Page 19 of Hot for Slayer
He immediately puts the blade away, like sharing an activity with me is the only thing he has ever desired, and it’s ...
Nice, kind of. Shared. Pleasant. Not really what I usually do during the day, which is ... maybe not lonely, but definitely on my own.
This is different. Playing cards with Lazlo. Watching him realize that “Clearly we are bothverycompetitive people.” Laughing.
I can make my own meaning. I can find my own joy. But there is a different kind of happiness in this companionship. A sense of something coming. Like the breeze picking up before a storm.
It’s possible that I am, like the abbess said, just a fanciful, too-distractible girl. But for the first time in nearly one and a half millennia, I forget to keep track of time, and I don’t feel the need to run outside the exact moment the sun has set.
Chapter 9
Lazlo’s response to the hordes of kids wearing costumes, adults sitting on their stoops giving out candy, and jack-o’-lanterns casting rich golden light across the neighborhood is a simple, unfazed, straightforward nod. I’m not sure whether he remembers what Halloween is or just thinks that this is what goes on every night in the West Village, but he’s game, and I cannot help but laugh.
“What sharp teeth you have,” he tells a group of little vampires who hold out their baskets to him. Then he distributes some of the cash I found in the back pocket of his jeans before washing them—all one-hundred-dollar bills.
I mouthSorryto the children’s baffled mothers and quickly pull Lazlo away.
My people are, unsurprisingly, highly represented in this year’s costuming choices. I glance at Lazlo, wondering if seeing them is jogging his memory, but all he says is, “I’m hungry.” He eats a hot dog. Then a candied apple. Not once does he ask me if I’m hungry, too, or if I want a single bite.
I think he’s done with my bullshit. And I think that he’d rather I stay quiet than lie. So I do. When a pack of sexy Slimers tries to step between us, he grabs my hand to pull me closer, and doesn’t let go, not even when a fortune teller tries to sell us a couple’s reading.
“We’re not a couple,” I explain just as he loftily proclaims, “I am a man, and I make my own fortune.”
The teller’s eyes fall pointedly to where his fingers are closed around mine. “No matter,” she says. “Your fates are already intertwined.”
I scowl and let Lazlo drag me away into the night, watching the crowd as it transitions from adorable children to adults in skimpy costumes drinking questionable alcohol mixes from poorly disguised cups.
“I like it,” he says when we dip into a narrow, semi-deserted alleyway to avoid the throng. “We’ll do this often.”
“Halloween is only once a year,” I say, leaning back against the wall. “By the next, you’ll have remembered enough of who you are to spend it with ... with whomever it is that you usually do.”
He stares down at me, patiently amused, arms crossed. Steps closer. “Just tell me, Ethel.”
“Tell you . . . ?”
“What we are.”
I straighten a little. “We arepeople. I thought you knew that.”
“What we are to each other,” he clarifies, a note ofCome on, Ethel, don’t be obtusein his tone that I should take more offense to.
But Iambeing obtuse. And he is being remarkably forbearing. “Should I redefinework nemesesfor you?” I ask archly.
His smile just widens. “I think you’re tired, too.”
“Of what?”
“The lies.”
I look down at my shoes. Back up. “How are you so sure that—”
“I told you, Ethel. I know how I feel about you. And I know how you feel, too.”
“And what would that—”
He bends toward me slowly enough that I could conceivably stop him, but I don’t care to conceive of it—before his lips touch mine, or after.
I’ve kissed and been kissed by many people. None, however, who were, fundamentally, at an atomic level, like me. None whose feel and scent and body I’d learned over centuries, through endless battles and close calls. None who wereanythinglike Lazlo.
