Velvet (27 page)

I looked at him—and then shook my head. “I know that helps. But it feels wrong. It feels like I’m cheating, somehow. Even though it sucks, I feel like I need to be able to
feel
.” I looked up at him, hoping I hadn’t hurt his feelings. He was frowning, but he didn’t seem angry.

“I understand,” he said, after a long moment. “I actually do understand. No more Jedi mind stuff.”

He smiled and I smiled, and it was awkward again. I patted the bed and he crawled in next to me, stretching his arm out underneath the pillow. I guess he was going to be the big spoon tonight. I didn’t argue, just fit myself along the contour of his body and pulled the blankets over us. He rested his arm on my waist, and in a mirror of the night before, I wound my fingers through his. His breath was soft and warm on my neck and I heard him murmur, “Good night, Caitlin.”

I smiled, glad he couldn’t see me.

“Good night, Adrian.”

*   *   *

Adrian came over every night, sometimes crawling in beside me while I was still asleep, so that the moment I woke up, he was there. I’d grab his hand and squeeze it for as long as it took for the dregs of the dream to slip away. Sometimes he got there early enough that I didn’t have a nightmare at all. Usually we didn’t say much. Most of the time I woke up in the morning and he was gone. Occasionally, though, we were so entangled that he had to physically move me to get out of bed. I’d murmur something incomprehensible, he’d laugh (very quietly), and bundle the blankets back around me so I didn’t get cold. And it really only took a few nights before it wasn’t awkward at all anymore. It felt sort of … right, actually, to be sleeping next to him. And for that to be all we were doing. It was peaceful.

And before I knew it, it was Christmas Eve.

The insistent buzz of my annoying comes-with-the-phone ringtone startled me awake. I groped for it blindly on my nightstand and brought it to my ear, answering with a grunt instead of actual words.

“You’re always so eloquent in the morning.”

“Nmphmm.”

“When can you be ready by?” Adrian asked. It was funny talking to him on the phone knowing that he’d been lying next to me only a few hours before.

I searched my brain groggily. “A few years? I don’t know. For what?”

“It’s Christmas Eve. We’re supposed to go to my place?”

“Oh, yeah.”

Thank goodness I’d already told Joe and Rachel a week ago. They’d had time to get used to the idea.

“Julian’s been a pain in the ass lately. Do you mind if we go somewhere else?”

To be honest, I didn’t really want to be around Adrian’s family, either. They were kind of party poopers. “Sure,” I yawned into the phone. “Where you wanna go?”

“We own a cabin a ways up the mountain. I was thinking we could go there and just hang out?”

“Sounds good,” I said sleepily. “Give me an hour to wake up and five minutes to get ready.”

He laughed. “I’ll pick you up at eleven. And do you mind if I bring Lucian along? I want to get him out of the house, and he seems to like you.”

That surprised me. “No, I don’t mind.”

“All right, we’ll pick you up in an hour. Dress sort of warm; it’ll take a while to heat up the cabin.”

“Okay,” I yawned again. “See you then.”

I hung up and buried another yawn in my pillow, then forced myself to get up. At 10:48 I’d managed to shower, dress, and make myself breakfast. I was spitting a mouthful of toothpaste into the sink when I heard Norah yell her usual mantra up the stairs.

“I’ll see you guys later,” I said as I headed toward the door.

“Be careful,” Joe grunted in my direction.

“Call us if you need anything,” Rachel offered.

I waved and headed out the front door. Rachel and I still didn’t exactly chat, but we’d unofficially declared a cease-fire for the holidays. Maybe I was finally getting used to this place. The rage that had once been a natural part of my day had quieted, and sometimes I even felt downright happy.

Through the window of the truck, I could see Lucian bouncing up and down excitedly. When he saw me, he climbed over Adrian and pressed his face and hands against the window. I smiled and waved at him; he grinned back, lips squished to the glass.

“Hello, Lucian,” I said as I climbed into the passenger seat.

“Hello,” he replied, squirming with excitement.

As we pulled out of the driveway, Lucian leaned forward, cranked the volume on the stereo to an almost painful level, and sang.

“Jesus is just all right … something! Jesus is just all right, oh yeah! Jesus is just something something! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!”

I stared quizzically at Adrian. “You got him hooked on The Doobie Brothers?”

He shrugged helplessly. “Ever since he heard this song, he can’t stop singing it. I have no idea why.”

We listened to Lucian’s broken, half-filled-in lyrics for the next four and a half minutes. I’d never seen him look so energetic. He bopped his head along to the fast-paced beat and sang boldly. I was actually a little impressed. When the song was finished, he leaned back against the seat with his usual blank expression and listened passively to the variety of songs that shuffled through. Two playlists later, we pulled up to a log cabin and the landscape looked vaguely familiar.

“Remember when we went sledding?” Adrian asked as he parked the truck. “That was part of this property, about a half a mile northeast of here.”

That would explain it, then. We climbed out and Adrian led the way to the cabin. A fire was roaring in the stone fireplace of the main room.

“I came up here earlier to start warming it up,” Adrian admitted, looking shy.

I smiled. Of course he had.

He disappeared into a side room and came back without the small lunch cooler he’d brought with him.

“Would you like a tour?” he asked.

I shook my head at him, smiling. “There are three things in this world that require tours: museums, castles, and de la Mara private properties.”

He rolled his eyes and took me by the arms. “Come on; it’s a short tour today due to grumpy tourists. This,” he said, turning me in a slow, 360-degree circle, “is the main room. Notice the shabby-chic sofas, the Stony Creek original area rugs, and the Fields dining set.”

I stared at the dining room table and the six chairs that sat grouped around it. “Are those really Fields?” Trish had told me once that her grandfather had been a carpenter, and a ton of the furniture around the county had been handcrafted by him, once upon a time.

“Yep. Mariana and Dominic thought it would be best to have something that represented the spirit of the town. They actually lived here for a while, while the house was being built.”

“Doesn’t have enough marble to seem like their style.”

“And you’ve managed to sum them up in one sentence. On with the tour.”

He walked me straight forward toward two open doors. “In door number one, we have a bedroom! Door two is a bathroom. Over there is the kitchen. That’s it.”

I was surprised. “Really?”

“The cabin was already here when they moved in; otherwise it would have a six-car garage next to the well out back.”

I suddenly realized Lucian was missing. “Where’s your brother?”

Adrian sighed. “Frankie?”

“Alejandro!” I heard a small voice call from the kitchen.

“He’s recently discovered YouTube. Lady Gaga particularly fascinates him.”

“Ah.” In a weird way, that made sense.

We walked into the kitchen and discovered that Lucian had taken a jar of green olives out of the fridge and was thirstily drinking the juice from it. I shuddered.

“Why is he doing that?” I whispered as Lucian drained the jar and started popping olives onto his fingers.

Adrian leaned in. “Salt content is comparable to blood. It’s one of the ways we’re trying to help him with withdrawals. He’s down to two blood bags a day.”

I blinked. “Oh.”

“You’re gonna get a stomachache, buddy,” Adrian warned. Lucian stared at his brother and slowly chewed an olive off his pinkie finger.

Adrian shrugged. “All right, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

We walked out as Lucian contemplated the remaining olives.

“Still think he’s cute?”

I looked back at the door. “He’s adorable. Strange and slightly terrifying, but adorable.”

“You’re the only one who thinks so.” Adrian sat down on the couch and stared blankly into the fire. For a moment, he kind of looked like Lucian.

“What do you mean by that?” I sat next to him and drew my knees up to my chin to keep warm. Adrian grabbed a blanket from the back of the couch and handed it to me.

“I don’t know,” he said, propping his feet up on the coffee table. “He just has such a limited world. He’s not allowed to interact with anyone outside our family—besides you, of course, and I had to pull strings to even allow that—and no one in the family pays any attention to him. Which seems so stupid after we went to all the trouble of getting him back. Sometimes I feel like…”

He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the couch. “Sometimes I feel like the only reason he’s important to us is so we can say we won. Julian sure as hell doesn’t care about him, and Mariana and Dominic are so wrapped up in their own lives that they don’t even realize he’s there half the time. I try to help, but he needs more than me. He needs structure and discipline and love—he needs
parents
.” He smiled bitterly. “We all need parents.”

I’d never heard Adrian say that much about his personal life the entire time we’d known each other.

“What was your childhood like?” I asked, a bit abruptly, hoping to keep him talking.

He blinked at me a few times and shrugged. “I was born in Greece, so I lived with a family there until I was eight. Then I was sent to live with Julian in France for four years. Since we were related and similar in age, they thought it was a good idea to pair us together.”

“Aren’t you guys, like, seventeen years apart? And who’s this ‘they’?”

“The Council—they decide where we live until we come of age. And, yeah, we’re seventeen years apart, but that’s very unusual for siblings; most are centuries older than each other. A demon can only get back to earth in a physical body once every couple hundred years—it simply requires too much energy. My father got through a century and a half ago, created a body, and had Mariana. We destroyed his body and sent him back to hell, since he can’t really be killed.”

“I still don’t understand that,” I said, leaning forward. “
Everything
can be killed.”

“You can’t kill something that’s not real,” he explained, then shook his head, as if he knew that didn’t make sense. “I mean, they are
real
, but not like we think of things being real or imaginary. They’re ideas; individual units of energy that happen to have some sort of consciousness. It would be like trying to ‘kill’ light—you can cover a light source, stars can implode and go dark, but you can’t end the life of something that was never really alive to begin with. Honestly, we don’t understand what they are. That’s why we call them demons—they’re the stuff of nightmares.” A dark look passed over his face. “In your case, literally.”

He leaned back against the sofa. “Anyway, he got through again thirty-six years ago and had Julian, which was honestly pushing how quickly we thought demons could regroup their power. Then, somehow, he broke through less than twenty years later and had me. Which should have been impossible.”

Adrian’s eyes narrowed as he glared into the fire. “He’s smarter than the others, or stronger. More adaptive, somehow. Seven years go by and he gets Lucian’s mother pregnant and manages to steal him from right under our noses before we even realize what’s happened. It was an embarrassment. I remember listening to my Greek ‘parents’ talk about it at night when they thought I was asleep. I was only seven, but I knew it was important to get him back. It’s only recently become clear to me that it was to save face, not to save Lucian.”

The firelight hit Adrian’s glowing eyes and turned the silver dark, almost black. He was angry; I didn’t need an internal emotion sensor to tell me that. Lucian seemed to be a very delicate subject for Adrian.

“When I was at your house, you let Lucian climb on your shoulders,” I said slowly, “and Julian said you shouldn’t do that. What did he mean?”

Adrian’s face twisted into a scowl. “Julian’s a jackass. It literally doesn’t compute with him that I actually give a shit about Lucian, because Julian doesn’t give a shit about anything.” He blinked and scrubbed a hand over his face, letting out a long, slow breath. “My older brother,” he tried again, “is dissatisfied with his role in life. He thinks the Council’s rules are stupid. I do, too, but for different reasons.”

“Which rules, in particular?” I prompted. “You have a lot.”

Adrian looked disgusted. “Celibacy with humans. He could care less about having friends or truly getting to know someone, but he’s seriously pissed about not being able to have sex with whomever he likes. Since we’re sterile and can’t receive or pass on diseases, there should be no issue with taking full advantage of his … natural assets. I, on the other hand, could care less about sex. Well”—he paused, blushing slightly—“let’s just say it’s not a priority. But I want
friends
. I’m in high school, for God’s sake. But the same rule applies to both of us: no intimacy with humans. No friends. No spouses. No one-night stands. I couldn’t even join the math club.”

He glanced over at me and shrugged. “There aren’t that many of us, and we’ve survived this long by hiding, placing ourselves apart from the rest of the world. That level of isolation is too hard for most of us to handle. Immortality becomes far easier to cope with when you stop caring. The couple Julian lived with as a kid basically ignored him for ten years. When he sees me actually trying to be a brother to Lucian, I think he gets mad that he never had that growing up. I understand why he’s an ass, but it’s still hard not to hate him.”

I huddled in my blanket, afraid that if I so much as blinked, Adrian would stop talking. “So why don’t you ignore Lucian, like Julian ignored you?”