
“I know he was important—”
“He was a blight that should have been burned out of the world years ago. A tumor I should have removed.”
Ah. So it wasn’t sorrow, it was guilt.
“Yeah, that would have been nice of you. But it’s not what happened. Still. We’re alive. He’s not.” I shrugged. “We win.”
Again with the uncomfortable silence.
“I looked for a card that said,sorry your brother was such a psychopathic dickbut they were all out. So, here.” I held out the thing from under my arm.
It took him some time before he looked away from my face and down at my hands. Like I was suddenly speaking a language he had never heard before and he needed some time to process that.
“Why are you pointing a sheep at me?”
“It’s not a sheep. It’s a llama.”
“It’s blue.”
