“But now that you’re here, I—I know I didn’t. Not really.” My tears spill again, and I press my face into his chest again, and he squeezes me tight. “I don’t know how this can work,” I say into his shirt, each word releasing his scent. “You’re a—you’re not human.”
Theo tilts my chin up with his finger. I stare at him through the veil of my tears, and somehow, I feel lighter. Because I found the truth of things, I realize. I want him, but how can I have him when we aren’t the same? At all?
Theo tightens his jaw. Brushes his fingers over my cheek again, drawing away more of my tears.
“It can’t work,” I whisper. “You’ll have to keep doing—that.”
“Killing,” he says.
“Yes!” I step away from him and draw the blankets tighter around my shoulders. “You’re a murderer! You kill people, and when you die, you come back to life! When I die, I’ll be dead forever!”
The words explode out of me, and with a kind of soft, squeezing horror, I realize?—
That’sthe real truth of things. It isn’t that he kills. It’s that he’ll never die.
Theo stares at me for a long time. Then he lifts one hand and folds his fingers slowly into a very familiar shape—one of the first signs I learned, even before I started my major in college. Everyone knows it. Kids learn it in elementary school.
“I love you.”
I suck in my breath and take another step backward. He doesn’t drop his hand, just keeps it there, letting me see it, like he wants me to know it’s not a mistake. His eyes are wide and pleading. Almost desperate.
“You can love?” I whisper.
Maybe it’s the wrong thing to say. Or maybe not. Theo drops his hand and slumps his shoulders a little, his eyes never leavingmine. “Yes,” he says. “It’s different, but I know what it means to love someone.”
I pull on the blankets, my body shaking.
“I wanted Oliver to go with you,” he says, his signs crisp and his eyes blazing. “I wanted Oliver to have a mom like I had. A mom who loves him.”
I feel dizzy.
“His dad would be a killer,” Theo says, “but so was mine.”
My tears brim up again. “It doesn’t work that way.”
“Why not?”
I open my mouth, try to find the answers. There aren’t any.
“Oliver came to me for help,” Theo signs, the movements growing faster. “He was hurt.Ididn’t hurt him.” He shoves his thumb against his chest. “Theydid.” He doesn’t use the general sign fortheybut instead points off to the left, toward Oliver’s house. “I wanted to save him.” His movements are sharp. “I wanted to save you. Why can’t I do that? Why can’t I save someone I love?”
I sway in my spot until the blankets slide away from my shoulders. I think of Penelope’s sister, how grateful I was when she stopped that man in Miami from hurting us. How she swept in so cleanly and calmly and slid the knife between his ribs as if she were plucking up a spider that had set me and her sister to screaming. It had been nothing to her to take that man’s life.
It terrified me. But I was still grateful.
And when I look up at Theo, at his steely eyes, his firm mouth, I realize hehaddone the same for Oliver.
He would do the same for me.
“You can,” I whisper. “But it’s still not how things work.” I swallow, my throat dry. “For humans.”
“It’s how things work,” he says, “for Hunters.”
I nod. Then I fall into him again, letting the blanket drop to the floor. He pulls me into him, buries his nose in my filthy hair,and breathes it in like it smells sweet. I don’t know what to make of any of this. What any of it means. All I know is I don’t want him to leave my side.
“I’m going to take a shower now,” I whisper. “Come with me.”
He responds by scooping me up in a bridal carry, and I cling to him, shivering. It can’t be from the cold. It’s not cold in here. Not anymore, thanks to him.
