“I’ll help in any way I can,” she says.
“You can come with me.” Selena pushes up from the table. “We need those descriptions, but we also need to figure out how to fix that wound.”
“There’s another healer in town?” Clementine shares a hopeful glance between Carl and the witch.
Selena tsks. “Not that’s known to me. But if anyone has an answer for what’s going on with your wound, it’ll likely be the Shelly family.”
Clementine scrunches her nose in confusion. “Never heard of them.”
“They’re new,” I grunt, mind on my good friend Bo and his mate, Morgana.
“What’s so special about them?”
Selena smirks. “They’re librarians.”
9
SEV
I do not like babies.Their necks are weak, and they excrete slime from every orifice.
I assume Levi has somehow discerned my dislike, and that is why he insists on wearing his child in a front-facing chest sling when he visits me. Or else he thinks his young will somehow stop me from attacking him. As if I couldn’t kill the leviathan without jostling the carrier.
“Did you fall?” Levi stares down at where I lie prone on my front lawn, the grass I haven’t tended this season long enough now that I should have been hidden from view. He likely sniffed me out.
Lucky him, I smell delectable.
“Of course not. Falling is unintentional. I have full control over my limbs at all times.”
“So, you’re lying outside on purpose?”
Levi’s tiny offspring lets out a high-pitched squeal and flails its arms with complete lack of coordination. How embarrassing.
“Aren’t you worried about ticks?”
“They would die the moment they bit me.”
“Bug spray in your blood?”
“Something of the sort.” I stare directly into the sun, daring the fiery orb to incinerate my retinas. As always, it fails. “Why are you—and the smaller, slightly less annoying version of you—here?”
“Are you all right?” My uninvited guest ignores my question, likely because he considers me less intimidating when I’m sprawled at his feet. “Sick or something?”
No. Not sick.
But also, I suspect, not all right.
“Have you inherited your father’s longevity?” I ask.
The original leviathan is thousands of years old, lurking in a deep, shadowy part of the ocean I last heard.
Levi brushes his fingers through the hair at his temple, where I make out a handful of silver strands. “No. I seem to be aging at a normal rate.”
I hum in my chest, a noise that means nothing. “Then you wouldn’t understand.”
“I can try. Listen at least.”
Ever since Levi Abadi was elected as the first monster council member, he’s convinced himself I’m one of his many responsibilities. Probably because he suspects I’m too dangerous if left unattended.
