I laughed. “Yeah. I guess she is.”
“So are you going to...”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I want to,” I admitted quietly. “But at the same time, I don’t. I mean, I’m me, you know. This Chosen One demon hunter thing...it’s like I got shoved into a grown-up costume and then tossed onto stage and told I had to win the Tony. I mean, I never got to finish being a kid. So, I don’t know. I want to—I mean, when we’re kissing and stuff, I really,reallywant to. But I think I want to wait even more.” I shrugged, feeling beyond awkward. “I haven’t told Jared any of that.”
“He’ll get it. I bet he already does. And besides, it’s not like it costs him anything to wait. The guy’s got all the time in the world.”
She wasn’t wrong.
She cocked her head. “Is that weird? I mean, he really does have all the time, and you...” She trailed off with a shrug.
“It’s weird,” I admitted. “I mean, yeah. What happens in ten years, twenty years, when I start getting older and he...doesn’t? When I have gray hair and wrinkles, and he still looks seventeen.”
“You could, too, though.” Mindy’s voice was careful, tentative. But I knew where she was going with this. “If he turned you?—”
“Don’t tell my mom I said this.”
“Scout’s honor.”
“You were never a scout.”
“Semantics. My lips are sealed.”
I took a breath, then let it out slowly. “I’ve thought about it. The turning thing. What it would mean. Being with him forever, never getting old, never having to say goodbye.”
“But?”
“But eternity scares me.” I stared at the ceiling again, like the answers might be written up there somewhere. “I’m only seventeen.”
“Not for a few more days.”
“Whatever,” I said. “Point is, how am I supposed to know what I want forever? I don’t even know what I want for breakfast half the time. What if I change? What if he changes? What if we’re perfect now but in two hundred years we can’t stand each other, and we’re stuck together for all of eternity?”
“That’s...” Mindy paused. “Really mature. Plus,” she added, “you’ve got to factor in the whole demon essence thing.”
And there it was.The thing I tried not to think about too hard, because when I did, it opened up a whole Pandora’s box of questions, and I had no answers.
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “There’s that.”
The demon essence in my blood.
The thing that made me strong enough to seal hellgates and powerful enough to fight things that should have killed me ten times over. The thing that made me special and dangerous and possibly something other than entirely human.
“Would turning even work?” Mindy asked. “With what you are?”
“I don’t know. No one knows. There’s no precedent for...” I waved a hand vaguely at myself. “Whatever I am. It might work fine. It might kill me. It might turn me into something worse than either vampire or demon.” I swallowed hard. “Jared won’t even talk about it. Every time I bring it up, he shuts down.”
“Maybe he’s scared too.”
“Maybe.” Probably. Definitely. “He told me once that he’d rather have fifty years with me than eternity with anyone else.”
Mindy made a sound that was half sigh, half groan. “Oh. Oh, that’s like...romance novel good.”
“I know.”
“I hate him a little bit for being that perfect.”
“Same, honestly.”
