Page 35 of Moth to a Flame

“Guess he wasn’t around much, huh?”

“No, too busy posing for statues.” The hurt crested, and then he laughed, surprising me. He hadn’t shoved it away but moved through it, feeling it, then letting it go. “Last winter, we put a tramp stamp right over his shiny silver buttcrack, and it went viral, and he was pissed. We thought it was hilarious.”

“We?”

“Me and my brothers.”

“You have brothers?”

“I have a lot of brothers. Six, actually.” He shifted on the bed and pulled his phone out of his pocket. He clicked it on, and his home screen was a picture of him and a teen boy with the same dark, curly hair.

“He’s your⁠—”

“Youngest brother. He’s about to graduate high school, valedictorian. That kid is going places.”

The smile on his face told me everything. How proud he was. The affection threaded through his voice as he said it.

No bond needed.

A complex feeling rose in my chest. I loved seeing his smile, feeling his pride, but vines of jealousy climbed my ribs. That’s how an older brother should be. He gave me another concerned look, and I pushed it down.

“You seem very close.”

He shrugged, one shoulder against the pillow. “We are. Dad wasn’t around much, and Mom’s human. Somebody had to teach them how to fly without hitting anything.”

I had a feeling it was a lot more than that. He said it casually, but I felt the hurt beneath it. If his youngest brother was in high school, that meant he had just been a kid when more than his fair share of responsibility had likely settled on his shoulders.

And he’d done it.

He’d stepped up, and by the look of it, still was.

I loved my brother.

Once.

When we were small and neither of us knew yet what he would grow into.

I remembered him at seven, showing me how to press flowers between the pages of a book. I remembered him at nine, sitting on the end of my bed, reading me passages from the family grimoire in a dramatic whisper, making shadow entities on the wall. I remembered him at twelve, teaching me my first Latin conjugations because our tutor had gone home and I had begged him to. He’d complained, but he had done it.

Then I remembered him at eighteen, pouting when I’d been named valedictorian of our private school, and not him. I remembered him at twenty-four, doing all the press for our newest drug that I’d invented—not stolen—as the stock price soared. And I remembered him at twenty-seven, in the drawing room downstairs, looking me in the eye and saying those same Latin words that had once bonded us as our stock price tanked.

Only this time, my throat closed around every sound I would try to make for the rest of my life.

My chest tightened, and Hawk rolled back toward me. “Hey, you can talk to me, you know. Might as well take advantage of this bond, right?” He gave me a soft smile, like he was afraid I would run away again.

But it wasn’t me who was going to leave.

Not that I blamed him. Everyone left eventually.

“I’m glad he has you. A good brother to look up to.”

He shook his head. “He’s so much smarter than I’ve ever been. Only thing we have in common is we both got the most human from our mom.”

He swiped and showed me a picture of him and all his brothers. They were more moth, to say the least. One had a fluffy ruff around his neck, and others were much fuzzier overall. One’s face was almost completely moth-like, huge glowing red eyes taking up most of it. It was obvious why they would have issues blending in somewhere that wasn’t used to the supernatural.

“Why don’t they come live somewhere like Pumpkin Hollow?”

He frowned. “There’s a reason I have the motorcycle. Moths, we…can’t stay still. Need to be on the move. Even if they moved here, it wouldn’t last. We were meant to fly. Even Motthew. I swear, sometimes I wanna nail that kid’s boots to the floor.”