Page 95 of Found Objects

“That’s right, and you’re not doing that until you have an heir for your land so it will always be a sanctuary for all your freaky little friends.”

“Freaky?” Evan asked her.

“She means Teague.”

Evan looked at her. “What’d he do?”

She glared at him. “He called me a mermaid, as though I were common.”

As Ondine launched into another tirade about Teague and mermaids, Cole reached out and took hold of my chin, turning me to face him. “You can simply decide when you want to die?”

“It’s not death for me. I’ll simply rejoin the universe like I never existed.”

“Okay, I hate that.”

I smiled at him.

“Will you age with me?”

“I will. I have to in every lifetime, leaving my land to the next link in the chain.”

“Which is always just you, right?”

“That’s correct.”

His eyes narrowed. “Tell me how old you are.”

“Do you want to discuss this to take your mind off everything else?”

“Partly, yes. But also, I just want to know.”

“Well, I’ve never seen a dinosaur,” I teased him.

He shook his head at me. “How long? A hundred years?”

“It’s hard to say, really, because I wasn’t aware of time at first. I was focused on what I was made to do.”

“Which was to punish.”

“Yes.”

“But then you changed.”

I smiled at him. “It was a slow realization that if the child could be saved, then the adult they became would not need to be punished for their sins.”

“Clever of you.” He moved his chair closer to me and ran his knuckles down my throat. “So, a thousand years old?”

“A bit more than that.” I refused to have him delve any deeper.

“I can’t even grasp that number, but I also find myself not caring as much as I thought I would,” he murmured. “The important thing is that I get to spend this lifetime of mine with you.”

I scoffed.

Slowly, he scowled at me. “What was that?”

“That was cheesy is what that was.”

“Could you please pretend to be madly in love with me?”